The Sports Media Thread

[The_Admiral]

He's all over the place, it's a big sloppy mess, but there is a grain of truth in there that she was hyped really hard for a while just for doing The Right Opinions Show that no one really watched. The rest of it, I don't know, he probably should have given himself 24 hours to calm down before he wrote it, or waited 24 hours and not written it at all. 

 

EDIT: see, look at the mess Whitlock left because he wrote this in a fit of rage and possibly adderall, he linked to an article without realizing he gave away the game and that he'd had it out for her for a while now:

 

When Deadspin’s Greg Howard published a searing take-down of Jason Whitlock’s disastrous tenure at the ESPN site The Undefeated, Nolan had the writer on to talk about his reporting process, something that couldn’t have happened on ESPN (Fox Sports 1 now, ironically, employs Whitlock and Colin Cowherd, another ESPN cast-off Nolan has been happy to mock).

[JayMac]

I will agree that Jason Whitlock is pretty terrible but I have one question for everyone...what is the big draw with Katie Nolan? I never got why she was even remotely popular. 

[Sport]

Fun personality, different perspective, cute, and loves sports. I like Katie Nolan and I'm a regular listener of her podcast. Has it helped her career that she's cute? Absolutely, but - get used to this - talent isn't fair.

 

And if Jason Whitlock wants to say she's the death of meritocracy in America then he needs to look in the mirror because he's been put on TV despite being a super fat uggo-fuggo, he's appeared in print despite being an objectively poor writer, and he keeps falling into jobs despite being a world class dumbass who's wrong all the time because his bullshirt gets clicks. It's garbage like this most recent incident that make him a known name. It's definitely not his own "talent". 

[Digby]

There's a certain niche in the internet era for sports-media voices who are "voices of the average fan" but, more likely, can bring the perspective of someone who appreciates the irreverence of it all and is self-aware and rolls their eyes at the cult of access. It was Bill Simmons in the early Page 2 days, it was Will Leitch's original Deadspin, then it was Katie Nolan with that mantle for a while. I'd rather listen to someone who can appreciate where sports is funny and kind of absurd and can also point out the toxicities and hypocrises of the whole thing, which is what those guys did. I'll take that genre over the First Take/PTI screaming match nonsense, or the talk radio sports-as-white-male-grievance shtick.

[The_Admiral]

5 hours ago, JayMac said:

I will agree that Jason Whitlock is pretty terrible but I have one question for everyone...what is the big draw with Katie Nolan? I never got why she was even remotely popular. 

The latest iteration of the Just One Of The Guys girls after Michelle Beadle and Sarah Spain aged out of it. It'll happen to her, too. Until then, it's easy to understand why she's popular: she's charismatic and cute and says funny stuff. I think the idea that she'd been doing some kind of very important work was always severely overstated, but that's the case in the vast majority of sports media.

 

5 hours ago, Sport said:

And if Jason Whitlock wants to say she's the death of meritocracy in America then he needs to look in the mirror because he's been put on TV despite being a super fat uggo-fuggo, he's appeared in print despite being an objectively poor writer, and he keeps falling into jobs despite being a world class dumbass who's wrong all the time because his bullshirt gets clicks.

that ball hit WAY back

[TheBigFiz21]

Seeing ABC flirt with the one-off returns of MNF and postseason baseball (depending on the longevity of this new format) has got to be very delightful. Makes me wish ESPN would use the network to carry more sports. They're heading in the right direction though by lobbying the NFL to get ABC involved and hopefully, Super Bowls back again as well. Not sure the same can be said for MLB because there's a very slim chance Disney would let Sunday Night Baseball take away the summer game show block on the same evening or let alone take up LCS and/or WS games when we've seen Fox get beat by some scripted shows and sometimes SNF, obviously, in the past.

[The_Admiral]

What's the plan for ABC simulcasts? Was the Raiders game a one-off? Chiefs-Ravens seemed like an obvious pick to simulcast but they had Dancing with the Stars instead, which is somehow still on TV after like 15 years.

[TheBigFiz21]

On 10/1/2020 at 4:55 PM, the admiral said:

What's the plan for ABC simulcasts? Was the Raiders game a one-off? Chiefs-Ravens seemed like an obvious pick to simulcast but they had Dancing with the Stars instead, which is somehow still on TV after like 15 years.

Raiders-Saints was a one-off simulcast to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first MNF game. If it was me handling the schedule, I surely would have had Chiefs-Ravens that week instead.

 

ESPN is indeed pushing to have ABC simulcasts in the next TV deal with the NFL. And I have no doubt they'll get their wish. The ratings would easily trump any recent episode of DWTS. Not to mention, they can negotiate for better games on their schedule than in years' past, even though they may not have the flexibility of NBC and their SNF lineup.

