Since I was at Jordan-Hare Stadium Saturday night (very late into Saturday night, as it happened, but still not as late as the lovely 9PM Eastern kickoff awaiting fans for the next game), I didn't see any of ESPN's game coverage until sometime Sunday. On the plus side, somebody at the Worldwide Leader managed to reverse their rectal/cranium disorder for one evening and assigned Ron Franklin, the best play-by-play man in the business right now to cover the game. Well done, but you're still idiots for condemning Franklin to the purgatory of mid-afternoon Big 12 games for the rest of the year.
That said, I was among the fortunate 87,000 or so fans who were not subjected to ESPN breaking away from the Auburn-Kansas State game midway through the third quarter. The network in its brilliance decided to switch over to a meaningless Major League Boredom game in Boston in order to cover the ultimate in dull sporting events, a no-hitter.
Hey, all you nimrods up in Bristol, here's a news flash: The millions of people who were tuned in to see an SEC vs. Big 12 football game Did Not Care What Happened In Pro Baseball That Night. They were there to watch college football, and they damn sure weren't adding to your ratings to see a bunch of spoiled, steroid-addled millionaires fail to hit a little white ball. ESPN has at least four networks on the air, and two of them were probably showing idiotic poker game reruns or "Stroker Ace."
So the next time you feel the urge to cut into an important college football game in order to broadcast an MLB snooze-a-thon, why not just put an alert on the screen, and broadcast the baseball garbage on ESPN Classic or ESPN News? Because I guarantee you, SEC football fans did not care what the hell was happening on Boston. If we wanted to be put to sleep by a lame "sport" like pro baseball, we'd sell out Braves games instead of SEC stadia (and in case you haven't been paying attention, we don't sell out Braves games, even for the playoffs).
Don't you EVER do that again.
4 comments:
Oh, man, you said it. I yelled at the TV the entire time they were showing that damned baseball game. What pissed me off was that after the no-hitter was finally complete, they continued to show that baseball crap for another full 60 seconds or so. It was a nonstop stream of profanity it my house. The worst part: when they finally went back to Auburn, the Tigers were punting. I guarantee you NOBODY watching that game gave a rat's ass about baseball. What a STUPID move.
I was going to write the same thing, Jim. The post-game celebration they showed was twice as long as the entire final at-bat.
I wonder what the chances are of interrupting a Red Sox game with coverage of some amazing Auburn comeback? I'll go ahead and answer: zero. And that's because the folks up at ESPN can't imagine that there's anything more important to the rest of the country than something going on in Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park.
Memo to ESPN: for most of the country, baseball has gone the way of horse racing and boxing. We'll only watch baseball if Arena Football and the National Quiltmaking League seasons are over, our dvd players have broken, and it's 110 degrees outside. Come September, it's time to watch football. Then baseball should be relegated to The Ocho along with dodgeball where it belongs.
Where do we send our complaints?
I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but I appreciated the cutover to the Red Sox, being a Red Sox fan (Will can attest to that). What I didn't appreciate was the complete switchover. I would have been fine with a PIP box. Plus, once the out was made, the AU game should have immediately come back on. I do love baseball, but not as much as AU football, mind you. To be honest, I would have been OK with no coverage, with maybe a blurb on the ticker regarding it (as they did throughout the game), and see the highlights of the whole game on Sportscenter/Baseball Tonight.
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