ESPN's Online Downgrade

I want to thank ESPN. I bitch about you to every human being that will listen. I complain to no end about your inability to refrain from making the news you cover. I can’t stand most of your anchors and nearly every “expert.” As a little Bearcat I can remember watching Sports Center reruns two or three times in one day… soaking in every detail of the prior days sports news. Now I just wait for the “All 22” segment so I can hear Emmitt Smiff discuss how the Steelers deef-ence needs to attract the ball and use-tilize the run bits on third and sorts. Put simply, I hate your TV content but I have nowhere else to go. I get my Pittsburgh sports news form FSN Pittsburgh (it is great and the only way I can stand being away from my beloved sports teams), but for national coverage on TV all I got is Sports Center…

And as bad as the TV stuff had become at least the online content was good. For years Page 2 was the most important website during my work day. I read and loved Jason Whitlock, loved Shandoff, tolerated Skip Gayless and patiently waited for Sports Guy and DeGallo updates to get me through the pain of another workday. But eventually ESPN killed Whitlock’s column (at the time I blamed Mike Lupica and ESPN TV)…Shandoff grew tired of ESPN or was not reupped on contract and eventually Page 2 died a little bit. I still read Sports Guy but most of the time I am disappointed and frankly just spend the time looking for clues as to if he is on his way out or taking a shot at editors or ESPN management. Now I get my sports columns else where, I go to fox sports, I read kissing suzy kolber and I check Deadspin.com often enough to account for at least 2% of their daily hits. My sports life is better informed and more fun today. But for hard sports news and analysis I still go to ESPN.com. When wanted to know the scores for all the games and only wanted to look one place I went to ESPN.com. Box Score for the Pirates lasted disaster… ESPN.com… Fantasy breakdown… First stop? You guessed it, ESPN.com.

And what do I get for my loyalty to this site… a retooling akin to New Coke. It wasn’t bad enough that you went and gave that ass wipe Rick Reilly a huge contract. I could almost get over that but then you had to go and make your website a complete cluster fuck.

So here are a couple suggestions for you other than just simply retro back to the old design…

1. More Pontiac game changer advertisements. I know that the load time on this website is currently sitting north of two minutes but if you could make that ad a little larger and more annoying it could add at least another minute of load time. While your at it can you make the Ford F-150 ad a little bigger as well. I need to be reminded of the fact that Ford has a all new redesigned truck in a more prominent way. Thanks.

2. More video… those Pontiac and F-150 ads are only doing half the work to bog down my computer. If you ad a second video panel I am sure you could push the ten minute mark.

3. While adding the video and additional ads please post the headlines and scores in a smaller and more illegible font. They are almost too easy to read. After going nearly blind waiting for the page to load up I think I could make out at least two scores. Why are you helping me?

4. Can we move the link for ESPN cars to the top of the page? I really would hate to miss “Hot Celebrities and Their Hotter SUVs” (Fuck this makes me angry… do you really think guys give two shits about this fucking crap!!!)

5. More crippling code… I know you have tried to make the page completely useless by ensuring that Internet Explore craps out half the time I log on to your website but that is making my PC Russian Roulette less fun. I want a more random crashing of my already unstable POS Microsoft program. How about if the website crashes when I am mid-paragraph and not just when I am surfing between baseball tonight’s website and my fantasy page or just coming on to the ESPN home page. That would make me near homicidal and finish ESPN’s desire to completely infuriate the male universe.

Thanks… you former loyal reader,

Bearcat