The ongoing Foxification of sports coverage (and how it's ruining everything)

Cafe Society
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Fall means it’s that time of year for Fox to be at the height of its obnoxiousness. The baseball playoffs and the NFL season means they’re busier than usual with the swooshing graphics, irritating announcers (though they don’t have monopoly on this one), grating close-ups intended to create “drama”, and video effects presumably intended to improve the viewing experience. Just like any other plague these practices are spreading.

It used to be the exception (Fox being the only one to do it) to put the distracting graphic on the field showing down and distance in the form of a huge arrow. The first down line was a great addition, as well as constantly having the score graphic on the screen. The first down line is useful, it’s relevant to the game, and before it was used, you had to look for the chains on the sidelines to figure out where the team needed to get for a first down. The line of scrimmage graphic was then added. Not really as important to me, but I can see how it could be useful. The graphic across the screen with the time remaining and score is one of the best things about modern sports coverage. Watching old games will give me a new appreciation for that graphic, as you could go for minutes without knowing the score. Useful additions, that improve the “viewing experience”.

Then the gigantic arrow came. I have never considered down and distance something that was that hard to figure out. It’s usually in the score graphic, so why add a huge, distracting arrow to the field of play? This was started by the same company that came up with the great idea of the glowing hockey puck. These are additions that might be irritating to average fan, but aren’t bad enough to cause someone not to watch at all, and presumably have been added to draw in more casual viewers. I don’t think it’s enough to bring in a casual viewer, or allow them to enjoy the game more. Is it really supposed to help someone sitting on the fence decide to start watching more football? The other networks have followed suit, and have annoying on-field graphics to show down and distance. Totally unnecessary, and really not adding value for anyone.

The same goes for the baseball coverage. It’s been beaten to death in the press about the incessant close-ups of everyone in the crowd to try to build drama. Baseball fans apparently aren’t smart enough to know when an important moment comes up. This year they’ve also added a flame graphic and sound effect for any time a pitcher throws hard (95+ MPH?). Another small, yet annoying distraction.

I haven’t watched much of the World Series, but I was unlucky enough to briefly tune in when the ridiculous taco promotion was going on. In the big scheme of things, does it really matter? Maybe not, but it was shameless (steal a base for free tacos). The players in the dugouts were wearing microphones, and wouldn’t you know it, the Fox cameras managed to catch a few of the players casually talking about the promotion, which then lead right into a commercial with the company’s COO and Chris Meyers (who apparently didn’t have anyone’s marriage proposal to ruin) in the middle of the game. I guess we better get used to it, because now that Fox knows it can get away with it, it’s only going to get worse. Essentially the ad “worked” because it got people to talk about it. It was so novel that some crummy fast food joint would be shameless enough to put an ad in the middle of the game (and that Fox would let them) followed by their sleazy looking corporate officer, of course it would turn into something people would talk about, and get plenty of media coverage. It’s really too bad that Fox has to show any game at all, and can’t run commercials all the time.

Now, most of this ad creep is going on with all types of media, but Fox seems to be the worst offender. There is so much media competing for attention now, that the only way to get noticed is to be louder and more extreme than everyone else. Is anyone affected by advertising anymore? If anything, it does the opposite for me (I like to think so, anyway), because bad commercials remind me not to use that product/service. I have no desire to eat at the lousy taco restaurant (or the other two that make up the fast food Axis of Evil). The food is bad, and the stupid advertising makes me mad enough that I will actively seek out alternatives or go without before giving them business.

Once the first company does it, everyone else follows suit. Rather than thinking of something new, that will work, they do the same old thing, and just turn up the volume.

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Hate the “whoosh.” Really hate the “whoosh.”

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It is helpful if you are watching in a busy sports bar while chatting it up during the game.

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Yeah, that promo really annoyed the &%!@^@ out of me. We’re bombarded by enough advertising as it is - do they have to make it intrude on the game itself? And it was so transparent - the players in the dugout just happened to be miced and just happened to talk about the promo right before a Taco Bell commercial. Is there anyone in the world dumb enough to be fooled by this?

