The Sports Media Thread

[dfwabel]

1 hour ago, DG_Now said:

Is anybody reading The Ringer? I got to the site and I'm immediately overwhelmed -- especially on mobile. There's no organization; it's just CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT with no unifying theme other than a general sense of snark.

 

I did read their NBA free agent preview and it was pretty dumb. The comments (!) weren't very supportive either.

 

The site isn't in my rotation yet, in large part because I don't really get it. Besides being the new Bill Simmons thing, I don't know why it exists. SBNation is generally measured analysis. Deadspin is snark that's sometimes funny, plus the race talk that I love. Bleacher Report works hard to shed its slideshow past. Yahoo Sports has Woj and those terrible autoplay videos with that big guy in bad clothes talking baseball. ESPN is ESPN. What the hell is The Ringer?

I think of it a try to The Nerdist for (mainly) "sports-minded men" who would never admit that they would like the content of The Nerdist if they visited it.

[2001mark]

On 02/07/2016 at 1:38 PM, DG_Now said:

Is anybody reading The Ringer? I got to the site and I'm immediately overwhelmed -- especially on mobile. There's no organization; it's just CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT with no unifying theme other than a general sense of snark.

Yeah, they've been tweeting at a Kanye pace since their d-day.  

I plan on looking into only following/subscribing certain aspects.  

I could use none of their Game of Thrones nonsense, I've never watched a second of the show- not sure what homework they did there, but it's remarkably annoying.

[The_Admiral]

37 minutes ago, 2001mark said:

I could use none of their Game of Thrones nonsense

 

No one is allowed to publish anything that doesn't involve Game of Thrones. Half our political coverage has been comparing politicians to characters from Dungeons and Dragons and Boobs.

[CS85]

The Ringer is an interesting endeavor, but their connections to HBO have left them a bit of a well-intended mess at the moment.  If it can last 3 years, I think they'll hone things down to functioning as at least being a refined mess instead of the current pandemonium. 

[Cosmic]

1 hour ago, CS85 said:

The Ringer is an interesting endeavor, but their connections to HBO have left them a bit of a well-intended mess at the moment.  If it can last 3 years, I think they'll hone things down to functioning as at least being a refined mess instead of the current pandemonium. 

Well-intended mess seems a fitting description. I never read more than a few things at Grantland, so maybe I'm off base, but I expected The Ringer to be mostly about sports. I didn't expect the top screenful of stories to be (as they were when I just checked it out) "Aloe Vera is a Lie", "You Haven't Lived if You Haven't Watched Lifeguard Rescue YouTube", and "The New Instagram Food Trend You Should Skip". Oh, and presented by Miller Lite for some reason. It seems like a lot of generic clickbait that you'd find at the bottom of, say, a CCSLC thread.

[The_Admiral]

On 6/8/2016 at 2:27 PM, the admiral said:

I read something about how Jennifer Garner's Capital One commercials are more than just Capital One commercials. It's a minor miracle I'm not dead by my own hand.

 

It's been a month and I'm still haunted by this essay.

 

Quote

Jennifer Garner for Capital One is my favorite TV series currently on-air.

No shots at Broad City, or Veep, or Black-ish, or Game of Thrones. No shots at BoJack Horseman, or The Americans, or Transparent, or Better Call Saul. (NO SHOTS EVER AT NARCOS — NARCOS KEEP DOING YOUR THING. PROMISE ME. NARCOS, DO YOU PROMISE.) But what’s happening on Jennifer Garner for Capital One right now is something special.

 

And we should talk about it.

The first thing we should talk about is the Venture Card itself. I’m kidding — we 100 percent should not talk about that. I know nothing about the Venture Card. I mean, I literally know nothing about it. Maybe it’s awful? I really hope not! But we don’t ever need to talk about it, because it doesn’t matter.

To be clear: I would write this if the Venture Card were a “you might die”–era Chipotle coupon. I would write this if the Venture Card were one of those brands of niche mid-’90s cigarettes designed to entrap healthy teens (I mean, of course I would — hot people just want to smoke and date and play pool by the ocean all day, and who’s to stop us). I would write this if the Venture Card were a trial membership for one of those cults that seems really charming at first (vegan menu? Dope) but then suddenly the next thing you know you’re in the bathroom of the internet cafe from The Beach and looking over your shoulder and swallowing a mailbox key in a locked stall as you tattoo a set of coordinates to your hip bone and Google “Jennifer Garner + get my life back” (11,000 results). I would write this … no matter what.

And that’s the point, really: Jennifer Garner for Capital One … is not about Capital One. It’s important to understand this at all times. No one knows what Jennifer Garner is selling. No one knows, and no one cares, and it’s fine.

