My (belated) thoughts on the Erin Andrews Peep Show

I hate the sports blogosphere's obsession with Erin Andrews. I think it's cheap and trashy and shows an objectification of women and that Andrews doesn't even look that great.

But guys, stand firm on your principles.

I've heard that several sports bloggers have called out the rest of the blogosphere for hypocrisy for criticizing the "EAPS" while making much of their traffic off pictures of Andrews.

I don't have a problem with making a distinction between an "acceptable" form of leering and "unacceptable" forms. That's probably going to be the second thing in a month that makes me run the risk of being flamed by feminists, but the fact is that men leering at hot chicks is as old as time, as is limits on it. That distinction, really, is everywhere in our society. As far as I'm concerned you can do whatever you want on the "right" side of the line as long as you stay on the "right" side of the line.

In fact, I'm going to go further. If I were in the position of a sports blogger who liked posting pictures of Erin Andrews, I would not have come to the sudden, shocking (SHOCKING) realization that this is WRONG and pulled back on the EA exploitation like, say, Fang's Bites did. No, I'd keep up the EA parade at the same pace I always did.

If you're going to decide it's wrong to exploit male lust for hot chicks for hits, regardless of whether or not the object is okay with it as Andrews has been, then be consistent with it and maintain the policy all along. (As I do. I prefer my site to be porn for the mind. Hey, maybe that'll be my tagline when the site relaunches: "Porn for the Mind". I'll get more hits than I otherwise would, certainly. Eh, maybe I'll stick with "Ideas every day". Even though I don't post every day.) But you can object to Andrews being exploited in the wrong way and still continue to exploit her in the right way if you feel it's okay. (Not that I'm precluding a legitimate change of heart here, of course.) All you have to do is make clear that you and your readers know where the line is and not to cross it.

Now I could be wrong about the first sentence...

Weren't ESPN The Magazine stories placed on Insider before they launched a new website with all the bells and whistles?

And does this mean I have to start paying for ESPN The Magazine stories (with an Insider subscription that requires an ESPN The Mag print subscription anyway)? (I'd rather not lose Bill Simmons' magazine columns!)

Could actually be worth watching... basically one test of the "you can only read our stuff if you pay to receive the dead trees" model for Saving Newspapers (tm).

Fun with sports ratings

So, what else can we learn from the sports ratings post from two weeks ago?

• We can learn that the number of people who watch the Super Bowl just for the ads is lower than you might think. Subtract the 29.0 for the NFC Championship Game, reflecting actual football fans, from the 43.1 for the Super Bowl and you get 14.1. Doubtless the actual rating contributed by people watching for the ads is lower, as there must have been some football fans not watching the title game. Still, a 14.1 is on par with American Idol, and even if some of the football fans weren't football fans they might still watch for the commercials.
• We can learn that outside the championship round, good matchups or teams matter more than being further advanced in the tournament - at least in basketball. The 8.7 for the Davidson-Kansas Elite Eight game nearly matches the highest-rated Final Four game (8.8) while the other Final Four game lags significantly behind (7.2). The highest rated non-Finals NBA game is a conference semifinal, admittedly on broadcast television. Last year, ALDS games involving the Yankees outrated a terribly-rated NLCS.
• We can learn that the NCAA Tournament is the most powerful non-football, non-Olympics property in sports, more even than the NBA. The National Championship Game beat every game of the NBA Finals and World Series, even the rating for the shortened finish of the World Series alone. In a down year for the tournament and up year for the NBA, the aforementioned 8-range games beat three NBA Finals games, in a six-game series. Of course in the NCAAs, everything comes down to single games, but the 3.4 for North Carolina-Duke, the highest rated college basketball game, compares favorably not only to every non-Christmas Day game in 2008, but even to the "lesser" Christmas Day game. (Two non-Christmas games have garnered ratings of 3.8 so far this year.) You see why I claim that a playoff in college football would only be good for the sport.
• We can learn that people do not always watch only games that matter in college football. Michigan-Florida in the Capitol One Bowl was more for bragging rights than anything else, but it outdrew every bowl except the BCS Title Game and the Rose Bowl.
• For whatever reason, people watch the Kentucky Derby, comparatively ignore the Preakness, then when they find out the Derby winner won the Preakness they come back for the Belmont.
• Golf is not baseball, the NBA, or NASCAR, and neither is the Triple Crown. Average rating for the NBA Finals: 9.3. Average rating for the World Series: 8.5, a rating depressed for a late night game. Rating for the Daytona 500: 10.2, .5 less than the highest NBA Finals rating and higher than the total rating for Game 5 of the World Series (admittedly a Series depressed by bad markets). The Belmont and Derby barely beat that depressed Series number by .4-.5, and the Masters by .1. Outside the Masters golf just doesn't matter comparatively.
• Every All-Star Game is trying to rip off the baseball one. And for good reason. Only one World Series game beat the MLB All-Star Game, even though the ASG is a farce. (Baseball is not as well adapted to an all-star game as you might think from its individualistic nature, because of the way pitching works.)
• The Pro Bowl sucks, but it is still an NFL game.
• NASCAR loses a lot of momentum as the season progresses, and moving to cable is a big reason - and it ruins the Chase. The lowest-rated full race on Fox receives a 4.4; the highest-rated cable race is a 4.3 (the Brickyard 400, which comes temporally after the entire slate of TNT races), and only one ABC race outpaced any Fox race.
• On the same level as the LCSes is the Indy 500, the Conference Finals, the other high cable events, and the NCAA Tournament's Sweet 16. Also up here are semi-high-profile college football games. The NFL has left this group in the dust; the lowest-rated game on any of the Big Four TV partners is a 5.9 for Monday Night Football between the Jags and Texans.
• If the IRL doesn't belong in that middle tier because it never creeps beyond 1.0 outside Indy, then horse racing doesn't belong there either. It's just that its big events have a more dramatic difference. The Indy 500 may actually be underrated as an event because of the overall reputation of the IRL.
• The Stanley Cup Finals ranks behind the Indy 500 (in the US). But at its best, it can do better than tennis, which I think is actually overrated as a sport by ESPN and the like. The highest-rated tennis rating I could find was the Wimbledon Nadal-Federer classic at 3.5; two Stanley Cup Finals games beat it.
• Now that NBC has moved the US Figure Skating Championships (3.3) to primetime, are they underrated as a sports property? How much of the value of tennis (US Open Women's Final: 3.3) and the Stanley Cup Finals are created by primetime positioning on broadcast television? How should EliteXC feel about its relative inability to create even that much of a buzz on broadcast primetime (admittedly in relative late night)? I'd be interested in seeing what UFC did on broadcast primetime. Would it break the 3.0 barrier, and if so, would it do significantly better than EliteXC? (Ratings for UFC's big numbered events on Spike hovering around 2.0 or worse should be taken with a grain of salt because they are often tape-delayed.)
• Don't read too much into the NFL Draft's ratings. It's on par with the broadcast networks' pregame shows. The only reason most people watch it is because they're just obsessed with all things NFL. Though keep in mind that the rating given might be an average rating; ratings for just the first round might be on par with the highest cable events.
• Really, the only sports that matter are the NFL, Olympics, college football and men's basketball, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, golf, and then a huge gap to most everything else. I don't know how highly the World Cup ranks in general, but outside of the World Cup soccer still doesn't matter, and neither does MMA, despite being "sports on the rise". Here are all the events of other sports with ratings higher than 3.0: the three Triple Crown races, the Indy 500, two Stanley Cup Finals games, the Federer-Nadal Wimbledon classic, the figure skating championships, the US Open (tennis) women's final, and that's it. Only the Triple Crown races and Indy 500 are higher than 4.0. Even excluding the NFL and Olympics, there are 21 different events with ratings more than double that (8.0), including two of the Triple Crown races. EliteXC MMA (which doesn't exist anymore), women's college basketball, Euro 2008, and the Little League World Series (plus the Winter Classic) are the only new events to be introduced above 2.0. Both varieties of football outpace the other sports, and golf lags.

Did Sports Media Watch read Da Blog's 2008 Sports Ratings post?

