BETWEEN the end of last Monday’s Giants-Cowboys telecast and the start of this Monday’s Pats-Vikes, something happened up at ESPN, something important and, if it lasts, something good.
Perhaps ESPN execs were passed a memo. Or maybe they read the writing on their walls. Perhaps, after some self-examination, they realized that ESPN, even by ESPN’s standards, had gone too far. After all, once even dopes know they’re being treated like dopes, who’s left to fool?
Two Monday’s ago, ESPN seized an attractive match-up and, keeping with its quickly established Monday Night Football tradition, turned it into an anything-but-thegame a-thon.
The sell of Disney product and the quest to appeal to “casual fans” (they’re the ones who sit in your living room, saying, “What else is on?” then start leafing through the wedding album), had finally eclipsed the good senses of the primary audience.
Had the NFL finally had enough? Did it make it clear to ESPN that abandoning the game for anything and everything – to chat-up Hank Williams Jr. and to promote ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars” – was intolerable?
The NFL denies that any official persuasion to clean up its act was sent ESPN’s way.
Yet we do know that at least a few league and team officials regarded that GiantsCowboys telecast as unacceptable.
Beyond that, and for what it’s worth, independent sportswriters (those not on ESPN’s payroll) left ESPN, shall we say, jacked up.
Whether ESPN got the message or unilaterally engaged in some better-late-than-never self-inspection, Monday’s Pats-Vikes telecast was too radically different from ESPN’s first seven Monday nighters to have been accidental. Monday’s, despite a semiblowout, was almost entirely devoted to football.
ESPN yesterday said that its Day 1 blueprint hadn’t been altered. But how could that be? Not only was the booth without a “Desperate Housewives” performer, the only in-game interview conducted was from a sideline, with ex-Viking QB Warren Moon, and even that, at 24-7, was not designed to intrude.
The self and/or cross-promotion was limited to halftime, when people ran around dressed in costumes depicting ESPN’s studio and announce crew. Lame, but at least not in-game.
Bottom line: ESPN, in NFL Week 8, did a 180 from weeks 1 through 7. And we’ve been at this too long to think of such a happenstance as accidental.
Who knows? Perhaps ESPN has come, even if briefly, to the realization that its best customers – sports fans, and of all ages – had better be served first and best.
Perhaps ESPN execs woke up to realize that ESPN now creates in sports fans a palpable sense of both fear and loathing, that no matter the anticipation for a game, if that game is on ESPN, one tunes to it with a sense of habitformed dread.
Regardless, something happened between the end of Giants-Cowboys and the start of Pats-Vikes, something too startling to ignore.
*
Wednesday, during the Knicks’ opener, MSG Network twice ambushed its audience with that “Opie and Anthony” radio show ad in which they tell a woman that it’s not the dress that makes her look heavy, but her “[expletive].” Other than demonstrating that Opie and Anthony are vulgar, what’s the rest of the message? That they’re cruel? Brilliant.
And while these two champs are so hip and happening, should we forget that they eagerly threw in with Vince McMahon to host his WNBC XFL pre-game show, which was not only pure and predictable garbage, but served as the warm-up act for history-making garbage?
*
YES’s Nets’ analyst Mark Jackson remains flat-out good. In the Nets’ opener, Jackson said it’s evident that Raptors’ forward Chris Bosh is not yet in shape following a foot injury, otherwise, “he’d go around Jason Collins instead of trying to go through him.” That Chris Russo had not yet seen Louisville or West Virginia play this season, and Mike Francesa didn’t seem to know much more about the two undefeated Big East teams than did Russo, didn’t prevent them yesterday from handicapping last night’s game.
MSG Network is now so loaded with suggestions that last season’s Knicks were Larry Brown’s fault you’d think that hiring Brown was your idea.
