Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 11:17 am
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Spinnin' Bucket wrote: IMO, the Countdown show died a while back, long before Ditka. I used to love that show, but it lost its bite a long time ago. Now, I spend my Sunday mornings scouring the net for news. I really can’t stomach any of the pre-game shows anymore. Why do they, not just ESPN but FOX & CBS as well, insist on cramming so many guys into the studio? Two guys with thoughts are better than six guys with no thoughts.
From a Sports Guy mailbag. I dont know how true it is, but it makes sense
Q: Can you tell me why it is necessary for all the networks to have like 12-20 people on their pregame shows? Brent, Jimmy, Irv, and Phyllis were all we needed back in the day. I feel like NBC needs to take a census of who is in their studio each week.
-- Dan, Greenville, S.C.
SG: It's an interesting answer for two reasons. First, NBC could have done a show with Costas, Cris Collinsworth and the Token Former Player Who Has Nothing Interesting To Say And Just Does A Lot Of Laughing and everyone would have been happy as long as the show was built around Collinsworth (who's great). But here's where my time-proven Job Justification Conundrum comes in. You know how everyone always wonders why networks make so many bad decisions and ignore common sense so often? Well, the problem is every network has too many executives, and when you have a lot of executives, you have a lot of meetings, and if you have a lot of meetings, those same executives feel obligated to come up with ideas for those meetings just because they don't want the head boss to say, "Gee, that was weird, Bob didn't come up with a single idea in today's meeting."
That leads to people feeling obligated to throw out bad ideas because a bad idea is better than not having ideas at all. And there are times when everyone in the room talks themselves into a bad idea -- mainly because they couldn't think of any other ideas -- and once the bad idea springs into motion, everyone starts working on it and eventually talks themselves into the idea. Again, this never would have happened if one of the execs didn't feel obligated to justify his job by coming up with an idea he didn't like. And that's how situations like "Let's do a pregame show with six people when everyone just wants to see highlights and would be fine with Costas, Collinsworth and the Token Former Player Who Has Nothing Interesting To Say And Just Does A Lot Of Laughing" end up happening.
Second, when people have a ton of money to spend, and it's not their money, they're always going to end up spending it ... even if they're spending that money like a drunken sailor at a strip joint. You could call this the J.D. Drew Corollary because that's what Theo Epstein did last winter. The Red Sox had money to spend, but the logical move would have been to hand right field to Wily Mo Pena for two or three months and see if he could handle it, and if he couldn't, either trade for a big-name outfielder (of the Bobby Abreu/Jermaine Dye class) or a veteran stopgap (of the Kenny Lofton/Dave Dellucci class) or hope Jacoby Ellsbury had progressed enough in the minors to step in. Considering they valued Pena highly enough to trade Bronson Arroyo for him, and they had Ellsbury rated as highly as Dustin Pedroia, this seemed like a logical course of action. Instead, they splurged on J.D. Drew. Why? Because they had the money to spend. It was burning a hole in their collective pocket. So they made a $70 million black-or-white roulette wager on Drew, killed Pena's confidence to the point they had to give him away, and now Ellsbury is thriving and we're facing a situation in which Drew might sit for him in the playoffs. Fantastic.
Here's the point: When networks and sports teams have money to spend, they spend it. NBC gets the Sunday night games, they're excited about it, the head of the company says, "Pull out all the stops, let's have a great night of TV, money is no object!" And that's what leads to a six-man pregame show and a wildly expensive Madden-Michaels team when they could have hired Marv and Boomer for one-third of the price. .
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