Sunday, October 22, 2006

Ummm, I think it's called nausea?

With Grey's Anatomy moved to Thursday nights and Desperate Housewives relying far too heavily on Eva Longoria's semi-clad tiny torso for ratings bumps, the only TV left to consume on Sundays is sports.

Sure, there's LPGA, MLS and NASCAR racing offered on networks major enough to only need a single digit but what Sundays in October really come down to are football and post-season MLB. The Sunday sports viewing sesh can be broken down into 3 segments: Morning, Afternoon and Night.


Morning's obviously noon pregame coverage for a 1:00 game. Afternoon's the second game of the afternoon at 4:00 EST. And Night is usually NBC's new Football Night In America and, for today, MLB on FOX's presentation of Game 2 of the World Series.

CBS and FOX have had standard Sunday football packages for the past several years. 2006, however, saw NBC break back into the football business by launching its own primetime Sunday football showdown to usurp the network share lost by Monday Night Football's move to ABC affiliate ESPN. NBC celebrated the launch of it's new sports show franchise with the lamest name it could possibly come up with: Sunday Night Football and its associated analysis program Football Night In America. Right when it seemed NBC couldn't get any whiter they spice up their promo video with a rap song lacking so much melanin that the unacknowledged perpetrator could only be MC Powder.

NBC's shortcomings as a sports network are only reinforced by a terrible presence in the field of digital media. Though its SNFONNBC website boasts pretty bad-ass graphics, it's really nothing more than a Flash window with sound effects ripped straight out of Tecmo Bowl. It's now week 6 of the NFL and NBC's football home page still hypes a Manning Bowl that took place two months ago.

MLB on FOX = Huge DB's on FOX

This weekend also saw the start of the World Series on FOX with Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, Ken Rosenthal and Chris Myers handling the live game coverage. A new addition to the pre and postgame coverage, however, is guest analyst Eric Byrnes, formerly of the Oakland A's, whom we have the pleasure of seeing every time the series returns to Detroit this year. If anyone saw the coverage they'll understand that the picture posted to the right does not nearly do justice to how big of a douche bag Byrnes actually is. Like, I don't know of any dictionaries that actually have pictures but, you know, if there happened to be one that existed and if it actually chose to water down its credentials as the only dictionary to have pictures by including definitions and illustrations for words like "douche bag" then I'm sure Eric Byrnes would be smugly staring back at us between entries for "doubtless" and "dough."

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