media Page 116 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Overhyped Northeast Media Shitstorms Converge As Analysts Predict Hurricane Sandy Will Somehow Lead To More Tim Tebow
The great thing about the northeastern part of the United States—the only part of the United States—is the way the region and its residents amplify the most of middling of things (think quarterbacks and weather events) into the only things in the world for a brief (long) period of time, thereby ass...

NBC Looks Like It Will Beat Out Fox and ESPN For The EPL After A Crazy Bid
So we now live in a world where not only Major League Baseball draws insane amounts of money from broadcasters (fresh off the lowest rated Game 2 of the World Series ever!) but now soccer too. Fox and ESPN are out of the bidding for the English Premier League and NBC is looking like a winner. Becau...

Basketball Prospectus Writers Are "Lab Geek Rats" With "Pocket Squares," According To Reggie Miller
During a Clippers-Nuggets preseason game yesterday, commentator Kevin Harlan brought up the fact that Basketball Prospectus, a highly regarded, stats-driven site, had chosen the Nuggets to win the Western Conference this season. As Harlan says, BP made this prediction based on many reasonable fact...

Stephen A. Smith Says "Nigga, Please" On ESPN2, And Everyone Gets Stupid In Response
On Thursday morning's First Take, Stephen A. Smith expressed his disbelief that Kobe Bryant would miss time with an injury by saying "nigga, please." This was not a thing he should have said on TV, yet he did. It was barely noticeable, but at least one person noticed, uploaded the video, and cert...

Grantland's Jonah Keri Picks The Giants In Seven; ESPN's Jonah Keri Likes The Tigers In Five
Today on Grantland, a pair of World Series preview pieces: Rany Jazayerli on why the Tigers could win, and Jonah Keri on how the Giants could take home the championship. Both men predict the series will go seven games—Jazayerli takes Detroit; Keri, San Francisco. Also on ESPN.com: a list of experts'...

The NLCS Was Less Popular Than <em>The Walking Dead</em> And <em>Blue Bloods</em>: Last Week's TV Ratings, In Context
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen and Sports Business Journal's John Ourand. Viewership numbers represent approximate number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all households using a telev...

Jay Cutler's Press Conference Was The Chicago Fox Affiliate's Presidential Debate Highlight
It was a busy night last night for WFLD, the Chicago Fox affiliate. Just after the station finished airing Game 7 of the NLCS, there was the Bears game and the presidential debate to go over. But what better debate highlight was there than a live shot of Jay Cutler's press conference? Cutler was r...

Even Mack Brown Hates The Longhorn Network
Fourteen months in, how's the Longhorn Network doing? The University of Texas's 20-year, $300 million partnership with ESPN nearly destroyed the Big 12 before it even launched, and while it is helping UT make up for state-funding shortfalls in academic departments, it still has a rather sizable dist...

Sportswriters: Who's The Grossest Or Most Obnoxious Person You've Encountered In The Press Box? Share Your Stories.
Professional sportswriters love to tell you the rule about how there's no cheering in the press box. What they don't tell you is how many other forms of normal human behavior are also missing from the press box. Anyone who's ever picked up a sports media credential has discovered that it is a ticket...

A Very Confused Jim Nantz Insisted The Jets Beat The Patriots, Pulling Off Today's Biggest Upset
A Skyline Chili-sized brain fart exploded in the broadcast booth at Gillette Stadium tonight as CBS flagship announcer Jim Nantz, in the closing moments of New England's overtime win against the Jets, insisted New York were the winners in a "stunner" that was the biggest upset of the day....

There's No Cheering In The Pressbox, So ESPN's Lee Corso Went Down To The Sidelines
Lee Corso's College GameDay schtick has for decades been his end-of-show prognostication of the day's feature game—usually involving his favored team's mascot. (Today he picked the hometown Gators to beat South Carolina, and even brought a baby alligator to the set.) But we mostly assumed his inte...

Ryan Lochte Picked Auburn To Win LSU Vs. Texas A&M On College Gameday
Scintillating! Newly minted college football analyst Ryan Lochte made a cameo on College Gameday today, and provided insight into today's match-up between the Texas A&M Aggies and LSU Tigers as only he can: by mumbling an answer that was not among the two options he was given, and wearing a t-shir...

<em>Men's Journal</em>'s Skip Bayless Article Contains The Saddest Paragraph In Recent Memory
Skip Bayless, as a major member of the sports discourse, is a lamentable thing. He gets an enormous amount of airtime to manufacture controversy, and his style of vacant carnival-barking is, if not actively lowering the intelligence of your average daytime ESPN-viewer, at least taking up time that c...

Rick Reilly Got Fooled By A Satirical Blog Post (Again)
Remember when Rick Reilly wrote a column that included a line about LeBron James punching Juwan Howard’s cane, and it turned out that he got that anecdote from a satirical post on The Basketball Jones? Boy, that was a silly mistake, and one that you wouldn’t expect Rick Reilly to make again.[jump]...

Bill Simmons And Jalen Rose Are Heading To ESPN's <em>NBA Countdown<em></em></em>
This news broke a few days ago, and ESPN confirmed it today: Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose are joining Magic Johnson and Michael Wilbon on ESPN's NBA Countdown. Getting the boot? Jon Barry and Chris Broussard. The press release: Barry "will transition to game analysis," and Broussard will remain an "N...

A Speculative Column About A-Rod Being Traded Contains The Dumbest Sentence You'll Read Today
With Alex Rodriguez quickly falling out of favor in New York, speculation has started to fly about whether or not the Yankees would be interested in trading Rodriguez in the offseason. This morning, USA Today's Bob Nightengale got in on the action with this column, claiming that "This will be the l...

Here's How A Year-Old Aerial Shot Of St. Louis Ended Up On Last Night's Fox Broadcast
When we noted earlier today Fox's apparent use of old video during last night's NLCS broadcast from St. Louis, we asked how such a thing might happen—and if it was simply a mistake or a revelation that much of what we assume is a live broadcast is, indeed, not live at all....

People Forgot To Shut Their TVs Off After Football, So The NLCS Pregame Show Had More Viewers Than The Game: TV Ratings, In Context
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen and Sports Business Journal's John Ourand. Viewership numbers represent approximate average number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all households using...

Asian Football Confederation Does Racist Thing, Blames Wikipedia
An article recently appeared on the Asian Football Confederation's website that referred to the United Arab Emirates' national soccer team as the "Sand Monkeys." That's a really racist thing to do, in case you didn't know....