ESPN Headline - English Translation Guide

Because sometimes the headline writers at the World Wide Leader don't quite communicate what they're after, here's a handy-dandy ESPN-English translation guide from today's ESPN.COM front page (with bonus content from the CFB page, ya nitpicking bastids)

There's a Topical Cream For This, You Know

Spotted on an ESPN chyron today:

"Is Ohio State Already Crumbling Under Pressure To Repeat" (roughly).

I don't know. Let's see them play an actual game first and maybe, just maybe we can find out. 

Great Moments In Radio Tags, NBA Draft Division

"The NBA Draft is on Thursday. Every discussion could make or break your team."

Err, no. The thing the discussions are about, like if the Sixers should decide to trade all their picks for Kevin Love, who promptly has a myocardial infarction while eating his first cheesesteak at Jim's and is out for the year, after which he leaves in free agency? That could make or break the team. The discussions on ESPN? Not so much.

But thanks for asking.

11 Things We Learned From The NFL Draft

We won't know who "won" or "lost" the NFL draft for years. It kind of takes that long for players to develop, or not. We can, however, take certain things away that are strictly a result of the data provided by the draft, and that on-field production (or the eventual lack thereof) will have nothing to do with. 

To wit:

O Hey They Paid Clayton Kershaw A Lot Of Money

When Clayton Kershaw signed his new contact, the ESPN coverage was over the moon. Tons and tons of Jayson Stark-style factoids about how much Kershaw was getting per win and per pitch, straight out past the Oort Cloud. The subtext, of course, was "CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW MUCH MONEY THIS GUY IS GETTING TO PLAY A GAME?"

Except.

Wouldn't It Be Great If...

Skip Bayless: The Early Years

Sometimes Christmas comes a little late.

In this case, shortly after the holiday, ESPN announced they were hiring noted ex-fullback Tim Tebow as a football analyst. Tebow was available largely because A)ESPN, through the efforts of braying Mad Hatter lookalike Skip Bayless, turned him into a Name and B)he can't actually play quarterback in the NFL. Seriously, in a year when the Browns are mourning the loss of Brian Hoyer, the Bills start a guy from Duke, and John Kitna is on a roster for week 17, if your phone doesn't ring, it's probably never going to. 

Network of Denial

This is what happens when you cover the product and you are the product.

There's a reason ESPN has pulled out of its coproduction with PBS on a documentary for Frontline. The piece, which was 15 months in the making, was called League of Denial, and was based on the investigative work of the Fainaru brothers - who write for ESPN. If the name Mark Fainaru-Wada sounds familiar, it's because he's been at the forefront of the ESPN's investigations into PED use in baseball for years, and has a spotless reputation for journalistic integrity.

Sportsthodoxy Fisks The News

I always liked the tag line of The Daily Show back when Craig Kilborn was hosting: "When news breaks, we fix it."

This morning I was reading the latest scoop on Aaron Hernandez from ESPN, and I noticed a few questionable turns of phrase.

Sportsthodoxy Guide to the 2013 ESPN MNF Booth

With reports that Ray Lewis has signed a contract to be a part of the ESPN 2013 Monday Night Football broadcast team, we at Sportsthodoxy Central decided you might need some assistance telling the difference between Ray and current MNF color commentator Jon Gruden.

	Jon Gruden	Ray Lewis
Height	5'9"	6'1"
2000 AFC Championship	Lost	Won
Buseyfication	Looks suspiciously like Gary Busey	Acts suspiciously like Gary Busey
Super Bowl Rings	1	1
Children	3	6
Sainted Despite	...winning the Super Bowl with somebody else's team, against his old team, which was still using his old playbook	...maybe killing a couple of dudes
Enormity	head	ego
Hobbies	dancing with head coaching job offers	pregame fireworks dancing
Drink Every Time He Says	"They're running a cover-two, man-under"	"The bottom line is..."
Crazy	looks like a psychopathic toy	may have killed a couple of dudes

Great Moments In Sports Journalism, NHL Lockout Edition

From the ESPN.com story about the end of the NHL lockout:

The negotiating process -- which began in June but intensified when the league submitted its first proposal July 13 (one the players found almost universally insulting) -- has been marked by episodes of mistrust, missteps and a significant amount of enmity between the two sides.
There were times players felt disrespected and underestimated, and that their willingness to make concessions went unreciprocated.
On the flip side, the NHL was quick to express, both outright and through back-channel avenues, its lack of trust for Fehr and what it felt were his "negotiating tactics."

So, let me get this straight: The owners locked out the players, starting this whole mess. They submitted unworkable proposals, they refused to make concessions even when the NHLPA was willing, and they slagged their negotiating "partners" - who, after all, are the actual product they're in the business in. But they didn't like Don Fehr, presumably because he stood up for his clients as per his job description, so it's all even.

Those of us with any sort of formal writing training call this "false equivalence". It's a rhetorical trick that lets you present equal sides of an argument with supposedly equal weight, and it's about as intellectually honest as a debate about baldness at the Trump residence. For God's sake, the last round of blowups at the negotiations were about how the NHL would be forced to do its accounting if they got caught hiding revenue. In other words, both sides had already conceded the fact that the owners were going to try to screw the players and evade the basic tenet of the CBA - they were just arguing over what to do once the owners got caught.

But they didn't trust Fehr. And that makes everything they did, presumably, better - at least to their future negotiating partners at ESPN.

Smokin' Hot Journalism

ESPN the Magazine's big story in the new issue is an expose on - wait for it - the fact that a lot of college football players smoke weed. This is, apparently, shocking. And a crisis. And a revelation. And all sorts of bad, m'kay?

In other words, ESPN is shocked that college kids are smoking weed.  The only thing that should be shocking about this is the number of players who might get way too into Pink Floyd as a result, and become Astronomy majors so they can spend more time blessing out in local planetariums.

