Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I gave up on ESPN 5 something years ago. I grew up on the network and would always leave it running in the background, but no longer. My main complaints
- Too much off the field coverage, turning into TMZ. Back in the 90's when breaking a controversial story: the anchor would simply state a few sentences of the event/charges and move on until further news broke. Now they bring on some analyst (former player/coach) to offer his perspective. We are led to believe this is an expert
- Bias towards their own coverage. This is blatantly obvious with women sports and particularly womens basketball. Statistics show "no-one" is watching and yet they continue shoving it down viewers mouths. Another example is Golf. Constant mention of Tiger Woods.
If you have a chance, check out the new Fox Sports 1. I personally prefer it and although ratings show "Crowd Goes Wild" is struggling compared to ESPN's mid afternoon shows, I actually prefer it.
FS1 is just as stupid. I've had to watch some of their On Thin Ice and it is so stupid. If you think Stuart Scott on ESPN is bad don't watch Jay and Dan at all.
I'm definitely not ready to give up sports, but I totally feel you about ESPN. Listening to them during football season is almost unbearable; they go a little into depth about the play/tactics etc, but spend way more time than they need to basically gossiping about personnel ("Guuuuuuurl, did you hear what Jerry Jones said about Tony Romo?" "Oh no he didn't!")
Also: What makes this worse for me is that they can't find it to at least cover the championships of many "minor" sports (Rugby, weightlifting, etc), instead of giving us every obscure college football/b-ball game or another show with fat old men arguing with each other.
Yeah ESPN is giant sucking sound of awful. It's painfully bad and biased. The NFL is big mainly because they jam the NFL down everyone's throats. It's dread. They really have a nerve calling themselves the total sports network. I wish I could dump all the ESPN's off my directTV. My bill would probably drop to 5bucks a month shaving off all that garbage.
Yeah ESPN is giant sucking sound of awful. It's painfully bad and biased. The NFL is big mainly because they jam the NFL down everyone's throats. It's dread. They really have a nerve calling themselves the total sports network. I wish I could dump all the ESPN's off my directTV. My bill would probably drop to 5bucks a month shaving off all that garbage.
ESPN itself is the big culpret in that, NOT the other ESPNs. ESPN 2 is as big of the other ESPNs as you can get. The issue I have with a la carte is that it will jack the rates up for the channels people want. I rather wait 3 years and ditch cable for pure Roku or similarly based programming similar to WWE Network. I would do it in a minute for Disney whether or not it is just the Disney vaulted material.
It's: live weightlifting OR talking about the same tiresome, pointless NFL story lines for the 100th time
And Americans would actually be into weightlifting/strongest man, if it were aired. Many Americans have gym memberships
This is a big reason why I got into global football the past 5 years. MLB, NFL, NBA, these are all domestic sports. Furthermore except for MLB and sort of NBA, the players are all American. Boring.
Would weightlifting get ratings, perhaps. NFL has a known fanbase who actually try to follow all the post-season and pre-season storylines. People buy into it and ESPN is not the ESPN of the 80's when you would see say Star Shots (the 80's shoting show) and both TNT and USHRA truck and tractor pulling and monster truck racing. ESPN is legit when it comes to sports unlike the 80s. The world changed sadly. I hate it too. I miss seeing monster trucks on ESPN but at least FS1 has it now...
You aren't wrong, at least about ESPN. ESPN has become something just awful. I remember in the 90s (granted I was pretty young so this could be a bit wide eyed) Sportscenter was AWESOME. Wall to wall highlights, which meant more highlights than just dunks and fights and what not. Great anchors, less "debate" and I even loved how they used to close the show with the "Did you know"
Now, you turn it on, they got a side panel for you to stare at to see what they are going to argue about next. They trot out former players as 'experts' whose insight goes barely further than "I played the game" - which is a valid POV but if you don't have anything informative to say beyond that, or you aren't particulary articulate, you make for BAD TV.
I consume my sports media via the smaller AM radio stations, sites like deadspin and forums for fans of particular teams. Sure I pull up ESPN's website every now and then as the landing page usually has the scores I want and grantland has some solid content, but tuning into their TV station outside of the OCCASIONAL PTI/ATH viewing (like once a month) - NO THANKS. You become a worse sports fan by watching ESPN, plain and simple. Oversimplified analysis and lack of innovation has rendered them totally irrelevant in my mind as a TV entity.
Ok - I feel better now.
I still have hope for the NBC Sports channel. It's still relatively new, and I think I see promise there. They are learning from the Booyas mistakes.
It's a sad trend in television networks trajectory that we have seen played out on MTV, ESPN, the History Channel among others. Cater to the lowest common demnominator and feast on low hanging fruit. I hate 95% of TV. Thank god for the internet (and HBO)
As I get older, with less times to watch full games, I find myself living in box scores when I find the time to read them, or coming sites like CD where I know which posters to listen to and which to tune out. I think it might be a better way to be a sports 'fan.' At least it works for me. My sports fandom has turned into a novel with 90 second clips linked in every few pages.
Maybe people could start caring about more diverse sports if they could get even a little bit of airtime, instead of "BREAKING NEWS: LeBron takes kids to ice cream shop, chooses strawberry", followed by Jalen Rose and Simmons debating the merits of LeBron's favorite ice cream and how he stacks up to Jordan's snacking habits.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
