In the Northwestern game thread, Jeffcat made post ripping ESPN because Jim Donnan (or one of his proofers) said we have played Wisconsin this year. It seems that folks will go out of their way to point out even the most mundane of errors on their part and blow them out of proportion. In fact, Jeffcat's post was originally a thread he started entitled "ESPN in the gutter again", which was then merged into the NW game thread. When I saw the pre-merged thread title, I thought "Now what?". And then I saw that being in the gutter meant a typo, well, I think you get the picture.
I'm not advocating that anyone forgive and forget. I think it's just time to quit bringing up every little instance of them making an error or doing something we aren't in 100% agreement with.
I personally agree that letting this fester in us hurts us a lot more than the craplogs at ESPiN, but I understand the temptation to point out every little mistake, because there is that primal feeling of vindication every time someone there makes a stupid mistake, because of how hard they latched on to the one-sided Clarett fiasco.
Example used already: Alberts wrote a somewhat glowing review of Ohio State after 2002, after he had said we sucked for basically all of 2002 and then said we would get destroyed by Miami...now, do I believe he just hated everything about Ohio State? No, I think he decided who he thought was going to win at the beginning of the season, and it wasn't us, so he kept beating it in that we would lose eventually...which we didn't. So, on the flip side, did he write what he wrote for our benefit? Of course not, he was covering his own ass. With most of the commentators and whatever, there's no conspiracy, but by the same token they haven't been offering any olive branves our way for our benefit, either.
The Clarett thing was anti-Ohio State, but not because the network was anti-Ohio State, if that makes any sense. What I mean is that they would have latched onto any story about any school that suddenly started winning national championships after being away from it for so many years. What still bothers me the most is how many opportunities the network had to go after Bawby, Jimmy Johnson and Erickson at Miami, Phillips and Osborne at Nebraska...and they passed on them all. I do think the culture of the network has changed dramatically over the past 10 years or so (as mentioned, keeping Screaming A-hole Smith and getting rid of Aldridge, hiring Michael "I can't say more than 2 words of English" Irvin, etc.) and the story about Ohio State probably reflects a transition to gotcha journalism and reality TV, which are fairly recent phemonea.
The Desmond Howard/Nick Le-fag thing was completely unforgivable under any circumstances, and I also blame our people for allowing them to even attempt that in any context. And the more that we don't see the same things with former Auburn players at Alabama and former Oklahoma players at Texas, the more pissed about that one I still get.
ESPN is a crappy network, plain and simple...if there is a game on, I'll watch it, but until they get people in the studio who know their ass from a hole in the ground, I'll still check my e-mail at halftime.
