RyanMcD29

ESPN may or may not have unveiled a new NBA graphics package tonight with the NBA Draft

Latching on to this.. when I walked into the room where CBS' Election Night coverage was on, it did seem to have quite a CBS Sports (particularly NFL on CBS) feel to it all with the graphics package and wipes

Plus that'll get ABC back into the Super Bowl rotation

And as expected rolling it out with college football. But I do say it looks way more generic with them using the college names with no logo on them. It was good in the Super Bowl after a drive or two of getting used to it, but a big part of that was the bells and whistles of the logos and using each team's actual font. It's way less lively when you take that all out.

Digging the custom typeface to the Chiefs font all around

NBC and Sportsnet look like they'll keep the status quo for scorebugs and the like for the playoffs. NBC will produce the Toronto feed and Sportsnet the Edmonton feed, and worth noting NBC had their usual replay wipe while SN had a NHL logo for theirs.

Albany has a new logo set and they overcorrected their cartoony set with something straight out of 1998

Wonder if that does provide an opening for Forslund to just sign on to NBC full-time and become Doc's heir apparent when the new contract rolls around (or, likewise, could be in the running for another network's top position)

In addition to my prior sports TV thoughts, two ones that might make me run for the hills and one that's not unpopular. Let's fire up the one that won't make me put on top of a fire -The first go round of NASCAR on NBC was meh when they were paired with TNT, and it became clear it was TNT's doing in that 2007-14 stretch. Part of it was unfortunately losing Benny Parsons to cancer, but it really came down to all the commercial breaks and not good production values. They wasted that Bestwick-Benny-Wally combo because of those issues hampering it. Oddly enough NASCAR on NBC since 2015 is on the 2001-07 NASCAR on Fox tier of great coverage. -Speaking of NBC... the latter years of the NBA on NBC kinda lost its luster a bit in the Kobe and Shaq Lakers dynasty and post-Jordan era. It just didn't have the big time feel it did in the 1991-98 stretch. Also didn't help that NBC Sports didn't have an on-screen scorebug at all times until 2004 with whatever the hell abomination they had for Notre Dame football. -Actually, one other NBC one that's kinda linked to today. It was really weird having no baseball on NBC and then WHAM! there's a LCS and the World Series on NBC all of a sudden in October. Not that it's a bad thing to have Bob Costas calling postseason baseball (granted again, they were behind the times with scorebugs). Same thing with TBS when you watched 0 games on it all year because the Sunday national game was when 13 other games are on and it's blacked out locally and then all of a sudden the entire LDS was on TBS. It's smoothened out a bit with Fox getting a split of the LDS now and at least TBS has stuck around for a long while, and the extension of the deal might carve out a new more prominent weekly package for them too. -And now for the one to make me head for the hills. Boy, the OLN debacle made a lot of hockey people forget that the NHL on ESPN was utter trash the final 3 years or so, especially once they got the NBA deal. The NHL on ABC was a downgrade over Fox in terms of the amount of weeks it was on and the games they were airing, and that's oddly enough around the time National Hockey Night took a hit in quality. NBC has its own issues with variety. but the final years of ESPN were all Wings, Avs, and Devils all the time with some Flyers or Pens sprinkled in. Then once the NBA moved to ESPN they didn't promote it, they switched networks games were on last second, they didn't even throw the Heritage Classic onto ESPN2 or anything, and it was clear ESPN didn't want anything to do with the NHL anymore at that time. Once Comcast started giving a bit of an effort in putting together a sports network after getting those Pens-Wings Cup finals and hockey fans stopped caring about every single TV ratings release, there wasn't much left to miss about being on ESPN, at least from the standpoint of the 2000's. I'd definitely be down with the NHL adding ESPN alongside NBC and NBCSN with the next contract like every other league does with multiple broadcast partners (just with the caveat that you put all 7 SCF games on NBC proper, and then you can split the weeknight CFs with one conference on ESPN, the other on NBCSN, and weekend games on NBC), but if every NCAA Hockey Tournament and the 2016 World Cup of Hockey are any indication I wouldn't be too upset if FS1 outbid them instead.

The past 10 years are a godsend for things like this -Every March Madness game on TV, especially when dealing with local affiliates being locked into one game. It was no big deal my freshman year in Syracuse when they stuck to Syracuse and Cornell's cinderella run, but here in the NYC market you can get stuck with any one of St. John's, Seton Hall, the bunch of low-major NYC schools, and pretty much any school within the quadrant of Rider-Marist-Fairfield-Stony Brook. March Madness on Demand was fine, but it's so much better once Turner joined the fray -NFL RedZone becoming the antidote to having just 3 games on TV, which here in the NYC market means "Jets, Giants, and probably the 4:25 Fox Cowboys game". I know there's NFL Sunday Ticket but the NFL's insistence on having everything exclusive from over the top packages to video games cancels that out, not to mention how much more expensive it is. Plus for as much as they promote it as a fantasy football channel that's geared to offense, it's really more of being the TV remote for you and shows you pretty much everything. Best sports TV invention since the scorebug (in before someone says in the other thread they miss watching games without scorebugs) -Every Stanley Cup Playoff game on TV without having on NHL Center Ice (which FWIW I am a 17 year subscriber of, but that obviously doesn't apply to everyone). Yes, NBC can get ridiculous with channel selection, but having every game available on national TV one way or another is a nice thing to have that's surprisingly a recent development.

