The Evil Empire Strikes Again

BCS is coming back to Disney, but it won't be on ABC. ESPN has won the rights to the BCS and the national title game (sans The Rose Bowl) starting in 2011.

Add that to ESPN's lists of conquests, which also includes a 15 year deal with the SEC.

I kind of address why something like this is bad for sports when I talked about how ESPN shoved the lameass, not-so-exciting, did-anyone-other-than-old-white-guys-pay-attention-to-this Ryder Cup in the summer.

The same goes here. ESPN is slowly becoming a monopoly and is slowly becoming the place for sports and sports entertainment. I have no no problem of the "World Wide Leader in Sports." I do have a problem when it acts as if it (ESPN) should be the only place anyone can go to watch quality sporting events on television.

Again, it's all about the money. Sure, ESPN, in its own press release, sites that 86 percent of televisions in America have basic cable, which ESPN is on. But what about that other 14 percent? With the BCS exclusively on ESPN starting in 2011, it gets to charge higher fees to cable companies in order to carry ESPN, which in turn leads to higher cable bills for all of us.

But shouldn't everyone get to watch the biggest games of the year?

And even ESPN wants the rights to the English Premier League in the United States.

I am sure that ESPN won't stop until it has every major league signed to a deal that lets the network show their games.

In the world of television sports, ESPN is the Yankees. No, they're worst. They're the Yankees without the competition. Because ESPN has been branded as the sports network in America, other networks like Fox Sports or Comcast Sports have no chance of breaking through.

When the average American thinks sports they think baseball, football, cheerleaders and ESPN.

At least the Yankees lose every now and then. Maybe George Steinbrenner should ask ESPN president George Bodenheimer how the network does it. The Yankees could use the help.

The Ryder Cup, ESPN and Money

Does anyone really care about the Ryder Cup? I mean, it's just golf, and does anyone care about golf?

There are so many other things going on this weekend that I'd like for ESPN to not shove it down my throat. Please, no Tiger, no watch (like I'd watch even if Tigers Woods was playing).

You've got the SEC's stalwarts going at it in college football this weekend;MLB pennant races; the NFL and even European fans won't be able to pay attention when their ADD problems with a rematch of last year's European Cup final--Manchester United going to London to play Chelsea.

So why is it that ESPN has give the Ryder Cup, usually an afterthought to many, all this hype? The answer is simple. It's the same reason why CBS promotes CSI up the ass, NBC marks out to The Office, ABC keeps telling you to watch Grey's Anatomy and FOX overexposes American Idol.

Each of those networks owns the rights for those shows. And those networks want to make money. To make money, they need to charge advertisers big bucks. To charge advertisers big bucks, people need to watch (or the possibility of a lot of people watching) in order for broadcaster to justify charging ridiculous rates for 30-second spots during breaks.

It's the same reason why my friend Steven Dunst felt as if the NFL Draft, for years, was so overhyped and got so much more attention than the NBA Draft.

This is a generation of sports fan that gets most of its sports news and information from ESPN, the world-wide leader of sport. They dominate the competition. They try to make sure that their media brand is the only brand that people care about.

And when blogs started to take away from ESPN's readership online, bam, ESPN created blogs.

This is a network that knows how to invade and take over the lives of sports fans across the country and the world.

So, if ESPN is the sole presentation for sports information in the United States, as it is for many, then things such as the Ryder Cup, or the NBA and NFL Drafts and Arena Football will permeate throughout the country's collective sports consciousness because ESPN has a stake in all of these things getting watched on its network.

Sure, ESPN will have a somewhat objective view when it covers the sports and the leagues that it partners with. It kind of has to.

But that doesn't stop it from promoting those leagues and sports and teams and sporting events, no matter what their coverage is. That doesn't stop SportsCenter anchors from devoting extra coverage to those events.

Because I really don't think ESPN cares about whether or not Team USA can finally beat the Europeans for the Ryder Cup or if the San Jose Sabrecats win another Arena Bowl or if a guy like Aaron Rodgers spends an entire day in the green room waiting to get drafted. What they care about is whether or not people watch all of those things happen.

Hype equals money and with the sports nations' undivided attention given to ESPN, they can hype anything it wants, exploiting the viewer to gain some cash.

Welcome to the Big Show

And yes, of course I'm trying to elicit the images of the mid-1990s when Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick ruled the SportsCenter universe. If you (and many people of my generation at least) do not remember the best-ever SC tandem in history, then you probably don't remember where "Welcome to the Big Show" comes from. So here's the story.

Olbermann used to open their nightly sports-newscast with that statement, "Welcome to the Big Show." However, ESPN producers found it, and I'm putting this bluntly, offensive towards the other SportsCenter crews. So, Patrick and Olbermann began opening SportsCenter with a sarcastic, "This, is SportsCenter." And thus SportsCenter's tagline/slogan/motto was born.

I still think that Olbermann and Patrick are The Big Show and I'm excited to see them team up together for Football Night on NBC.

But I must digress. This post wasn't supposed to be about two of my idols. It's supposed to be about me and what this thing we call a blog is going to be about.

It's going to be about sport...obviously. It's going to be my random thoughts about random instances in sport. You'll notice that, in the future, that I'll have a sort of West Coast bias. You must understand that is because I was born and raised on the West Coast. So if I don't talk about Yankees or the Sox, then boo-hoo. You can watch ESPN's Yankees/Sox Tonight staring Karl Ravech and John Kruk.

But to start, I love the Olympics and the next month or so will be dedicated to the Olympics in Beijing.

And I'll start with a daily post about quirky things you need to know about the 29th Olympiad. Okay, maybe they won't be so quirky, but at least they'll be interesting.