Interview with Paulsen of Sports Media Watch

In the last decade, you may have heard as much about television ratings as quarterback ratings. Whether it’s television, print, radio or online, ‘major’ sports media personalities constantly mention them in some way to justify or belittle the viewership of games. However, with the increased public discussion to viewing measurement, few actually provide proper context behind the much ballyhooed numbers. It’s why a site such as Sports Media Watch has become a go-to destination for media and fans alike over the last five years.

Since 2006, Paulsen has maintained the well-regarded and highly-referenced site which takes a deeper look into Nielsen ratings and major movement in the sports media industry. Certainly one with his own opinions and curiosities about sports media, Paulsen was gracious enough to respond to questions about the purpose of SMW, the public conversation about ratings, social media’s role (or lack thereof) in increasing television viewership and his frustration with the sports media world throughout the LeBron James free agency saga.

In advance, many thanks again, Paulsen.

A Sports Scribe: You’ve operated SMW for a few years now. Could you explain why you came up with the site?

Paulsen: I used to write a lot of Wikipedia posts, which in retrospect wasn’t a great idea. One day in ’06, I read a blog post that quoted fairly liberally from one of the Wikipedia articles I edited, and I realized that it made a lot more sense for me to publish that kind of information on my own blog, as opposed to a place like Wikipedia where you really have no ownership of the things you write.


Scribe: SMW is predominantly television ratings analysis, yet over the past year and a half, you’ve added some excellent in-depth interviews with some major players in the sports media business. How did a passionate fan as you manage to talk to the crew from Inside the NBA and Russ Greenberg of HBO Sports?

Paulsen: I can really thank some very good sports PR people out there for helping me get these interviews, such as Jeff Pomeroy and Megan Bondi at Turner Sports, Nate Smeltz and Diane Lamb at ESPN, Mike Giluyi at PromaxBDA, Brandon Bagley with the Ivy Sports Symposium, and others.

I actually went to Turner Sports in December of last year and May of this year, and they couldn’t have been more gracious and accommodating, from the PR officials like Pomeroy, Eric Welch and Tareia Williams to the on-air personalities like Chris Webber, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson. They showed me an incredible amount of respect, which is amazing considering how bloggers are sometimes viewed by others in the sports media.

In February, I attended the ESPN Wide World of Sports opening, and ESPN’s Mike Soltys and George Bodenheimer were kind enough to take the time to speak with me – especially Mike, who I pelted with sports media questions as we walked through the Disney theme park. Funny story: as Mike and I were talking, a woman came by and just blasted ESPN the Weekend right to our faces. She was the only person I saw who complained.

Also, I should thank Bob Rathbun and Darren Rovell, the first two people I reached out to for interviews.


Scribe: The interviews with former players & coaches turned analysts – NBA’s Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley and Chris Webber from TNT and former NHLer Barry Melrose of ESPN – were especially enjoyable reads. Did they discuss anything about how they educated themselves on the media business during or after their active careers in those leagues?

Paulsen: Not necessarily. Kenny mentioned how he didn’t really see being a TV analyst as a career until Craig Sager told him how much potential he (and Inside the NBA) had.

Set Meters used by Nielsen for ratings measurement (via AgencySpy)

Scribe: Nielsen television ratings have been around since 1950, yet it truly started to enter the sports lexicon over the past decade. Sports media critics and industry insiders have had conversations about the metrics for years, yet it seems that only now, these numbers are talked up on the air in the same breath as yards per catch and ERA. Do you see a rhyme or reason to it all?
 
Paulsen: People like to compare. They like to say that their sport is #1, and someone else’s sport is less popular. From what I can tell, sports fans use television ratings as a sort of value judgment, where sports with higher TV ratings are somehow better than sports with low TV ratings.

Just look at the NHL-NBA and MLB-NFL flame wars that erupt each year. I think a lot of fans take pride in how their sport does on an overall level, and on a team level as well. Just going from what I see on message boards, Laker fans are proud, for whatever reason, that their team is the biggest draw in the NBA. I guess it’s a good reflection on Kobe. Yankee fans like to point out how World Series ratings drop when their team isn’t in it. It’s a badge of honor, another thing to brag about. That said, I don’t necessarily agree that TV ratings information is as commonplace as yards per catch and ERA – but it certainly seems more commonplace than it was a few years ago.