In 2004 MLB planned to put Spider-Man logos on the bases to promote the release of Spider-Man 2. After a lot of complaints by fans and sportswriters MLB decided not to go ahead with the promotion.

Another one that annoys me is the planting of TV actors in the stands to promote Fox shows. There are real fans who have been kept out of the ballpark so that Fox can have a fifteen-second promo. This isn’t like Jack Nicholson at a Lakers game - Nicholson is a real fan who attends many games during the regular season and pays for his own seat.

At least they haven’t used Scooter the Talking Baseball this post-season (not that I’ve seen, anyway).

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I was just saying to my husband today that the arrow is just ridiculous. I don’t know jack about football, but even I can tell which way the ball is going.

Oh, and today they were showing a replay from something that happened last week. They had some crazy animated frame around the edges of the screen…I don’t know what it was supposed to be…maybe it was meant to look like the actual edges of an old film? It was so distracting I couldn’t follow what I was supposed to be looking at.

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Next year, they’re going to add a sleeping man graphic and a snoring sound effect for whenever Jamie Moyer pitches.

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Of course, it’s possible to err in the other direction. Yesterday on CBS (the Georgia-Florida game) the announcers broke out posterboard and magic markers to make a point. Talk about rejecting the Fox paradigm!

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I would add the ESPN-ification of sports coverage too. Now every network has scrolling scores and fantasy stats on the bottom of the screen during games.
This might be helpful information if they didn’t repeat the same 2 players stats for every game all day long. On the CBS bottom stat line I have noticed they will show game’s score thusly:

New England 85 Washington 0

Then they will have a player’s stat pop up right next to that:

New England 85 Washington 0 Brady 55/56 750 yds 11 TD

OK, so far that is fairly helpful. But then what they will do is have the player’s stat scroll to the left, with nothing following it. How is that helpful?? If you have a bunch of player or game stats scrolling by that would make sense, but the way they do it now it’s just annoying. Someone didn’t think that through very well at CBS.

Also, could the self-important background music that Fox came up with be more pretentious for the World Series intros?

I have also noticed on the World Series games that they can sometimes go 3-4 minutes without having a graphic on the screen showing the score or the announcers mentioning the score.

I’m wondering what Fox paid NBC and/or the NFL to not have a night game scheduled against the World Series!! Care to wager which contest would have better ratings? Surely the NFL doesn’t think that a World Series game would have a bigger audience than a regular season game.

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Oh, I really hate all the damn fantasy stats. Just give me the scores, please. I don’t want to sit through the scroll of a bunch of useless numbers when I’m just trying to find out who beat whom. If people want detailed stats, that’s what the internet is for.

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Ok, first of all, the idea of hooking in your network’s TV shows by spotlighting their stars at the game has been going on for way more than a decade, and it wasn’t Fox that started it, or even started abusing it, it was one of the big 3. So that’s hardly Foxification.

Second of all, annoying graphics have often made it into coverage ever since computers and TV were linked up. Sometimes graphics work, sometimes they don’t. You don’t know what’s going to work until you try it for a while. I love the baseball graphic which shows what bases are occupied by men, for example, though some broadcasters do a poor job of that graphic (too large, to tiny, to hard to tell if the base is occupied). The yellow first down line is another wonderful addition, though I recall being somewhat annoyed by it at first, especially when they didn’t have the kinks worked out and it would show over the top of players pants, etc.

I imagine that showing a large graphic for down and distance is aimed at sports bars, where you may not be able to hear the commentary, and where the graphic at the top of the screen may not let you easily read the numbers.

As for Fox announcers, they are hardly the worst of the bunch: all networks have annoying announcers. I personally like the young Mr. Buck, but could lose Tim McCarver without any hesitation. But one man’s good announcer is another man’s infected tooth; I hate Vin Scully’s work and always have, even when I was a wee lad and he was just the announcer for the Dodgers games on Channel 9 (iirc).

