Why ESPN is Dead to Me

the fact that ESPNEWS is the one property that isn't dead to me.  They have Joe Sheehan from BP on every Wednesday and Rob Neyer on Tuesdays as well.  They actually use the 24-hour time space to talk intelligently.

Even though they only metion the A's in their closing arguments, and only after we've won 10 in a row.  I like that Wilbon takes notice of the east coast bias (by giving Tony crap for it).

Otherwise, I agree, ESPN is pretty much useless for sports fans who don't follow NL East teams or a team thick with controversy.

ESPN is possibly the most biased network on television. Covering what it wants (Yankees, Boston, T.O., and ESPNs Bonds version of the OJ trials) when it wants (24-7). 30 second clips go out to the scrapping other teams without the $100 million payrolls.And now no Harold Reynolds?! ESPN is dead to me too, they can have their cake and eat it too and far as I am concerned. Maybe Harold got fired for wanting to do a piece on a team in the West. I cant stand watching it now. oh and ESPN..... ITS PRE-SEASON for NFL! "Practice.... were talking about PRACTICE"

ESPN = sports' MTV

Tends to come off a little bit too strong.

Are they supposed to be NBC Nightly News?

PREACH ON!!

...is that their score ticker doesn't go away during commercials.  On regular ESPN, I hate having to sit through all the NASCAR standings, and random golf blurbs and 7,251 NCAA scores, then just as the ticker gets to "AL," and does a couple of games...  COMMERCIAL!  Five minutes later, the ticker comes back and may or may not pick up where it left off.

OTL is probably the only mature thing on the network, where someone is not screaming or yelling.

i don't even go to the espn website anymore and removed it from my "favs". sorry espn but i ain't paying to read what joe morgan has got to say about baseball.

Even I'm sick of hearing about "All TO, All the time." I think with things like TO, the endless Shaq soundbites (Big Aristotle? Someone kill me now.)... they're trying to make news, not report it. If they just keep provoking Owens a bit more, maybe he'll blow up and they can do a mini-series about the ruination of sport (that the network ironically contributed to).

You forgot to mention the lovefest that is Reggie Bush. I know preseason football is much-maligned in these parts (I'm looking at you, Sal!) but following the Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints, they spent at least 60% of the analysis on a rookie tailback who ran for a grand total of seven yards. On four carries. Did not touch the end zone. They broke down and analyzed all of Bush's carries, all of his receptions, all of his blocks. I swear to god... Stuart Scott even led into the segment with "Did you see Reggie Bush's run last week against Tennessee?" They even showed his post-game interview.

By the way. Bush's Saints lost the game by 23 points. They analyzed Dallas quarterback Drew Bledsoe's game after the Bush lovefest, but I was too annoyed to listen.

ESPN has actually made Bonds into a martyr. I never thought that would happen. Caminiti = Bonds. Giambis = Bonds. Palmeiro = Bonds. Grimsley = Bonds. I honestly think they would care less if say, Albert Pujols or David Ortiz tested positive. They would be talking about Bonds that entire day. And yet as they're shaking their collective finger at Bonds for his (alleged) steroid use, they are celebrating and tripping over themselves every time the man goes deep. Pick one! Either he's a cheater or a man to be celebrated - not both.

Bill Simmons, as I linked to yesterday, should be writing for the Boston Globe, not a national media outlet. He is willingly ignorant about all things outside of New England. That's what I can't stand. Sure, he can admit that he hasn't been tracking Hatteberg specifically. But to compare the Senior Circuit to a minor league is just stupidity.

What annoys me the most, though, is the ADD nature of the network is breeding these new kinds of journalists. Why do actual reporting when you can just spout your mouth off like Jim Rome or Skip Bayless?

I'll stop there, I could go on and on and on.

However....please don't knock the Contender. That show is awesome. Mark Burnett is an emotion puppetmaster. I'm guy-crying by the end of every episode. (it was better on NBC though).

I pretty much ended my affair w/ ESPN after Dream Job. I tried out for Season 1, and made it pretty far in the process. I was one round away from being on the show when I got cut. Then, the show came on and I could't believe the people that made it, and it was borderline unwatchable. That really soured it all for me.

When I watch ESPN, they seem to be so in love with their own voices. They are trying so hard to be "clever" and "hip," they don't give much info on the sports! That is the same with the magazine, which I have browsed through once or twice.

All I want is highlights of the best of all sports that happened that day. If I want special details on a specific sport, I go to another source.... such as, to learn about A's baseball, I come here or even the official site.

or at least attempted to kill the NHL.

They say no one cares about the league, but how can it gain new fans if the only sports channel never mentioons it.

Like others ESPN has some redeming features, mainly ESPNEWS and PTI. ESPN.com is not only uninteresting, but often late with breaking news. TSN had all the major NHL moves up half a day before they appeared on ESPN.com.