Because SMW is now using spiffier ratings tables rather than bulleted lists... did Paulsen get Office 2007 to play with?

At least in IE, though, there are still some kinks to be worked out.

The post we don't want ESPN to read

Two weeks ago I did a post on the biggest sports TV ratings of 2008, which went beyond its Sports Media Watch inspiration to cover every sports rating I could find over 2.5 (well, 3.0 anyway), and a few over 2.0. I mentioned that I had found the original post to be one of the most useful references I had in the new year. How useful could such a post be? What can we learn from that post?

 

We can learn just how devastating the BCS' move to ESPN really is.

 

It should hardly be surprising to most people who are paying attention that the BCS Title Game is the biggest event on the sporting calendar outside the NFL or Olympics. It's got a full two-point margin over its biggest competition, college basketball's National Championship - but that could easily change with the distribution penalty the Title Game will take from being on cable, especially if the economy drives people to ditch cable or satellite and just go with their antennas. If the depression stretches into 2011, I have a feeling, or at least hope, that ESPN will move at least the Title Game to ABC (and keep the Rose Bowl there).

 

But if what happened to the BCS Title Game is the wave of the future - big sporting events moving to cable en masse - it becomes imperative that we find real competition to ESPN. ESPN will now not only have the biggest sports property on cable, but the top two in the BCS and Monday Night Football. You have to scroll down to 7.9 to find a cable sports rating held by anyone other than ESPN, and 5.4 to find a second (still behind an unusually strong Home Run Derby). Throw out the Red Sox-Rays series, as you undoubtedly will have to do with TBS picking up the weaker NLCS this year, and you have to go down to 4.8.

 

The future could be one where ESPN bullies its way to capturing virtually every sport imaginable, marginalizing all but the biggest to smaller channels like ESPN2, and dominating what gets said in the sports conversation. The allegations that it's guilty of an East Coast/LA bias show that a monopoly is not really something we can trust ESPN with. But no one's even daring to challenge ESPN's dominance. Versus was thought to be trying its hand at it... but last week, its president Jamie Davis, interviewed by the Washington Times, denied that ESPN was "what we want to become" and that "we are trying to serve a fan base that we believe has been underserved in the past". I'm hopeful that Versus' prior attempts to take baseball or the NFL reflect that there's more to this than meets the eye, but I'm not optimistic. Other than ESPN and sport-specific networks, the only other cable networks to even appear on this list are TBS and TNT. We're in trouble if the closest thing we have to competition for ESPN doesn't even see itself as a sports network, and the biggest non-ESPN sports network doesn't see itself as competing with ESPN.

 

Unfortunately, there are pretty slim pickings for a network looking to establish itself as a competitor to ESPN. Aside from the BCS and MNF (and ESPN won't let go of the latter without a fight with all the NFL programming it has), there's not much in the way of big events for a cable network to pick out, and before the BCS deal it may have seemed that whatever network controlled the NFL cable contract controlled the world of sports. The NCAA and the major sports are under pressure from Congress to keep their big events on broadcast; the only reason the BCS could shore up with ESPN was because it's not under the banner of the NCAA, and the non-BCS conferences have been talking about pressing antitrust charges against it anyway.

 

The only options may be those opened up by the BCS deal, namely the Masters, the Triple Crown races, some high-profile college football games like BCS conference championships and the Capitol One Bowl, and the Final Four and earlier rounds of the NCAA Tournament. I don't know what their relative commitment to broadcast is; the Masters will probably stay on broadcast for a while, and the Cap One could bolt to ESPN at any moment. But ESPN's second highest rated MNF game got an 8.7, and the above list consists of the only events I could think of that would top even the fourth highest rated game (7.9). The highest rated of the bunch is an SEC Championship at 9.3 that was an effective BCS semifinal, which you can't count on; #2 is the Cap One Bowl at 9.1. Even 80% of the 14.4 the BCS Title Game received would be an 11.5, two full ratings points ahead (almost 2.5 over the Cap One). (You might be able to throw the Daytona 500 into the mix as well, but THIS year, it fell below 10.0 if my memory serves me correctly...

 

(There's the Olympics, but the Olympics are still legitimately valuable for the broadcast networks.)

 

The prospects are even bleaker for long-term competition. ESPN has two networks, a connection with a broadcast network, the top sports news web site, a nightly sports highlight show, an international arm, a web-streaming site, a mobile deal and mobile-TV channel, a radio network, a sports news network, a classic sports network that serves as an overflow channel, a college sports network, and a Spanish-language network. To create a compelling bid for just about any sports entity and to truly be seen as an equal with ESPN, you need to be able to compete with almost all those revenue streams.

 

Fox may be the best positioned with Final Score, News Corporation's international presence, Fox Sports Radio, Fox Soccer Channel, Fox College Sports, and Fox Sports en Espanol. Indeed Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of most of the regional sports networks was made with creating competition for ESPN in mind, and its failure may have scared off Versus, but what was supposed to be Fox Sports Net's strength - local programming - turned into its weakness, as many regions pre-empted national programming. The Big 12 and Pac-10 tried to abandon ESPN for a time and put their top cable football games on FSN and TBS, but it only led to people making fun of them for being on FSN. Now FSN has been selling networks like there's no tomorrow - Chicago, the Bay Area, and New England have all gone from FSN markets to Comcast SportsNet markets, and that's not counting the ones sold to third parties like FSN New York (now MSG+) or the ones sold to Liberty Media in the DirecTV deal.

 

Ideally, competition for ESPN would reduce the need and demand for ESPN2, by moving some events that would be on ESPN2 to ESPN. The four major networks all have some online presence, though their streaming capacity varies, as does CNN and Time Warner with SI, USA Today, Sporting News, Yahoo Sports, and AOL Sports/Fanhouse. Yahoo in particular may already have the most popular non-ESPN sports site, so if for some unfathomable reason you don't already have such a presence, shacking up with Yahoo might be a good approach. (NBC is learning of the perils of launching your own site at too late a date.) Alternately, embracing blogs can help with marketing your brand. An international presence is one of the biggest obstacles unless you're Fox. For radio, Fox Sports Radio and Sporting News Radio are out there, and Westwood One may be an actual competitor for sports rights (which helps CBS, which owns it). CBS has a top-quality college sports network as well, while NBC would be best positioned other than Fox to launch a Spanish-language sports network alongside Telemundo. (There's a part of me that wonders if the acquisition of what's now Universal Sports was made with an eye to becoming a competitor to ESPN.)

 

Of the above, I think the most important aspect may be the sports highlight show. It may not get a lot of eyeballs, especially in the age of the Internet, but it helps further that notion that you're a major player. Even if you get the same number of eyeballs as ESPN for big events, people might not associate you with being a leader in sports. Besides, it's with time on SportsCenter that ESPN blackmails lesser leagues into joining them, or at least that's the perception. But you need something to promote. You need a reason for sports fans to come back to your network again and again.

 

Ignoring the NFL, and assuming the BCS moves back to ABC and other big events stay on broadcast, a good way to establish your presence is to have at least an even split of MLB, the NBA, and NASCAR with ESPN. All three are held by ESPN, but all three also have alternate contracts with TBS or TNT, alternate contracts that make them at least equals to ESPN in at least one respect (one LCS, one Conference Finals, and most of the biggest cable races not held at the Brickyard, like the second Daytona race). But even if the Turner networks were to start a sports highlight show and turn one of its networks into a sports hub, they wouldn't be convincing people to keep coming back again and again nearly as often as ESPN. It's college sports and other relatively lesser sports that are ESPN's real hook (not to mention shows like ATH and PTI).