 

Quote

It would have been easy for “What’s in your wallet?” to become a slogan like any other — literalized and postliteralized into semiubiquity. Actually, the truth is: It kind of already has. A previous version of the campaign — starring [VAPES THE ABSOLUTE MOST DEEPLY] lovable Vikings as fish-out-of-water consumers who must answer to the closed fist of middle capitalism while finding solace in the broad comedy of modernity’s embrace — was an inescapable bit player in early 2000s culture. Somewhere between “This Is SportsCenter” and “the GEICO cavemen getting a television pilot,” the “What’s in your wallet?” Vikings wove a deep idiot web: They went on shopping sprees after being disappointed by the Grand Canyon. They bought new paper shredders to replace their out-of-pocket pet goat. Typing this out I feel depressed, but I’m sure someone got paid. The Vikings were a hit, and did their (please don’t look up what “job” means) job.

 

And yet under Viking (and Jackson and Baldwin) rule, “What’s in your wallet?” is pure catchphrase — the refrain to a bad song. It’s too broad, too blunt, too “at” and not “to.” They get to the chorus but no further. They are finally just Vikings.

Garner’s is different — more conversational and limber. Its most important pattern is its only pattern: She never speaks the same twice. In “Out of Reach,” she is challenging: “What’s in your wallet? (Prove it.)” In “Grand Illusion,” reassuring: “What’s in your wallet? (Whatever it is, it’s fine.)” In “Websites Galore,” casual: “What’s in your wallet? (I mean, it’s just a wallet.)” And in “Seats Roll Out,” yes, flirtatious: “What’s in your wallet? (I mean — you don’t have to tell me. If you want to tell me, you can tell me. If you told me, then I would know, and it would be our secret. I do think we’d love having a secret. I like to imagine that we’d talk about it sometimes. Just us, of course. A whisper, a little laugh, when no one else was around. Maybe over some wine. Only a glass, I think — you know, that kind of night. Sometimes we would text about it. Short texts, quick ones, not too late. I bet that we would text each other back really promptly. ‘What’s in your wallet?’ I’d ask you, and then you would tell me. You would know I already know but it wouldn’t matter.)” In Jennifer Garner’s hands, “What’s in your wallet?” isn’t selling — it’s asking. And it becomes something else entirely.

It becomes language.

I honestly think this is some of the worst writing I've ever read in my life. You could brain Chuck Klosterman with a cast-iron skillet first thing every morning for a year and he still wouldn't end up writing this.

[Sodboy13]

19 hours ago, the admiral said:

You could brain Chuck Klosterman with a cast-iron skillet first thing every morning for a year

 

God, I wish somebody had told me this was an option, like, 15 years ago.

[infrared41]

On 7/2/2016 at 1:38 PM, DG_Now said:

Is anybody reading The Ringer?

 

I've been checking it out. It's a lot like shopping at a TJ Maxx - you have to dig through a lot of junk, but occasionally you find that really nice replica jersey on the rack for $19.95. 

[Sport]

38 minutes ago, infrared41 said:

 

I've been checking it out. It's a lot like shopping at a TJ Maxx - you have to dig through a lot of junk, but occasionally you find that really nice replica jersey on the rack for $19.95. 

Good analogy.

 

Their current tabs at the top of the page are NBA FREE AGENCY - THE UNDENIABLES - SPORTS - POP CULTURE - TECH - PODCASTS

 

WTF is the undeniables and why should I click on that? Sounds like something Sportscenter would've done one summer when they don't have any sports to cover. Remember "Who's Now?" or the Mt Rushmore nonsense? Here comes Stephen A Smith and Barry Melrose to talk about The Undeniable blank in blank. 

NBA free agency is a bigger deal than "Sports"? Eat me.

Pop Culture might as well just say Game of Thrones.

Tech, I don't care.

Podcasts - Simmons puts out one podcast every week now and it's always with his goofy buddy Joe House who I find annoying so unless he has a guest on I want to listen to no thanks anymore. All the other podcasts are pretentious or hosts who are both pretentious while also just too excited to be there. Lower the personality volume a notch. I listen to podcasts so I don't have to listen to morning talk radio. 

 

So far it feels like Grantland except Simmons is too busy with the show to be an effective editor. I'm also not a fan of the art direction. There's too much garbage to sift through and things aren't well organized and I don't have the energy to go through all that. 

[teddthebucfan]

23 hours ago, Cosmic said:

Well-intended mess seems a fitting description. I never read more than a few things at Grantland, so maybe I'm off base, but I expected The Ringer to be mostly about sports. I didn't expect the top screenful of stories to be (as they were when I just checked it out) "Aloe Vera is a Lie", "You Haven't Lived if You Haven't Watched Lifeguard Rescue YouTube", and "The New Instagram Food Trend You Should Skip". Oh, and presented by Miller Lite for some reason. It seems like a lot of generic clickbait that you'd find at the bottom of, say, a CCSLC thread.

