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The Big Questions Why does most modern sports broadcasting suck so hard?

by Noel Murray December 7, 2010


One night this past summer, Bob Costas broadcast a baseball game on the MLB Network, with former Atlanta Braves all-star John Smoltz as his color commentator. Throughout the game, Smoltz used his iPad and his MLB At Bat app to keep tabs on the other games going on around the league, and at one point a confused Costas asked Smoltz what he was doing. Smoltz tried to explain that an iPad was like a big iPhone, so Costas picked up the iPad and held it up to his head like a phone, intending to illustrate how ridiculous modern technology is—and not, say, how a certain once-youthful and plugged-in sports broadcaster had become embarrassingly out-of-date.

A few weeks later, Costas was back on NBC for the NFL, and made a passing mention of Twitter, cracking, “Maybe I should get on Twitter. Then I could tell everyone what I had for breakfast. That’d be great!” Hearing that reminded me of the infamous Costas Now! segment on the evils of sports-blogging a couple of years ago, during which Costas and Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger piled on Deadspin founding editor Will Leitch, showing a deep misunderstanding of what Internet-based sports commentary is really about. The democratization of sports commentary—allowing fans to create mini-communities where they can swap jokes and insights with the like-minded—understandably unnerves some of the media’s old guard. But reacting to that natural evolution with knee-jerk mockery and outrage is rarely a wise move.

I don’t mention these incidents to pick on Costas, who has a long, distinguished career as a broadcaster, and who was a hero of mine through most of my young adulthood, both for his insights into sports and his passion for popular culture. (I still have some old videotapes of my favorite interviews on Costas’ Later show.) But while Costas rolled his eyes at iPads and Twitter, I was in the middle of having one of the most enjoyable summers I’ve ever spent as a sports fan, largely because of my iPad and my Twitter account. Thanks to MLB At Bat, I could follow baseball games from around the country, frequently while reading reactions on Twitter from far-flung friends who are Giants fans, Reds fans, Blue Jays fans, etc. And during big sporting events this past year—March Madness, for example, or any given college football Saturday—I’ve found that following the tweets and re-tweets of writers like Leitch, Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, and Rob Neyer has enhanced the fun. It’s been like sitting at a virtual sports bar with buddies I’ve never met.

I’m not asking that sports broadcasts start integrating Twitter, because chances are that would be awful. (I think of how CNN uses Twitter, with the most inane commentary on the day’s events either scrolling along the screen or read aloud by anchors, and I shudder.) Still, I do find the “I’m just an dumb old guy who doesn’t understand this kooky modern world” attitude of most sports announcers doesn’t just fail to make games more enjoyable; it actively impedes pleasure.

It’s not just technophobia that’s become a problem with modern sports broadcasting. (Or at least, that part’s nothing new. How many veteran newspaper columnists made fun of blogging five years ago? And how many of them write a blog for their paper’s websites now?) It’s more the general ossification and cockiness that’s set in when it comes to how the networks and cable channels call, report, and analyze sporting events. Because sports are one of the few areas of television programming that are DVR-resistant, ratings have remained steady or rising for almost all games, studio shows, highlight shows, and what-have-you. And the people who broadcast those events seem to have misinterpreted the reason for their success, assuming that it must be the broadcasters themselves that are awesome, and not the sports.

ESPN is largely to blame for the increasing “we are the show” approach. In its early days, ESPN was an upstart institution, so watching its anchors crack jokes and kid around during highlight reels was part of the fun of being an ESPN devotee. It was a way of rebelling against the previous bout of ossification and cockiness within network sports divisions. Here was a channel that didn’t parcel out sporting events stingily and treat them like fine dining, but rather set out a sprawling sports buffet, while taking an appropriately irreverent attitude toward the slop overflowing their trough.

But then ESPN’s catchphrases and commentary began to overwhelm the actual job of calling games and hosting highlights, to the extent where half the time these days when I watch SportsCenter, the anchors can’t even keep pace with what’s on the screen. This summer, I fell in love with the MLB Network’s late-night highlights show, which is heavy on facts and stats and light on quips. Sometimes, the MLB Network anchor even shuts up entirely and lets excerpts from the local broadcasting teams’ commentaries serve as narration. For those who tune into sports highlights because they want to watch sports highlights, it’s a dream.

