There once was a time in the mid-90s when I watched Sportscenter with the obsessive daily fixation I’d had for the nightly news in junior high and high school. Famously, I arrived for my second year of grad school to turn on the TV, set it for ESPN, flip to ESPN2, and proceed to go the whole term without touching any buttons but volume, mute, and previous-channel – including the power button.
Back then, ESPN was just making the leap into mass consciousness. ABC still hadn’t quite been acquired by Disney (that came in 1996) and the whole “espn2” project was still seen as a bit fringe-y, and a lot of the personalities were the same ones who had been around for most of the 80s – happy hour with Charley Steiner and Robin Roberts, or the big show with Olbermann and Patrick (still one of the best television programs ever, never mind sportscasting or even newscasting).
The problem is that ESPN was too good at what it did. It went from being the Worldwide Leader In Sports to the 800 lb gorilla, especially in areas where it was the predominant carrier of the sport – college. ESPN made college basketball a national obsession in the 1980s and 90s because it was finally possible to see a lot of games with a lot of teams in a lot of areas – and they televised NIT and early-round NCAA action to boot. ESPN showed four college games on Saturdays – usually more than you could see on all the over-the-air stations combined. And ESPN’s influence grew out of all proportion once it essentially ate ABC Sports, heretofore the primary purveyor of college football in the fall.
Now, the track record speaks for itself. Half a dozen channels, a magazine, a huge web presence, a string of restaurants for crying out loud – ESPN is too big for its britches. It singlehandedly shattered the notion of bias against west coast teams when it pimped USC for three years as “possibly the greatest team of all time” when they won a total of one (1) national championship along the way. It treated Brett Favre as bigger than the Green Bay Packers, beating the drum incessantly for him as The! Greatest! Toughest! Gunslinger! Quarterback! Ever! even when his last three teams finished their season with him throwing a pick that lost the game and eliminated them from postseason play. It essentially reduced major league baseball to the Yankees vs the Red Sox. It enabled the greatest feat of NBA narcissism on record with “The Decision” and hyped the results to the stars with a year of the “Heat Index,” only for Lebron James to choke in the playoffs. And its latest project, Tim Tebow, the best-throwing wildcat fullback in the NFL today, got a whopping 88 mentions in one hour of Sportscenter last week.
Most important for our purposes, though, is the way ESPN precipitated the realignment of college sports with its operation of the Longhorn Network, giving a university its own private cable network for the first time ever (not even BYU, with its LDS-provided satellite coverage in years gone by, had 24-hour run of the service). Its ownership stake in almost every minor bowl and broadcast rights for the BCS mean that it essentially controls college football’s postseason – indeed, it administers the coaches’ poll that is itself a third of the BCS calculation. And most infamously, one of its on-air personalities essentially used the network as a platform to provoke the firing of his son’s college coach. (At least it was a break from covering up the five hookers he killed at SMU back in the day.)
ESPN has essentially arrogated to itself the right not just to cover sports, but to order the pieces on the board to its own satisfaction and promote the ones of its choosing. Not for nothing does it backbone the “SEC Network” that puts every single SEC football game on some ESPN outlet (even if Vanderbilt seems only to rate ESPN3 most weeks) when the SEC is looking at a sixth consecutive BCS football championship.
Maybe Fox Sports will make a dent with its half-dozen Pac-12 networks, the B1G network, and the electrifying tones of Gus Johnson. Maybe the transition of Versus to the NBC Sports Network (in conjunction with NBCU’s Comcast SportsNet offerings) will enable a third party in the cable sports marketplace. But right now, ESPN has a monopolistic level of influence on the world of college athletics, and the collegiate sports realm is the poorer for it.