 

For a network to hold up in comparison to ESPN, at least in my view, it needs to at least tie ESPN by comparison. For all practical purposes, it needs to come close to tying ESPN in the ratings. Outside of the NFL, the largest cable sports ratings in 2008 were:

• 7.9: ALCS Game 7 (TBS)
• 5.5: Home Run Derby (ESPN)
• 5.4: ALCS Game 6 (TBS)
• 4.8: Western Conference Finals Game 4 (TNT)
• 4.7: ALCS Game 5 (TBS)
• 4.6: Western Conference Finals Game 5 (TNT)
• 4.5: Champs Sports Bowl (ESPN)

There's a pretty small list of events with ratings 4.5 and above. I didn't like the move of one LCS to cable, partly because only one LCS was moving there. I might have been okay with both LCSes moving to cable, but Fox needs some sort of presence in the playoffs like ABC does, and you see above that the LCSes can be a more significant property than the NBA's conference finals. Before the BCS deal, a cable sports rating higher than 5.5 or so may have been sacrilege.

 

You also see it driven home that not only is Turner the closest thing to competition to ESPN in terms of events, the three networks combine for every cable sports rating over 3.4 in 2008. (Their high ranking may be because the closest thing they have to a connection to a broadcast network is the CW.) FSN and Versus do not even register on the chart at all, failing to break 2.0 nationally even once - but the list does provide a possible template for which sports to go after. First, they need to keep up with ESPN in the acquisition of big events that are currently on broadcast - the ones like the Masters and (what I think is likeliest) the Triple Crown races. In addition to those and the ones listed alongside them above, the US Open in golf, baseball's All-Star Game, the World Cup, and the Pro Bowl (which will be on ESPN in 2010) should all be targets.

 

On a larger scale, though, the above list of events that are already on cable provides a basic framework to go after. Simply put: NFL, MLB, NBA. More specifically, the cable NFL package (which I explicitly excluded from this list), Home Run Derby, and the baseball and NBA playoffs. Choose at least one to start building your empire. The easiest picking would probably be baseball, as ESPN is identified too much with its NFL coverage and TNT is identified too much with its NBA coverage. Pick out at least one of the ESPN weekly packages for baseball, plus the Home Run Derby, plus at least a piece of TBS' playoff coverage. TBS' Sunday afternoon games are almost a complete flop.

 

There isn't much need to go after much else, because taking something away from Turner creates a nice balance between ESPN, Turner, and what I'll call EK, for ESPN Killer. As long as you seize the Home Run Derby and, if necessary, at least one LCS, you can throw ESPN whatever's left of the bone you want. And it's very much within the grasp of Versus to follow through on this in my opinion.

 

Let's continue down the list below 4.5:

• 4.3: Spurs/Hornets Game 7 (TNT)
• 4.3: Eastern Conference Finals Game 5 (ESPN)
• 4.3: Allstate 400 at the Brickyard (ESPN)
• 4.3: Miami (FL) @ Florida (ESPN)
• 4.2: Eastern Conference Finals Game 6 (ESPN)
• 4.2: USC @ Oregon State (ESPN)
• 4.1: Western Conference Finals Game 1 (TNT)
• 4.1: Tennessee @ UCLA, Labor Day (ESPN)
• 4.1: ALCS Game 1 (TBS)
• 4.0: Eastern Conference Finals Game 4 (ESPN)
• 4.0: Emerald Bowl (ESPN)
• 3.9: Pocono 500 (TNT)
• 3.9: Alabama @ Georgia (ESPN)
• 3.9: Angels/Red Sox Game 3 (TBS)
• 3.9: Meineke Car Care Bowl (ESPN)
• 3.9: Alamo Bowl (ESPN)
• 3.9: Holiday Bowl (ESPN)
• 3.8: NBA All-Star Game (TNT)
• 3.8: Coke Zero 400 (TNT)
• 3.8: Pennsylvania 500 (ESPN)
• 3.8: ALCS Game 2 (TBS)
• 3.8: ALCS Game 4 (TBS)

Highlights of this relatively small section include the second NBA contract - the one with ESPN's half of the conference finals - plus both NASCAR contracts, the NBA All-Star Game, and both regular season and postseason college football games. Only one NASCAR contract and the NBA All-Star Game are on Turner. The rest are on cable.

 

I'll get to college football in a second. It goes without saying you want a piece of that action, preferably the top cable contract (not second fiddle like FSN and Versus get with the Big 12 and Pac-10). Throw out the regular season college football, and you want to limit ESPN to half of the second NBA contract, both NASCAR contracts, and bowl games. The bowl games can be thrown out as well, but if both LCSes move to cable, the contract that includes the second LCS comes into play here.

 

Basically, claim one, and make sure you have no less than one less of what ESPN has. As Turner's only presence is one of the NASCAR contracts, you probably have to take on ESPN directly here.

 

I'm going to start my discussion of college with the regular-season conferences, which take care of your needs in football and basketball, so the consideration of balance needs to be made with regards to both. In football, the two "weakling" conferences are the ACC and Big East. In basketball, the two "weaklings" are the Big 12 and Pac-10. Claiming one of each leads to the obvious conclusion that you need to claim one of the remaining two conferences, the SEC or Big 10.

 

It's been suggested that recent megacontracts signed with the latter two conferences will give them an edge over the field, especially in college football, so signing a deal with both the Big 12 and Pac-10 and thinking that counts just as well towards your three will lead to a perception you're signing with two runts, or positioning yourself as a "West Coast network", especially in conjunction with the Mountain West. I'm looking at you, Versus. But there are major problems going on here. ESPN doesn't want to give up the Big East because they're in Bristol near UConn, they don't want to give up the ACC because they don't want to lose Duke-UNC, they don't want to give up the Big Ten and lose Ohio State-Michigan (even though that technically airs on ABC), and you just missed the boat on a hefty 15-year deal with the SEC. Sports on TV as we know it could be dying by the time that deal ends.

 

The Big 12 and Pac-10 already play a basketball series against one another, so why not split the difference on the other two series, ACC/Big 10 and SEC/Big East? That means the other two conferences are either the SEC and ACC, or the Big 10 and Big East. Whatever you go with, you need to have the first pick of cable networks for at least one conference, and the more bones you throw ESPN the more you need to build your empire even further to compensate.

 

(The Mountain West could become a BCS conference soon, but the reasons they moved to Versus and the mind-boggling lack of flex scheduling suggest they don't want Versus to develop the regimentation of time slots in football ESPN has, which is probably required by having so many conferences. That could cut it out of the discussion, and the Mountain West is generally in the lower portion of the BCS conferences anyway.)

 

Non-BCS conferences are also an important part of the picture, but I'll get to that later.

 

What about bowls? FSN's not going after any, that's for sure, because of local hockey and NBA coverage. Versus doesn't want bowls because they want "total immersion" or some such malarkey, but it seems to me that the Las Vegas Bowl - top-line Mountain West against a team from another Versus conference, the Pac-10 - would be perfect for them, serving as a continuation of the "immersion" Versus already provides for those two conferences. Turner has zero presence at the bowls, meaning ESPN dominates the bowl landscape. 23 of 35 bowls, nearly two-thirds, are on ESPN (two more on ABC, the BCS Title Game to air there next year, and three more to move to ESPN in the form of the BCS, bringing the total to over 80%); ESPN is the chief beneficiary of the proliferation of bowls. Not all bowls are equal, but sadly, ESPN tends to lump in even its top bowls with bowls like the Independence Bowl or New Orleans Bowl in its "Bowl Week" promotion.

 

I averaged the 2005-6 through 2007-8 ratings of all the bowls and came up with these average ratings for the non-BCS bowls (courtesy here):

1. Capitol One (6.7)
2. Chick-fil-A (5.0)
3. Alamo (4.7)
4. Holiday (4.5)
5. Cotton (3.63)
6. Liberty (3.56)
7. Gator (3.47)
8. Emerald (3.41)
9. Outback (3.37)
10. Meineke Car Care (3.04)
11. Champs Sports (2.96)
12. Music City (2.8)
13. Independence (2.6)
14. Sun (2.4)
15. Motor City (2.32)
16. Las Vegas (2.28)
17. Armed Forces (2.10)
18. Hawaii (2.07)
19. Papajohns.com (1.97)
20. New Mexico (1.89)
21. Humanitarian (1.58)
22. GMAC (1.56)
23. Insight/New Orleans (tie) (1.55)
24. International (1.45)
25. Poinsettia (1.447)
26. Texas (1.3)

Some notes: The EagleBank and St. Petersburg bowls only started this year and aren't counted. Ratings for the Texas and Insight bowls are depressed by being on NFL Network. Ratings for the Outback Bowl are depressed by airing at 11 AM ET (8 AM PT) against many other bowls, and it deserves better ratings given its conference tie-ins and payout money. Fixing its gametime problem, either by moving to a saner hour or earlier in the week, should be a top priority for the Outback the next time its contract comes up for renewal.

