“… I realized I’ve been getting cranky in the evenings, just from being blathered to death watching the Olympics. Last night, I started muting the sound, and had a much more pleasant time.”
This one is for a particular reader. He/she knows whom I mean.
Oddly enough, going online during big TV events has the bizarre effect of boosting the ratings of whatever everyone is watching. Like the Super Bowl or Grammys or the MTV Video Music Awards, all of which saw big boosts in popularity in the last year. You don’t care about the show, you care about being able to talk about the show. This is called “community,” which is also the name of a terrible show on a terribly out-of-touch network called NBC.
Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.Super-smart NBC has figured out that what all these big blockbuster Twitter-TV combo events have in common is that they are happening live. Shows that are broadcast at different times in different zones (and probably DVR’d anyway) don’t have the same effect. Yet, they have not applied this simple common sense approach to the Olympics.
Frustratingly, Olympic primetime ratings are also up this year and people are marveling about how sports fans will stay up long past their bedtime to watch events that they already know the outcome to, just so they can be a part of the phenomenon. It’s not because they prefer it that way. It’s because they have no other choice.
“Most emotional of all were probably the television executives who prefer to think of the Olympics as a two-week long soap opera filled with emotional turmoil, heartbreak, and redemption. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you overcame enough adversity to make your life story worth a three-minute interstitial package.”
Speaking of moms, can we talk about how offensive that Proctor and Gamble Olympic campaign is? Not because it completely ignores the contributions of abusive, overbearing fathers in the creation of great athletes or glamorizes the most annoying tendencies of stage/soccer parents, but because the underlying message of every single ad is, “Thanks for supporting me, Mom. Now go clean my socks.”
Laundry detergent is for ladies. Don’t ever forget that.
“Unfortunately, no one could block out the music of the sibling couple from Great Britain who chose Linkin Park as their backing music and were somehow not disqualified.”
I’m beginning to think Evgeni Plushenko should take a luge run.
And yet, in its infinite wisdom, the NBC mother network gave us another retrospective on the 1980 Lake Placid miracle in the middle of which Al Michaels–who, at this point, seems firmly to believe that he landed on Omaha Beach or something 30 years ago–said, “It seemed like we went from burning flags to waving them.”
Oh, Jesus H. Christ On A Power Play, just shut up already, please?
“Yes, our NHL All-Star team beat another country’s NHL All-Star team in a tough hard-fought non-elimination game that is seriously being compared to the most important international sporting victory in our nation’s history.”
An analysis of NBC’s 3 ½-hour program Friday night showed that there were 56 minutes, 41 seconds of commercials over 24 breaks—that’s three more minutes than actual event action that was showed. Ski jumping, which took up about 30 minutes of the broadcast, featured less than two minutes of action, compared with four minutes, 46 seconds of replays (there was, on average, more than one replay per jump). More than half the time during the compulsory-dancing segments showed action, but good luck getting into a rhythm watching the sport: A commercial break separated each routine.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the Olympic figure skating judges gave their opinions like Simon, Randy and whoever do on American Idol?
[First gleaned at Sideline Chatter during the last winter Olympics.]
“The people NBC needs to woo aren’t sports fans. They broadcast the Olympics for people who like stories about polar bears and gymnasts with rare diseases and speed skaters whose sisters have cancer. Yes, these people are out there and to justify the insane investment dollars they have to watch too. It’s a mini-series that happens to have some sports in it.”
The other problem I had was the ski jump. People speeding down an incline and then launching farther than a football field through the air has to be about the coolest thing, right? Not if you watch on NBC! The shot of every competitor was a close up that fit just them in the screen. You know in how in The Aviator, Howard Hughes puts his movie on hold because there are no clouds in the sky and planes flying without clouds around provides no frame of reference and you can’t tell they are moving? That’s what this was like, basically you have a stationary guy first crouching, then pointed awkwardly, then suddenly landing. What is the point of this close up? Does the average person have enough knowledge of this sport to look at these people’s technical performance? “Oh, I don’t like how his ankle is cocked there. He’s making a big pocket in the middle!” No, just show people flying through the air already!
Always have. Always will I’m afraid. Just hate it. Roone Arledge, the creator of all this highlights-based, personality-featured sports coverage should rot in hell forever IMHO. All those channels; why can’t we (if we wanted to) see every performance by every athlete from every country LIVE?
Henry Blodget agrees with me. This is part of a longer rant:
What NBC Sports apparently doesn’t understand (because it has done this to us before, again and again) is that we don’t care who is televising the Olympics.
