These Guys Mean Business

ESPN, perhaps in an effort to suck in more non-sports fans, has, for the last year or so fallen into an incredibly annoying trend. They have to find an angle. It's not enough to simpy have a big game anymore. There has to be COVERAGE. And it has to last for hours and hours leading up to the actual game. The game, when broken down to actual action, generally only lasts 40-60 minutes (or in the case of baseball 5 minutes). The coverage ends up being 75% of the actual event. Then the post game analysis, the TV coverage of Twitter tweets (still can't figure that one out) the polls, and the next day interviews (don't listen if you enjoy english).

Most annoying though, within this trend is the pre-game human interest story and the post game explanation through science (yeah science). Enter Tom Rinaldi and John Brenkus... two guys who couldn't even touch the net on a good jumping day. Let's start with Rinaldi. This is the last guy you wanna see in your neighborhood. Trust me. If he's strolling the streets of Pleasantville, some serious shit went down. Dollars to donuts, either a tornado devastated your entire city, a blind amputee just took 2nd place in his 1a high school wrestling tournament or someone got raped. This guy should dress in a black cloak and carry a scythe. I think when the Bernie Fine story broke while they were still covering Sandusky, ESPN went into a panic. How was Rinaldi going to cover both stories at once?

Not everything he covers ends badly though. Sometimes, there isn't a story. Sometimes, gameday rolls into Lawrence, Kansas for the week, and nothing has gone wrong. Don't worry though, they'll MANUFACTURE a story. Something with a feel good ending, so Tom can look into the camera with those sympathetic eyes and elven like features and tug at our wives' hearstrings while we're recovering from our hangovers waiting for the action to start. It's all becoming so over-produced and contrived.

Then we have Brenkus. Little Johnny Brenkus. How he carved out this niche on my beloved worldwide leader of sports I'll never figure out. Talk about making stories where none exist. I found some of the earlier stories about the roles of mass and acceleration somewhat interesting, but you can only tell these stories in so many ways. After that, it's just science for the sake of science... and nobody cares.

Take this segment for example...

WTF? Gronk caught a pass, got up and broke a few takles. Stayed in bounds and scored. That's it Brenkus. It's not science. I mean... Gronk catch ball, Gronk score.