The current state of SportsCenter/ESPN makes it an awesome untapped source that is ripe for parody. Luckily for all of us, we stuck our best people on this situation with the launch of The Onion SportsDome which debuts in 6 days on Comedy Central.
SportsCenter started out as a half-hour show that ran down all the previous night’s highlights. Over the years, SportsCenter has now morphed into a sensationalized sporgy rarely consisting of highlights, but rather a circus of halfbaked sports analysis and opinions that will repeat itself ad-nauseum for hours at a time. If you read Awful Announcing, the insanity of their coverage probably upsets you, but, let’s face it, sports are awesome.
Just before I started writing this, Desmond Howard was scouting the National Championship matchup by running simulations on EA sports NCAA 11. Unfortunately for Oregon’s QB, Darron Thomas, it looked like his team was being controlled by someone’s grandma who has never picked up a controller and he repeatedly got demolished by Auburn’s D-line. Yep, this passed the test and was an acceptable preview to the Championship game.
These days, reading twitter updates on air and deciding which athlete is “more now” are things that make it on the air. ESPN is stocked with insiders and they constantly bombard us with “news” that is essentially them throwing stories against the wall to see what sticks in effort to be first to break the story. This is tough to accept as acceptable journalism.
Don’t get me wrong, I watch ESPN way too much, but it is just mental these days. I’m thrilled that one of my favorite websites, The Onion, are deciding to go after them on their new show. In the past, they’ve had some amazing sports videos and hopefully this just means we get more of that. Here’s some of my favorites if you aren’t familiar with their work.
Click on “Read more” for many more of my favorite sports-related videos from The Onion.