ESPN also has become like some insanely awful combination of MTV and Fox News. Too many shows are only vaguely related to sports and too many shows feature the talking head format.

ESPN.com is become a maze of locked doors because of the Insider tag.

Deadspin and TSN have replaced ESPN for me. ( not to mention AN)

I think ESPN has fallen victim to the reality television audience -- that formidable band of jackals that have taken over television. As Blez pointed out, Sporscenter basically focuses on fights, the Red Sox, Yankees, T.O., and BALCO. The other scores and highlights of the day are treated as extraneous and are nothing more than chores packaged together in a 30 second clip. Other than the occasional baseball highlight and the sporadic Civil War clip on the History Channel, I don't watch TV anymore. Gone are the days of "snickerable" sitcoms and commendable sports journalism. Welcome to the world of trashy television: BALCO, T.O.,and Bonds on Bonds.  

ESPN is unwatchable these days.
Between the morons they put on tv and the craving for "headlines" the network is bad.

I'm actually glad that FOX has a highlight show on now and if I need my NBA or NFL coverage I tune into NBA and NFL TV. I wish MLB would do the same.

... I'd add that ESPN mirrors the spiral into turbid uselessness of all televised "journalism."

Poppy makes a good analogy above by comparing ESPN to MTV (in that neither channel provides the programming that it was originally known for), but I think that the more significant parallel is to CNN or MSNBC, in the way that all cable news has swept aside genuine inquiry and informative discourse in favor of sensationalized, he-said/she-said bullshit.

But, of course, the people I ultimately blame are the majoritarian morons who provide the ratings that keep the crap on the air and the advertisers supporting said crap.

I hate Cindy Brunson and Robert Flores.

I like that Kim guy.  He just delivers the news, no flash, few "zingers", and I doubt I'm gonna see him in the next Adam Sandler movie.

The channel that I really like is ESPN-CLASSIC!  Now, there is nothing better than seeing re-runs of the 1989 WS......

AH, as for Bill Simmons, he is the classic Boston-boy, (see Marky Mark, Joe from Survivor, Ben Affleck, etc.)  They "bore" the hell out of me.  They are proof that sterotypes exist for a reason.

seems totally racist to me, they have a fascination with "controversial" black atletletes that borders on the sexual.  T.O., Clarett, Artest, Bonds, Ricky Williams, and a thousand others must all have ESPN cameras trained on them 24 hours a day, the network execs praying on their knees that one of them goes AWOL, gets busted for pot, or gets caught shooting up steroids.  I am surprised they don't have camera crews stationed at Reggie White's tomb, waiting for him to issue a  Ouija Board statement defaming one minority or another.

That coupled with the obscene bias for the East Coast teams just makes it laughable to watch, like Fox News but with more touchdowns and home runs.  The only way the Athletics will ever get more than 30 seconds on Sportscenter or BBTN will be if Milton Bradley cracks his bat over his knee, drives it straight through the heart of the plate umpire, and strips naked for a brisk sprint around our ample foul territory.

We joke in our house that if the Atletics were to win the World Series, it would be the #4 story on ESPN, behind what Alex Rodriguez had for breakfast, what movie David Ortiz saw that night, and what Derek Jeter thought of both of those.

Little League World Series on.  They have completely demonized everything.  I also think Brian Kenny is fantastic.  He's about the only guy on ESPN who could interview Neyer and intelligently discuss OPS and what it means as a metric of a player's offensive performance.

is not a fav of mine..but they have done a great deal for women's sports. The coverage of softball ,soccer,volleyball etc...has helped women's sports get attention.

ESPN used to be the king of sports coverage; now it's just the king of watered-down, opinionated commentary.

The fact that Stephen A. Smith, Jim Rome, Tony Realli, and Michael Wilbon/Tony Kornheizer actually have their own shows is sickening.  Nothing they say is important; I could listen to a few New Yorkers on the subway talk about sports and get the same information and attitude.

That ESPN has become a waste of time, but I think a lot of you are a bit overzealous in your vitriol for ESPN. Yes, they've done a LOT of wrong things. But they still do a great job of covering the NBA. Sportscenter, despite it's sensationalist journalism, is still a quality program for getting the national, broad view on the world of sports. Like Blez mentioned above, their coverage of the LL World Series is execptional. They do well with poker even though they highly oversaturate it. I guess what I'm saying is that I wouldn't generally watch a lot of their programming, and yes I agree they've been going in the wrong direction for a very long time, but I think it's a bit overboard to call the station "worthless." It's done amazing things for the world of sports, and continues to be the one outlet where sports is the flavor of the day. Without ESPN we'd be watching KRON for the local hilights and then reading whatever we could in the paper in the morning.

