Here we sit two days out from yet another championship, calmly piecing together yet another parade plan – mine includes the parade followed by the Phillies’ home opener, where Doug Pederson and, you would think, Jay Wright, will make an appearance – and yet I’m about to write a post about that dipshit Jalen Rose.
It hit me the other night while watching that two-hour pre-game show– just how bad most mainstream sports coverage is. That isn’t to just shred something for the sake of shredding, but to point out what useless filler most of it has become. By the time tip rolled around, the panel was in a consensus that Michigan might win or, at the very least, it would be a very close game. Why? Because talking heads were caught up in the hype of balanced coverage, fan bases and coach speak? I’m not saying Michigan couldn’t have won – far from it – but every sane, statistical-based analysis of the game pointed toward not only a resounding Villanova win, but also a cover of the line with a double-digit delta. Had one person on TBS’ rotating cackle of panelists – including Jim Boeheim, who gave the most old school take on paying players imaginable – predicted a Michigan win, that would’ve been reasonable and in-line with expectations, but pretty much the whole crew did it.
One can live with those sorts of platitudes, especially if they’re in service of pumping up a national broadcast (indeed ratings peaked at 11.0 before diving in the second half once Villanova asserted its dominance). What continues to be difficult to reconcile, and perhaps a reason why so many millennials with access to better, more nuanced or entertaining coverage continue to drift away from this nonsense is the endless hot take filler content that networks use – like NBC Sports Philly airing Quick Slants in the face of spending money to cover just about anything useful – in a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
Enter Jalen Rose.
I actually never really minded him, perhaps because of his nexus to Bill Simmons, who I still enjoy. But this butthurt take about Villanova after they WHOOPED his alma mater is ridiculous: Continue Reading