 

And a shocking number of the highest-rated bowls are on cable.

 

The broadcast non-BCS bowls are the Cap One on ABC, the Gator and Sun on CBS, and the Cotton on Fox. The Chick-fil-A, Alamo, and Holiday bowls all beat all the broadcast bowls except the Cap One, and the Liberty Bowl beats both CBS bowls. The position of the Sun on broadcast despite iffy ratings is probably because of the potential of Notre Dame going there, which also explains why the Gator and Sun are on broadcast instead of better conference tie-ins. (Both bowls have their potential Big 12 tie-ins ranking behind the Holiday, and ditto for the Sun's Pac-10 #3. When the Sun picks a Big 12 team it picks behind the Alamo, and the Gator's ACC #3 pick is behind the Chick-fil-A... which itself picks its SEC pick after the Outback.)

 

Based on these ratings, the bowl payouts, and more than anything else the quality of the conference tie-ins, I came up with a ranking of the non-BCS bowls:

1. Capitol One
2. Cotton
3. Outback
4. Chick-fil-A
5. Holiday
6. Gator
7. Alamo
8. Champs Sports
9. Sun
10. Liberty
11. Music City
12. Emerald
13. Meineke Car Care
14. Insight
15. Independence
16. Las Vegas
17. Motor City
18. GMAC
19. Humanitarian
20. Hawaii
21. Poinsettia
22. Armed Forces
23. Papajohns.com
24. International
25. New Mexico
26. New Orleans
27. St. Petersburg
28. EagleBank
29. Texas

I identified several subdivisions where the comparison was closer than others. If you're running EK, you're paying attention to this list of conference tie-ins, but you're ALSO paying attention to the above list of TV ratings. The latter is what you really want, but you can turn the former into the latter if you try. Assuming the broadcast/cable status quo holds, that means, from a TV rating perspective, an emphasis on the Alamo, Chick-fil-A, and Holiday. Throw the Outback on there, since its conference tie-ins warrant it, and the Champs Sports after its gerbonkers ratings this year. I'm tempted to add the Liberty as well for its ratings and position on the tie-in list, but that's opening up a can of worms. Of the first five, claim two - and make sure at least one more is taken from ESPN if one of the bowls you claim is the Champs Sports. (Replace the Champs Sports with the Liberty if you want.)

 

So we consider the Liberty (or Champs Sports), we throw in the Emerald and the Music City to fill the gap, and throw in the Meineke Car Care bowl as well. Split them half and half? Maybe. Consider, too, though, that the Insight would probably get better ratings if it were off NFL Network. Fairness dictates you also consider the Independence and Las Vegas bowls, and may-y-ybe the Motor City Bowl. Everything else is comparatively minor and not worth worrying about, but it might still be worth going after anyway.

 

(Note that most people don't see it this way. A matchup between two BCS conferences is all they see that's valuable. The Las Vegas Bowl is valued much lower than this by most people. The Pac-10 is considered to deserve better for its fourth or fifth line. The Mountain West actually does deserve better for its first - though it would suddenly make some sense on the off chance the MWC joins the BCS. Why the Liberty Bowl ranks so highly is beyond me, but tradition probably has a lot to do with it.)

 

Look at the ratings chart. By seizing only the bowls that matter, you've pretty much guaranteed yourself that your bowl coverage will almost exclusively (maybe one exception, two if you're unlucky) get ratings large enough to make my end-of-year chart. Some bowls are better for this than others; I recommend getting bowls that align with your own conference tie-ins. If you're going the SEC/ACC route, pick up the Chick-fil-A bowl and either the Holiday, Outback, Champs Sports, or Liberty Bowl (or a combination of two of those, preferably not Champs Sports AND Liberty). The Alamo might be an option as well if you have a tie-in with the Big 12. For the second tier, pick up the Music City Bowl and one other; if you pick up the Pac-10, that one other should probably be the Emerald. If you pick up the Big 12 instead, in addition to whatever you do pick the Independence Bowl is a good investment.

 

If you go with the Big 10 and Big East, a lot depends on your third conference. Align with the Big 12, and the Alamo becomes a must. Even without it that and the Holiday are good choices, though the Outback is an option as well. In the second tier the Meineke Car Care bowl is almost a must-have, just to be sure you have a Big East bowl; the Big East's other non-broadcast bowl tie-ins fall below the cut line. The Champs Sports becomes a must if you're aligned with the Big 12, unless ESPN throws you an SEC or ACC bone (unless you're with Conference USA, as we'll get to later); otherwise the Emerald Bowl is also an option. Pick up the Big 12 and the Insight is a good investment, maybe even imperative (they'll certainly be begging to be taken off NFL Network), as well (the Big 10 and Big 12 have a lot of bowl tie-ins with each other). With the Big Ten, the Motor City becomes very interesting indeed.

 

A note on non-BCS conferences, because if you have just three BCS conferences ESPN can still push itself as the leader in college sports (and you can't launch a college sports channel to compete with ESPNU). Non-BCS conferences become especially important with the splitting of the BCS conferences, because they could well get more play as gap-fillers. (Especially if you launch a competitor to ESPN2.) In football, there are four non-BCS conferences that matter: the Mountain West, WAC, MAC, and Conference USA. The Sun Belt is too crappy to matter, although taking away one conference like the Mountain West to Versus arguably means we should put the Sun Belt back in to replace it. But before splitting the difference we need to consider the very different scenario in college basketball.

 

The goal in college basketball, in my view, is to render BracketBusters meaningless outside of what we might call the "low-majors" or even "minors". A comparison of four-year average RPI shows that, despite the lack of distinction I make in my annual "mid-major conference", there is a distinction between one "higher" class of mid-major conference, and most of the other conferences, not as large as the gap between the majors and the mid-majors, but significant nonetheless - and in fact there's a definite spectrum, where some conferences are fairly objectively better than others, even if the rankings of the conferences in-between are far from clear.

 

The Mountain West, mired on Versus, doesn't participate in BracketBusters. Is that because they want to see themselves as a major conference, or because ESPN is excluding a conference that doesn't have a deal with them? If someone took away enough mid-majors, you wouldn't want ESPN to put conferences into BracketBusters far ahead of the rest of the field simply because they had a deal with them, would you? That would appear to be favoritism.

 

Three conferences in particular are strong enough to occasionally approach the status of the major conferences. I dare you to find a conference since the shake-up of Conference USA to finish first among the mid-majors not named the Missouri Valley, the Mountain West, and the Atlantic 10. The Mountain West is mired on Versus and ESPN sometimes seems unnaturally obsessed with the A-10 in mid-major terms, leaving the Valley for EK - although after several years of the Valley occasionally finishing ahead of the major conferences in conference RPI, they finished behind the A-10 last year and similarly have only one serious at-large contender this year, so they may be on the decline.

 

The other true mid-majors are Conference USA, the WAC, the WCC, the CAA, the MAC, and the Horizon League. The Sun Belt is in a weird in-between state between the mid-majors and the low-majors, though they're closer to the low majors. Obviously, those six should be split half and half, but use caution. Conference USA and the WCC are both more valuable than the middle-pack teams in their league would suggest, because of the presence of major-caliber programs Memphis and Gonzaga respectively. (C-USA actually has a very slight lead over the A-10, in fact.) We've seen just how much Gonzaga adds to the value of the WCC to ESPN. Taking at least one of those is imperative, even if you otherwise discount the value of the mid-majors, and no way ESPN is letting you take both.

