ESPN Is Actually Children's Programming

Like many sports fans, I grew up on ESPN. It was probably the first channel I started to regularly watch after Nickelodeon. It had football, and it had grown men talking exuberantly about football, so of course I loved it—by 13 I probably had all of Chris Berman’s catchphrases memorized. From 2002 to 2005, the first thing I did when I got home from school was tune in to Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption—a full hour of grown men yelling at each other about sports. I was obsessed with all of the sports columnist bros on the channel: Ron Jaworski was cool, I wanted to be Tony Reali, and to this day I can’t take my eyes off Skip Bayless.

As I got older and more conscious, however, I became increasingly aware of how goofy all of these shows were. I mean, Around the Horn is a show founded on the premise of literally awarding points to sportswriters who bloviate the most effectively about irrelevant sports topics in 90-second chunks. When I went off to college, I started to take myself pretty seriously. It’s impossible to take yourself seriously if you watch a lot of daytime ESPN. Just last week Kevin James (the fat dude from The King of Queens) was debating Stephen A. Smith about Tim Tebow. Something like that should never be on television, especially not on a channel that’s dubbed itself the Worldwide Leader in Sports.

But the other day I had an epiphany. I was sitting in a shitty run-down mall eating a sandwich and watching Bomani Jones talk about how he won Around the Horn while holding a giant golden title belt when I realized ESPN is not for me anymore—but maybe that’s because ESPN isn’t meant for adults at all; maybe their target audience is kids aged nine to 14. Maybe that’s why Around the Horn and PTI are scheduled for perfect after-school consumption. Maybe that’s why they put Lil Wayne on First Take. If ESPN is actually for children, that would explain everything.

Outside of its more news-oriented programming, ESPN rarely talks to its viewers like we’re adults. Banal sports opinions that barely qualify as opinions (Eli Manning wins Super Bowls, so Eli Manning is elite) are repeated endlessly like they’re trying to drill the alphabet into our brains. ESPN feels it necessary to explicitly talk us through a highlight of Raul Ibanez hitting a homerun, instead of just letting the video of Raul Ibanez hit a homerun speak for itself. Adults like Stuart Scott shout catchphrases like, “Wow! That’s-a spicy meatball!” that would embarrass the host of Blue’s Clues. ESPN is so afraid of our attention spans diminishing that they’d rather focus hours and hours of airtime on broad topics (Alex Rodriguez’s slump) and insane questions (“If you were to do a Broadway show on Mark Sanchez as a Jet QB this year, what kind of play would it be?”) instead of stuff that’s actually interesting and important (the NHL lockout). None of that really matters, since nobody has ever watched ESPN’s entertainment division to be cognitively engaged. It’s what you watch when you’ve given up on a day. The entire network is essentially piped-in daycare programming for grown men and women—no wonder it’s constantly played in waiting rooms and bars across the country.

I’m not saying ESPN only consists of people who don’t have anything prescient to say about sports. The Worldwide Leader employs people like Bill Simmons, Tony Kornheiser, Bob Ryan, Katie Baker, Chuck Klosterman, Bill Barnwell, and John Clayton, who—no matter what you might think of them now—have all been responsible for some good and important writing at some point. But ESPN also employs Woody Paige, a longtime columnist for the Denver Post, who is mostly just a giant doof on TV. He can barely speak—he communicates primarily through sputtering and facial tics—and does his Around The Horn appearances with a chalkboard over his right shoulder that always says something new and always says something dumb. Woody Paige is beamed into Bristol on a daily basis not because he can communicate effectively about American sports, but because he is the journalistic equivalent of Elmer Fudd. He’s paid to be a cartoon character more than he’s paid to be an “analyst,” and naturally, ten-year-old me thought Woody Paige was really fucking funny. At 21, I can’t deal with Woody Paige anymore, but I also don’t watch too much Bugs Bunny either. Woody Paige is certainly a more memorable presence on camera than plenty of other sportswriters, and his alleged ethical deficiencies don’t really matter when he’s just playing a lovable oaf.

The only people dumb enough to watch unfiltered daytime television are bored middle-schoolers, and bored middle-schoolers are the only sort of people who think Tony Kornheiser in a turkey costumeis really funny. Sure it’s harmless, but it’s still a little disconcerting that easily the biggest voice in sports media regards us as preteens, and more disconcerting that it actually seems to be working. So next time you get exasperated at Jon Gruden’s jewelry or Chris Berman’s strange chicken noises, remember that it’s not for you. ESPN is for children, and it’s about time we understood that.

And I’m not even going to bring up how much Skip Bayless looks like a Muppet.

@luke_winkie