You know what this is (via Los Angeles Times' Showtracker)

 
Scribe: Until this past July, you were once very active on Twitter; using the forum to engage with your readers outside of SMW itself. Yet, shortly after The Decision, you tweeted “underrated aspect of LeBron saga: the unbelievably poor state of American sports media. And I don't just mean ESPN.” Could you elaborate a bit on that statement?
 
Paulsen: I truly believe the coverage of NBA free agency, and of LeBron James in particular, was the nadir of sports journalism – at least since I’ve been following it. Lots of rumor based reporting, the ‘Allan Houston’s house’ story being arguably the worst of it.

The coverage of LeBron post-The Decision has produced, in my opinion, some of the worst sportswriting in recent memory. There’s one writer who has gone after James in such a personal, unprofessional manner over the course of the past several months that it amazes me he is considered one of the better NBA writers out there. He’s just one of many. The number of cheap shots taken at James, whose only crime is being very full of himself, has been frankly disheartening.

I’m not a big fan of moral outrage, especially when it comes to something irrelevant like sports. I can’t muster up the energy to be offended by something like Hanley Ramirez not going hard after a ball. As far as LeBron’s special goes, I really have no respect for anybody who watched it and then complained about it afterwards. Everyone knew what it would be days before it actually aired. Nobody had to watch it; if they wanted to know where he would sign, they could have just checked any sports website that night. I watched it, and then I got on with my life. I didn’t feel the need to complain about it for four months, and I surely didn’t feel the need to judge somebody on the basis of sixty minutes of easily escapable television.

Anyone who has watched LeBron over the years knows he has a big ego. For me, that’s mildly amusing. For others, that is a high crime. I guess it comes down to perspective – or lack of it, in the case of the sports media. If LeBron wants to think of himself as a “winner” when he hasn’t won, that’s his prerogative. I don’t need to write articles sneeringly pointing out the fact that he hasn’t won a championship. A lot of these guys take James’ hubris personally, which tells me that they need to perhaps take some time off and reevaluate their lives.

The defense of the people of Cleveland has been particularly ridiculous, considering that James was a free agent and owed neither the city nor the Cavaliers anything. The fans of Cleveland deserved nothing from James, or any other player, the same way no fan in any city deserves anything from the people providing them optional entertainment. As far as James not informing Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, I just think of the many, many players who are not informed about trades, or about being cut – like Damon Jones, who in 2008 reportedly found out from his limo driver that Gilbert’s Cavs traded him to the Bucks.

Overall, it was a pretty awful summer for anyone who enjoys rational thought, as opposed to screaming outrage, cheap shots, and the ravenous tearing apart of yet another athlete. There’s a lot of people I lost respect for over the summer, not that it would (or should) matter to them.


Scribe: Being that social media has become part of the new normal, how much of a role do you think it plays in attracting eyeballs for sports programming, if at all.

Paulsen: I think the influence of social media is a bit overstated. I may be wrong about this, but I can’t imagine that a tweet or Facebook message from ESPN or Turner is going to get someone who wasn’t going to watch a sporting event to suddenly decide to tune in. Even in the case of dedicated (as opposed to casual) sports fans, I’d imagine the effect of social media on the decision to watch a sporting event would be negligible.


Scribe: Considering how deep in the forest you are when it comes to the sports industry, do you have the same sporting interests today as when you were younger? If not, how do you reconcile such changes?

Paulsen: Probably not. For example, the first couple of times the Spurs made the NBA Finals (’99 and ’03), I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it through the lens of their negative effect on the NBA’s TV ratings. Once I became more aware of the business of the NBA, it was tougher for me to watch their subsequent appearances without thinking about how poorly the games were doing in the ratings. For games that I know will do poorly – for example, Bucks/Hawks Game 7 last year – there is certainly that feeling of ‘nobody’s watching this’. Generally, games and series that do terribly tend to correlate with games and series that aren’t very fun to watch. I can’t think of very many series that have been entertaining and well-played that still had terrible ratings. Maybe Devils/Ducks in ’03, but perhaps a more astute NHL viewer than I can tell me whether or not that series was actually good hockey (I enjoyed it, at least).

