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The baseball postseason is upon us, we are storming into the heart
of the NFL season, basketball and hockey are knocking at the door,
NASCAR’s down to the wire, and boxing may have just ended.
Nevertheless, on this frenzy of a sports media Monday, we need to talk
about NFL Blitz.
In a segment called “High Stakes Game” on yesterday’s Outside the Lines, ESPN investigated Midway’s updated version of the classic NFL Blitz video game franchise: Blitz League.
While the new installment features cartoonish gameplay familiar to
previous Blitz gamers, it also explores cartoonish realities of
football stardom: gamers can purchase steroids, go to nightclubs, and
send escorts to the opposition’s hotel room prior to the game (thanks
here to Lawrence Taylor, the game’s official coverperson).
The
tone of the feature was clear: even though Midway’s league is not
officially the NFL, the game perpetuates negative stereotypes about NFL
players and management and is generally unfit for consumption when
compared, of course, to Madden. Apparently Bristol has no sense of
irony. The feature only briefly mentions Playmakers,
the first dramatic offering from ESPN Original Entertainment, in which
a football team in a fictional professional league waded through as
many seedy plotlines as possible until Paul Tagliabue made a phone call.
Of
course, since Playmakers, business deals have changed. ESPN caved to
the NFL and cancelled the show despite massive ratings and critical
approval. After EA signed a massive, half-billion dollar contract with the NFL for exclusive rights to teams and logos, ESPN teamed up with them to provide cross-media marketing and intergrated coverage.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em – but don’t expect journalistic
objectivity, if you ever did, from Bristol, at least not when it comes
to the NFL or its video games. When your media is acting as guardian of
that on which it is supposed to report, you have a duty to ask
questions – and, possibly, a duty to buy Blitz.
Let’s
stick with the Bristol-bashing for just a moment longer. ESPN’s Sunday
NFL Countdown remains an SMW-endorsed pregame show, as long as viewers
observe Mike Irvin’s interviews with an appropriate dose of loathing
and self-hatred. Countdown also has the best moment in the sports media
week when, just before the ending, Boomer has to pitch the ensuing
curling, bowling, or billiards broadcast which ESPN programmers have
chosen to fill unusable airtime.
Yesterday was no exception: the National Scrabble Tournament Championship
received a nice lead-in from Boomer & the team, and SMW was
convinced that all of them could barely contain their excitement. But
as the afternoon progressed, ESPN’s “around-the-horn” strategy of MLB
broadcast (switching between five different games across two networks)
showcased the worst in East Coast bias.
ESPN refused to
switch to the critical Houston/Chicago game even after the Yankees/Sox
blowout had become inconsequential On ESPN2, Washington and Philly went
down to the wire with none of the split-screen broadcasting
that the network had promised. Houston and Chicago fans should be up in
arms: a close game was left unseen in deference to an irrelevant game
between two large media markets. Bristol believes that the Yankees/Sox
rivalry is more important and compelling than any other game even if
its playoff implications have been erased.
This shouldn’t
surprise us that much. Friday on PTI, in Kornheiser’s absence, Bob Ryan
and Wilbon spent the first ten minutes (four news items) entirely on
Sox/Yankees and the Patriots. Does ESPN really think all of its viewers
live off of I-84? Or is it just that Bob Ryan isn’t equipped to talk
about anything that doesn’t happen in Massachusetts? The next time you
see talking heads on ESPN debating the existence of East Coast bias, do
a little irony dance and drop us a line.
Seems like TK also took a break from being a columnist, judging by today’s Redskins-for-Dummies garbage.
277 words of self-congratulatory nostalgia threatening to bring the
Redskins’ bandwagon back from 1991 (when he was still a real
journalist). Terry Bradshaw writes a similar article, but much better, which is not something SMW ever wants to say again.
Tomorrow: Actual column recaps, annotated TMQ, and new theories on the media-friendly NFL.
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Daily Digest 
