Why I Hate ESPN

Really, ESPN used to be the coolest thing on the planet. Constant sports coverage of stuff you wanted to hear about, and funny sportscenter anchors. Now can I put up a list of shows and efforts they've made over the past few years?

1.) Playmakers? Seriously horrible show about professional football where everyone was taking drugs and shooting each other. Ray Karuth is Ray Karuth, but this show made it seem like everyone in the NFL was Ray Karuth. When you make a TV show, make sure it has good actors, and at least somewhat realistic plot lines ( if it's not a sitcom or purposely fake like pro wrestling). The fact is, male soap operas don't survive unless they come a similar form to pro wrestling.

2.) Stump the Schwab: This would have been a good idea, except that no one EVER won. If you want a successful game show, someone has to win occasionally. This guy they put on there had ridiculous sports knowledge oozing out of his head, plus if it is your FULL TIME JOB, and not the other person's job, no one should ever beat you at it.

3.) A series of horrible, horrible movies ( ummm 3, and Codebreakers, and Four Minutes, and a couple others I am forgetting) . All of these movies had bad actors attempting to play some real life sports hero, or reenacting some dramatic sports situation. I think that 3 was the worst one, showing all the potential of late night Cinemax for plot quality and acting. Who decided that it would be smart for a sports news organization to start making movies?

4.) That "reality" show with the potential sports news anchors. This would have worked if these people had actually been given jobs or stayed with ESPN. The first winner's only moment of fame was doing an essay about basejumping. On a side note, kudos to several people who managed to spin off side careers (like the guy who ended up doing Dodgeball commentary on GSN) .

To continue the real theme of my blog, ESPN was a great sports news network, and that's all it was ever supposed to be. I want to drill a point into people's heads. THERE IS ONLY ONE, MAYBE TWO CHANNELS WORTH of sports news and events to cover at any point in time. ESPN is now spinning off side networks like the Simpsons spun off side characters. Is there some reason that bass fishing, bowling, and every other sport that 3 people care about need to get hours of daytime coverage? If you eliminated ESPN classic and just showed game reruns of the core sports (football, basketball, baseball) during the day I guarantee you viewership of ESPN/ESPN2 would increase! And the idea of ESPN U could make it if you just expanded pay per view coverage!

AND my cable bill would go down. ESPN's self righteous battle with Cox Cable (although I hate Cox as well) wouldn't have been necessary. Their costs are ballooning because of all these poorly thought out projects and failures!

And every time I see the "in" logo on ESPNs home page I want to scream. Seriously, why would I pay that money to see why Jay Bilas thinks that basketball teams foul too much in the last 2 minutes of the game? And they want money from me to see my local sports articles, when in reality they're just linked to the Post, which I can get for free anyway.

ESPN has ballooned out of control, and often times it seems to actually suck the life out of sports. The poor ideas of coming out with show after show of talking heads, too many networks, barring people from reading articles (seriously, if the Post doesn't charge for content, what makes you think that its a good idea? I can read Michael Wilbon for free, but not Jay Bilas? Are you making money off of this?), and treading in places they weren't meant to (movies) have all contributed to over-commercialisation in the network. None of the ideals that ESPN started with are there anymore. I don't watch Sportscenter anymore, and really I only tune into ESPN for game broadcasts and PTI. The only real good that ESPN.com does for me anymore is providing Page2 (since it continues to be more of an open forum for sportswriters) and factual information. Their website is way too cluttered to be considered useful at this point.

What I really want would be a channel that I would be perfectly willing to pay $10/month for that would broadcast solid sports, and the announcers would never even have say "That touchdown was brought to you by Mazda, who never drops the ball in the clutch!" But we can talk about that later.

-K