People have to understand that ESPN is catering to a national audience. The casual fan. No, they're not gonna put the A's in the limelight. Quite frankly, the A's aren't an interesting story right now. They're playing good baseball, but so are the Tigers and White Sox and Yankees and Mets and you get the picture. Couple that with the fact we do have one of the smaller fan bases and you just can't expect a national program to take much heed of us, especially in August. Perhaps come the middle of September that will change, but right now they do pre-season football because football is America's biggest dollar maker and most popular sport. And the casual idiot loves all this TO,Red Sox-Yankees, Maurice Clarett crap. I suppose what I mean by all that you can go ahead and fault ESPN for all these things, but they're not unreasonable by any measure.

That being said, I love ESPNEWS.

what are the alternatives?? I turn to ESPN and ESPN 2 to get all of my sports news (praying they show some A's highlights) until there's something better and more informative. I'll switch once there's a viable alternative, until then I think I'm stuck w/the T.O. / Parcells BS.

I thought I saw some something like that when...

ESPN is like the cool side of the pillow, BACK BACK BACK BACK BACK BACK gone!  

Preaching to the choir, but after all that, I still watch it, beats the hell out of Lifetime.

in a thread somewhere, but it bears repeating. Sort of the neo-Marxist critique of ESPN... try not to flame me up too toasty, AN comrades.

It's easy to forget what the real purpose behind ESPN is (hint: it ain't there to tell you who won the game): to sell the advertising that promotes the lifestyle built around blind consumption that is killing this planet and choking its people into submission.  To make the advertisers (large corporate entities, far-too-unaccountable to anything but the uber-predatorial profit system) and beyond that Disney-owned ESPN (they also own all of these outlets here in the "Land of the Free": http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/disney.asp) richer and richer, presumably until the day in the not-too-distant-future when they have everything, claim over every vital resource on Earth, and everyone else has nothing, kind of the logical end-game of post-consumerist, hypercompetitive capitalism when foisted upon a biosphere with finite accessible/implementable resources like the Earth.  Not unlike the Lords and their Vassals enslaving their Serfs in the feudalist economic model, only with more "bling" so the serfs can't see that they are really serfs with only their ability to mortgage/sell their time standing between them and starvation.

The soon-to-be Oakland Athletics of Fremont confound this model and poke a serious hole in its foundation, built as it is upon a near-religious devotion to "more is more" as a guiding mantra/philosophy.  We are spoiled to an extent, in that we watch the team's every game and every move so the bigger picture (how our team fits in the dynamic of MLB and of the sports economy in general) can get sort of lost... suffice to say that all you need to do is think of what all those poor Angels fans say on Halos' Heaven (aka Haters' Hell), that we are a bunch of "nobodies" cobbled together from the "Moneyball scrapheap" and that they are increasingly appalled to the point of enraged apoplexy at our ability to win on a consistent basis without a fraction of the vaunted, all-perfect dollars that they enjoy over there in Moreno Valley.

ESPN covers the Dodgers just fine, the Lakers get obsessed over, so the anti-West Coast bias argument holds limited water.  Our team gets the shaft because our team doesn't have the payroll, the superstars, the palatial stadium, or the sexy city that networks (really Propaganda Ministries) like ESPN need to fulfill their true purpose (and that of nearly all American Mainstream Mass Media), which is to reinforce the exaltation of wealth and power (Yankees/RedSox paradigm) on a constantly-assaultive, all-saturating basis, so that the masses of people out there (their viewers) don't get the message that they are really being fucked over nine-ways-to-Sunday by this wretched, exploitive, meta-destructive system we have that forces them to think/say/do/act/vote against their material interests (and those of their allegedly-precious children) just to survive.  The Moneyball/sabermetrics trip is kind of like Luke Skywalker to their Death Star, and I think they try not to show it on TV or pay it too much attention in the hopes that if an OBP-based analysis falls in the forest and no one hears it, it won't really exist.  The whole idea of OBP as the Holy Grail stat is anathema to what they are trying to promote and sell their ads with, which is that the big sluggos that don't get on base enough aren't shit and are in fact a big illusion... an over-hyped, ineffective superpower whose only real asset seems to be its ability to crush the opposition, just like this formerly-great, overmilitarized country you might have heard of. Our team's success takes a bit of the piss out of their ability to trumpet the Slavery-is-Freedom model so prevalent on American TV screens, and we should be very proud.

Even if the goddamned team is Gap-owned and probably has the blood of thousands of abused sweatshop workers in foreign lands on its hands.

Im pretty sure that ESPN stands for the EASTERN SPORTS NETWORK, oh chours they are going to be biased towards East Coast teams. The Reason alot of people back east dont care about west coast sports, is that most of the time they are sleeping when the games are played. Think about it, a 7pm game in Oakland, Starts at 10pm east coast time, and is usually not over untill 1230 or 1 AM.... What we need is WSPN, or PCSPN. Pacific Coast sports network...

And I'd want to do that why?

