By Pat Bataillon
ESPN covered the first day of Notre Dame’s football practice in four straight shows yesterday: Rome is Burning; Around The Horn; Pardon The Interruption; and SportsCenter. Amazing how the fourth-ranked team in the preseason polls gets so much coverage. Perhaps the three teams ahead of them practiced too? We’ll never know.
While Notre Dame has its share of anti-fans, it’s striking how many really eager fans still remain ready to root for their beloved Irish. I am pretty sure that the same people that love the Fightin’ Irish love the following teams: the Yankees, the Lakers, the Patriots, the Duke Blue Devils, and the (pre-strike) Detroit Redwings.
Notre Dame will do fine this year, but for the record: they are not going to the National Championship and Brady Quinn will not win the Heisman. They will lose a game early and be out of contention for the rest of the year. And we’ll be stuck watching wall-to-wall coverage of them anyway.
Seeing ESPN pander to Notre Dame fans all day yesterday really made me sick. Every year around this time we college fans get to hear about Notre Dame and how they are going to win it all again this year. Lately, ESPN has been getting on my nerves. Their hype about everything is getting old. First with the Notre Dame stuff, and then sandwiching it with Tiger Woods as the greatest golfer ever. It would be nice if EPSN could just cover sports like they did before ABC/Disney bought them out.
Seems to me that since the buyout ESPN has been more talk and less sports. Sort of like how MTV rarely plays music anymore. PTI is a great show, but only when Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser are on together. Around the Horn is equivalent to the fashion police section in Glamour magazine. The four idiots they put up on the screens moan about each other and then have a fake point system to determine a winner. Woody Paige and Jay Mariotti are bickering like an old married couple by show’s end. I truly feel bad for Tony Reali; he is the only reason that show is still on. Rome is Burning is terrible.
ESPN has gone downhill and there is a huge opening for someone to swoop in and take it. The Best Damn Sports Show on Fox won’t be it because of the annoying presence of one person: Tom Arnold. So as ESPN becomes the sports version of MTV, we look to a new era in mindless television. ESPN even programs reality shows and game shows now. Enough with just showing sports. Who wants to see the games when we can watch those who write about them instead?
Catch up with Pat Bataillon’s daily dispatches from the front lines of awful television viewing, in the What I Watched Last Night collection.
Posted on August 8, 2006