Late Night ESPN Is A War Crime

Some of you notice the time of the blog posts, and wonder about the conditions that cause me to be up in the middle of the night. Well, it's fairly simple; I don't get enough sleep during the week due to job and family responsibilities, so far too often, I sit down to fill the bloghole at night, only to pass out and wake up halfway through things. It's life after 40, without cutting down on my workload; something has to give, and it's usually my consciousness. So be it.

What happens for and to me, far too often, is that I wake up after a reasonable enough nap, and find myself watching the same thing that I was watching before I fell asleep. Which is usually the late-night replay of the ESPN NBA game I was watching before, only now with the World Wide Lemur's rather curious editing ideas.

It's not enough, of course, that the bottom line news crawl makes you feel silly for watching the game in the first place, since there's no way to turn it off and not know the outcome of the game you are watching. (Why this isn't part of other re-run entertainment options, I'll never know. Oh, wait, that's because it's obnoxious.) But even better that that is the fact that the game might have the highest percentage of commercials outside of a late night infomercial, as well as chopped-up coverage.

You see, it's important that we are told by a canned Stuart Scott moment that, due to "time constraints", the game will not be where we left off before the huge boat of ads. It's 4am and beyond; time is constrained! We need to make pennies on low brand advertisements in heavy rotation! But fine, whatever, we're already up at this hour, we must deserve some form of abuse. So what's left on the telecast? Why, anything the analysts say, of course! Any physical foul and announcer puling about the post-foul moment! Dead ball stoppages where the refs are looking at replays! Replay after replay of any physical foul!

Hey, ESPN? I want you to consider a small point. That point is that if you think the hardcore fans of a sport really would rather watch your announcers talk about a game, rather than the game itself... well, um, maybe you shouldn't be covering the sport at all.

You know, just like what you do most of the day.

Or, perhaps, just maybe as an experiment or something...

You show the damned game?

(No, seriously. I just watched a fourth quarter between the Nuggets and the Jazz in which the Lemur showed less than half of the 12 whopping minutes of game action. In a close, entertaining, hard-fought game. Someone needs to die.)