This is a great take that I’ve had to have multiple times in college, only coming from the other side.
I took a sports broadcasting class with people who really wanted to go into sports broadcasting. I know that sounds stupid, but there were also people like me that didn’t have that goal, we just took the class because it was fun. During our first or second day we went through sports shows and broadcasters we liked/didn’t like, and you could definitely tell the people who thought they were too cool for school.
They hated Mike and Mike and the local talk shows because “they were so stupid and were just made for ignorant armchair QBs who don’t know about REAL sports like us.” I got into so many arguments with them because I had to constantly say “Yeah, because 99% of the population ARE simple armchair QBs. The first rule of broadcasting is relating to your audience, they do that, you don’t.”
Mike and Mike and the local shows are on the good side of the “appealing to the masses” front, wheraas the loud talking heads are on the dark side of it. But the argument still stands that there are few shows in the sports world dedicated to the smarter fan. You generally have to go to podcasts for that.
Is anyone running a site anymore like firejoemorgan.com? If you enjoy the roasting of sports media, there were few places like it. Their content is still available to read, for those of you who weren’t lucky enough to read it when it was fresh. But after Joe Morgan actually did get fired, they decided they’d achieved their goal and moved on.
Actually, i think they stopped more because of competing claims on their time. They say in their last post that personal and professional obligations make it difficult to keep the blog going.
I still go back and read it from time to time. There’s some truly outstanding, and often very funny, commentary on that site.
There are a few writers on Deadspin who sometimes make the same sorts of critiques of sports journalism, but it’s a bit hit and miss.
Perhaps to add a little bit to this, the thing is, if someone’s “plan” is to turn all fans into highly educated, insightful sports fans, forget it. It’s not possible, not because people are all morons, but because most people just don’t want to be.
I know a lot about baseball because it’s literally the thing I know the most about. I know more about baseball than ANY topic, including my job. I know more about baseball than anyone I have ever personally known. The history of baseball literally affects my perception of history in general; if you ask me about 1954 the first thing that jumps to my mind is who won the World Series (the Giants) and the baseball events of that year make me think about the year in different ways. I actually kind of tend to think of 1981 and 1994 as years that were shorter than other years because those baseball seasons were shortened by strikes. (I’m serious.) That is, obviously, very odd. Very few people will be like that about baseball. There is clearly a market for people who are as obsessive about baseball as I am (obsessive is the right word), as proven by Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts, or Baseball Prospectus or what have you, but it’s not ESPN big. It won’t support a regional TV network or a sports radio station. And it never will, because there will never be enough people this intesnsely, ferociously interested in baseball for that to happen. Even most people who like baseball are much more casual fans, and that’s fine with me.
I would presume there are people who know as much about many different topics as I do about baseball. There are people who know everything there is to know about Survivor, or Italian cinema, or women’s fashion, or fire control systems, or the Korean War, or the history of graphic novels, or any number of things. One of my best friends is a huge tennis fan; if you ask him if Ivan Lendl ever won the French Open he’ll tell you what years and who Lendl beat and what the scores were. There is no doubt that
Were I to offer my opinions on those topics, people who are deep into them would think I sounded like a total doofus, and
The fact is that mass media has to be targeted at ME, not the obsessive fans, when discussing those topics.
Now I have to say that in general I think sports journalism is pretty bad, but there’s good stuff out there. But even the good stuff isn’t especially deep, for the most part.
Yep, that’s indeed the same Skip Bayless. Aikman was not thrilled when he heard Skip was joining the Fox Network. I doubt we’ll be seeing any production meetings with these two in the same room anytime soon.
To follow up on your point, even a lot of sports games broadcasts have been dumbed down in recent years. I appreciate it when you get a color commentator who isn’t afraid to get a little technical once in a while. John Smoltz, IMO, is a good baseball analyst for that reason. He makes baseball on Fox watchable.
I think Mike and Mike (specifically, Mike Greenberg) are just as bad, and local shows usually even worse. Greenberg’s nebbish persona comes across, to me, extremely fake and forced, and when he does try to put forward an actual fact-based opinion, it’s just flat-out wrong (per Rick’s assessment upthread).
