The_Admiral

Yeah probably but I was thinking more of NHL fans, who are never happy about anything. Bear in mind this was well before the rise of Twitter, #pleaselikemysport, and this perverse need to prostrate oneself before the NBA and talk about how much better the NBA is (it isn't). Everyone just sorta got annoyed by Crosby-Ovechkin hype back around 2008-2010. Now, if you suggest that maybe P.K. Subban cannot be marketed above everyone else, well, 

3 hours ago, charger77 said:

 

I'd assume that it would be mutually beneficial to the NHL and NBC to get McDavid as much American exposure as possible, especially against Crosby.

 

This is kind of Magic v. Bird moment for the NHL not seen since Gretzky/Lemeiux... #OITGDNHL?

Nah, not really. The NHL has essentially given up on marketing players over teams. Remember that when they tried to push that really hard with Crosby and Ovechkin, everyone got really mad at them and said it wasn't working (it really wasn't) and that not only was it antithetical to the game of hockey, it wasn't done well because one or both of the guys was always hurt. At best, they're happy to supersaturate Canada with McDavid/Oilers coverage and give the American exposure to proven stateside draws (Blackhawks, Penguins, Sabres, Red Wings, Flyers, the Rangers but not really but don't tell them). At worst, they want to keep the Oilers in a state of benign neglect so that when everyone starts fretting over the US TV deal coming up for bids, perhaps some owners can nudge the Oilers into trading McDavid to, oh, let's say the L.A. Kings.

15 hours ago, charger77 said:

Why isn't the NHL brain trust doing everything in within its power to get every Edmonton vs Pittsburgh game as a national broadcast?

You're presuming that the NHL wants Edmonton on national broadcasts any more than NBC does.

Bit of a vagina dentata vibe on the Trappers.

Isn't the phrase usually "inmates running the asylum"?

Put the Astros back in the NL West, move the Cubs and Cardinals back east, abandon hopes of Montreal.

Barstool is their beloved New England Patriots. You despise them and are right to do so but you have to begrudgingly accept that they will run up the score on everyone. Just as Belichick mastered football, they've mastered, uh, being pricks on the internet, basically.

But yeah, good points, none of this is remotely healthy or constructive. And I just can't quit! Set me on fire already.

Well, I think the internet as self-righteous circular firing squad is pretty accurate. Isn't there a mountain of evidence to that effect? It certainly seems that way, but if you're as sympathetic to all this passive-aggressive snitching as you're showing yourself to be, if not engaging in it yourself, then what's the point of me arguing? I'll never change your mind; you're dug in too deep. If citing someone who's a way better writer than I am can only get me "oh he just wants to say the n-word" for some dumb reason, then screw it.

26 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

But when I read the above passage, I mostly get a better-written version of "why do only black people get to say the N word?"

Talk about a pretty bad-faith reading but at this juncture I can't say I'm surprised.

Now that it's had time to settle, this whole mess reminded me of "Planet of Cops," what I think was the last big essay Freddie deBoer did before he had to institutionalize himself:

Quote

The irony of our vibrant and necessary police reform movement is that it’s happening simultaneously to everyone becoming a cop. I mean everyone — liberal, conservative, radical and reactionary. Blogger, activist, pundit, and writer, obviously, but also teacher, tailor, and candlestick maker. Cops, all of them. Cops everywhere. Everybody a cop.

Quote

Demos firing Matt Bruenig because people dropped a dime on him to powerful people. The little army of snitches who have written to my employers and tried to divest me of my job. The self-appointed Twitter police — they’re in every subculture of that forum — who constantly start :censored:, DMing people to berate them for who they follow or whose work they boost, the ones who keep an oppo file on everybody, who try and regulate other people’s friendships. The ones who keep a big file folder of screen grabs, just waiting to play judge and jury. They’re cops.

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

Yeah, pretty much, right? Sarah Spain tattling on Dan Katz to their boss, the Barstool drones tattling on Sarah Spain to anyone who will listen, just tattletales all the way down. High school never ends.

Side note: it's interesting that the phrase "bad person" has never had more currency in recent memory than it does today. He's a bad person. This person's entire existence, entire sense of humanity, is rotten, undesirable, past redemption. Being a bitch or a dickhead still has a sense of being temporal or transient, but bad person, where the hell do you even go from there? Calvinism, man.

That's our league!

1 minute ago, Tracy Jordan said:

I'm completely out of the loop here (I've never even heard of Barstool sports until recently). Who is this PFT guy? Is he parodying someone? 

