I don’t know how many people caught last night’s thrilling victory by Middle Tennesse State over Florida Atlantic on ESPN2, but a new feature was debuted called “Interactive Tuesday”. There were video clips, emails, soundbytes, votes and scrolling messages, and announcers Todd Harris and Ray Bentley constantly highlighted them throughout the game. There was only one small problem, apparently they were unedited before being displayed and some of the more asinine moments were caught by Complain In Vain….
(1) First, we saw the following message scroll atop our screen from a watcher named Landry Arnett: “sec title game: bama and lsu forget florida who loses to ole miss.” So, Landry had to take the time to sit down at his computer and write this, but not once consider is that is even a possibility? Seriously, there is 0% chance that these two teams could meet in the SEC title. None, nada. LSU is in the SEC West, Alabama is in the SEC West.
(2) Next, another message scrolls atop the screen. This one is not quite so offensive, but we do appreciate misuse of the English language. This was from texaswinbig12: “I think that Texas is a very good team this year even better then Bama.”
In the end, Middle Tennessee (nicknamed the Blue Raiders) won on a pretty exciting Hail Mary play as time expired. Just after the 32-yard game-winning touchdown pass was brought down by the receiver, Harris exclaims, “And the Blue Raiders snatch defeat from…[trails off]” then comes back with “Blue Raiders win!”
All hilarious moments, but nothing was better than the voting process. At multiple times throughout the night, both Harris and Bentley tried to use results from polls to add excitement, but when only 1,338 people vote on a poll that was posted in the second quarter….it’s probably not the best idea to highlight that at the end of the game….
It seems like a fun idea in theory, and maybe ESPN is testing it out on lesser viewed games first, but they might want to work out some of the kinks before trying it again. Either that or just lie about the number of voters at the end of the night. That’s just embarrassing.
Interactive Tuesday (for idiots) (Complain In Vain)