On the flip side, there's a danger in putting both West Coast leagues on one network, especially paired with the Mountain West (the MWC and WAC together is enough of a concern for football), and getting branded as a "West Coast" network. So: either C-USA and WAC or WCC and MAC, with the CAA and Horizon split whichever way works out (although the Horizon is on average worse than the other mid-majors, except for Butler which may be joining Memphis/Gonzaga as major programs). The remaining conferences are like minor bowls: go after them, but don't make them a priority.

(While you're at it, pick up that "College Basketball Invitational" oddity to make it stronger - they're trying to be an NIT competitor, not the third-tier tournament - and balance ESPN's coverage of the NIT.)

Those are the important parts. But there are other things you should keep in mind if you really want to create a viable competitor to ESPN:

• Golf often gets forgotten in the "major sports", with all the talk of the modern Big Four (NFL, NBA, MLB, NASCAR) and the two college sports, but its ratings are on par with any other, even for certain non-majors Tiger doesn't attend, and it even gets coverage on par from ESPN and others, even if it sometimes seems Tiger-centric. The whole sport has been moving to Golf Channel in recent years on all levels, increasing the importance of the majors. ESPN just claimed the entire British Open for its cable network, and the other majors could follow; even for those majors that stay on broadcast, coverage of the first two rounds is important. Split them half and half, and make sure it's not a situation where you have two first-two-rounds contracts and ESPN has two whole-tournament contracts.
• The NHL and IRL (along with tennis) are significantly ahead of most of the other detritus, like MLS and the WNBA, that make up the high-minor sports. These sorts of things are the mid-majors, and both of these two in particular are ESPN's bread and butter. But ESPN may be smarting from losing the IRL and the NHL may be smarting from losing ESPN. We can allow ESPN to reclaim one, but not both.
• Soccer has a lot of levels and competitions, and ideally there should be plenty for you. In fact true soccer connosieurs have plenty of options for their soccer palate beyond ESPN, including Fox Soccer Channel, which currently has US rights to the English Premier League and Italy's Serie A. ESPN is making a solid play for the Premier League, and it may appear that EK's best approach is the third European major league, the Spanish league. But both Spain and the German Bundesliga have their outpost on GOL TV, and those who have it, from what I've read, like it far better than Fox Soccer; the problem is it has limited distribution, and because of a bilingual gimmick is often consiged to Spanish-language packages. I don't think it's owned by a larger conglomerate at the moment, so trying to hitch your wagon to it and trying to grow its distribution might be a good idea. (ESPN was once rumored to be turning ESPN Classic into its own soccer network.) If all else (including, if need be, France or Mexico) fails, there's always MLS.
• But really, all these pale in comparison to the major soccer competitions worldwide: the World Cup, the European Championship (the title game of which, which the US has no stake in, registered on my chart, thus more than doubling almost any MLS game), and the UEFA Champions League. And all three run on ESPN. That needs to change.
• Tennis is the same as golf. ESPN just triumphantly claimed all four of tennis' Grand Slams, inheriting the US Open after USA pulled out of sports. The US Open considered an offer from Versus, which would have been great for Versus, bad for the USTA, and good for anyone looking for an ESPN competitor. (Now that we know Versus is the wrong place to look for one, it's just all bad.) As with golf, split the difference.
• Other sports: MMA? (UFC runs on Spike and sister promotion WEC runs on Versus. Various competitors keep springing up.) Horse racing? (NBC runs two Triple Crown races and ABC runs one, while ESPN runs the Breeder's Cup.) Poker? (Look up Poker on Wikipedia and, along with ESPN's World Series of Poker, the World Poker Tour is credited with poker's rise in popularity. After getting placed on odd networks like the Travel Channel and GSN, it's now on once-ESPN competitor FSN.) Lacrosse? (Split between ESPN's outdoor MLL and the indoor, and barely covered stateside, NLL.) "Action sports"? Outdoor programming like fishing? Rodeo? (The PBR already runs on Versus.) Volleyball? Bowling? Cricket? Rugby? Don't forget those high minors of MLS, WNBA (probably hitched to the NBA), and Arena Football (which ESPN partially owns right now and which is collapsing anyway).

This is really more important than any other consideration right now: it's even harder to rise up to the level of ESPN right now. ESPN will stumble through the recession like any other business, but to try and start a competitor from scratch may be suicide. In retrospect, the last glimmer of a window for at least several years, maybe ever, for a competitor to ESPN may have closed this past fall with the SEC and BCS deals; for there to not even be a network on the rise, the closest things being FSN and Versus (and Turner if they wanted to become a full-fledged sports destination), does not bode well for any real challenger to ESPN to show up anytime soon. The one saving grace is that an ESPN stumbling through recession is an ESPN with less money to spend on rights fees, but chances are a potential ESPN competitor is hemmoraging money as well, or doesn't have any and is finding it hard to get any starting capital. Although it'll claim it's not a monopoly because of the existence of the broadcast networks and competing sports sites, all things considered, it's ESPN's world and we're all just paying the rent, and realistically, that's not changing in the near future.

Maybe this post is just to maintain my two-today pledge in my own mind.

One thing that, when you think about it, is rather amazing about America is its diversity - not in race or creed or anything like that, but in the places people live. America is a big country - only Russia, China, and depending on who you talk to, China (and I'm not talking about Taiwan) are bigger. But in those other three countries there are pretty wide swaths of the country that are basically unsettled, and #5 on the list, Brazil, is a full million square kilometers smaller - and with the exception of the capital of Brasilia, the vast majority of the population is packed in on the coast. Australia is perhaps the only country that can compare to the US' size and uniformity (all other countries are a third the States' size at best), in that they have at least some major cities on the west coast (Perth, the capital of Western Australia, is fourth-largest), but even they have the Outback. The United States may have a lot of "flyover country", but fairly large cities like St. Louis and Texas' cities dot it, and even the Rocky Mountains have some sizable cities in Denver, Salt Lake, and the like. And on the UN's list of "urban agglomerations", only India has two entries larger than Los Angeles, or three entries larger than Chicago.

Perhaps as a result, we seem to take a lot of pride in our cities and really identify with them, especially since we tend to be further from other cities than in other countries. It also helps that our cities identify themselves more and stand out more. Sure, you might have heard of both Shanghai and Beijing, or even Mumbai and Delhi, but good luck distinguishing between them. But Los Angeles is the movie capital, Las Vegas is the gambling capital, Boston and Chicago are crazy about sports, Philadelphia and Boston are birthplaces of the nation, Miami is a vacation destination, San Francisco is known for the Golden Gate Bridge and liberalism, and so on. (I'm sure people in other nations will tell me the only reason I can't tell the difference between cities in the same country outside the US is because I'm an ignorant American, but bear with me here.)

We all identify with Americans, but in something that may be a holdover from the days when people identified themselves by their state first, the place we live is close behind. There isn't a monolithic culture across the entire country; America's too big for that. One thing Americans take for granted that, from what I hear, is largely unique is that we have one level of news broadcasts for the nation, but also another for each community we live in. Similarly, when it comes to sports teams we identify very tightly with a fairly small set of sports teams that generally associate with one general metro area, and for the most part, we root for the local team by default. I really am fascinated by it. The closest parallel in Europe might not be individual cities like London and Paris, but the whole countries within the European Union.

Anyway, I'm not sure where I was going with this, other than I wanted to talk about ESPN's creating a blog network for local coverage of all 30 NBA teams. There's quite a bit of mileage out there in the "blogosphere" - you have blogs for specific topics, blogs for just about any league, blogs for individual teams, and so on. (Baseball and college basketball are presumably now demanding their own blog networks from ESPN.)

I was wondering if there were blogs out there covering a given city's entire sports scene - one for New York, one for Chicago, one for Philadelphia, and the like. I was shocked to discover that (at least for New York and Seattle) they were few and far between! Blogs covering individual teams, two at most, were FAR more common! I could understand that it might be stressful to cover too many teams in too many sports at once, but it can't be THAT stressful just to be a fan of the teams in your backyard, and certainly the reward of building a tight-knit community of fans would be worth it, don't you think? Even if you're uncomfortable covering two teams in the same sport that are probably bitter rivals, you could easily split the work with a sister blog or second writer, right?

