ESPN and Sportishness

The stakes aren’t very high in sports so give my little rant here the attention it deserves by not taking it too serious.

 I miss the days when ESPN used to record the hour long Sportscenter coverage of the previous day’s scores and highlights. If you caught the first half and missed the second it would repeat every hour from 6 a.m. till noon. It gave viewers memorable sound bites and clipped highlights in a tidy package. It told America what happened in a clever and fun way; they introduced witty anchors and memorable lines, like the late Stewart Scott’s “Cooler than the other side of the Pillow.” Now we have what? I don’t even know what to call it, sportishness?

The network’s main course is still sports but now includes a mixed helping of politics, star power and talk show antics.

I should probably explain that I am not talking about the live sports they cover, the Monday Night Football segment and all the basketball games are great. Kirk Herbstreit on college football is superb, as are Dick Vitale and Jay Bilas for basketball.  Daily ESPN is like network soaps and talk shows, colorful characters and opinionated talking heads. One of their morning shows, First Take, encourages 3 guys to argue over a given topic. Each gets a short segment of time and occasionally uses it to blast another’s point of view. It’s more ‘talk friendly’ and works with the overall transition to hot take scripts that nearly every program before the 6 o’clock news follows. SportsNation, another hot take show, uses mic’d up audience feedback heavy on the “WOOAHs!” and “OOOOHs!” that Talk Soup made popular decades ago. These aren’t terrible shows and when you realize sports is entertainment the move toward personalities and gimmicks makes sense.

They just resemble the rest of the daytime television landscape instead of rising above it.

I don’t fault the executives at ESPN for wanting to change direction. Few companies have the boldness and intuition to cast aside a winning formula and head into the digital unknown. ESPN is avant garde in this way. Sportscenter went from a recorded morning news roundup to a live one in 2008. That was huge because it meant they needed to create new content for 6 hours every day. That was the beginning of this shift away from sensible today-in-sports broadcasting to a hodgepodge of Twitter posts, gossipy did-you-see-what-So and So (insert star name) wore trolling. Again, this is sports so the level of outrage is tempered by its entertainment nature.

Today’s version is heavy on opinion and light on reporting.

They have to fill up time somehow though. A cable channel that needs to get new material out for 12 hours a day every day should get a break on a few of the shows. They can’t all be Emmy winners right? Whatever the quality, a certain progressive political fiber runs like a thread through nearly every studio show. Not that every personality or journalist thinks like an editor of Mother Jones but the presentation of events suggests the network has Leftist sympathies. During the Missouri football team so-called strike last year the journalists’ covered the team like they were civil rights pioneers. Some of the players didn’t like the way the university president was handling complaints of racist incidents. The tone was very what-does-this-mean-for-athletes-in-America and unfairly portrayed a tolerant school into a place where bigots find refuge. ESPN didn’t say this of course but the reporting on it as a serious issue of our time was too much for me.

I don’t like the athlete profiles they do either. The productions are better than magazine covers for promoting star image. Uglier parts of their life get airbrushed or ignored. Not that stars should be criticized or dragged through the mud but neither should they be presented in an unflinchingly positive light. Journalists should always worry about their closeness with people, places and things they are covering.

For all my criticism of the new daily format ESPN trains their on air talent well. They had a formula for news and reporting that everyone seemed to like though. Go back to the recorded morning schedule and get back to sports news. 

Get rid of the sportishness.