The Internet and the Death of Sportscenter

Sportscenter sucks. So does Baseball Tonight. These things should be blatantly obvious to anyone who has watched either show for more than the past couple of years: they used to give you highlights with occasionally funny and insightful commentary. Now both shows give you the occasional highlight with a heaping serving of crappy features, retarded running segments that serve only to give the announcers another avenue to repeat the same crappy, shallow analysis they give out during the rest of the show, and a gigantic shitstorm of stories involving involving steroids, scandals, athletes getting arrested, or even which celebrity Tom Brady happened to bang last week. If I want to watch Sportscenter I want to see sports, not hear Scott Van Pelt breaking down an NFL quarterback's sex life.

ANyway I go on this rant not to state an obvious point (otherwise how would i be any different than every anchor/analyst currently on the show), but to make a prediction: Sportscenter, Baseball Tonight, and every similar highlight show will be off the air within 5 years.

Why? The answer, of course, lies with the internet: when Sportscenter was in its heyday in the mid-90s the internet was just getting going, and while you might be lucky enough to find box scores or game summaries online you sure as hell weren't finding streaming video highlights (can you imagine how long it would take one 30 second youtube clip to load on a 28K dial-up) online. Sportscenter and Baseball Tonight used to be awesome because they were the only place to go to see a genuine wrap-up of the day in sports besides the next mornings paper or the 6 minute segment on the local news.

Now, however, you can find almost any highlight you want within hours (if not minutes) of a game ending, negating the need to check out sportscenter if you wanted to actually wanted to see what happened outside of your local teams. This is one of the reasons theyve moved towards the vapid crap that now characterizes each show: the hardcore fans left a long time ago, so they need to appeal to the casual sports fans who might actually want updates on Tony Romo's lovelife. The hardcore fan who cares about how Romo performs against different defensive packages left a longtime ago to go read Football Outsiders.

The same thing holds true for in-depth analysis by experts: it used to be that Peter Gammons was the end all and be all of baseball reporters, with the occasional yearly statistical summary book produced by someone like Bill James or Ron Shandler. You watched Baseball Tonight because it was one of the only places to get analysis of your team beyond the local newscaster making bullshit small talk with the anchor about how excited people are for another Barry Bonds home run (and yes, I'm talking to your A's hating, biased ass Gary Radnich: I hope you enjoy KRON getting railed by every other tv station in the bay).

Now, however, with the rise of Rotoworld, Baseball Prospectus, Hoopsworld, and, yes, espn.com (which has smartly hired some of the best analysts, bloggers, and writers in the world), you can get in-depth coverage on any important (or not so important) development within hours of whatever happens without having to wade through loads of crap you don't care about. With sportscenter I had to watch an hours worth of highlights to get 30 seconds about one of my teams, so whatever was said was inevitably simple, shallow, and something I already knew because its hard to really say something when you've only got 30 seconds. Now, I can just go to athleticsnation or Golden State of Mind and find instant links to every story about the team and every expert opinion about what how the team is doing and where it needs to go from here.

So farewell to Sportscenter and Baseball Tonight, you guys gave it a good run while it lasted, and I'm sure Chris Berman can still find someone to pay him to come up with godawful nicknames for sports figures. Enjoy the twilight years, I'll be on Fire Joe MOrgan, where Ken Tremendous skewers columnists with posts 50 times funnier than anything that ever left the mouth of John Kruk.

Youtube magic of the day: How much would you give for your team to win a championship?