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Then, there’s Michael Fartkamp of the phocking USA network who interrupts the U.S. Tennis Open with interminably long and inane interviews with celebs, which are usually shameless plugs of mediocre TV shows.

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Communist. Vin Scully is God!

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None of that stuff really bothers me except the bad announcers. However, the fox announcers aren’t any worse than the other networks(as you said). National sportscasters are just bad in general.

Some of that other stuff might be annoying every now and then, but not to the level of that foxtrack puck was or anything.

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What, nothing about how Fox sucks for starting the World Series so late every evening?

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Yeah that’s the worst, man. They’re cutting kids (and old tired people) out of the games. Well, at least the ones in the eastern and central timezones. If it goes long enough, mountain too.

Sure, my dad would let me stay up until whenever o’clock if the Indians were in the playoffs and I was a little kid (luckilly for him, there was no Indians in the playoffs when I was a little kid) but if it was any other team and it was on this late-ass schedule, I’d be missing most of the World Series.

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That Brady sure can play, huh? :slight_smile:

This has actually been a longstanding agreement between the NFL & MLB. When NBC got into the Sunday night biz, this came along with it. I’m sure the NFL regular season game would out-rate the series nationally. MLB started the series this year on a Wednesday, to potentially conflict with only one NFL weekend though, so there’s that.

I hated the big arrow at first, until I was out at a bar watching the game and it made perfect sense. I still wish the sound effects that went with the graphics would at least be lowered a bit, if not done away with.

No complaints about the K-Zone or whatever fox calls it? Their great computers can show you if the pitch was really a strike, because a replay just isn’t good enough. I hate those.

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Amen! I don’t know what on earth those two boxes are supposed to represent, because everything they show on that graphic looks like a ball, even when it was a strike down the middle. It’s certainly not an accurate depiction of the pitch, just an approximation. This thing needs to go away.

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There’s one network, I don’t remember which one, that insists on cranking the crowd noise up to ridiculous levels. So much so that I can barely hear the announcers. And they in turn have to play the macho man role, constantly laughing and talking over each other.

The overall impression is a cacophony that makes me jumpy as hell. So I no longer watch Monday Night Football, and I miss it.

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My wife and I theorize it’s just some guy in the production van, jabbing his electronic pencil wherever he thinks the ball goes.

Really, this thing was useless. I don’t really care to have some phony “computer” tell me if it was a ball or a strike, but ESPN’s K-zone does this far better than the Fox equivalent.

I also see they ditched the “9 foot” marker for men leading off first base (it was used by TBS during the playoffs). Yeah, real innovation, using a computer and a million dollars worth of production equipment to do the same job as a guy with a tape measure.

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I was talking about this with my roommates yesterday… The higher you get in baseball, the shittier the broadcasts are. Worse since we’re so spoiled here in San Francisco with Kruk & Kuip, Flem, and Jon Miller (sans Joe Morgan, thank Og).

K-Zone/Fox Trax: The most annoying thing is that in doesn’t fucking matter where the pitch actually was. What matters is where the guy in the blue behind the plate thought it was. If it’s a blatantly horrible call, show the replay a few times, but applying some stupid CG grid to it is ridiculous and a waste of everyone’s time.

The 9 foot lead graphic was just bizarre. Someone actually thought that would be useful?

I think last night, Fox was actually attempting to show a close up of every fan, individually, for at least three seconds. I swear, a whole minute would go by without so much as a blade of grass in the shot. Show the goddamn players!

Stop interviewing managers & coaches during the game. That is the last thing they want to do and therefore the last thing I want to listen to. Hell, I don’t think any non-stationary equipment should be on the field at any time. I hate the on-field camera- when someone hits a home run or a pitchers throws a good inning, some jackass with a camera and a mullet will scamper out to the player and follow him backwards like Gollum. All that for a looking-up shot that looks lame anyway, and ruins every other shot in the ballparks of that player.

I like the scrimmage line in football (and kinda wish it were used more) and the down/to go arrow. That’s real information, so it can stay.

Hrm. Someone apparently has a case of the Mondays.