The Morning Commute for Friday, December 27th, 2024
Welcome to the Morning Commute
I’ve been thinking about this headline and this post from AwfulAnnouncing.com for the last few days: ESPN’s College Football Playoff coverage makes for a miserable, negative experience:
Well, if you watched ESPN all weekend long, you would think that the 12-team playoff was an abomination and an embarrassment for college football. You would think its fans are on the level of English soccer hooligans of the 1980s. And you would think there is no point playing any of these games and that we should just give things to teams that have great brand names who we “think” are “best.” You would believe college football is in a total crisis because it turns out it’s really hard to win a playoff game on campus.
This made me think about coverage and our perception of sports through the coverage of it. It also made me think about how ESPNs coverage has shifted and mostly through its promotion and it’s top voices.
Growing up I couldn’t imagine a high level college basketball game being played without the voice of Dick Vitale. I know Vitale can be polarizing, and even I will admit that over the years he’s lost his fast ball. But Vitale helped energize College Basketball broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s and he did that through a sheer love of the sport.
Pivot to today and the lead broadcaster is Jay Bilas, who can be categorized as having a general malaise about the sport. Watching a broadcast with Bilas is like listening to a two hour long negative review of a fun summer action flick from Gene Siskel. Bilas spends his time complaining about the state of the sport, and setting up Kirk Herbstreit to do the same surrounding the launch of the College Football Playoff feels like malpractice.
Blowouts happen, all the time. Especially in college football where it doesn’t take much to swing the momentum. Mizzou fans are acutely aware of this after getting blown out on the road by Texas A&M and Alabama, despite not being statistically that much worse than either. Yes there were some blowouts, but SMU still finished 14th in SP+. They just had a bad day. Tennessee got slapped around and they finished 9th. Indiana finished 11th. All those teams lost on the road, where it’s really hard to win.
ESPN spent too much time sandbagging good teams on a tough night instead of celebrating the first ever playoff.
I get the state of college sports, and specifically football, are more in flux than ever before. The landscape has changed significantly and in a short period of time. It’s important for those who cover the sport recognize that fact, but also stay true to what makes college sports different from professional sports. Sure many of the players are being paid, but the core of what makes college football more fun than the NFL hasn’t changed a bit. The games are still wild and fun. Just last night Toledo and Pitt played a 6 OT game in Detroit with nothing on the line for either, but at the same time everything was on the line.
At least Matt Schumacker was on the call to celebrate a great game.
Yesterday at Rock M and Rock M+
With it being Christmas, the posting was a touch light the last few days. But if you haven’t I encourage you to check out the excellent feature we repackaged from the Preview Magazine sold in the summer, with Chad’s retelling of the 2014 season.
- With Mizzou’s transfer class largely put together, Josh tackled the reset for Mizzou’s newest Offensive Tackle, Keagan Trost:
Trost started 11 games for the Demon Deacons this past season. In 10 of those starts, Trost started at right tackle (and the one game he didn’t, he had his worst performance according to Pro Football Focus.) Unless someone deeper on the depth chart steps in and blows away the staff during spring and fall camp, Trost fits perfectly as the new starting right tackle.
I guess I wasn’t the only one noticing how good Armand Membou had become, so did the NFL unfortunately for us Tiger fans. Hopefully Trost can step right in and there will be limited drop off.
- Nathan dropped Best Bets, I would like to reiterate that I do not condone nor support gambling on sports. But if you are I guess you should use FanDuel since they have a partnership agreement with the overlords here at SBN.
- I also published the How to Watch, which is a necessity these days.
- Over at Rock M+, DataMizzou is talking about the high-level game scores in the SEC:
A couple weeks ago I went through a similar exercise for buy games. Notably, non-conference games against sub-100 teams played at home. We found that on balance, they were fairly predictive of how the season would go according to Bart Torvik’s game score metric (grade given to a team for their performance, rated 1-100.)
Well, now that Mizzou has played a few games against higher level competition, let’s look at the same process with a different data set. My standard for “High Level,” was fairly simple. Either 1. Games against High Major opponents; and/or 2. Teams ranked in the top 100.
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