The good folks over at Awful Announcing are still in shock over the top ESPN features this year. Specifically, Who's Now, the ESPN summer tournament used to vote for the most "now" athlete of the year, was the most searched-for item on ESPN.com's web-site. AA isn't the only one confused and/or annoyed by ESPN. Will Leitch of deadspin.com wrote a 304 page book titled "God Save the Fan" that describes ESPN as thinking its viewers are stupid. And many other bloggers have opined on ESPN's supposed stupidity, mediocrity, or poor taste.
I think the answer to all this blogger angst is quite simple. Before bloggers complain about ESPN, most of them begin by telling us how much they liked ESPN from 1994-1998 or so. Doing a little fancy math on my fellow bloggers, that was when they were teenagers or early college students. And that right there may be the answer: ESPN's content, outside of its live sports announcing perhaps, is mainly FOR TEENAGERS AND COLLEGE STUDENTS. Look at the Who's Now voters; it's the young folk that loved that topic. Neil Best sums it up nicely here. So what does that say about your ESPN angst, fellow bloggers? It appears that what we have is a bunch of elderly blogger 20-somethings and 30-somethings telling the kids to get off their lawn and stop playing their loud music on them there I-Pods, heh. I wonder, is ESPN that different from a decade ago? Or is it you who changed and got older? Yes, I'm baiting you, but prove me wrong.
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