I haven't been to the Ringer yet, and what everyone's said hasn't really given me any reason to, but this description sounds an awful lot like half of the reasons I stopped frequenting Deadspin a while back. I can;t remember the exact time or what the exact stories were, but I remember one time I visited and on the front page there were only two stories about sports, four were reblogs from other Gawker sites, and 2 were those adver-posts about sweet summer deals on speakers.

[CS85]

Deadspin confuses me.  Hell, half of these websites that try to portray themselves as outlets to be taken seriously to the Nth degree baffle me.  Deadspin is 90% retreading hours-old news with their typical snark and appeal to the burnouts and skeptics who drearily populate the comments section, BUT on the very rare occasion they will publish a brilliant article.  Sports On Earth (if it's even still a thing?), The Players Tribune, The Undefeated, Vice Sports, The Ringer, etc. - all these sites are either virtual or spiritual branches off of the Grantland and Deadspin trees, and it bums me out that I don't know where the hell to turn for good investigative sports journalism that outputs consistently and doesn't water down its own brand with veiled hipster appeal and outright authorial bias.  

 

In the end I just sort of allow reddit to be my aggregator of what is even worth reading from these places, but even that is unsavory.  Nothing feels good or pure or exciting when these sites are either patronizing or unfocused, and it's even more of a drag when the ones that start to stand apart either get bought out or shut down.

[teddthebucfan]

Grantland was one of the few of these "all-around with focus on sports" kind of websites that I actually frequented, mostly because I liked the guy that wrote the lengthy movie reviews they had there. I think Grantland to a certain extent, at least compared to some others, was able to pull off the kind of departmental magazine feel that I think they were going for, as opposed to Deadspin, and this is the other major reason I stopped frequenting it, which often reads like a sports blog that desperately wants to be a politics blog, or vice versa.

[infrared41]

1 hour ago, CS85 said:

Deadspin confuses me.  

 

I don't know where the hell to turn for good investigative sports journalism that outputs consistently and doesn't water down its own brand with veiled hipster appeal and outright authorial bias.  

 

I think of Deadspin as snarky sports humor more than anything else. That's not saying they don't do some good work on occasion, but I can't take them entirely seriously. 

 

Take the shopping at TJ Maxx analogy I used for The Ringer and apply it to sports sites overall. 

[buckeye]

ESPN loses another reporter in Shannon Spake. She's headed off to Fox Sports to be involved with college football and NASCAR among things.

 

 

[The_Admiral]

There's a pretty good interview with Keith Olbermann on hockey here if you're interested. It starts at the 25-minute mark in case you want to skip through Greg Wyshynski and Dave Lozo being lame. SPOILER: You do.

 

This almost has a "Joe Buck calls a Blues game" feel to it, where a guy we hardly associate with the sport drops in and immediately outshines the people whose whole careers are supposed to be based on hockey. It's not a perfect comparison, because Keith shows himself to be a longtime Rags fan, but the point is it makes you wonder why Keith isn't doing a podcast and these two limp-dicks are. 

 

It's not perfect, though, because Olbermann has no idea what he's talking about with Hockey Night, going on about how Strombo reinvigorated the panel and elevated Healy and Kypreos to relative greatness. There's a lot of sound and fury to say "sucks they fired my friend." One shining moment of idiocy comes when Dave Lozo tries to intimate that everyone calling Strombo a "bad fit" is a dog-whistle for racism. Come on. He's Greek. No one has it out for the Greeks, especially in Toronto, the city that's probably more into its own diversity than anywhere else on the continent. When they say he doesn't fit, they mean he doesn't fit: he's not enough of a hockey guy on a show that above all others is expected to be Hockey Guys. Olbermann, to his credit, dismisses this stupid allegation out of hand and says it's just that Strombo wasn't enough of a specialist for an audience that more than ever expects specialization, for better or worse.

 

Interesting that Olbermann cites hockey as the only sport he can still enjoy as a pure fan, baseball and football being overexposed and basketball being too boring and timeout-heavy -- haha, jump down his throat for dog-whistle racism about that. His point about no longer calling the play dead on pucks tied up along the boards is a great one, and surely has gone a long way in getting us in and out in just about 150 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if NBC gives him a ton of money to come in and head up their NHL studio coverage. I also wouldn't be surprised if Keith takes the job, then starts bitching about commuting to Stamford, bitching about his panelists, bitching about his cameramen, and goes on to make a complete hash out of something that started off highly promising and ends with Mike Keenan and some fungible haircut named, I dunno, Blake Guntley or something doing intermissions out of a broom closet because NBC blew their whole budget on Olbermann, the ad rates went down, and all the cameramen quit.