[RyanMcD29]

1 hour ago, TheBigFiz21 said:

Raiders-Saints was a one-off simulcast to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first MNF game. If it was me handling the schedule, I surely would have had Chiefs-Ravens that week instead.

 

ESPN is indeed pushing to have ABC simulcasts in the next TV deal with the NFL. And I have no doubt they'll get their wish. The ratings would easily trump any recent episode of DWTS. Not to mention, they can negotiate for better games on their schedule than in years' past, even though they may not have the flexibility of NBC and their SNF lineup.

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

[Digby]

Has it really been 15 years since Monday Night Football moved to ABC??? Jeez. I'm old. And still not even used to that.

[Sec19Row53]

4 hours ago, Digby said:

Has it really been 15 years since Monday Night Football moved to ABC??? Jeez. I'm old. And still not even used to that.

Do you mean ESPN? You're right - you really aren't used to that.

[Digby]

Moved FROM ABC, yes.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

It's really crazy how immediately the switch from the Sunday night to the Monday night game being trash happened. John Madden (remember him?) and Al Michaels hosting SNF made it immediately big time. That plus NBC getting the best game, compared to ESPN (and TNT!) before them getting the dregs for Sunday night, much the way ABC gets mostly trash now.

 

Doesn't this seem impossible?

 

Also the idea of networks (ESPN and TNT) swapping weeks? Wild stuff. Also I loved those late-90s Turner Sports graphics.

[The_Admiral]

I remember back when the NFL was first making noise about how they wanted to do flexible scheduling, there were plenty of people who were really upset at the thought of it: if you move a game from 3 to 7 or 7 to noon, it'll screw up ticketholders' travel accommodations, blah blah blah. It ended up working just fine, if you ask me. Now, 14 years on, the idea of not having the biggest game of the week on The Football Day seems strange. And until ESPN bumbled everything on their end by pissing off the league* (who locked them into much worse games) and generally making a hash of their production, the Sunday/Monday switch turned out really well. You had a great game on Sunday night and still had the brand equity and ceremony of Monday Night Football. The old Mike Patrick Sunday night games always felt like a sad afterthought, like ESPN was in way over their heads trying to do network TV. They started getting back there again with the crappy matchups and yelly guy.

 

 

*The NFL rightsholder model really is something, isn't it? "Okay, here's the deal: you give us money, and then you have to be really nice to us all the time or else we punish you with Jacksonville Jaguars games." You would think it'd be ESPN's dime, ESPN's dancefloor, and that paying $2 billion kind of entitles them to the occasional honest reporting or Michelle Beadle petulance. It's good to be the king.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Maybe it's because he was from Buffalo, but I always thought of Paul Maguire as my friendly old uncle who somehow landed an NFL broadcasting job.

[Digby]

The way I remember it is that TNT got the early SNF games when it was still baseball season, right? Because Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN was actually quite a thing.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah, TNT had the first half, ESPN had the second. 

 

MLB and NHL are the only pro leagues I think ESPN ever did well. The NFL was too big for them, and they've never mastered the NBA like NBC did and TNT does.

[Digby]

*Insufferable Soccer Dweeb enters the chat*
 

ESPN does big soccer well, too, or at least they did after the Dave O’Brien debacle of the 2006 World Cup. I miss them having any world soccer of importance.

[The_Admiral]

I think I floated this concept before for NFL scheduling: byes fall in weeks 7-11 (6 per week except 8 in week 9), with the Thursday night package running weeks 8-11, then shifting to Saturday nights for 12-16. All Thursday games, including Thanksgiving in Week 12, have their teams coming off their bye week (which effectively locks Dallas and Detroit into playing the first ten weeks in a row forever), so no game is ever played on less than five days' rest. Ideally in this system, an upgraded Monday Night Football would go back to ABC and the Thursday/Saturday dregs package would go to ESPN. 

 

The only problems are that you'd have to talk to Congress about overlapping with college on one or two Saturdays after Thanksgiving, but that's a law that's gotten more than a little dusty ever since the NCAA started squatting on various other weeknights, and anything in the name of player safety and diminishing the NCAA is the right thing to do. Also, you'd lose some national game inventory in the first half of the season, but only in games no one cares about anyway. I mean, that Broncos-Jets game the other night, that was an assigned-only-to-the-competing-markets game if ever there were one. That was an F-team broadcast, as in sixth-ranked and f'ing bad.

[The_Admiral]

 

The Browns are on the upswing and the Colts down the road are surprisingly not bad. Chicago gets Giants-Cowboys as the late game anyway in a glancing blow to pan-midwestern solidarity.