Seriously. College kids smoke marijuana. Those of us young enough to remember going to college either did it ourselves, had friends who did it, or knew people who did, and that's the case whether you went to Miami, Oregon, Wesleyan, or BYU. (Note: One of my classmates at Wesleyan swore up and down that the finest weed in the world was grown just outside Athens, OH, home of this year's NCAA basketball cinderella Ohio University. I'm just saying.)

Now, I'm not saying that everyone should be toking up constantly, or before every game, or that it's a good thing or a bad thing or whatever. I'm just saying that absolutely no one who didn't spend their entire college experience curled up inside the return box at Inter-Library Loan should be surprised to hear that college students are smoking. 

Except, apparently, ESPN.

Not to Go All FJM On You...

I'm not a huge fan of ESPN: The Magazine. OK, I've subscribed for several years. This is largely because A)I get it dirt-cheap and B)it makes decent throne reading, but there's a certain formula there that's never grabbed me. On average, a given issue is going to feature one story about a perceived-bad-guy-who's-shown-to-not-be-so-bad, a big glossy spread on one of the minor sports ESPN is trying to push in its programming, a reprinted Bill Simmons ramble, and a whole lot of infographics. Nitty-gritty sports content of the sort I used to get from The Sporting News, not so much. Then again, TSN's gone all strange and occasional, and ESPN took that opportunity to transform its print edition into a dead ringer for TSN's old format, so what the hell do I know.
The latest issue, the slightly hyped "Analytics Issue" (as opposed to the heavily hyped "Let's Get Professional Athletes To Take Their Clothes Off Issue") does have some good reading in it. The piece on the efforts Stan Conte is making to quantify injury data? Very cool. The piece on A's pitcher Brandon McCarthy? Great stuff. And then, at the back, there's a thoughtful column from Chris Jones about a time he sat down with former NFL running back and widely mocked iconoclast Ricky Williams.
Jones makes some good points in the piece, most notably talking about how there are very real people who aren't emotionless robots playing the game, and that Williams overcame a lot more than Miami's lack of a decent pulling guard to play in the league.
But before you get to any of the good stuff, you get this:

When I first met Ricky Williams, he was in the kitchen hut in a commune-turned-campground outside Byron Bay, Australia, squeezing the juice out of a giant stalk of celery before he headed back to his tent to finish reading a book called Gardeners, Gurus & Grubs.

Great lead, right? And then it's followed by this:

That sentence could not be written about any other athlete in the history of the world.

Or at least, any other athlete not named Ricky Williams.

In Which the Venn Diagram of SportsCenter And News Shows No Overlap

Back when I was in college, I had a first date that involved going over to some friends' living quarters (the word "habitrail" really was appropriate) for some board and card games. The last game came down to me and my date, and as we got down to the finish, it became clear that I was not going to take it easy on her in order to increase my chances of late-evening canoodling. I won the game, the evening wrapped up, and as I walked her back to her dorm, she asked me to apologize.
"For what?" I said.
"For not letting me win."
I very politely (because she was a very attractive young woman) told her that there was no way in hell I would apologize, and that I wasn't going to insult her by "taking it easy on her because she was a girl."
And she asked me again to apologize, and I told her that I wouldn't.
And then for the third time, she asked, and I said, no, and she said, "Good. If you'd actually apologized, I wouldn't have wanted to go out with you."

Fast forward to tonight, and the lead story on SportsCenter. (Don't ask me why I was watching SportsCenter. I never watch SportsCenter any more; there's too much Center and not enough Sports these days.) Now, admittedly, any night where the biggest game is UConn-Providence isn't a big sports night, but still, they led with the fact that Dwyane Wade had apologized to Kobe Bryant for accidentally breaking his nose during Sunday's All-Star Game.
Now, I'm not a big believer in the cult of ultimate macho, where you regard the guys in the other city's sweat pants as the eternal enemy and don't allow yourself to admit to feeling bad that you might have, you know, hurt him. These guys know each other off the court; they hang out, they do commercials together, they play on Olympic teams together, and they're hopefully well-rounded human beings who still exist once they're off the 94 feet of hardwood. In fact, I think it's an admirable gesture on Wade's part, and considering Bryant's well-known proclivities for being perhaps a trifle rude, possibly more than he would have gotten in return had the situations and nasal passages been reversed.
And yes, it was announced later that Bryant had a concussion, which is indeed big news, considering that the Lakers had only recently rounded into form, and without their best player they're the third-best team in LA, behind the Clippers and Long Beach State. Leading with the concussion announcement would have been eminently understandable. It's sports-related, it has a direct impact on the games, and it's news.
But instead, we got the apology. The perfectly sincere, absolutely respectful apology, which had about as much to do with actual sports news as, well, anything Skip Bayless says. I'm sure that someone at ESPN saw the opportunity to lead with an item that involved the names "Kobe" and "D-Wade" and got all fluttery over it, but it was barely sports and it was barely news, and it certainly didn't deserve to be the top headline.
I mean, yes, an injury in an All-Star Game could be news. The litmus test here sits at the intersection of Rose and Fosse, wherein baseball's all time hit leader deliberately and with hard-nosed intensity aforethought, leveled a guy right out of his playing career in order to win the game. Wade, on the other hand, committed a pretty generic foul without malicious intent. Rose didn't apologize. Wade did. There could have been news, but there wasn't, and leading off with that - implying that anything that follows is going to be less newsworthy and less about sports - is a great indicator that anyone actually looking for sports news ought to change the channel.
So I did.

Thank you, ESPN

Without your relentless coverage of Saturday's minor league NASCAR race, I never would have known that Danica Patrick A)drives cars and B)has breasts.