Great moments in broadcast planning

Did you know that Ole Miss and Baylor are scheduled to meet in the 2020 AdvoCare Texas Kickoff?  That has all the earmarks of a real classic, assuming there are enough scholarship players left at both schools to suit up.

Speaking of which, that could lead to a scenario where the Black Bear Rebels (or is it the Rebel Black Bears?) take a serious hit in the pocketbook.  Hey, just because schools aren’t proactive doesn’t mean Mickey ain’t.

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You don’t have to understand ESPN’s stats to mock them.

According to Mickey’s Power Football Index, college football’s top team as you read this is Ohio State, fresh off a pounding — at home — by Oklahoma.

Methinks your computer needs a tuneup, fellas.

Just remember that the next time some wayward troll decides to spout G-Day QBR numbers at you in the comments.

Look out, it’s MegaCast!

A reader thought it would be worth mentioning that ESPN’s going all out with tonight’s broadcast of the Indiana-Ohio State game.

ESPN will unleash its MegaCast production for Ohio State at Indiana on Thursday, Aug. 31 (8 p.m. ET), beginning the 2017 college football season with the most extravagant regular-season game presentation the sport has ever experienced. The multi-network creation will feature the traditional telecast on ESPN and six alternate offerings for fans on ESPNU, ESPNEWS and ESPN3. All previous versions of ESPN’s MegaCast have been reserved for the College Football Playoff Semifinals and National Championship games.

For one low, low price, you get Coaches Film Room (Les Miles!), what sounds like an abominable idea with Homers Telecast and a ton of camera angles and stats on ESPN3, in addition to Herbstreit on the main broadcast.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Mack Brown, but the other coaches ought to be good for some insight on the Coaches Film Room.  Plus, they’ll be skipping some commercials — never a bad thing.  The Homers thing sounds like it’s definitely worth avoiding, but I’ve enjoyed the All-22 looks before when CBS has used them.

Anyway, what’s your thought, useful or overkill?  (If you’re a the Big Ten is dead to me kind of person, you needn’t bother to answer.)

“Travis knows he can make the most money possible by criticizing ESPN…”

I’m the last person who thought it was possible to feel sympathy for the WWL, but Clay Travis seems bound and determined to prove me capable of it.  Sheesh, what a dick.

This ought to be good.

Be still, my heart.

Saturday’s game will be broadcast on ESPN. Mike Patrick and Tommy Tuberville will have the call.

Between Patrick wondering what Brittney Spears is doing with her life and the potential for Tubs to give Kirby coaching advice on how to succeed in the SEC, this has all the earmarks of an instant classic.

Clay Travis and white supremacy… what could go wrong?

What started out as a sensible, albeit regrettable, decision wound up being blown up by a guy who loves doing that, especially if it marks ESPN.

When the Charlottesville protests erupted two weekends ago, ESPN executives — for better or worse — wondered if there might be an issue on their hands.

With Robert E. Lee suddenly back in the news, they feared Robert Lee, a young, new play-by-play announcer assigned to the Virginia-William & Mary game on opening weekend would show up in Twitter memes and posts on Web sites like Awful Announcing or Deadspin. They were worried that his big moment, even on a lightly watched game, might turn into a national joke.

According to an ESPN executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, ESPN asked Lee if he would be more comfortable calling another game but gave him the option to stay. Lee chose to switch assignments, and ESPN accommodated him.

This would never have been an issue at all, except for the fact that it was leaked to Clay Travis of Outkick the Coverage, who frequently critiques ESPN and has accused the company of having a liberal bias.

Travis wrote about it on his Web site Tuesday night and it exploded into a national story, with Travis appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program.

Mickey worried about some people behaving like dicks on social media, gave the announcer the choice to swap games, accommodated his rational decision (would you want to take the risk of being made a national punch line over something which you have no control?)… and wound up with some people behaving like dicks on social media anyway.  Ain’t PC great?

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UPDATE:  This Will Leach piece is so smart.  There are two essential points.

One —

ESPN wasn’t being “politically correct.” They were just being corporate. The phrase “political correctness” has been morphed and twisted to the point of meaninglessness. The action that some mock as “political correctness” is less about “being political” and more about “not being a thoughtless rude jerk.” No reasonable person ever says, “I’m about to be politically correct,” unless they are purposely mocking the practice they have decided to use for their own rhetorical purposes. Here’s a way to think about what is inaccurately described as “political correctness:” Is what you are saying needlessly hurtful? Are you just saying it because you are resistant to change, or because you are resistant to understanding how someone different than you might see the world? Are you just saying it to get high-fives from people who choose to see the world just like you do? You are not being “politically incorrect.” You’re just being a jerk. Let’s not confuse the two.

It is worth noting that ESPN was not even trying to be “politically correct” in this sense. The decision-makers just thought, “How can we make sure we don’t get yelled at by our bosses because people might make fun of us on a Saturday afternoon?” The issue for ESPN here isn’t “political correctness.” It’s rabbit ears.

And two —

Clay Travis has clearly lost his mind. There has long been a school of thought that Clay Travis, who used to write about college football for Fox Sports but now mostly talks about globalist cucks and head lice, is actually a smart person who has decided that the way he can advance his personal brand is to try to become the Sean Hannity of sports and appeal to a select, but stubbornly, resolutely focused, sliver of the sports fan audience. As someone who has worked with Travis in the past, briefly at both Deadspin and Fox Sports 1, and found him mostly affable and effusive in person, let me humbly submit that if Travis’ “Sean Hannity of sports” schtick began as an act, the artist and performance have since merged into an unrecognizable singularity. He’s more Pepe the Frog than man now.

In a post on Outkick the Coverage that “broke” this “story” — please do not be distracted by the ads for Outkick the Coverage; there might be some for Infowars-esque Outkick Super Male Vitality Drops by the time this is published — Travis breathlessly screams about “MSESPN!” and their desire to avoid “offending left wing idiots.” This is Travis’ game, of course, and he is surely doing a victory lap today, having uncovered the vast, left-wing ESPN agenda he has convinced himself to be real. But let’s not forget that he’s the one who did the framing on this. What Travis believes to be a liberal conspiracy, a normal person might see as “a big corporation not really understanding social media well and doing something stupid they mistakenly thought would remain privately stupid, as a result.” Turning this into a political issue benefits Travis — it gets him on Breitbart and allows him to beg Skip Bayless to have him on his show — but is not actually what is so funny and ridiculous about this. Travis has invested so much of his personal and professional capital in “guy who tells the TRUTH about the liberal media AGENDA” that it’s all he can see. He’s a hammer who thinks the whole world is a nail, the lone truth teller in a world full of cucks. Sign up for VIP Membership. Get a Free T-Shirt!

ESPN is guilty of nothing more than ineptness.  Clay Travis is a consummate asshole.  If you can’t see the difference, that’s on you.

“Paul’s just warming up. He’s on mile 4 of a marathon.”

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

According to the report, he is adding weekly in-studio “SportsCenter” segments. His four-hour radio/TV gig also will add an hour.

The network will fly Finebaum from his Saturday “SEC Nation” campus pregame show to Connecticut every weekend during the season, giving him a high-profile perch on Sunday morning “SportsCenter” episodes to analyze the college football weekend.

I can only hope that one day we’ll look back on this and wonder what in the hell Mickey was thinking.