Well, sports fans, because good things come to those who wait, Saturday is your lucky day!
According to Mike Tirico and NBC, as heard every two minutes within last Sunday night’s Bills-Dolphins and spoken on behalf of Roger “It’s All About Our Fans” Goodell and his enabling team owners, the NFL has provided you a chance to be part of history:
All one must do is purchase Saturday night’s Dolphins-Chiefs, the first NFL playoff game to be sold and seen exclusively behind a paywall, as per the demand of no one other than those reliant on further feeding their bottom lines or servicing their buy-in costs.
That’s right, you lucky dogs, as Tirico was delighted to endlessly repeat (on orders), unless one lives in Miami or Kansas City, one, if able, must purchase the game on NBC’s Vulture, er Peacock Channel.
Apparently this is the wave of the future despite no evidence that adding pay TV sports by removing them from greatest-good view, will drive both the bright future and increased revenue of sports.
But there is hard evidence that this is based on a wish, as the failures of take-’em-for-granted-greed go unlearned and indeed copied. (See: how pay-per-view killed boxing and made-only-for-TV-money has severely eroded the popularity of MLB).
I suspect that if Saturday night’s game were in Berlin, Ronald Reagan would tomorrow declare, “Mr. Goodell, tear down this paywall!”
All week I heard from readers who would otherwise watch Saturday’s game but instead will live without it as a matter of principle, financial and moral, and for their unwillingness to further fuel their status as suckers — much as they had rejected the opportunity to be double walloped for Goodell’s “good investment” PSLs.
But the NFL under Goodell is so smug that it can’t see or stem the rot from within. Consider Sunday’s fabricated “exciting” end of this, the first more-revenue-driven 17-game season, one that gave mediocre-and-less teams undeserved postseason chances.
Sunday, the 8-8 Bucs in a must-win against the 2-14 Panthers could only manage a 9-0 win. The Titans, at 5-11, beat the must-win 9-7 Jaguars. The must-win 8-8 Seahawks trailed the 4-12 Cardinals until late in the game.
What once was explained and even extolled as “parity” have become conspicuous cases of very bad football played at critical times by unprepared taxi-squad assignees as well as reasonably fit bodies who can be summoned from their existing jobs to replace injured second- and third-stringers.
History? This has already been a season of historically bad football assigned to earnest but inept quarterbacking. But because it’s all a transparent, insulting con — all of it — Tirico, throughout Sunday night’s telecast, couldn’t have been happier or more excited for all of us!
Peacock/NBC paid $110 million for this betrayal. Funny, as NBC last week issued a press release bragging about its monster regular-season viewership totals. But who knows what money now costs? Last week Adam Silver fined the Nets just $100,000 for essentially playing not to win against the Bucks.
Can’t or won’t watch Saturday night’s NFL playoff game? Yep, Roger, “It’s all about our fans.”
ESPN’s CFP coverage was DOA
More TV sports history was made this week when the commercials-saturated Michigan-Washington college championship became the first to be broadcast in ESL — English as a second language.
Even the graphics appeared as artificial intelligence: UW’s sixth-year, two-colleges QB Michael Penix Jr., in a week prior semifinal against Texas, had a “season-high 10 off-platform completions.”
Analyst Kirk Herbstreit arrived with his bag of slick-sounding empty nonsense, including the contradictory and impossible “tackled in space.”
In the first quarter alone he three times spoke of the importance of “getting on the same page” as well as twice noting the desire to “run downhill.”
And foolish formula camera shots again deprived audiences of seeing what was going on with the defenses and offenses at critical moments as third-and-goal and fourth-and-goal were preceded by collections of worthless crowd shots.
But the telecast did show a recording of ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro in an on-field ceremony to salute ESPN for all its good deeds performed for kids.
I wondered if Doug Adler, fired as a racist for the false claim that he called Venus Williams a “gorilla” when he praised her “guerilla” tactics, was watching. After all, Adler, before ESPN recklessly destroyed his career and reputation, annually served as a volunteer tennis instructor for poor black kids prior to the USTA tournament in Washington, D.C.
Instead of the informationally useful and brief nuts and bolts, Herbstreit drowned the telecast in his own alphabet soup.
Rather than tell us how many yards were gained, Herbstreit went with the neo-vague “ran for positive yardage” and the means-nothing “play behind the sticks,” as opposed to allowing the down and needed distance to speak for themselves.
And ESPN never did explain why there were so many “sixth-year” student-athletes in the game.
But while Washington lost, 34-13, it destroyed Michigan in performing nauseating all-about-me demonstrations.
Lappas right call on college basketball
TV person of the week awarded to CBS’s underutilized college basketball analyst Steve Lappas for keeping our eyes and minds focused during Saturday’s Mississippi St.-South Carolina.
Yes, Lappas can be a bit loud and excitable, but as a former coach (Manhattan, Villanova, UMass) it’s a good thing for us that he can’t help it.
Among his wondering-out-loud sessions he asked why SC, after MSU scored inside, would tightly defend a “non-shooter on the outside. Let him shoot!” His sense of what was and wasn’t a foul was spoken immediately, then supported by replays. And in crunch time, “I just don’t understand” why SC, eventual home losers, did not exploit an inside mismatch, another observation thoroughly supported by replay.
Top-tier college basketball continues its by-design destruction of the ends of close and reasonably close games.
This past weekend: The final 22 seconds of regulation in Miami-Wake Forest on The CW (Ch. 11, here) took 4:10 to complete.
The final 1:51 of NC State-Virginia, on the ACC Network, ran 10:25 as three consecutive timeouts were called with 7.4 seconds left.
And I’m still not sure if LaSalle-Fordham on NBC’s USA Network ended, as the plug began to be pulled, then pulled again, with two minutes left
So after self-serving suspected phony Aaron Rodgers delivered a speech calling for the Jets to discard all unneeded distractions, he continued his mutual highly public hissy-fitting with Jimmy Kimmel during his paid appearances on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show.”
Meantime McAfee, vulgar hero to both disaffected dimwits with nothing better to do and desperately starved-for-attention ESPN, has become the very kind of misanthrope he mocks.
Our vigilant truth chronicler @backaftathis account on X, formerly Twitter, tracked sports betting-financed podcaster Mike Francesa’s annual never-wrong, “My picks have value” expertise on college football.
Nov. 11: “Oregon is the best team in the country.”
Dec. 30: “As I’ve said all along, Georgia is the best team in the nation.”
Jan. 8: “I’ve been on the Washington bandwagon for two years.”
Another undefeated season!
