Showing 1 - 3 of 3 posts found matching keyword: espn

The 18th Annual Wriphe.com Batman and Football Month got off to an inauspicious start last night when my cable provider Spectrum unexpectedly dropped ESPN from its lineup without warning just as Florida was preparing to kick off the season against Utah.

Apparently Disney wants Spectrum to pay a boatload for the privilege of sharing the same content you can get directly through a subscription to Disney+, and negotiations have stalemated as Spectrum rightly fears trying to pass that charge along to their subscribers like me, who are already paying $110 a month for a package that somehow no longer includes ESPN or ESPN2 or the SEC Network (or Disney or FX or nearly a score of others I can't say as I watch much).

I assume this tactic is intended to make me call Spectrum and demand they raise my rates to get ESPN back. Given that Disney and the other Hollywood producers don't seem very interested in paying writers or actors to create other content — today marks day 122 of the WGA strike and day 49 of the SAG strike — they rightly recognize that live sports is currently (and perhaps for perpetuity in the age of AI) their most valuable commodity.

While I respect Disney's right to try to negotiate for Spectrum's 15 million subscribers, I'm not particularly happy about becoming a pawn in these hardline tactics or the timing of all of this coming at the dawn of football season, especially since for the foreseeable future, it looks like I'll have to leave my house if I want to watch Monday Night Football or a wide selection of college games. It sure seems like Hollywood doesn't really care who they inconvenience in their quest for the biggest possible buck, and that just plain sucks. I won't forget this. As my father always says, pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered.

And Gators... Gators lose 11-24, according to my local evening news. So it's not all bad. The University of Florida football team losing is a good start to any season.

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UGA is playing their home opener today versus UAB. ESPN was late switching to the game, and by the time they did, UGA had already scored their first touchdown, essentially winning the game before any television audience was looking. Thus reinforcing why, if you really want to watch a football game, the best way to do it is be in the stadium.

Assuming it's not the middle of a pandemic.

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Obviously, I'm not there. I told you why I wouldn't be going earlier this month. The statewide COVID-19 infection numbers haven't improved significantly in the past two weeks, and if you are wondering why, I suggest you take a look at the pregame pictures posted by the student newspaper, The Red And Black where the only people wearing masks*... are in the band. You know, the group of people who actually have to use their mouths.

*Ok, I admit it. I saw one person wearing a mask who was not in the band. So, yeah, technically I'm a liar, but I'm still not going to the game.

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Some days, you know that the world is passing you by. Take Monday Night Football, for example. I used to really enjoy watching football on Monday night. I used to sit in a bar with a bunch of friends, each of us sacrificing our voices in order to talk over the excessive decibel levels of 30 television sets with their volume turned to "Deafen." And we enjoyed the hell out of watching a football game. But lately, football on Monday has turned into a chore.

Ever since ESPN, "the Worldwide Leader in Suck," has taken over Monday Night Football from ABC (both stations are owned by the Evil Empire: Walt Disney Co.), they've stocked the press booth with in-house announcers from other shows in their line-up, making watching Monday Night Football more like watching a spin-off of Sportscenter than a live football game. It has become the sports-world equivalent of Baywatch Nights, an unsuccessful attempt to cash in on the name recognition of characters from other popular shows who aren't quite suited for their new roles.

Worse still, desperate to reach the lowest common denominator of sports fans, MNF encourages Tony Kornheiser, once a respected sportswriter for the Washington Post, to act the part of beer-swilling, amateur buffoon and armchair quarterback for three hours every week. While Kornheiser's role as devil's advocate is perfectly suited to his op-ed show Pardon the Interruption, it is a grating distraction from the action during a football game. Like all other original programming on ESPN, MNF's producers hope that by creating stories and generating ungrounded controversy, the legion of bottom-feeding members of society incapable of forming opinions by way of anything other than emotion will be drawn to their programming. Unfortunately, their strategy has proven highly successful.

Sure, MNF has always been a program obsessed with the celebrity and popular culture that surrounds an NFL game, but they used to be focused on celebrating the game, not disparaging it. The best example of the change in the show's culture is Dennis Miller. After years of populating the press booth with former players (with such notables as Don Meredith, Frank Gifford, and Dan Dierdorf among others), Miller was brought in to give the "average" fan a voice on the show. Miller was rehearsed and focused on the game, but his obscure researched and rehearsed cultural references proved unpopular in the role of MNF color-commentator. Just a few short years later, Kornheiser's selfishly crass and unprofessional on-air cheers for players on his fantasy football roster and complaints about blowouts -- even going so far as to encourage the television audience to turn off their sets, no doubt to the anguish of his advertisers -- has changed the perception of what exactly the "average" fan is as it has steered intellectual discourse of the game to a new low.

I can't help but recall that once, now seeming so long ago, the broadcasts were not about grabbing a market of people interested in the personalities in the booth or how they felt about football, but what was happening on the field. I suppose that the real shame is that all those years of bar room televisions didn't completely destroy my hearing, sparing me from Kornheiser's irreverent and irrelevant blather.

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To be continued...

 

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