Locally, I have Dan Dakich - who is really pushing for a national spot on ESPN. He gets some high profile basketball game jobs as the color announcer, as he worked under Bob Knight and coached IU for about 16 minutes. He loves to talk about how no one knows how to watch basketball like he does, and he takes pot-shots at the local competition. I think he’s deplorable.
Michael Schur (Ken Tremendous) does mostly weekly podcasts with Joe Posnanski (The Poscast). It’s highly entertaining, especially if you like the work Schur did writing for The Office, being the head writer of Parks & Rec, and now creating The Good Place. I do - his is my type of humor. Schur’s twitter feed (@KenTremendous) is also good - but only for flaming liberals like myself, as he does get political most of the time.
If anyone here gets the Sportsnet network, there’s Bob “Bite Me” McCown, who’s been at it, since…well, he was one of the first to do it. I still haven’t come across ANYBODY with a more all-around knowledge of sports, in general, than Bobcat. On any topic he’ll have the best big picture questions and speculations, and many a-time I’ve seen him completely tear apart guests who basically don’t know as much as he (sometimes quite acerbically) demonstrates. I always figured you have to be really really on your game if he’s gonna i-view you. He can have a bit of a short fuse, which at times I find entertaining and at others tedious.
Gotta do something with the fucking hair and glasses, though.
Sportsnet also has the TimandSid Show, with dingbats Tim McCallef and Sid Sixeiro, who definitely know their shit but if you’re put off by zany jack-asses, especially Sid, you’ll just roll our eyes and change the channel. A couple friends can’t stand them, but I watch them every day, for their “edutainment”, with Sid insulting the camermen, or saying intentionally ludicrous shit and then suddenly deadpanning at the camera, or getting nagged at by Tim for his B.O. and gravy obsession.
That’s always been the exception. Color commentators have usually always been terrible.
I think my favourite was back in the 1980s, a friend and I were watching a Leafs game, and Harry Neale, who in fairness was usually drunk by the middle of the second period, said - this is a direct quote - “The Leafs would really like to score a goal here.” That was the only thing he’d said the whole game that wasn’t a pointless old war story.
There was a pause and my friend Mark turned to me and said “Hey, Rick, when are the times in a game you don’t really want to score a goal? Is there some time in a hockey game when scoring a goal isn’t a good thing to do?” The stupidity of Neale’s comment had kind of gotten past me because I tuned him out anyway, but I had to admit it was maybe the dumbest thing I’d ever heard.
Well, until a few years ago when Joe Morgan observed that the reason the Astros had lost a playoff game to the Braves is that they had not scored as many runs as the Braves had. Delphic wisdom right there, folks.
Can’t say I’ve ever seen someone so obsessed with the appearances of male sports commentators before. It really drives home how ridiculous and shallow criticisms of the appearances of their female counterparts is as well.
And this is exactly why Frank Caliendo’s Madden impersonation is so compelling to me. I love football an order of magnitude more than baseball (partially because my team, the Reds, tend to suck quite often…even when they make the playoffs) and I used to love listening to Madden and Summerall call games. Caliendo’s Madden on the Letterman show is so damn funny and spot on…I love it.
Everyone and their pet amoeba jokes about Bob’s look, which he’s had since the 70’s. And like I was saying - with Skippy’s twerpadelic look, that was qualified as a lesser complaint, so conflating that with obsession I think is “offside”!
Nobody else here cares about his “look.” Nobody I am aware of in real life cares what sports broadcasters look like. No one cares. 99% of people hearing him aren’t seeing him. No one cares. Get over it. If they do joke, it’s just kind hearted ribbing.
Just because 99% of people (the radio listeners, that is) hearing him aren’t seeing him, doesn’t, in any way, discount the fact that Sportsnet president Scott Moore stated that more eyeballs are watching Bobcat, now, than ears hearing him. When I state “everyone”, that would be people I know who watch him, Sportsnet colleagues, callers who phone in to his show, as well as guests he’s interviewed - if that doesn’t qualify as “everyone” to you - oh well. At least we agree that it’s not the end of the world - all in good fun, so, yeah, I’ll try my best to get over it, then.
Nope. (Except for in the bars, heh)
Meaning - more people watch him on TV than listen to him on the radio.
I guess you’ve never seen him interview Mario Belli, formerly of the CFL, John Sally, and a number of other guests razzing Bob’s style. Oh and the great Bill Lee.
If I sat down about this I could easily come up with more.
