Does ESPN really think that "naming" the weekend's slate of college football games makes them bigger or more important?Can't add a thing to that, other than noting that the idiotic "naming" carried over to ESPN Radio, where it was, if possible, even more annoying than on TV, since "Gut-Check Saturday" was repeated more often.
I don't think it would have been humanly possible for any ESPN on-air host, announcer, commentator, sideline reporter and anchor to have mentioned more times that last weekend's football games had been dubbed "Gut-Check Saturday!" by the network. Put it this way, if my friends and I had been playing one of those college drinking games, in which a person has to drink each time the phrase in question is uttered on the TV show being watched, we'd all be dead today.
Seriously. Can't we just enjoy the games?
Yost is dead-on. Give it a rest, ESPN.
Come on, Will, you didn't think that was "clever" on ESPN's part? I know I did!! It really enhanced my enjoyment of all the games!! Whenever I was watching and saw a great play, I said to myself, "Hey, it's Gut Check Saturday!" If I got distracted and started doing something else, a little voice went off in my head that said, "Hey, it's Gut Check Saturday, gotta get back and watch some football!!" Gut Check Saturday, Cut Check Saturday. Whatever they're paying their writers and producers to come up with such great names, it's not enough!!!
ReplyDeleteWell, we could go on for ages about all the ways that ESPN actually detracts from the sports it covers. IMO the most glaring example is college basketball, where their love affair with Duke and a couple of other "name" programs has so trivialized everything about the sport that it makes it harder to appreciate the sport as a whole. And they also do this ridiculous naming, only of entire weeks -- I remember last winter they had "Rivalry Week", presumably with UNC-Duke and a few others. Tennessee happened to play LSU on "Rivalry Week", so they showed this really contrived vignette of a UTK and an LSU fan talking about their intense hatred for each other. Sheesh.
ReplyDeleteI mean, ESPN deserves a lot of credit for growing the exposure of college sports, but they're really a mixed blessing.
Every single part of their television college football coverage, save Ron Franklin and Ed Cunningham, is grotesque. I was specific to TV because I actually like their team of writers, led by Ivan Maisel.
ReplyDeleteESPN's only rival in the "craptacular" category is FSN's CFB coverage. Living on the West Coast, I am, unfortunately, subjected to frequent FSN Pac-10 games with Petros Papadakis as the color man. He is head-in-the-oven bad.
It's almost as though they are afraid the product (sports) will fall flat on its face if they don't pump it up this way.
ReplyDeleteIIRC, wasn't ESPN a standalone channel at one time? Did it start going downhill once ABC bought them, or was it later, when Disney bought ESPN-ABC?