Oversaturation: OK For Sports, Not So Good for Sports Coverage

I really liked Cee Lo Green's Forget You. I'm not the only one, based on the 13 million hits the video has; and the video itself is especially entertaining with the Cee Lo and Gary Coleman love-child lip-syncing and acting out large portions of the song. The first time I heard the tune it stuck in my head because it was catchy, but in a good way, not in that annoying, "Lamb Chops" song kind of way. Somewhere between the 30th and 863rd time I heard the song though, my feelings changed. It was too much of the same, and I didn't care anymore. There was nothing new to the song, and the Cee Lo Coleman love-child didn't learn to juggle fire in the video or anything like that, so I became indifferent. It's not that I suddenly think the song is bad, I just don't care to hear about it any more.

It's rare that I experience this sort of apathy when it involves one of my favorite Chicago sports teams, but this is the way I've felt about the Bears for the past couple of weeks. It's not just that it's still the preseason for football; this stoic, passive feeling towards football will oftentimes strike me in the middle of a football season. Don't get me wrong, football is one of my favorite sports, and Sundays and Monday nights are always something to look forward to every week. Even the analysis on Mondays and Tuesdays are something I look forward too. But with one game a week, I can't stay interested in what's happening from Wednesday to Saturday during a football season (which is good because I certainly don't have the time anyways). That said, I most definitely can't make myself rehash the actions of millionaire athletes when the games don't even matter.

Don't look at me like that Roy, just catch the damn ball.

I felt compelled to write about my apathy (which is ironic enough) after the Bears lost to the NY Giants last Monday. For the next week, there was non-stop radio/blog/internet coverage about Roy Williams dropping a ball that got knocked out of his hands in the first quarter, and generally not showing enough effort. I'm not going to defend Roy Williams when he's sarcastic with the media, or for his failures in the earlier stages of his career, however I'm not gonna buy into the idea that one or two plays in meaningless games have any effect on the potential for Williams' season. First of all, Roy has been around the league for a few years, and there aren't any veterans who play all out in the preseason, because the most important thing is for players to stay healthy. Second, Roy Williams only makes $1.5 million on a one year contract; he's expendable. If he's not good or doesn't show enough effort, the Bears can cut his ass without any real financial repercussions (I wish the Sox could say the same about Alex Rios). But third and most importantly, a receiver having a bad game in preseason should not be the topic leading off every Chicago sports conversation for a week straight. We have two baseball teams in this city playing actual games, the one on the south side has an outside chance at the playoffs (I'm still holding onto a glimmer of hope for the White Sox), and the northsiders just fired their GM and will be rebuilding their front office soon. There's more than enough to talk about outside of football in this city.

Therein lies the issue with sports coverage pertaining to football. We live in the information age, where anyone can learn or find out whatever they want in an instant. Thanks to all of the access we have to any kind of information we want, our society has developed an issue with oversaturation, which has led to this information actually affected our society negatively. Oversaturation has manifested itself in a lot of different aspects of our life. Sometimes its hearing the same song too many damn times (sorry Cee Lo), but an even better example is the insane number of 24 hour news outlets we have in the US. Sure the news is important, but I don't think anyone is crazy enough to believe that there's enough worthy news stories to fill a 24 hour network. And I'm not just talking about one 24 hour news network, we've got FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, among others, and that's not even touching the surface of podcasts, or internet sites/blogs like Huffington Post.

Maybe I'm not "camera friendly." Maybe I do "eat my own dandruff"

So what happens when you need to fill 24 hours of news and you don't have enough stories? Well, you report extensively on things that aren't important. You can create storylines within stories that don't necessarily exist. You can serve up bold editorial comments/opinions on issues that serve as a way not to enlighten consumers and better our society, but more to make it interesting for the viewers so they keep coming back.

There is enough of an interest in sports that 'around the clock' sports networks can be easily supported; ESPN or sports radio are the best examples of this. These networks don't always have the same oversaturation issues as news networks though, because there's a lot of sports, and they have a responsibility to report on all the action. With baseball oversaturation is a non-issue because there really are enough games to support a 24 hour network during the baseball season. Remember, there's 162 games a year for 30 teams, which usually means about 6 games a week for 6 months. There's always a new game/story to talk about with baseball, because the games are happening every single day. This is one of the things I love about baseball, the large sample size allows you to find out who the really good teams/players are without worrying about whether it was a fluke.

Football is different. We have an avalanche of games on Sunday, then those games are talked about, dissected, analyzed, re-dissected, regurgitated, and analyzed once more, and then Wednesday rolls around and the networks essentially rinse, and repeat. Despite the fewer number of games, any network will admit that they spend the majority of their time/resources on football because it's the most popular sport in America, and that seems pretty fair for a business in a capitalist society. It is obviously flawed though, when football, a sport that has 16 games a year gets more coverage than baseball, a game that has 162 games a year. There's just not enough to talk about every week because there's not enough games. So sports fans end up enduring analysts griping for days/weeks at a time about how Roy Williams dropped a pass in a game that didn't count. This is not an indictment on football, I still love the game, right up there with baseball and basketball, there's just far too much analysis for me, and I know that the 2 weeks before the Super Bowl happens are gonna annoy the crap out of me like they do every year, with so much analyzing and predicting without anything actually happening for 2 weeks.

I can promise you every Sunday my DVR will be fired up and I'll be genuinely excited to watch my Bears play. I'll even read Gregg Easterbrook's TMQ (Tuesday Morning Quarterback) article on ESPN on Tuesday. But as for the entire preseason coverage and rehashing of the week's games on Wednesday through Saturday, I think Cee Lo summed up my thoughts when he said "Forget you and f@#$ you too."