Da Blog's Predictions for 2009

Because a lot of sites I visit are putting up predictions for the new year, so am I, and I'll check back in at year's end to see how I did:

• The year in sports is a massive disappointment. The Super Bowl pits the Dolphins against the Vikings. North Carolina, after an undefeated regular season, loses in the Final Four and the national championship pits UCLA against UConn. The game is a laugher. Cleveland beats San Antonio in the NBA Finals; the Knicks just barely miss the playoffs and LeBron James signs a contract extention to stay in Cleveland after winning his first championship. Mike D'Antoni agrees to a buyout soon thereafter to coach LeBron in Cleveland, condemning the Knicks to a decade of mediocrity. The Stanley Cup Playoffs pit the Calgary Flames against the Montreal Canadiens, and America tunes out. So does Canada when it turns into a four-game sweep that's not that close. Neither the Red Sox nor Yankees make the ALCS, and one of them misses the playoffs as Tampa Bay and Philadelphia square off again in the World Series.
• Tiger Woods comes back too soon, finishing second in the Masters, and misses most of 2009, raising concerns he may retire. Jimmie Johnson wins yet another Sprint Cup in a laugher, and by the end of the season he's winning races basically by showing up, with all the teams quitting. Rafael Nadal is the only player to win at least two majors of either gender, and Roger Federer never makes a major final. USC, Cincinnati, and Alabama are the only three undefeated teams by week 4; they stay that way through the end, and USC routs Alabama in the national championship. There are no BCS buster mid-majors. At least one minor league cancels either the 2009 or 2010 season, and at least one MLS team folds. The IRL cuts back drastically on the 2010 season, and doesn't so much pass NASCAR as NASCAR passes it backwards. By 2012, though, the IRL is back to 2008 levels, and returns to ESPN in 2018. UFC effectively becomes NASCAR's replacement as one of the four major sports, and shows it wasn't moving to pay-per-view that killed boxing.
• The Olympics moves to ESPN and ABC after landing in Chicago. NBC immediately pulls out of the NHL following the 2009-2010 season. ESPN becomes the exclusive cable home of the NHL (beyond NHL Network) after 2011.
• The Saints challenge for the NFC South, and the Lions are at least respectable. Brett Favre retires and the Jets become the new Lions. Matt Cassel bolts from New England to join the Jaguars, who instantly become a Super Bowl contender. Tom Brady comes back a clearly different player, and the Pats begin a slow slide into mediocrity. The Cowboys self-destruct and don't even challenge for the playoffs. The Titans trade Vince Young to Houston in the offseason.
• Barack Obama finds himself frazzled by the vexing economic crisis and various foreign crises. Troops are out of Iraq by June, but by August Iraq is effectively ruled by several cabals of warlords. Obama uses the money freed up by exiting Iraq to institute his own version of the New Deal, but it doesn't work very well. Meanwhile little actual "change" happens, even from the politics of the last eight years, and when Obama calls in the military to break up a food riot in November, many in his own party compare him to Bush, and the "netroots" begin forming their own nascent political movement for 2012.
• By 2012, that movement has gained enough steam to attract attention (and support) from both major parties. However, the economic crisis has only gotten worse and the US has effectively become a vassal state of China... and the Republicans, as a result, prove far more resilient than expected after adopting a bizarre fascist-anarchist policy, a strange kitbashing of the politics of Ron Paul and George W. Bush. Before 2020, World War III has erupted, and America is Nazi Germany after the GOP win the 2012 elections, the last to be held under the Constitution of 1776. The 2016 Olympics become America's 1936 Munich Games, and come complete with a past-his-prime Michael Phelps being dragged back to the pool. The world comes out of the war with the economy back on track, but set back to the Middle Ages if not before. China, India, and Japan become the new "modern" world powers with Depression-era technology, set back from reaching 1950s-era technology by the ravages to the environment. The Amazon becomes a desert; Canada and Russia become the world's new breadbasket.
• The Internet undergoes its latest metamorphosis. By the end of the year, it is as good at watching video as the average television. In the short term, it only benefits from the deepening economic crisis. When the Obama administration passes a universal broadband bill, it sparks an Internet revolution, and blogs become the new MySpace, since you can at least theoretically make money off them. Internet advertising finally becomes viable, if only because nothing else is.
• Webcomics undergo an explosion during this time. A Penny Arcade TV series is commissioned for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block by year's end. By 2010, a Girl Genius movie is in development, and rumors of an Order of the Stick movie persist as well. Sandsday becomes the biggest new thing in webcomics, and by year's end I'm fighting off TV series offers of my own.
• Da Blog attracts two huge followings in particular: people looking for webcomics criticism, who singlehandedly make it ten times more popular than Websnark ever was, rendering my getting a real job unnecessary, and people looking for straight-dope political analysis. Da Blog plays a significant role in attracting new audiences to politics, healing the rifts of our political landscape, and shaping the aforementioned nascent political movement.

And that just left me incredibly drained and depressed. I think it's better if I don't try to predict what happens, and just try and enjoy the ride. You should try it some time.

Double dose of the Random Internet Discovery of the Week! Yay!

If you're interested in fancying yourself a Jackson Pollock and creating your own work of "art", have at it. There's something more profound I need to get to.

This post (link courtesy Awful Announcing) takes a look at how the blog market could be affected by the present recession. It's mostly written from a sports blog perspective, especially paid sports blogs, but it has implications for everyone else who blogs, paid or not, employed by a third party or merely doing it themselves, whether for fun or profit.

It takes an interesting perspective: Although some, like the blog collective Gawker, think ad revenue is likely to decline in the current recession, the post itself talks to several bloggers and draws its own conclusion based on a study, and they seem to all agree that the recession could help blogs. Some people might decide that, needing to cut costs, the Internet might be one of the first things to go, but AA's own proprietor suggests the Internet might be one of the last things to go, because it has become so important to job searches - and thus could increase in importance to many people. Some of the bloggers talked to suggested that the blog population could rise as newspapers cut traditional journalists, making room for cheaper bloggers, and as laid-off workers of all stripes look for new lines of work.

Regardless of whether it becomes Great Depression II, this could be one of, if not the, most important recession in our history.

If some of these reactions are true, this recession could greatly accelerate the rate at which the Internet becomes the chief way people get their news, information, and entertainment. At the moment, the Internet is big enough that "old media" - newspapers and TV - are concerned about the impact of losing their audience to it, but not big enough that they're comfortable with making money off it. If it ever can get that big - and this recession could greatly hasten the day that it happens - newspapers and television as we know them could become as antiquated as the telegraph.

And as the Internet and blogging grows, it has the potential to change the very way we live. We may well look back on the first decade of the new millenium as a time of great flux and transition, when the Internet was still in its relative infancy, or at least childhood and was still taking shape, still taking the form that would shape the twenty-first century. One thing I neglected to mention when I listed a number of ideas I have and might like to work on was a book coming out of my continual wonder at how dramatically the Internet has already changed our lives, and how it holds the potential to change our lives even more, affecting everything from the  news to entertainment to politics to even the very underpinning of our economic system. I had been thinking about holding off on writing it until I had enough of a name that I would have any credibility whatsoever, but recent events - not least of which being the coming recession - have convinced me that right now is a unique moment in history in the evolution of the Internet, and "the fierce urgency of now" - to borrow a phrase from our president-elect - would seem to dictate that I get such a book written in the next couple of years, and preferably starting as soon as possible.

There's supposed to be a second part coming out today, "focus[ing] on reactions from bloggers who blog as a hobby (i.e. for free) and from readers whose blog-reading habits may be affected by the economy," and the post elicits reactions from anyone that would fall in either or both of those categories. I've sent this post to the blogger in question, but I want to hear from anyone that would have a voice in all of this, anyone who might use the Internet on a regular basis as an outlet, from YouTubers to webcomickers - not to mention, if possible, any advertisers who I imagine count for a significant amount of revenue. Send an e-mail to mwmailsea at yahoo dot com, or if you want to take it directly to him (and his second post encourages it), use the address on the sidebar of that page.