At the very least, I can say that the business aspect of sports is very much present in my mind when I’m watching games.

As far as how I reconcile this with my personal sports fandom, sometimes I have to separate myself from the business aspect of sports in order to enjoy it. It’s been a bit more difficult to do that since I started the blog.

The San Francisco Giants and their fans couldn't care less about ratings (via SF Chronicle)

 
Scribe: Much is made about how this past World Series between the new champion San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers was tied as the lowest rated series of all time despite the teams being from the 5th and 6th largest media markets in the United States. When both teams defeated the favored Philadelphia Phillies and New York Yankees, immediately there were cries about how the Series would fare poorly because neither team (more so New York) was involved. Do you see some sort of self-fulfilling prophesy when it comes to ratings: if people start predicting doom, doom will happen? If they begin to hype something, ‘everyone will watch’?
 
Paulsen: In a way, yes. It’s kind of a chicken and egg scenario. The Yankees are a big TV draw because they can attract large audiences. Those large audiences watch the Yankees because they’re told the Yankees are popular and important. Here’s my ‘theory’: there’s a base level of popularity these teams bring to the table, which is magnified by media attention. The Yankees are already extremely popular, and media hype just shoots them further into the popularity stratosphere. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Yankees would be the best draw in baseball even without media hype – but if the media gave more equitable attention to the Yankees and other teams, perhaps the gulf between a Yankee World Series (11.7 in 2009) and a non-Yankee World Series (8.4 in 2008 and 2010) would not be as great.

Having said that, one thing that bothers me is when sports fans complain about the Yankees, Red Sox, Heat, Lakers, Penguins, Red Wings, Cowboys, Patriots and others getting lots of nationally televised games. With few exceptions, these teams always get substantially higher ratings than others, and that’s on the fans, not the networks. I’ve heard it suggested that if the Rangers and Giants got more national TV appearances, the ratings would have been higher for the World Series. But the Rangers were on FOX as many times as the Yankees last season (granted, not always as the featured game) and the Giants had two fewer appearances. As another example, just this past week, ESPN aired Suns/Heat on Wednesday and TNT aired Suns/Magic on Thursday. In both games, Phoenix was blown out. The Heat game drew a 1.4, nearly twice the rating of the Magic game (0.8). Why shouldn’t the networks give the Heat more national appearances than the Magic? Say what you want about the Heat hype, but nobody’s forcing anyone to watch.


Scribe: Finally, SMW’s existence is based on a belief that sports fans should care or at least be aware of viewing measurement. As a whole, do you think they do care?

Paulsen: I would say the belief of SMW is not necessarily that sports fans be aware of viewing measurement, but that they have accurate information. There are plenty of newspaper articles that don’t distinguish between a cable rating and U.S. rating, an overnight and a final or even between a rating and a share. Granted, who cares, it’s just TV ratings. But when I see a lot of the incorrect comparisons that go on, it can be a bit frustrating.

As far as whether sports fans care about viewing measurement, I would go back to my answer earlier. Fans want to know how their sport is doing relative to other sports, and from that perspective, I do think they care. They don’t care enough to think about it too frequently, and I don’t think it’s a top of mind concern when they’re watching actual sporting events, but it matters enough for them to want the basic information.

Virus

There is probably no more undervalued component of business than organizational behavior, save for ethics. When managers, executives and owners set out to add (or sadly these days, subtract) personnel, the core objective is to find the most capable performers of tasks possible. No matter how much we believe in being über-talented individuals with über-reserves of awesomeness, the reality is that talent > awesomeness.

Now there’s no disputing the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace, in fact, this Scribe certainly admits to having a laughably higher EQ than IQ. Emotional intelligence shifts morale for better or worse, allowing or discouraging employees to utilize their full skill sets. However, nothing will cost an employer, regardless of size and scope more revenue, profits, prestige and clients than incompetence or negligence of duties.

