[SPOARTS!] Comments that don't warrant their own thread 2026-?? (SPOILERS!)

I just went down the weirdest rabbit hole, which unexpectedly led me to discover that the new head of the IOC, Kirsty Coventry, will be presiding over her first Olympics as IOC president.

Coventry is the first African-born head of the IOC and, well... let's just say that she's not what I was expecting when I saw that she was born and raised in Zimbabwe.
 
So the Chiefs are moving from Missouri to Kansas (and getting nearly $3 billion in public money to do it) and now the Bears may be moving from Illinois to Indiana in exchange for something. The numbers are still being negotiated on this one. Let the sports venue extortion continue, I guess.
 
hrdboild said:
So the Chiefs are moving from Missouri to Kansas (and getting nearly $3 billion in public money to do it) and now the Bears may be moving from Illinois to Indiana in exchange for something. The numbers are still being negotiated on this one. Let the sports venue extortion continue, I guess.
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Blazers in extortion mode right now too. A little weird because the city owns the Rose Quarter/Moda Center but they want us to foot the bill on a full renovation. It is 30 something years old now I guess, but it still feels like a nice arena. Seats are cramped even when I was skinny.

Granted I still have yet to go inside G1C.
 
I feel a way about the fact that there's no coverage of League One Volleyball on the "Worldwide Leader in Sports," even though they have a limited partnership with them. Like, if you dig deep enough into their archives, you can find a couple games on demand, but no reporting, no box scores, nothing! :mad:
 
Mr. S£im Citrus said:
I feel a way about the fact that there's no coverage of League One Volleyball on the "Worldwide Leader in Sports," even though they have a limited partnership with them. Like, if you dig deep enough into their archives, you can find a couple games on demand, but no reporting, no box scores, nothing! :mad:
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The self-described "Worldwide Leader in Sports" picks and chooses what is worthy of their coverage very selectively. It is particularly surprising that women's indoor volleyball has not garnered more attention in the US market though. I think if it were promoted more and readily available that a lot of people would watch it.
 
hrdboild said:
The last time I lived in a house which had cable television I was in first grade and only cared about Nickelodeon. What's the USA Network? I may be out of my depth on this one.
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This is a little funny to me, because I'm almost the opposite: the first time I lived in a house which had cable was when I was in the eleventh grade, because my mom and dad weren't willing to pay for it. Before that, I only got to watch cable for, like, three weeks every other summer, because my biological father used to work for the cable company after he got out of the Navy, and had his own black box.

I'm legit surprised that you've never heard of USA, since it's one of the biggest cable networks that exists: its market share is roughly equivalent to that of ESPN, and every cable company in America carries it. In many markets, it's even included as part of "basic" cable these days. It's been under the NBC Universal umbrella since 2004, so they show some NBC shows in syndication (primarily the Law and Order franchise), as well as original programming (in the pre-Netflix/Hulu era, USA was the exclusive home to shows like Suits, Monk, psych, White Collar, Burn Notice, La Femme Nikita, etc.). And, in the pre-Peacock era, it was one of the handful of networks where you could watch the non-marquee Olympic events in real time. The network actually got its start as the original MSG Sports network and, to this day, they continue to have a presence as a place to watch non-marquee sports (like the aforementioned League One Volleyball, shout out for bringing it full circle!).

Based on the age you have in your profile, the programming that would have been most relevant to your interests during the last year you lived in a house with cable would have been the USA Cartoon Express, which came on twice daily, before and after school (USA had the American broadcast rights to the Hanna-Barbera library until Ted Turner bought it in 1992 and founded Cartoon Network). You may have also been interested in Calliope, which was USA's bootleg version of Sesame Street (the same way Pinwheel was for Nickelodeon).

They also have wrasslin', which is what's made it most relevant to my interests.
 
Mr. S£im Citrus said:
This is a little funny to me, because I'm almost the opposite: the first time I lived in a house which had cable was when I was in the eleventh grade, because my mom and dad weren't willing to pay for it. Before that, I only got to watch cable for, like, three weeks every other summer, because my biological father used to work for the cable company after he got out of the Navy, and had his own black box.

I'm legit surprised that you've never heard of USA, since it's one of the biggest cable networks that exists: its market share is roughly equivalent to that of ESPN, and every cable company in America carries it. In many markets, it's even included as part of "basic" cable these days. It's been under the NBC Universal umbrella since 2004, so they show some NBC shows in syndication (primarily the Law and Order franchise), as well as original programming (in the pre-Netflix/Hulu era, USA was the exclusive home to shows like Suits, Monk, psych, White Collar, Burn Notice, La Femme Nikita, etc.). And, in the pre-Peacock era, it was one of the handful of networks where you could watch the non-marquee Olympic events in real time. The network actually got its start as the original MSG Sports network and, to this day, they continue to have a presence as a place to watch non-marquee sports (like the aforementioned League One Volleyball, shout out for bringing it full circle!).

Based on the age you have in your profile, the programming that would have been most relevant to your interests during the last year you lived in a house with cable would have been the USA Cartoon Express, which came on twice daily, before and after school (USA had the American broadcast rights to the Hanna-Barbera library until Ted Turner bought it in 1992 and founded Cartoon Network). You may have also been interested in Calliope, which was USA's bootleg version of Sesame Street (the same way Pinwheel was for Nickelodeon).