Predictions for SportsCenter's "Top 10 Games" of 2008

In case you haven't heard, this was a particularly exciting year in sports. When ESPN's "SportsCenter" does its annual "Top 10 Games" countdown, they could easily extend it to a Top 20. With so many great games, I've taken it upon myself to take my own stab at mimicking the ESPN list and what it might look like.

Between some college football playoff-related features and Da Blog's regular features, I think it's reasonable to schedule the College Football Rankings' release, as well as the bowl schedule, for Thursday.

#10: Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, men's basketball gold medal match, USA v. Spain. The "Redeem Team" lives up to their name in a game Bill Simmons called "one of the 10 most dramatic basketball games of my lifetime. And nobody gave a crap or even knew. The game started at 2:30 in the morning ET and vanished into thin air. Only West Coasters and super-diehards stayed up to see it."

#9: NHL Hockey, Winter Classic, Pittsburgh Penguins @ Buffalo Sabres. Could the NHL have asked for anything less than a shootout from the first (true) Winter Classic?

#8: College football, SEC Championship Game, Florida v. Alabama. If the regular season is a playoff, this was its semifinal - and it certainly played like one.

#7: MLB Baseball, ALCS Game 5, Tampa Bay Rays @ Boston Red Sox. For the moment, just forget about the fact the Sox couldn't come all the way back to win the series.

#6: Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, swimming, 4x100m freestyle relay OR 100m butterfly OR 4x100m medley relay. The first two were dramatic finishes on Michael Phelps' road to Mark Spitz's record. The last was the one that broke it and had an exciting finish of its own. And I only have it at #6.

#5: College football, Texas @ Texas Tech. The Red Raiders came out to an early lead, only to see Texas come storming back to take a lead of its own. In the end, Texas Tech had the play of the year, and as it turned out, the one that kept Texas out of the National Championship Game.

#4: Wimbledon, men's final, Roger Federer v. Rafael Nadal. This and the next two I could have put in any order. A five-set, record-length classic that ended with Nadal finally getting the best of Federer away from clay.

#3: Men's college basketball, NCAA Tournament Final, Kansas v. Memphis. Finally, a National Championship game that lives up to being the culmination of March Madness instead of being a complete anticlimax!

#2: US Open Golf, playoff, Tiger Woods v. Rocco Mediate. 19 holes of pure tension, as basically an unknown gives Tiger every inch of challenge he has, and brings out Tiger's best to put him on top. And Tiger was injured to the extent it's still the last event he's played!

#1: NFL Football, Super Bowl XLII, New England Patriots v. New York Giants. Perhaps the greatest iteration ever of the biggest sporting event of every year? How can it not be #1?

Honorable Mentions: IRL racing, Indy Japan 300 (Danica wins!); Euro 2008 quarterfinal, Croatia v. Turkey (or was it the semis, where Germany beat Turkey? Basically a sop to my soccer-crazed dad anyway); MLB Home Run Derby; ArenaBowl XXII, Soul v. SaberCats (about the only thing that could make it better is if it were the last one); some NBA game I'm forgetting; some obscure game I never heard of or just didn't watch (possibly from MMA, boxing, the LLWS, Fresno State's run, the WNBA, MLS, or the like)

Wait, WHAT? The MLS edition!

Take a look at the "About Major League Soccer" list at the end of the article: MLS is expanding to Philadelphia and no one told me? They're quadrilateraling and no one told me?!? (The WNBA really needs to get on the ball here!)

MLS already has 16 teams as of 2010 - the addition of Philly will re-balance the conferences at 8 apiece - and will add two more later, as will be announced either later this year or early next, which is insane. You might want to think about breaking them up into divisions within the conferences at this point, certainly once you hit 20.

So with Philly, Atlanta becomes the largest Nielsen market without an MLS team, and - ta da! - Atlanta is one of the teams on the short list of potential expansion candidates. (Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver are among the others? Is soccer THAT big in Canada?) Detroit is the largest 2000-definition metro area without an MLS team (followed by Atlanta) and is next on the list of Nielsen markets, but isn't on the short list to get a team. Instead, it's Miami (repeating a bad experience and leapfrogging fellow-Florida-bad-experiencer Tampa, along with Phoenix and the Twin Cities, on the Nielsen market list)... along with St. Louis and Portland, the #21 and #22 media markets respectively?!? It's not even as small as #31-33 KC, Columbus and Salt Lake, but... they really are going for soccer markets, and I didn't even think St. Louis was that big on soccer. Maybe they've seen Wizards viewership numbers.

St. Louis is #18 on the metro areas list but, in addition to all the ones above except Tampa, leapfrogs Cleveland (who pays attention to Columbus just like in hockey) and San Diego (weren't they supposed to get Chivas USA at one point?), and Cleveland, Orlando, and Sacramento on the markets list (the latter two are stepbrothers to larger nearby markets everywhere except the NBA anyway - but then again, so is Portland). On the metro areas list Portland also leapfrogs Tampa and Pittsburgh (who's right behind it on the markets list).

(Worth noting: Most of the cities on the list would also be in the Eastern Conference, necessitating Kansas City to move West. Portland and Vancouver are the only exceptions.)

Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 7/19-20 (UPDATED)

All times PDT.

Saurday
11:30-1 PM: AVP Crocs Tour, AVP Crocs Slam Brooklyn, men's final (NBC). Yes, despite the British Open we're scraping the bottom of the barrel this week.

1-4 PM: MLB Baseball, regional action (FOX). Tune in immediately upon the end of volleyball. Because it didn't end in a tie I originally wasn't going to comment on the All-Star Game, until people on TV started commenting on it anyway. The "this time it counts" era was supposed to prevent this sort of thing, and it's obvious that it didn't. Now there's a lot of hand-wringing about adding more pitchers to the roster, but how about tackling the problem at its source? Here are the problems with the ASG and their sources:

• The players and managers treat it like an exhibition, instead of as a source of pride for their league. "This time it counts" was supposed to fix that problem, and strangely, it's being credited for fixing that problem. We may be able to attribute to "this time it counts" the fact we could have gone into the 16th whereas 2002 ended after 12, and the managers were prepared to use position players to pitch instead of ending the game in a tie.
• The managers feel obligated to use every player that's willing, to mollify them but even more to mollify their fans. In the old days, it wasn't uncommon for position players to play the whole game.
• Teams' concerns about overworking pitchers.
• The rise of middle relievers and closers. Have a look at the 1968 All Star Game, the year before saves became an official stat. You see the same pitching carousel we see now, with a few more multi-inning pitchers - but every last pitcher was a starter, in an age where it was rare for pitchers to fail to go seven innings. The 1967 All-Star Game went 15 innings with no problem; Catfish Hunter pitched the final five innings for the AL (and ultimately lost), a feat that seems inconceivable today. Now teams protect pitchers more and gobble up large chunks of their rosters with relievers. Now pitching is not a position where players are interchangable at will - replacement pitchers have specific roles in theory - and thus is not a position well suited for all-star games. The NBA All-Star Game may well be the best all-star game, followed by the NHL, because their games actually feel like real games, unusually strong offense notwithstanding.

I'm not sure if anything can be done about any of that at this point, but if anything can, it's worth thinking about.

6:30-9:30 PM: NASCAR Nationwide Series racing, Gateway (ESPN2). Because I rarely get a chance to put up a Nationwide Series race and there's no Sprint Cup action this week.

UPDATED 7/19: ALTERNATE: 6-9 PM: Ultimate Fighting Championship, Fight Night (Spike TV). Not sure how highly to rate this since it's not what would normally be considered a PPV, but I don't want it to go unmentioned. Live on both coasts, so 9-12 on the East Coast.

Sunday
5-10:30 AM: PGA Golf, British Open, final round (ABC). If there's a golf tournament, and Tiger isn't playing in it, does it make a sound?

10:30-1 PM: IndyCar Racing, Honda Grand Prix at Mid-Ohio (ABC). Last year ratings were inflated by the British Open. Look for history to repeat itself.