Also this summer, I began to look forward to baseball games broadcast on MLB Network—which most often picked up a local feed—and to dread any game covered by ESPN. On the local and regional level, broadcasting remains in decent shape, by and large. The announcers are more interested in calling the game than promoting themselves, so any personal asides tend to be quirky, funny, or related to the history of the sport being covered. On the national level, meanwhile, I’ve noticed an increase in time-filling business only loosely related to the game at hand: more guests in the booth, more uninformative sideline reporting, more in-game interviews with coaches, and the like. Watching a Saturday baseball game on Fox is like tuning into an especially lame daytime talk show, interrupted by the occasional play in the field. This most recent Thanksgiving weekend, while gorging on football, I grew exhausted by the frequent breaks to show the broadcast crews of the respective games enjoying their holiday dinners. A little bit of that is fine, but on one game, an announcer went to commercial teasing more footage of the staff’s touch-football outing. (Because surely that’s why we we were all watching.)

Again, this all goes back to a misperception among the networks and ESPN that viewers tune in because of the personalities of the commentators. I’ll grant that some games are more fun to watch if the announcer’s a little eccentric (a la Gus Johnson), and some are more rewarding if the announcing team knows how to develop a narrative (as Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth do on Sunday Night Football). But the announcers I enjoy the most are the ones I barely notice. I cringe a little if I switch on a game and see that it’s going to be covered by a three-man booth. That tells me to expect a lot of chatter, with some potentially valuable comments lost in all the forced bonhomie.

Circumstances aren’t much better on sports-talk radio, a format where, again, the more thoughtful and likable hosts tend to ply their trade in smaller markets or less valuable time-slots while national drive-time is dominated by cocky loudmouths who disdain statistics (unless they back a point they want to make), sneer at failure, and ignore historical trends in favor of overreacting to whatever happened yesterday. Nothing speaks more to how much the contemporary sports commentariat wastes fans’ time than the typical sports-talk radio host’s love of the dramatic pause. A standard sports-talk segment—on ESPN radio especially—consists of a bold statement along the lines of, “TCU doesn’t deserve a shot at the BCS title game,” loudly repeated over and over with a different wording and a three-second pause between each sentence. Then the host throws to commercial.

Frequently, the supporting evidence for any claim made on sports-talk radio comes down to gut feelings. Last week, I wasted about 10 minutes listening to Colin Cowherd—who inexplicably just landed a deal for a CBS sitcom about his life—as he laid the struggles of the Miami Heat at the feet of coach Erik Spoelstra, whom Cowherd claimed is demonstrably “not an ‘it’ guy” because he served as an assistant coach for such a long time. According to Cowherd, truly great coaches don’t spend a lot of time serving as assistants, because true greatness would be recognized early. It’s a self-fulfilling argument, and one that Cowherd supported anecdotally by naming a few long-time assistants who’ve flopped as head coaches. Some of Cowherd’s points were valid—like the difficulty some players have in respecting the authority of a person they’ve seen as a subordinate for the past five years—and he’s not wrong necessarily when he says that coaches like Spoelstra or recently fired Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips are responsible for their teams’ underperformance. But for the most part, Cowherd based his case on intangibles, because this is what sports broadcasters do when they have nothing significant to say: They talk about “leadership” and “heart” and “clutch performance,” and congratulate themselves for being able to recognize those qualities even if those nerdy stat-heads can’t.

As I said earlier, the situation with sports broadcasting isn’t entirely dire. There are good announcers out there, and good analysts—some of whom even work on a national level. And of course, just as there are columnists, bloggers, and fans who provide smart, witty commentary about sports, there are also plenty of yahoos sharing half-baked opinions and pointless snark online. (Some of you may even consider this column you’re reading now as a case-in-point.) But it’s dismaying that the media institutions with the most resources at their disposal aren’t leading the way in covering games in ways that are both enjoyable and enlightening. Instead, we’re still getting sideline reporters asking coaches, “What do you need to do in the second half?” (the answer to which is always, “We need to execute better”) and studio anchors continuing to pick through quotes from banal press conferences for clues to a team’s future performance.

Granted, I could expand this Big Question to encompass the media as a whole, because ESPN and the like are only following the larger trends of cable and network news, where weighing the political implications of a speech or a piece of legislation occupies far more airtime than what those items mean to the citizenry. (Or if “the voice of the people” does get heard, it’s in the form of sob-story anecdotes and/or balanced man-on-the-street soundbites, with little to no consideration of real facts and figures.) So naturally SportsCenter is going to gravitate toward trumped-up controversies and unjustified hype a large percentage of the time. If the ratings keep spiking, why try to improve the formula?

I get how and why the business works the way it does. But it still baffles me that so many fans accept it and keep watching, rather than seeking or demanding alternatives. Would we feel at ease if our surgeons or our pilots talked about their areas of expertise using terms like “believing in yourself” and “grit,” while admitting that they don’t really understand or care about the technical side of their jobs? Or is broadcast media the only field where that kind of vagueness and willful ignorance is celebrated?
 
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