As sports fans we are now entering week two of no NFL. You know, that time of year when you actually can get schoolwork done on Sunday afternoons instead of being glued to CBS and NBC until midnight.
At least one good thing happened at the conclusion of the Super Bowl: the four letter network is going to stop talking so much about how much fuel the Jets are leaking on a weekly basis.
Instead, we get the major media outlets talking about how an NBA team with one of the league’s 15 greatest players ever (Kobe Bryant), Canada’s most beloved dime dishing machine (Steve Nash), and a freakishly athletic talent who cares more about being famous than being great (Dwight Howard), can’t form a good team.
For whatever reason, in this country it feels as if there is a natural impulse to reward things that suck by giving them our attention.
Who could forget the times when the best thing to do on Thursday nights was to pre-game to the sights of Snooki flashing her crotch to whoever was looking. Honey boo boo and her awful mother have made a killing in the 18-49 demographic this year. For the love of all humanity, Skrillex won three Grammy awards for producing noises that are an awful combination of a truck backing over a dying cat and a crack head doing unspeakable things with a toaster.
The world of sports is no different.
Certain media outlets find it important to constantly remind us that the Jets still sucked this year and that the Magic Johnson is one Howard missed free throw away from killing Jim Bus. Yet they could be explaining to fans why the San Antonio Spurs have the best record in the Western Conference or why next year actually could be the Atlanta Falcon’s year.
But instead, ESPN would rather constantly update their national fan base on whose fault it was for bringing Tebow into the fold. They cave into their impulse to watch things that suck, especially near their general area (ESPN’s two biggest headquarters are in Connecticut and Los Angeles).
Now you may ask, ‘well if they don’t cover the teams that suck you just want them to only focus on the winners?’ A fair question, but you can’t insatiably cover just teams that dominate the league either hoping to find faults.
Remember the Heat Index that lasted two years and has mysteriously vanished this year? No, that’s because LeBron hadn’t won a ring yet and the nation wanted to burn them for every time they lost after ‘not five, not six, not seven’ happened.
The entire country outside of bandwagon fans and South Beach hated the Heat because they anointed themselves champions before playing a single game. When the Heat finally won the title a year ago, the pit-bull like coverage that should be reserved for tracking the national and state governments was called off the Heat.
It wasn’t fun to cover them anymore, so everyone let up. Now the Heat are in first place in the East and nobody gives a crap because fans can’t stomach that kind of Heat Index again.
The larger point is not to reward the extremes of one side or the other because it serves no productive purpose. There should be a higher standard of media consumption by the fans so that the sports media has to do this weird thing called reporting.
When a culture rewards things that suck, things that suck continue to multiply in order to address the consumer’s demand.
So demand better coverage of all thing sports not all big named sports teams that suck.