Monthly Archives: May 2009
ESPN’s state of college football
ESPN plans to go around the country to look at each state’s best in high school and college football on the weekday College Football Live show, running June 1 to Aug. 7.
The shows will include guests representing each state, though a look at the first week’s schedule displays how ESPN is going to cheat. Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco will be representing both Delaware and New Jersey on June 3. Flacco grew up in Jersey and played collegiately at Delaware.
I’m a native Delawarean and lived in New Jersey for several years, so I’ll be insulted for everyone from the First State and the Garden State.
Classic lacrosse, most-viewed NBA
ESPN has deemed Monday’s NCAA lacrosse final between Syracuse and Cornell worthy of the oxymoronic tag “instant classic” and will replay the game tonight at 7 on ESPN Classic.
# # #
Game 3 of the Lakers-Nuggets series drew 8.7 million viewers, setting a record for ABC for a conference final game, bettering the 8.2 million for a Pistons-Heat game in 2006.
ESPN and Sports Bias- Example #6542
I am back from my out-of-town business endeavors and have a brief commentary this Memorial Day…
I awoke to check the latest sports news since I put head to pillow and navigated to ESPN.com. The first thing I do is check the scoreboard at the top of the screen to see the results of some of the late games. Here is a screen grab of the scoreboard as of 7am ET:
Look at the headings and guess what’s missing. Let’s see…ESPN carries the NBA, MLB, and the French Open. Hey, where’s the NHL? Another dis for a sport not on the ESPN family of networks. We’ve seen this all before. I’ve never had a problem with the WWL promoting the sports they hold the rights to over others they don’t. I do have a problem when, on their information platforms, they disregard major sports for what appears to be the same reason. Sigh.
Hockey fans, enjoy your holiday just the same…
The return of Mr. Flip
Note from Ray: I haven’t had the heart to tell Mr. Flip The Baltimore Sun is no longer running The Flip Side on Mondays. But Mr. Flip contacted me and asked why he hasn’t appeared in the newspaper lately. I told him I’d look into it. In the meantime, I told him I’d post one here.
Buyer be where?
The NBA wants you to be sure you’re buying only league-approved jerseys, caps and tchotchkes.
“The 2009 NBA conference finals is an event that Nuggets fans will want to remember for many years to come, but a counterfeit T-shirt is not really a keepsake if it contains a typo or shrinks three sizes when you put it in the laundry,” Ayala Deutsch, the senior vice president and chief intellectual property counsel for the NBA, told Denver’s Channel 9 news.
(All right, there was no mention of tchotchkes, but Mr. Flip loves the sound of that word so much he’ll definitely include it in his next “Say It With Yiddish” podcast.)
How can you tell a vendor is offering a knockoff? A couple of hints: if that Chauncey Billups T-shirt has a picture of Brian Billick or if that George Karl autographed photo is really John Lithgow, though the latter is an understandable mistake.
In the meantime, caveat emptor (which, until just recently, Mr. Flip used to think was the name of a guy who played with Linas Kleiza back in Lithuania).
They are all witnesses … after the weather
The timing of LeBron James’ Three-Pointer for the Ages was just right for Cleveland’s Channel 5 news team. After all, there was time for one more look at the weather forecast. And then it was — to quote Ren and Stimpy — happy, happy, joy, joy. Check out the clip:
Did that mean the anchorwoman has renewed her Sports Illustrated subscription?
Is that a microphone in your pocket …
Prostitutes surely face many risks while doing business, but a support group in Canada wants them to be prepared to deal with an extremely dangerous group during the Vancouver Olympics next year — the media.
Natasia Wright of the Prostitution Alternatives Counseling and Education Society told Reuters: “All people should know their rights with the media, and if they don’t, then they should be informed.” The article reported Wright said “sex workers have previously been asked impertinent questions and have had to deal with rude and aggressive behavior from the media.”
Mr. Flip will leave it up to you to decide what would constitute an “impertinent” question.
(Tips of the Flip to fark.com.)
Callin’ Colin
In July, ESPN will be giving us more Colin Cowherd, setting him up in an hour-long weekday show on ESPN2. The specifics on SportsNation were short, so we can only conclude it will be much like Cowherd’s ESPN Radio show, with the host opining and cracking wise on a variety of topics.
So that got me to thinking about what we regularly hear from Cowherd.
He often has a refreshing take on the issues of the day, but I just as often find myself slightly annoyed when listening to him. Why is that? It’s not his arguments, really. Just like with most sports talk hosts, sometimes you agree, sometimes you don’t.
For example, not long ago, he was talking about the economics of baseball and relating the business of running a ballclub to operating a pizza shop. (Because they’re both rolling in dough. Budda-bing. Thank you, I’m here all week. Try the pepperoni.) His point was a lot of the transactions are in cash, and when a business is getting paid in cash, it isn’t necessarily inclined to report each dollar on the ledger. There’s your explanation for why teams don’t want to open their books to the players union, Cowherd said.
Outrageous? He had just accused the people running clubs of being cheats. But Cowherd made the on-target point that it would have been just as outrageous to claim Enron was cooking the books before we all learned about that corporation’s creative accounting. In such a context, it seems perfectly reasonable to question whether major league clubs have stacks of bills stashed away like Tony Soprano did in his backyard bird-feed storage bin.