Constantly, there’s chatter about teams bringing in ‘players of good character’, ‘savvy veterans’, ‘lockerroom guys’ and my favorites, ‘winners’ and ‘leaders’. You’d be led to believe that every team is like the scene in Kindergarten Cop as ‘Ah-nold’… err, John Kimble has to give discipline to a classroom full of rambunctious four and five year olds.

Yet, for those of us who have been around these teams in some capacity, this isn’t the case, at least while on the job. Despite the singular focus of becoming an elite athlete that they all exhibit and the transgressions that a few carry with them, there are such diverse personalities throughout every roster that the irascible tend to be offset, if not overwhelmed by the affable, reserved and cautious.

That’s the intrigue of Terrell Owens’ fourth stop in his eventual Hall of Fame career. In one of the most surprising acquisitions in recent NFL history, the Buffalo Bills signed the wideout to a one-year deal this weekend. Surprising not in that he was signed or as ensuing details emerge that his agent Drew Rosenhaus may have been 100% right about the interest around the league, but in that T.O. is actually in Buffalo.

Much has been made about his previous stops and deservingly so. His feuds with team personnel are NFL parables on the relationships between coaches and players, between teammates and between players and management. Yet, as many have and will continue to write about until the end of time, the tantalizing talents he possesses, no matter how much of a pain in the ass he may be, are hard for any struggling team to pass up. It’s akin to what most of us go through in our professional and/or academic lives.

When a company brings in ‘that guy’ or has to deal with the affectionately-labeled Dragon Lady in order to jumpstart productivity, the immediate reaction may be moans and groans. This person’s well-chronicled history – be it through news of him or her being a change agent at other firms or word of mouth of interactions with industry colleagues – will present challenges to the current employees. How will this person screw up our lives may be the initial thought, but will this person bring us to the promised land – greater profits, improved quality of work, revamped company culture, stability, etc. – is the fundamental issue that all will consider in some degree.

And so like many others for the next few months, we’ll ask if Ralph Wilson made the right move for his team by bringing in someone considered a locker-room leper in San Francisco, jaded and jealous in Philadelphia and a distrustful distraction in Dallas. We’ll wonder if the mercenary-like one year deal will remind T.O. how much of a precarious position he is now in because of his controversies over the course of his career; that a team will rather use him for short-term gains and force his combative persona to earn a long-term commitment.

We’ll wonder not only about his relationship with Trent Edwards (and for argument’s sake, current backup J.P. Losman), but with Lee Evans, Marshawn Lynch and the rest of his new teammates.

We’ll wonder if Owens’ arrival really helps the Bills supplant AFC East division champion Miami, the defensively-retooled New York Jets and a Patriots team with Tom Brady’s imminent return to the gridiron.

We’ll wonder if Wilson and head coach Dick Jauron can convince him that at least for 2009 that he can trust them to deal with him fairly.

Most of all, we’ll wonder if Owens – despite having a few good years of elite play at the age of 35 – finally gets it or is truly a virus that can cripple the structure and identity of a franchise, as was the case in the past.

Say What?!?!: An interesting take from Jason Cole from Yahoo! Sports.

Knowledge

Due to taking in a weekend excursion away from the hustle and bustle, there won’t be much to talk about on A Sports Scribe until at least Monday. Yet, while in transit, a few things popped to mind.

For starters, I can’t remember people talking so much about a quadrennial event before. If you think I’m talking about the Presidential elections, think again. Everywhere I turn, be it in New York or Newton, MA or Providence (hints of the excursion), Michael Phelps’ exploits have been the instant conversation starter. The dominance of both the U.S. men and women’s basketball squads has piqued the interest of even the most ardent pro-basketball detractors. Some of you may consider giving beach volleyball a shot, at least as the summer fades into the fall.