.....,but don't give FOX or even MLB.com a free pass. I agree ESPNEWS keep ESPN alive for me and other. So, does ESPN Mobile on my cell phone and ESPN.com just go to the Oakland A'S section. Remember, FOX had a special about the Yankees/Red Sox rivarly plus our Bay Area sports report got axed, and Kevin Kennedy of FOX Saturday Baseball always likes putting the Yankees, Red Sox and Halo homer for FSN West Sports Report. MLB.com always gives the free pass to the Yankees and Red Sox, but at least Bleacher Dave is there to reminder that baseball isn't Northeast sport.  

ESPN is airing the A's all-time web gems on Sunday, September 3rd.

Period.

Another network such as Fox Sports should branch out and pick up the market that ESPN left on the table.  You can't blame ESPN for being entrepreneurial but when there is nothing else to watch... I feel you can blame other networks for not trying to compete.

I could give two shits about the Royals and absolutely HATE the Cardinals.  I also would KILL my first born (don't have one) if he/she ever decided to attend Missouri.  Guess what news I constantly receive updates about on FSN???  Yep Royals, Cards & Misery.    

They need to go back to the days when the world hadn't decided to create a gazillion hours a day of televisable sports for Americans.  If they put the following sports on ESPN, I will find the time to watch:

1. Australian Rules Football
   
2. Rugby, especially international competitions.  When was the last time you got to root for Wales against New Zealand?
   
3. Cricket, especially test matches.  Did you know, for instance that there's a huge controversy involving ball-tampering (no, not that kind, good god) by the Pakistani squad?  Very exciting, could affect world politics.
   
4. Lawn Bowls.  Because guys actually smoke pipes while playing, and you've gotta respect that.
   
5. Miniature golf.  I actually saw this once on ESPN about 10 or 15 years ago.  Send Tom Rinaldi to do a stand-up next to the windmill!
   
6.  Buzkashi.  Because I want to see highlights of an ancient form of polo using a goat carcass as a ball whose name translates as "goat grabbing."

I'm sure we can come up with a much more extensive list of programming that we'd prefer to the current crop of talking heads and quips-over-highlights.

I gave up on the website when it was just Bonds and DUKE LACROSSE.

Simmons and Easterbrook are just trying to sell their fan views as if it was general knowledge. By now I understood how great Boston and rushing on 4th-and-4 are.

Los Angeles Angels of Los Alcarrizos 1. final.

5.5 up.

LET'S GO OAKLAND!!!

other than that, I have to agree--ESPN is CRAP

In the loss column for the first time.

Feels like he holds the record for most losses by a rookie...

The Internet has spoiled us...sure, the network's evolved (devolved?) over time, but the overriding factor for why ESPN no longer is must-see TV for even the diehard sports fan is because of sites like this...eventually all the major networks will experience such a loss of significance.  Now is not the time to invest in Viacom.

THAT will always be the most tired story to me...and that's a West Coast team...the Shaq-Kobe-Zen Master soap opera was so overdone...well, I still can't picture a future Christmas without a Lakers-Heat ABC matchup.

way too much coverage of his drama, but it may all have been worth it just for the privilege of seeing Drew Rosenhaus' "next question" press conference in TO's driveway last year

not abandoning the MLS.  Horrendous ratings, but they still air it every Saturday in the summer...I don't know what the contract with the league looks like, but it can't be very lucrative.

...I've posted like 20 times in this thread, and I feel like I have a lot more to say.  Taking my posts as a whole, I guess I'm somewhat ambivalent about the ESPN family...it's fair to say that I don't watch ESPN as much as I used to, or visit espn.com at all anymore really, but I respect some of their innovations while not really compromising their coverage of sport.  I mean, to listen to some of you guys, you'd think that, say, women's tennis would've been completely eliminated in favor of some ridiculous reality programming by now...nope, I can still find almost any sport on ESPN.  ESPN would be wise to keep it that way, as sports is indeed the ultimate reality television, as one of the better current anchors (Scott Van Pelt) has been known to say.

Blez, if ESPN were how you, and others, really wanted it to be, I think that your web site wouldn't be as appealing as it is now.  That's not a knock on the web site, and please don't take it as one because that's not how I mean for it to sound, but I believe it's the lack of 'traditional' coverage of our Athletics that has led many talented people that belong to this community to have found this site in the first place.

to my father (a former ESPN and Disney exec) about the lack of A's coverage on Baseball Tonight, and while he simpathized, he made it clear that most sports fans aren't as discriminating as us here on AN.
ESPN (and all of television) caters to the lowest-common-denominator because that is what sells.

Let's put it this way: off ALL MLB merchandise sold, over 65% is Yankees and Red Sox. Therefore, giving the East Coast 65% of the coverage is giving the people what they want.

Unfortunately, the people, for the most part, are idiots.