I mean. In principle I don’t have any problem at all with what he said. Business is business ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In practice I wonder how honest he’s really being. ESPN has been in business a really long time and most of us have been watching them for decades. Do they *really* have a business model of making all the talk and vid about the number one prospect in the postgame even if he loses? Maybe this is a Mandella Effect thing but to me that story doesn’t hold water. To me it seems like whenever I’ve tuned into an ESPN postgame since the 90s (which admittedly hasn’t been *all* that many times——but I’ve got an awful lot more experience watching postgames if you also include other networks, and I don’t see why ESPN in particular would be any different), if there was an upset they focused on the winner because man that was news. In fact, the bigger the upset, the bigger the news.
If lower-ranked Indiana beats higher-ranked Kansas you make some noise about Indiana. And if sixteen seed UMBC beats 1 seed Virginia then you go absolutely hog ####ing wild over UMBC. I don’t personally remember any number 1 draft picks ever changing that equation. I don’t remember John Wall getting much press outside Kentucky after the game the night West Virginia sent us packing.
I don’t remember Anthony Davis getting an awful lot of press after the game the night Christian Wattford’s “the shot” helped Tom Crean best us with maybe a little help from selfish MFr Terrence Jones’s girlfriend. In fact, even as a huge rabid and disappointed CATS fan on that night, I think I would have found it a little creepy if more than half the coverage had been about us that postgame. Hey reporters: maybe do a little reporting, would have been my take.
So in my mind it seems pretty obvious that what really happened is ESPN literally had no expectation that we could have won that game, and so they were entirely unprepared to cover anything else.
And also I think that’s only half of the story. It’s not like anyone expected UMBC to be able to beat Virginia that night. And that total lack of anticipation didn’t hurt the coverage of the actual story that night. In fact, it helped it. It was legitimately part of the news and so the more ethical (in my mind) sportscasters in that situation were right to show their raw reactions. It made everything better.
It seems to me like some combination of laziness and narcissism must have been responsible for ESPN coming across with so very much the opposite of that dynamic Tuesday night.
Which is kind of bad.
And then to lie about it when people objected vocally and say it was instead just a matter of business constraints that in reality don’t even exist, that to my mind would be an extra level of douchebaggery.
BUT, honestly, all of Western Civilization has gotten a little strange these past five years or so. If, in fact, for whatever reason, ESPN played it the way they did for purely business reasons…..
Or if, which, you know, seems honestly a lot more likely, if they wouldn’t have *had* to play it that way for business reasons (history proves pretty convincingly that actual business purposes favor hyping the underdog after an upset), but still there was some dumb new programming manager involved, running things, who was entitled somehow and who *thought* ESPN had to play it that way for business reasons…… and so the sportscasters just had to “yessir” or “yess’m” a stupid idea that was rammed down their throats and then hush up about it to keep their jobs?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ As I said, there is nothing actually wrong with what Jay said, IF it’s true.
