MISS THE POINT
SATURDAY’S Army-Navy game presented CBS with a serious dilemma. With no overt all-about-me showboating during the game, CBS could not enact its usual: slow-motion replays of players performing post-play demonstrations of excessive self-regard.
Egads! CBS was stuck! It had to concentrate on football!
Earlier, on ESPN, undefeated Duke was being beaten at Boston College, although the graphics showed the Blue Devils to be the team in blue — they were in Nike black — and BC as the team in maroon — it wore Under Armour gray, as both schools abandoned their colors on outside money orders.
While ESPN spends hours promoting basketball, showing the games to the nation with context-applied sense has regularly escaped it over the last 25 years.
As the game — a close one — drew to a close, ESPN again did all it could to place viewers in the eyewitness protection program. With the ball in play and under 1:30 left, we saw the benches, cheerleaders, the crowd, close-ups of players — everything except the game.
Again, when it was paramount to stay on the court, to stay on the game, TV treated us to the indiscriminate, habit-formed sights of people watching it.
The play that sealed it for BC — a foul away from the ball — was shrouded behind a too-large, misplaced logo in the bottom middle of the screen, that is, over the floor.
But ESPN continues to wreck every sport it touches.
Its Thursday night college football awards show from Atlanta, judging by the chosen action clips of the candidates, indicated eligibility was predicated on post-play ain’t-I-great me-dancing as opposed to skilled football.
Of course, there was no mention the student-athletes gathered in Atlanta were missing two or three more days of classes, but that national con is now a given.
Much the same, Saturday, when ESPN/ABC presented “The Herbies,” Kirk Herbstreit’s annual top college players show starring the All About Me Dancers.
Herbstreit even complimented one player for learning “to play with swag,” now the dubious substitute for determination. He did not mention that swag has increasingly led to games being lost to misconduct penalties.
But Army-Navy threw TV a changeup, got it off its game. The focus was forced to become hard-played, team-first, teamonly, mutual-respect football. Scandalous.