For all of the nasty controversies surrounding the Beijing Olympics, they have managed to capture excitement that hasn’t truly existed Stateside since the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta; an event made infamous by the tragic bombings. Maybe it’s the high-tech swimsuits, the fire hydrant-like statures of the male gymnasts (they’re short, but JACKED!) or Dwayne Wade’s aerodynamically-altered hair. Yet, when was the last time you’ve heard these gems on your way to work (forgive the Stuart Scott moment for those who don't sip that cup of tea, but I'm from and still live in the 'hood):

"Yo, son, did you see that synchronized diving sh*t last night?”
“Hell yeah! That sh*t’s crazy. Same time, my dude. That’s crazy”
“When those Chinese chicks did that spinning (acts out the spinning with his hands), I was like DAYMN!"

OR

“Hey, John, I’ll send you those competitive runs in a few minutes once I clean up the Excel a bit.”
“Sounds good. By the way, did you watch the Olympics last night?”
“I watched until about midnight because I had to wake up early.”
“You’re real good about that because…”
“Let me guess: you stayed up.”
“Until 2.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“Phelps, man. Phelps.”

Have you ever checked the mail and asked yourself “why the hell do I subscribe to this magazine again”? Then, it hits you; you subscribed because the annual price was next to nothing and you got a free choctchkey out of it. Of course, there has to be much more to it. After all, you’re not going to grab just any magazine, but one that is going to enhance your knowledge or at least give you the kick in the pants to get some personal project done. You keep telling yourself this after eight months of piling up unread magazines that are not propping up your Nintendo Wii. Yet, one day, something really catches your eye that reminds you of why you invested $20 annually in the first place.

It is that reason why you might have seen more links from trade magazines on this blog than, say, ESPN or FOX Sports. Sports as an industry has seemingly exploded over the past decade because even the most old-school of scouts, managers and media personalities have been compelled to embrace the digital wave and the business that surrounds the action.

As you can tell from this not-so-aesthetically pleasing template, I’m not the most savvy when it comes to the web. However, something that my brief involvement in sports media (as well as the fulltime job) has taught me is that the very best in both businesses have at least a working knowledge of another industry that connects to their careers. It’s for that reason why you will see references to general or non-sports media from time to time. It's the reason why I subscribed to WIRED over a year ago, even though admittedly, I have only thumbed through some issues and forgotten others. However, I was pleasantly surprised to how much sports-related pieces are in the magazine each month. This month has a few worth reading.

• If you recall from the visit to the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, the new playpen for the Dallas Cowboys is essentially down the block. Now, I mentioned how massive it was in person, yet because I was unable to get close to the construction site for more pictures and video, it was hard to capture its largesse. The September print edition of WIRED gives a sectional view of the new stadium’s design and technological treats. Even while writing this brief note about it, I’m in awe. It’s believed that everything is bigger in Texas. I just had no clue how much bigger.
  Imagine a stadium where there are support arches that are as long as the Empire State Building; high-definition LED displays over midfield that stretch from 20-yard line ot 20 yard-line and a 410-foot X 256-foot retractable roof . Oh, and it's a 2.7 million-square foot facility that costs at least $1.1 BILLION to build.
  
• Also in this month's edition, they have a quick matching game about athletes who are bloggers themselves; turning a platform littered with the most cantankerous and snarky pages on its head.
  
• While those will eventually land on the magazine's website, currently, they have a ton of work about the Olympics, including this bit that will enrage fellow bloggers who have taken NBC to task about its coverage.

Sunset

If there is a perfect moniker for the 2008 sports calendar, it is The Year of the Retirement.

It’s not as if all the professional athletes in the world had a convention somewhere to schedule their sunsets ahead of time, but there have been a few more farewell press conferences and phone calls than normal. It’s come to the point where Sports Illustrated’s website features a slideshow of the “twenty biggest retirements” thus far; those that have already happened and those that will start after the end of their seasons.

Some athletes who called it a career are without a doubt more recognizable than others. Some were newsworthy as they left fans scratching their heads. However, there are a few announcements that, for various reasons, have gone relatively unnoticed. Instead of ranking the importance or the overall careers of these athletes, tonight’s Scribe post looks into those various reasons that go outside of “it was just time”.