They also have wrasslin', which is what's made it most relevant to my interests.
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We only had cable for a few months -- it must have been included in the rent at that property -- and then we moved and I never had it again. Nickelodeon I barely knew thee! No great loss though, Legos were better anyway. For most of my life, if I'm watching anything on a television screen it's probably going to be a movie. Or a nature / history documentary. Or a live baseball / basketball / football game. And lately ice hockey.

So those are the channels I flip to if I'm in a hotel or at someone else's place and cable is available to me. If it's a series then it is probably a box set of DVDs that some friend convinced me I had to watch to the point of forcing it on me. Only recently have I started to appreciate watching shows and only because they've started scripting them less like episodic run-on sentences and more like actual beginning-middle-end stories. But those are rare exceptions and I'm most likely to be that one friend you know who still hasn't watched that one show everyone else finished years ago, whatever it is.

To wit, I held onto my Netflix "DVD's in the mail" subscription until the dying days when they cancelled that service and just said if you keep whatever discs you have at home, we don't care cause we don't want them back. I've been collecting physical media since I was 18 years old -- curating a collection of movies that I want to re-watch and share with others. That's still my bread and butter when it comes to entertainment. We had a rough patch around 2020 when it looked like studios would quit making physical media all together but 4Ks have brought them back... with annoying limited releases and scalping. Whinge.

I did watch Hanna-Barbera shows when I was a youngin' -- on VHS tapes -- and I've heard of some of the shows you mentioned but not seen them. Several years ago while visiting my folks, my mom was watching Suits in another room and I remember thinking "gee these lawyers sure talk a lot about movies." It did not peak my interest. I know the movie version of La Femme Nikita. Never cared for wrasslin'. Probably because I sort it into the run-on sentence style of scripted entertainment.

Anyway...

To loop this all back to the original prompt, I suppose what I meant is that I would watch women's volleyball semi-regularly if I knew how and where to watch it. And my (mostly male) work colleagues seem excited when the topic of women playing volleyball comes up so the relative sparsity of coverage on talking-heads sports media feels like a missed opportunity for someone. And I love to tweak ESPN because for all those years that I was an Oakland A's fan, the next A's game summary-highlight package I see on that channel will be the first. So I can't help thinking that in some small way they are complicit in bringing about the end of my favorite sports franchise.
 
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hrdboild said:
... To loop this all back to the original prompt, I suppose what I meant is that I would watch women's volleyball semi-regularly if I knew how and where to watch it. And my (mostly male) work colleagues seem excited when the topic of women playing volleyball comes up so the relative sparsity of coverage on talking-heads sports media feels like a missed opportunity for someone.
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As someone who hasn't cut the cord, I couldn't tell you. I know that most of the games that get broadcast are broadcast on USA Network (I think that Wednesdays is their designated LOVB night, IIRC), and the handful of other games that get broadcast might pop up on ESPN. As far as how to find it streaming, I wouldn't know. I know that it's not on Peacock and, aside from the original Disney+ bundle that I'm grandfathered into, that's the only streaming service I pay for.

hrdboild said:
And I love to tweak ESPN because for all those years that I was an Oakland A's fan, the next A's game summary-highlight package I see on that channel will be the first. So I can't help thinking that in some small way they are complicit in bringing about the end of my favorite sports franchise.
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Oh, you don't have to tell me: as a former Kings fan who is Off That Narcotic™, a hardcore casual WNBA fan, and a fan of the non-marquee sports like swimming and track and field, ESPN was never the hotness for me! That's why I broke ranks with pretty much everyone else when people started making noise about the six o'clock Sportscenter anchors around seven or eight years ago: if you're not a fan of the NFL or college football or the "glamour" teams in the NBA, the only reason to watch Sportscenter is if you **** with the hosts. Literally the only time that Sportscenter was relevant to my interests was when Michael and Jemele were hosting, and that's because I was picking up what they were putting down. Watching Sportscenter for highlights when they don't actually cover the sports that I care about is a massive waste of time.
 
SportsCenter was everything until maybe somewhere between 2003-2005. About whenever the time on-demand was added to digital cable packages. I watched PTI and Around the Horn for about 10 more years and gave those up when I quit my gym membership.

End of evening weekend routine for me was catch the sportscenter replay then USA up all night or one of the weird boston indy UHF channels for me in the 90s. Once on demand and streaming showed up I really stopped watching channels as background entertainment. Once a game ends, ESPN is off. Unless I'm just desperate for more of whatever sport I was watching and it's all day football/basketball.

ESPN was also the main way to watch hockey along with the old SportsChannel RSNs back then. I guess I like having all my teams at the press of a button, and that trumps hoping ESPN even shows a highlight, but there was something so nice about those days. I guess it came down to not knowing and having to imagine things? Dunno.
 
If we’re being real, Sportscenter’s relevance dipped when Eisen left to launch the NFL network and then unfortunately died with the great Stuart Scott. Also didn’t help that that all coincided with the launch of YouTube leading to highlights of every sport event imaginable being just a click away n
 
Tetsujin said:
If we’re being real, Sportscenter’s relevance dipped when Eisen left to launch the NFL network and then unfortunately died with the great Stuart Scott. Also didn’t help that that all coincided with the launch of YouTube leading to highlights of every sport event imaginable being just a click away n
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From Berman to Scott they revolutionized the highlight show, since then its trash.
 
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