Thursday, December 01, 2005

Sports News and thoughts
Michael Irvin is in trouble at ESPN for not letting them know about his legal problems last week. I think Irvin is a disgrace to ESPN and the journalism industry as a whole.
Of course, I thought that as soon as he started at the network.
I hope if I ever get arrested for drugs and don't tell my employers about it, that I get a week off.
My dislike for Irvin is not personal, however. Rather, it is his style of screaming out sentence fragments and passing it off as analysis. I don't like Irvin as a commentator for the same reason I don't like John Kruk, who didn't even seem to know who Milton Bradley was two years ago.
But Irvin and Kruk are merely symbols of what ESPN has become. It went from the "world wide leader in sports," to the leader in ego-driven athletes passing as commentators and the top producer of hyperbole in this hemisphere.

2 Comments:

At 3:21 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Stephen A. Smith screams out sentence fragments and spit droplets and passes it off as analysis, and he got his own show.
This is what TV, ESPN in particular, has done: it's not about how much you know, it's about how loudly you say it.

This is from the network that brought us Rush Limbaugh and Dennis Miller as football commentators. Who's next, Stuttering John from Howard Stern?

 
At 10:14 AM , Blogger Joel said...

I agree on Irvin/Stephen A., et. al.

I don't understand a lot of the moves they make -- they already had the market cornered. Why try to make yourselves look cool by hiring Irvin, who adds nothing except being Stu Scott's boy?

I disagree on Kruk, however. I think the Baseball Tonight team of Kruk, Reynolds, Ravech and Gammons is must-see TV. They click. He comes off as a guy who loves the game, which I think was evident by the Randy Johnson/All-star charade a while back.

The same goes for NFL Live and Salisbury. The dude sucked. He knows it. But that doesn't stop him from making good analysis, even at the expense of making himself look foolish.

But I don't understand why they combine Ron Jaworski, the best there is, with Irvin. That, to me, is the biggest telltale sign for them that something is wrong. here you have Exhibit A of what every broadcaster/analyst should be, and then you have him sit right next to Exhibit A of what they shouldn't be.

It's almost like they're parodying themselves.

 

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