Dan Morgan and David Pollack: Most of the retirements that have been announced have been related to the National Football League. Yet, the circumstances of these goodbyes differ vastly from those of more famed retirees such as Steve McNair and Brett Favre. Both Morgan (top right; six seasons with Carolina) and Pollack (second right; three in Cincinnati) came to the League with a lot of promise, but debilitating injuries jeopardized their careers early.

Morgan, a hard-hitting linebacker who first made his name like many of the league’s best defensive players of the past three decades; in Football U, also known as the University of Miami. After being drafted with the eleventh pick by the Panthers, he started 11 games in 2001, helped solidify the league’s second best defense en route to the franchise’s lone Super Bowl appearance the following year and made the Pro Bowl in 2003. Yet, he only played 66 of Carolina’s 119 games (including all seven of the playoff games) in seven seasons. A series of concussions, an ankle injury and a partially torn Achilles tendon took their toll on him as he felt that he could not contribute to what is supposed to be a revamped New Orleans Saints defense in the upcoming season.

Pollack was a stud defensive end out of Georgia, collecting several major college football awards on his way to the NFL. In 2005, the Bengals selected him with the 17th pick in the first round and converted him to outside linebacker. He played fourteen games in his rookie season and despite just notching 28 tackles (22 solo), he picked up 4 ½ sacks for a team that found itself in the postseason for the first time in 15 years. Yet, in the first quarter of an early 2006 season game versus Cleveland, Pollack broke his sixth cervical vertebrae on a tackle. Though not paralyzed, he was unable to suit up again that year. His injury was initially considered career-threatening, but even with the improved prognosis in January 2007, he didn’t play that season either. Bengals coach Marvin Lewis said a few weeks ago that Pollack is going to retire, though the exact words have not been uttered by the player himself.

Football is a very high-risk, high-reward sport. It may have the country in a daze for twenty weekends a year, but for many of its players, it can cause a lifetime of pain. Morgan (29) and Pollack (26) would have been at both ends of an NFLer’s prime, but no matter how much their hearts wanted to get on the field, their bodies were unable to match that desire. Their retirements serve as another reminder for those of us who believe that it’s always about the Almighty Dollar in pro sports; no matter how much we are aware of the fortune and fame that come with success, the physical body doesn’t know how much money you make.


Maurice Greene: There seem to be more controversies than track and field competitions, if you are like me and rarely keep up with the sport outside of the Olympics. It’s as if every athlete is connected to some performance-enhancing drug ring and check fraud (notice the and, not or). What makes Greene stick out above names as Trevor Graham, Justin Gatlin, Marion Jones or Tim Montgomery? It’s that until he officially retired in February, he avoided any questions of his professional integrity due to PEDs. Then in a New York Times article published in April, Greene responded to claims made by a former drug adviser that he used PEDs.

Greene had a longer career in track than many of the sport’s elite could manage. He notched two gold medals in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, along with a silver and bronze in 2004 (Athens). He held the world 100-meter record at 9.79 seconds back in 1999, a race he had dominated for two years going back to the 1997 World Championships. With the clouds hanging over the sport, his name may be more aligned with a $10,000 check that he wrote to this former adviser than his former records and medals.

When someone retires with a record of excellence, ideally, (s)he is not supposed to leave much doubt about the contributions made throughout her or his career. Yet, in the case of Greene – who has never failed a drug test, even if that leaves you skeptical – he left more questions than answers. With the Beijing Olympics on the horizon, this story may pick up some steam as the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) is seeking an explanation for his actions.

So why did he retire? His reason could be as legit as they come: in training for Beijing, he could not physically keep up due to injuries over the years. He wants to make room for new stars, he said in his farewell. For some, however, this recent news makes it hard to believe that Greene walked away for purely altruistic reasons.


Larry Allen: Another NFL retirement, this time with a player who set a high standard in his position in the way that many of the heralded quarterbacks and running backs did for many of the league’s current stars. Allen – considered by football people as the strongest player in the league’s 88-year history – retired after fourteen years in the league; having spent twelve with the Dallas Cowboys and his final two with San Francisco.