[CS85]

If there's anyone who would benefit from doing a podcast, it'd be Olbermann.  He could dictate all the terms and have nobody to blame but himself when he inevitably becomes dissatisfied, but I guess having somebody to yell at is half the point.

[Sport]

On 7/10/2016 at 7:07 AM, the admiral said:

There's a pretty good interview with Keith Olbermann on hockey here if you're interested. It starts at the 25-minute mark in case you want to skip through Greg Wyshynski and Dave Lozo being lame. SPOILER: You do.

 

Their being lame is why I don't listen to this podcast because they are lame a lot. I don't need comedy bits from my hockey podcasts and I get enough hockey cynicism from Twitter. If there's anything I can't stand it's people who laugh at their own jokes and think they're funnier than they actually are. No thanks, Puck Soup. Oddly, Wyshinski is listenable when he's with Jeff Marek on his other podcast. 

 

 

On 7/10/2016 at 7:07 AM, the admiral said:

This almost has a "Joe Buck calls a Blues game" feel to it, where a guy we hardly associate with the sport drops in and immediately outshines the people whose whole careers are supposed to be based on hockey. It's not a perfect comparison, because Keith shows himself to be a longtime Rags fan, but the point is it makes you wonder why Keith isn't doing a podcast and these two limp-dicks are. 

 

It's not perfect, though, because Olbermann has no idea what he's talking about with Hockey Night, going on about how Strombo reinvigorated the panel and elevated Healy and Kypreos to relative greatness. There's a lot of sound and fury to say "sucks they fired my friend." One shining moment of idiocy comes when Dave Lozo tries to intimate that everyone calling Strombo a "bad fit" is a dog-whistle for racism. Come on. He's Greek. No one has it out for the Greeks, especially in Toronto, the city that's probably more into its own diversity than anywhere else on the continent. When they say he doesn't fit, they mean he doesn't fit: he's not enough of a hockey guy on a show that above all others is expected to be Hockey Guys. Olbermann, to his credit, dismisses this stupid allegation out of hand and says it's just that Strombo wasn't enough of a specialist for an audience that more than ever expects specialization, for better or worse.

 

Interesting that Olbermann cites hockey as the only sport he can still enjoy as a pure fan, baseball and football being overexposed and basketball being too boring and timeout-heavy -- haha, jump down his throat for dog-whistle racism about that. His point about no longer calling the play dead on pucks tied up along the boards is a great one, and surely has gone a long way in getting us in and out in just about 150 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if NBC gives him a ton of money to come in and head up their NHL studio coverage. I also wouldn't be surprised if Keith takes the job, then starts bitching about commuting to Stamford, bitching about his panelists, bitching about his cameramen, and goes on to make a complete hash out of something that started off highly promising and ends with Mike Keenan and some fungible haircut named, I dunno, Blake Guntley or something doing intermissions out of a broom closet because NBC blew their whole budget on Olbermann, the ad rates went down, and all the cameramen quit.

 

I like Olbermann so I listened to this and there's a good story in there about Lindros, John Leclair, and the Rangers partying after an ESPY's show in the 90's. I can't really comment on the Strombo stuff because I've watched 0 seconds of Hockey Night coverage.

 

I think KO would be good on a hockey desk show. Hockey could really use a personality who shows up and drips knowledge and doesn't sound like he's faking his interest. 

[CS85]

BTW, how the hell is there not a 30 for 30 about the Eric Lindros trade yet?  The Lindros Trade Tree only just died a few weeks ago.  

 

[Sport]

2 hours ago, CS85 said:

BTW, how the hell is there not a 30 for 30 about the Eric Lindros trade yet?  The Lindros Trade Tree only just died a few weeks ago.  

 

There's been like 3 hockey 30 for 30's and one of them was about how a con man almost tricked the NHL into giving him a team. I don't think we'll be getting many more. 

 

Meanwhile there's at least 6 more basketball 30 for 30 in the works all about some unremarkable team like the 1998 Atlanta Hawks, probably. 

[CS85]

Just finished up the OJ Simpson:  Made In America series, and you really need to watch it to appreciate what an undertaking it was.  It was incredible and shocking to see just how brutally he killed those two people, especially Nicole.  She wasn't a saint but nobody deserves to have their heads nearly cut off.  

It was INSANE to hear about the jurors take a 10 month trial and reach a verdict in 3 hours, one of whom raised his fist (he was a former black panther on the damn jury) and others who brazenly say that this was outright revenge for Rodney King and a century+ of slavery, racial prejudice and abuse.  It all came boiling to a head in a way that had no precedent and no equal in terms of media scale.  

 

I don't blame the jurors, really.  I blame OJ for not facing the music, whether it was by surrendering and taking his sentence like a man, or having the guts to blow his head off in the Bronco.  

Watch it for free below.

 

 

http://espn.go.com/30for30/ojsimpsonmadeinamerica/