Yes. Pro Football Talk Commenter is a parody of Pro Football Talk commenters. I don't know how he wound up in the Barstool universe; I think he used to do stuff with Jeb Lund because I'd come across him before he had the show with Big Cat and really was just devoted to making fun of people who comment on Pro Football Talk.

22 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

It looks like an awful lot of the dislike for this particular sports person is 1.) geographic or 2.) sex-based. I get that no one likes to get called on their misogyny, but that doesn't mean that misogyny doesn't exist. Or that people also can't evolve their opinions.

No one said people can't evolve their opinions, but if you've done a lot of evolving, you should avoid putting yourself in positions where you can bite your own ass, which is what's happening with her right now as all the Barstool people unearth her pre-woke tweets calling other women sluts and complaining that they're getting work instead of her (which just serve to codify the vibe she's given off for years). Maybe it's too cynical, I know I get a lot of crap from you for that, but it's not hard to track her metamorphosis with social justice going mainstream and that Cool Girl monologue making the rounds. She was very much the Cool Girl until suddenly she wasn't because there was a new niche to exploit. 

I don't even know that Barstool has great content, I'm guessing they don't, but they have something that there's a market for, which is sports talk as frat house/corner bar/whatever. That's what sports radio as a 24-hour format was built on, not people telling you how stupid you are. But media is infinite now! They're not taking bandwidth from more highbrow sports discussion. They don't need to be no-platformed. Let them wallow in their mud while do your own thing, because if you don't, they'll drag you into the mud every time. 

You cared enough to call me an MRA for explaining why people dislike her so much but you're right to hit the eject button on this one because it's gonna get worse before it gets better.

UPDATE: Barstool Strikes Back

I've been owned online again.

Remember when the Bears went to the Super Bowl and there was a whole story like "area woman sells herself online for Super Bowl tickets" and everyone was either disgusted or horny about it? That was her and her big break. Then she made a name for herself as this sort of omnipresent Chicago sports personality where her whole deal was "hey, sports, I'm just one of the boys, one of the dudes, oh, except for these massive jugs on display," and she was always seen here and there, interviewing and being interviewed, sometimes just being in camera shots for no reason, generally just always being around everywhere. At one point she had a show on WGN where she and Walter Payton's daughter went to local restaurants to do one of those shows that I think every market has in some form or another. 

But a couple things have happened since then (let's say 2010, when the Hawks first won). The obvious one is that the zeitgeist has shifted dramatically in the last oh, just four years, really, in all the ways we don't need to explain. The other is that buzzing around Wrigleyville treating beer as a food group will catch up to you hard and fast when you're in your thirties and don't really have a petite figure to begin with. So once she put these miles on, filled out, and developed the voice of the grandma from Dinosaurs, she couldn't really market her Cool Hot Chick personal brand any longer, but fortunately she could get on board the Indignant Online Feminist brand, which she did, quite successfully, such that she eventually won the dang Peabody Award for a movie about guys being mean on Twitter. Now she's at ESPN -- she allegedly got kicked upstairs from ESPN Radio's Chicago station for reporting people to HR -- where she shows up from time to time when they need a woman's/Chicagoan's perspective, and now apparently continues to report people to HR.

tl;dr: Sarah Spain was Barstool before Barstool but picked up the zeal of the convert

Big Cat owns a chunk of the company, so I'm sure he's still coming out ahead even without the show.

I've consumed no Barstool content but their mere existence makes so many detestable media creatures so angry that I have to support their right to exist. In fact, I'm alt-right now.

It's just annoyingly predictable that she would be involved in this somehow. I joked that she was badgering HR about Katz but then I looked at the other Deadspin story from the other day and it turns out she actually did. 

Yeah but world-class backbiter Sarah Spain wanted them gone because they're rude and that's a half-hour of TV she could have instead.

I heard they're gonna replace the show with a new Sarah Spain vehicle called I Spent Last Night in a Ditch.

Deadspin and ESPN in a weird enemy-of-my-enemy position here.

Put on the Wolves game because I was bored and there's like no one at the Horizon on a Saturday night, unless they're all on the camera side (which I won't rule out). What a bummer. Maybe Rosemont's already usurious parking fees finally crossed the line.

If I recall, the issue with the FoxTrax pucks was that they never froze quite right and were taking funny bounces as a result. Of course, nowadays, everyone's ice is such crap that even normal pucks are bouncing all over the place, so maybe no one cares now.

Yeah, it would do a lot for goal-line and offside calls.

Oh, and a hearty LOL at Gary Bettman, the guy whose league has bungled one television contract after another when he wasn't taking the league off television altogether with lockouts, being inducted into a broadcasting hall of fame.