12-2 PM: LPGA Golf, State Farm Classic, final round (ESPN2). Girl Power Sunday again!

2-4 PM: US Open Series, Bank of the West Classic, women's singles final (ESPN2). Girl Power Sunday and Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel Weekend again!

6-8 PM: The ESPY Awards (ESPN). Because there can exist nothing for which there is not an awards show of some kind. And no network should have to go without an awards show.

Hey, it's a part of the site not named Sandsday getting updated!

Street Sign Gallery is updated with a new batch of signs, all in the Seattle area. Redmond, Bellevue, and Tukwila (okay, okay, Shoreline and the University of Washington too) all get their moments in the sun, as well as a couple new Seattle pictures.

I mentioned when I started the project that I didn't know if anyone else was doing this. Well, as it turns out, I did not know the terminology at all. Apparently the standard sign is known as a street blade, and one Samuel Klein has kept up a Street Blade Gallery on his (otherwise rather diverse) blog. Both of us are on the West Coast, so most of our signs are from around here, but both of us are interested in seeing what blades you have around your community. In my case, you can send it to mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.

Warning, Around the Horn geekery ahead:

I think we're all losers in the mustache contest between Cowlishaw and Blackistone. Cowlishaw should never have shaved the goatee because he really does look like a porn star, while Blackistone just looked ridiculous yesterday, especially with those coke-bottle glasses.

The Drinking Game is updated to reflect the fact Michael Smith has not been on the show in ages and the new "Deal... (long pause) ...or no deal?" kick Reali has picked up recently (and which should have been on the list a long time ago).

Well, certainly one involving Bill Simmons, at least.

Hold on, I'm about to go into super-nerdy mode for a moment here.

Popular ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons has had a total of one column since May 1st, and the reason why is not a secret within the sports blogosphere, as much as ESPN may not want it to come out. When popular sports blog Deadspin inquired about his lack of columnage May 14, Simmons cited "behind the scenes bullshit" and claimed "certain promises were not kept" "within a few months" of signing a recent extension. Shortly thereafter, Simmons started up an off-site blog, albeit only posting old columns for the time being, and introduced one such column as having been "written right as I was starting to find a groove and my column was starting to resemble what it's like now, only if nobody was killing five of the best jokes or making me re-write them so they weren't as funny.

So it's interesting to note that the Sports Guy's latest ESPN column is basically a roundup of very short, quick takes on various sports (and non-sports) stories from the past month-plus. What may be a lot more interesting is this:

...[a]nd can ESPN organize a Josh Howard roast so I can stand on a dais and make
these jokes as someone like Jerry Stackhouse keels over in hysterics and does
the slumped-over-and-pounding-the-table routine? (Whoops, I forgot -- you'll see
Danny Moder leave Julia Roberts alone for the night with George Clooney before
you see ESPN get involved with another roast. Scratch that thought.)

Of course, Simmons is referring to an infamous incident during ESPN's roast of their "Mike and Mike" personalities earlier this year, when Dana Jacobsen made some rather offensive comments while drunk. Okay, it's not taking a shot because of Simmons' own battles with ESPN, and that incident wasn't even really ESPN's fault, but am I the only one surprised, given what we've learned so far, that ESPN didn't censor what could be considered taking a shot at the Worldwide Leader in Sports?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Quick addendum

I left out one option on the new poll asking what features you want to see added to Da Blog. I have been thinking, off and on, about a "playoff watch" - keeping track of where teams are in their quest to get into the playoffs. It would essentially be a generalization of the Week 17 Playoff Positioning Watch on the SNF Flex Scheduling Watch. I didn't put it on the poll and I'm not putting it on now because it was just enough work that I don't want to do it week in and week out, day in and day out, all year long for all sorts of sports. But if you want it, feel free and comment.

It truly is a vast wasteland.

Look over my SiteMeter stats and it becomes glaringly obvious that since joining SiteMeter, my peak readership for Da Blog has been in November and December, when my college football rankings, SNF Flex Scheduling Watch, and (not next year) SuperPower ratings are in full swing.

The rest of the time, I barely break 100 readers for the whole month, or about 3-4 a day. By those standards, I shouldn't be disappointed by the readership numbers for Sandsday!

Currently, the poll on the front page of the web site has the following most popular topics with 4 votes each: Sports (well covered), Movies (well, if I can get the Greatest Movies Project off the ground...), Video Games (evidently the Sandsday crowd), RPGs, Politics (forthcoming), and the current overall leader with 5 votes, Computing/Internet.

As for my original Da Blog Poll, asking what you'd like to see out of Da Blog, the three leaders in the clubhouse are: Short poems or stories I've written, TV Ratings Reports, and Sports Watcher. TV ratings reports are out of the question; they take too long and are too much work. I heartily recommend TV by the Numbers for much more in-depth coverage than I ever had in mind.


Sports Watcher is coming back on a provisional basis this weekend and possibly for good, aided by Blogger's new Scheduled Posts feature, allowing me to work on the Watcher throughout the week instead of all at once on Friday. At this point, publishing short poems or stories I've written is a) probably going to be more a web site thing than a blog thing and b) will mostly be the ones I think are less publishable. My interests have shifted since writing them into more philosophic strains.


I've reposted the topic poll under the new mechanism, removing the three most popular items, and replacing them with four new ones: TV schedule reports (know exactly what's going to be on direct from the source!), philosophical treatises, live election results based on my projection mechanisms (which are coming for November's general election anyway), and random discoveries from the Internet. (I'm not a subscriber to StumbleUpon, but I was interested in the concept when I was semi-accidentially introduced to it.) Given the pace at which my polls get votes, this one will last until the end of July, although if I get enough votes suggestions from it will start filtering into Da Blog and the web site before then.

Now for another question. In a recent comment, someone suggested "send[ing my] posts to other bloggers". (Ironically, this was in a post about my inability to get readers for Sandsday, not Da Blog.) Two problems with that: I'm not certain who to send it to, and I don't want to feel like I'm spamming other bloggers. I am already on the blogroll of Sports Media Watch, but no place else to my knowledge; I haven't had a response to any of my posts on a blog recognized by Technorati; and I'm a bit put off by the concept of blogrolls myself, partly because some of my interests are a little embarrasing for me to discuss, partly because it seems cliqueish, and partly because what I read is none of your business. Unless I decide it is. As a result, I have a bit of a beef with blogs like Awful Announcing that seemingly will only link to me if I link to them in a blogroll.

It doesn't help that both of the blogs I referred to in the previous paragraph are sports blogs and I don't want Da Blog to just be a sports blog. So I welcome any advice in the comments on how to branch out and how to get more inbound links. And I'm starting a second poll question - the first multi-question Da Blog Poll - asking whether I should spam other blogs. Because it's simple, this one's only lasting through the end of the month.

Random thought from reading Sporting News' Sporting Blog:

What's with all the sports bloggers from the Baltimore/Washington corridor? Awful Announcing, Mr. Irrelevant, Dan Shanoff... I'm sure there's more that I'm missing...

At the corner of Update Street and Web Site Avenue

In case you haven't noticed, the strip is back to normal now. Today, however, I want to add something else to the web site.

The Internet is an amazing place. When I discovered that there were sites dedicated to nothing but obsessing over America's roads and highways, I became convinced that there was a website for anything on the Internet. So when I couldn't find a site cataloguing street signs in the same way as roads - something that can show a lot of variety - I decided to make one.

(Can someone tell Freehostia that I'd really love a way to select several files at once for upload rather than have to go through Browse box after Browse box? I'm sure FTP would be one way that's already in place but I fear complications...)

Also, I made a new addition to the Around the Horn Drinking Game.

The Around the Horn Drinking Game!

As some people who read Da Blog already know, one of my pasttimes is watching ESPN's "show of competitive banter" Around the Horn. As entertaining and informative as it is, it does have a tendency to rely on certain jokes and other repetitive elements... so much so that it seems to just beg for a drinking game.

Note: I know this has been tried at least once before, but to my knowledge, it's no longer available on the Internet. This attempt was done independently. Also, I do not support impulse drinking; remember, this is Just For Fun.