Thursday, November 16, 2006

Another Reason To Detest ESPN

I was watching SportsCenter tonight on ESPN, and is it my imagination, or does it seem like most of that show is one long infomercial for Saturday's Michigan-Ohio State showdown on ABC (who owns ESPN)? Granted, this is a HUGE football game, and of course, all of the college football world is talking about it.

But I just hate the incessant hype over it. And ESPN is the absolute worst when it comes to overhyping things. Tonight, they have a "countdown clock" showing during the 6 PM SportsCenter, and the game is on Saturday! "45:00:00" was the count at 6:30 PM tonight.

(BTW, would ESPN have these "countdown clocks" if this game were on NBC or CBS? We all know the answer to that one.)

Then I noticed that ESPNews, also had a countdown clock, and this one was constantly in the right hand corner of the screen. But I noticed that their countdown was different from the one on SportsCenter, and it was an hour earlier. I figured out that the ESPNews one was for the pregame, which starts one hour before kickoff. (And when was the last time you saw a one-hour pregame before any individual college game?) Yes, deceive the fans about the kickoff time as well.

But later in the hour, SportsCenter adjusted their clock to be in sync with the ESPNews one. Unbelievable.

ESPN has done their best to destroy Monday Night Football (not that it was so great on ABC), with unlistenable announcers talking about everything but the game (and mostly about something upcoming on either ESPN or ABC).

And it figures that all this comes from a network that STILL employs Chris (You're With Me, Leather) Berman.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about the Musberger (one guy I actually like) commercial: "the century is only a few years old, but already it has its game" or whatever the hell he says.

Ummm ... what happened to USC/Texas ... from last year!? My how ESPN/ABC has such a short memory!

BklynSoxFan said...

Musberger's yet another reason to hate that network...

I like your site, WR. Thanks for checking mine out.

Peter N said...

ABC and ESPN...same family, owned by the same parent company. But you knew that. But not everyone. I'm a stone's throw from Bristol, and it is quite a "campus" they have!

Anonymous said...

Ahhhhh, Bristol University!

Now that they don't have Sunday Night Baseball anymore, but will have it midweek like they usually do, will Sutcliffe get people as hot under the collar, as Joe Morgan did?