March Madness usually had a Turner based graphics package, so the rest of CBS doesn't go with them (so maybe they'll update their NBA graphics sometime this century when the season restarts in the playoffs or comes back in the fall?)

Got a snap of a one week only banner arrangement at the Coliseum. Butch Goring's 91 joined John Tonelli's 27 a few days later

In honor of my all-time favorite post of mine and all the talk of AHL having new leadership... HELL YEAH TIME TO REALIGN THE ALL UPSTATE NY AHL ORIGINAL CHANGES -Adirondack's now the Adirondack Red Wings again because that's about as stable as the Glens Falls team has been through the years -Binghamton's now the Devils a la real life -Albany River Rats come back -Ithaca has finally come to an agreement with Cornell University to become the Little Red! However they're now mired in a lawsuit with Ithaca High School. -Fredonia was forced to rebrand to the Eagles after their really racist promotion in the 2015-16 season finally pushed it past the point of keeping the Senecas nickname -Vegas gets their affiliate in the West Division in the Lockport Locksmiths (Canalmen's still taken by Batavia and they ain't giving it up) -Upon entry Seattle will open up the East Aurora Borealis. They will do at least two Simpsons theme nights a year. Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers will be the mascots. Laughs will be had when they play Albany and Utica. They'll play in the West. -"So now that there's 32 teams and two divisions of 6, wouldn't they just change to 4 divisions of 8?" No, because this is the AHL operating only with teams in Upstate New York.

Based on a few things Mike Joy tweeted out earlier in the week it looks like they'll be sticking to the 2017 graphics set this season

FWIW Fox's graphics haven't changed to the Super Bowl style for NASCAR just yet during practice. They have the Busch Clash tomorrow and then the 500 next week but usually Fox and FS1 keep the same set through Speedweeks

I know we keep on anticipating the NBC scorebug change that's never coming, but I guess there's a window to change it at the Stanley Cup Playoffs so it's in time for the "Championship Season" and Olympics. That being said NBC's practically given all their non-NFL and EPL properties new graphics for everything but the scorebug the past 2 years so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can get used to it for football. Jarring at first but it's fine as you get used to it more. This is going to be terrible for baseball if they stick to this style, though

If some of the graphics during the postgame of the NFC Championship Game were any clue, it looked like they were using some dark grey as the base and utilizing more of the wipes from this season's look. Now mind you I haven't watched Fox NFL Sunday all season so I might have missed this being a thing the whole year, but it does have a separate font from the usual Fox package. I don't think you'll see the top bar make a comeback in football any time soon. All the networks have it aligned the same way in the bottom and in this day and age with mobile and RedZone you kind of have to have Fox in sync with CBS on scorebug placement. But I agree with the sentiment, because that 2003-2006 scorebug was great and even better when it was done for baseball.

In actual realignment things to watch, keep an eye out on this Boise State-Mountain West lawsuit with the new TV contract the conference has. That might be a domino to fall in the near future

Looks like Cortland's getting a revamp. Kinda odd to see them change their Block C essentially to the same one as Cornell and Colgate given they're all in the area, though (granted Colgate's been using the vintage C a lot more this year so far)

I discovered you can do a full NCAA Basketball conference of schools that are in towns or cities with a Wegmans. Introducing THE WEGMANS CONFERENCE, and no, it's not even all Upstate NY like my throwaway AHL gag* Buffalo Canisius Niagara Cornell Syracuse Binghamton LIU (Brooklyn) Penn State Lehigh BC Princeton UVA George Mason NC State and future realignment/expansion members Navy UNC American/Georgetown The Orange totally getting a bubble NCAA Tournament bid off an unspectacular run in this conference magnified by a loss at Canisius and a 4 point squeaker against Lehigh. (*because Utica marks the Wegmans/Price Chopper divide in supermarkets in Upstate NY)

Blues' Stanley Cup banner The Athletic's got an interesting writeup on the process ($)

NBC kinda in a weird in between mode (even moreso than before) by ramping up the Conference Finals wipes and effects, but keeping the scorebug Meanwhile, Sportsnet still out here rolling the same exact graphics as 2014

oh boy that has all the makings of a disaster