When ESPN Says "Leap," You Say "How High A Cliff?"

We had an old friend who worked at a local television station in Illinois, and he always said the worst part of his job was when something important enough happened locally that the national network affiliate took notice. They would be demanding and gruff and generally unreasonable, acting like the local station was full of hayseeds and slack-jaws. So it didn't surprise us when a Binghamton station had a similar problem with ESPN.

So Cornell won the Ivy League, and ESPN wanted video of the clinching game from WBNG-TV in Binghamton. They were a little push about it. Meet Brendan O'Reilly, a guy unlikely to host "SportsCenter" any time soon, who wrote an open letter to ESPN.

Yes, we are happy to share the video from Cornell clinching their Ivy League title. Hope you don't mind if we go ahead and worry about our show first though. I know everyone loves the Sportscenter, with the zany commercials and all, but we're going to go ahead and edit our stuff first. We're selfish that way. Oh, when you run our video on all your shows, please find a font size roughly one pixel in height to show that it was shot by WBNG. We want people that have 60 inch monitors to have to squint to read it. That's the goal. So in conclusion, it was just fantastic bending over backwards to get you video. It really was.

Remember the old days, when people were afraid to criticize ESPN out of fear of The Empire? Isn't it better now? You have to admit it, it is. We bet ESPN, deep down, would have to admit it too.

Dear ESPN [WBNG]