When kids growing up in the 1990s debated if Emmitt Smith or Barry Sanders was the better running back, the difference always lied with the superior offensive line Dallas possessed for nearly the entire decade. Allen’s brute strength and deceptive quickness blasted holes in the defensive line for Smith to run through. He made eleven (yeah, that’s right, eleven) Pro Bowls at three different offensive line positions: left guard, right guard and left tackle. He blocked for Hall-of-Famers and Pro Bowlers: running backs Smith and Frank Gore along with quarterbacks Troy Aikman and Drew Bledsoe. He won his lone Super Bowl ring in his second season with the ‘Boys and remained with the organization for twelve years.

Likely, he will join the other ten Cowboys who are enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Since offensive linemen are typically low-key and still unsung, Allen didn’t get a pomp-and-circumstance press conference or video package on the sports channels. It was certainly the case for the perennial Oiler/Titan Bruce Matthews until he joined the Hall last year. The same will go for other all-time greats such as Jonathan Ogden and Orlando Pace.

Until Canton…

Sensationalism

For once when Terrell Owens says something, it wasn't illicting hoards of hate in his direction.

In fact, it seemed as if when Owens jokingly referred to Jessica Simpson's appearance in a Texas Stadium luxury suite at Tony Romo's worst game this season as a distraction, people laughed it up.

And went too far.

Days after losing to the Philadelphia Eagles, folks began to have a field day with the fact that Romo hadn't performed well with her or former girlfriend Carrie Underwood were in the suite. While many in the media used the excuse of 'T.O. being T.O.' to run with this story, it already had legs of its own thanks to someone... something else.

FOX.

It's no secret that FOX fashions itself as an entertainment network, from its success with staples such as The Simpsons and American Idol to its monumental emphasis on sports programming with its coverage of NFC games. The slant on sports is similar to anything else under the helm of Rupert Murdoch; make it sexy, salacious or scandalous. FOX is a master of cross promotions in their sports programming... not so much on their technological innovations (that failed tail on the hockey puck during their five minutes of NHL coverage). Yet, FOX wants to show their games to more than sports loyalists, but to the ultimate casual fan who probably doesn't have a clue about what is happening on the field.

Enter Jessica.


Somehow, the pop singer who lagged behind Britney Spears, Christina Aguliera and the boy-bands of the mid-to-late nineties has survived it all to become something more than relevant in a new era of entertainment. She has the music, movies, magazine covers, Pepsi campaigns and likely, the best publicist in the business (the latter is the only logical explanation of how she has made it to 2007 without becoming an answer to a trivia question). And now she has the quarterback of the most popular team in the country's most popular sport. Though this wasn't her first appearance at a Cowboys game at home, this was the first time that FOX noticed this. Just when you thought that you were watching a football game with a few bells and whistles, you found yourself wanting to throw the remote at the TV because of the constant references and attention to Simpson's relationship with Romo.

Outside an October loss to the New England Patriots, there was little for Cowboys fans to get riled up about this season. Of course, considering that any mention of her brings out the gossip pages, trashy tabloids and Perez Hilton-wannabes, this gave Cowboys fans something to be quite miffed about. One fan was so incensed that he felt that this story is the reason why women shouldn't watch football. While this isn't or shouldn't be a reason to call upon women's right advocates, this is a reason to wonder if this would happen with another network. Well...

This wouldn't happen on CBS. CBS' sports coverage is as no-frills as it gets.

Maybe on NBC. The Peacock has its hands in many forms of entertainment thanks to its parent, General Electric, yet they have some limits.

ABC? Well, it happened already. Someone by the name of Eva Longoria.

If you are tired of hearing about Jinxing Jessica, don't blame Owens. Don't even blame the media at-large. Blame FOX.

Because the camera could have shown the Eagles enjoying this upset. Or maybe Romo, himself.

If there's one thing to appreciate about this overblown story, the sales on pink-colored jerseys may decrease. It's about time.

Say What?!?!: Call this an early present from Scribe. I remember watching this game in my dorm room. There was no doubt that this was one of the worst officiated games I have ever seen, but the nation only knows about this because of color commentator Tommy Heinsohn's brilliance. Enjoy!