We don’t want to watch NBC’s “Olympics show”. We want to watch The Olympics. And like every other connected sports fan on the planet these days, we know exactly when the Olympics is taking place and what’s happening there–in real time.
So, right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics. It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics. And we hate NBC for that.
Henry Blodget has some Questions For NBC, The Network That Prevents You From Watching The Olympics. Among them:
3. How much money would you lose (or do you think you would lose) if you showed the events live on a subsidiary network and then showed highlights again in your prime time broadcast? To us, this seems like the best solution. If you did this, sports fans could get their fix, and the “general audience” you’re obviously trying to appeal to in prime time with segments on polar bears can watch the “Olympics Show” you put on every night without wanting to throw their remote controls through the TV.
Pitchers and catchers begin reporting to Spring Training on Wednesday.
Why are the American skiers wearing their jammies?
OK, I’m cheating. I didn’t take this photo (and neither did Jill). It comes from the AP.
Number 85, Pierre Garçon is American-born of Haitian parents. Yesterday he caught more passes than any receiver in AFC championship game history; 11 for 151 yards. The record was nine.
And then there is this, from the Palm Beach Post:
Even amid the bedlam of 67,650 screaming fans Sunday, that rang true. Dwight Lowery was one of a few Jets who took a shot at containing Garcon, the two of them fighting for something only one could have, yet even then, even amid the usual trash-talk, Lowery pulled Garcon aside.
“He said he was going to help me out with Haiti,” Garcon said. “He told me during the game, man. He said to get in contact with him and a couple of guys on their team.”
More broadly, the conference championships came down to Intellectual Man, in the person of Peyton, in one game, and Instinctive Man, in the person of Brett Favre, whose Vikings played the Saints in the other. For once, blessedly, Intellectual Man won the day. Instinctive Man, to be a little hard on him—though it’s my own view that you can never be too hard on Instinctive Man—cost his team a title for the second time in three years, throwing an interception (this one right across the grain of the play) that was not merely ill-timed, but dim-witted. Credit to Favre for getting them there, but let us have no doubt that he throws those things not because he thinks he should, but because he feels inside that he can, with predictable results.
Gopnik has another good line in referring to the Jets, “just when they needed the Audacity of Audacity. (Larger life-political lesson here, of course.)”
Yup, a little less audacity of hope and a little more audacity of audacity, that’s what we need.
I wanted the Saints to win and I’ve never really been a Brett Favre fan, but my god the old guy sure made it dramatic in every way, didn’t he?
The Fifth Down Blog has the transcript of Favre’s postgame interview (scroll down past Coach Brad Childress).
The NFL overtime procedure is just wrong.
If it’s fair, why does the coin-flip winner ALWAYS take the ball?
(Because the coin flip winner wins two out of three times, that’s why.)
And though I wanted the Saints to win, last night’s overtime was awful.
In a finale that will be talked about for years, the New Orleans Saints won the coin flip to start overtime in the N.F.C. championship game against the Minnesota Vikings. The Saints’ offense moved the ball 39 yards, 17 of them through penalties, to get into field position for a game-winning field goal.
Above from The Fifth Down Blog, which has a discussion of overtime and some alternatives.
Basketball was the brainchild of James Naismith, a Canadian who was teaching at a YMCA training school in Springfield [Massachusetts], which prepared young men to go out and be instructors in YMCAs. Naismith was teaching physical education, but the winters were cold in Massachusetts, and his students were frustrated that they couldn’t go outside. He wanted something physically challenging but that could be played indoors, in a relatively small space. He tried all kinds of new and old games, but nothing worked. Finally he remembered a game he had played as a kid in Canada, a game called Duck on a Rock. He took a few rules from that and adapted it into a game he called Basket Ball. He nailed peach baskets to the balcony on each side of the gym, but the baskets had solid bottoms, so if anyone managed to get the ball in the basket someone else had to climb up and get the ball down.
A week ago on Facebook, my brother Lee predicted that the Cardinals, Ravens, Cowboys and Chargers would win this past weekend’s NFL playoff games. I commented that he would go 0 for 4.
He went 0 for 4.
And that’s why I’m the oldest brother.
BTW, I have it in writing dated September 11, 2009, that Mack predicted the Vikings to win it all this year.
Never bet against Mack.
“Jets punter Steve Weatherford needs heart surgery in the off-season but will play this week. Remember that before making a ‘kickers are wimps’ remark.”
According to this report at the Wall Street Journal, NFL telecasts have 11 minutes of action (but 17 minutes of replays and 75 minutes of commercials).
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