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Just The Sports: 2006-01-22

Just The Sports

Friday, January 27, 2006

Now It All Makes Sense

No wonder it took Chris Andersen eight attempts to complete a dunk in the 2005 NBA All-Star Game Dunk Contest. I thought it was because he was a shitty contest dunker. Turns out, though, he was coked out of his mind. My apologies, Chris.

Oh Really?

No, he doesn't. Sean Taylor is a professional athlete. Professional athletes don't go to jail.

ESPN Radio is Horrible

Sports radio hosts are bad. All of them. Even the ones I like. The fact that they all still have jobs has convinced me beyond a shadow of doubt that sports radio host along with sports writer and sports news anchor has the most job security out of all occupations. Obviously, no matter what a host says, he will still be let into the radio studio. Case in point, here are two examples of actual segments from sports radio hosts on the Worldwide Leader. Just retyping these and having to think about the idiocy behind these statements makes my head hurt.

Colin Cowherd. Sometimes Colin says interesting things and every four days or so like clockwork, he actually makes me laugh out loud. For the most part, though, he comes up with ridiculous analogies that relate sports to stripper, prostitutes, and the corporate world. But even that isn't as bad as when he had a whole segment, maybe two, about how he didn't want to hear anymore about numbers from his listeners. What Colin? You don't want to talk about stats? You don't want to talk about the only way we can record performance on the field? I hope I don't have to remind Colin that stats provide the foundation for understanding how good players are and let future generations get a grasp on what former players did during their playing days. Not feelings or intangibles or whatever other shit sports radio hosts come up with to avoid doing research. Oh Colin.

Stephen A Smith. Yes, I listen to Stephen A Smith's radio show and no, I am not proud of the fact. Stephen A equates yelling louder than the person next to him with presenting a sound argument. He is wrong, but since he will never be fired, I don't see the point in telling him that. One thing he said yesterday actually made me turn the radio off and take a nap. In case, you didn't know, Isiah Thomas has been accused of sexual harassment by a former employee of the Knicks organization. Well, when a caller asked him a question, which I'm sorry to say I don't remember exactly, Stephen A said he couldn't answer the question and that only a woman can. This is a man who gets paid to give his opinion. Paid. I can't stress that enough. It is his job to give his opinion. And yet, given the opportunity, he says he is not qualified to give his opinion. It's probably the most true thing he's ever said.

ESPN Makes Me Cry

ESPN proclaims itself as the Worldwide Leader in Sports and far be it from me to dispute this claim since there really doesn't seem to be a serious competitor to ESPN's sports coverage. However, being the Worldwide Leader doesn't mean that ESPN is good at what they do or even cares about being a respectable sports news organization. ESPN should be so much better and it was at one point, and the fact that it isn't makes me cry.


The idea for ESPN Sportscenter was genius, cutting out the national and world news and focusing on only sports news, the only news a lot of people care about. Then Sportscenter got too caught up in its anchors and not enough in the actual sports. I don't know where this change finally came about, but I'm going to try to pin it down to an actual date. So here goes. The date when Sportscenter revealed to the country the fact it no longer wanted to be respectable is when they decided to hire Stuart Scott. You may say the date was when Outside the Lines became a daily show and it'd be hard to dispute that, but Stuart Scott with help from the likes of Dan Patrick, Jeremy Schaap, Mike Greenberg, and Linda Cohn helped turn ESPN into a joke.

Therefore, I have started my campaign to bring ESPN back to a place it hasn't visited in more than a decade. The place when ESPN was just the sports.