Sports

Great, ANOTHER streak-filler post?

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I was planning on writing a post wrapping up the Olympics in more ways than one… but my day became completely occupied with my fascination watching the FantasySharks drafts over the course of the day. And my own league wasn’t even part of it, being stuck at for over nine hours. I may have to consider the first day of the FantasySharks drafts a personal day for me from now on.

For the record, I think I’ve done pretty decently drafting so far (I’m 11th, so I get two picks pretty much one after the other). I’ve picked up Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew, and I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet because I came very close to spending my first two picks on wide receivers. (The Shark leagues are PPR leagues, but with two wideouts and no flex, so people are reticent to take wideouts too early. By the way, I feel like ESPN’s PPR rankings are the Matt Millen of PPR rankings; four wideouts in the first eight spots?) Regardless, despite the differences between fantasy and real football, anytime you pick up two players among the Top 50 resumes for the Hall of Fame, you must be doing something right. (If you want to follow the rest of my draft, I’m tweeting every pick and I might write a wrap-up when it’s done.)

That Olympics post may be up by the time you read this, or I may have scrapped the idea entirely because I wasn’t feeling it. Time will tell.

What Arab oil has to do with the Premier League – and the sports TV wars

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ESPN. Fox. NBC. Al Jazeera?

One thing that has become apparent to those following the world of international sports in recent years is that you don’t bleep with oil money. There’s no other way to explain why the United States lost the 2022 World Cup to Qatar of all places, in spite of all its problems. The richest horse race in the world is held in Dubai, as is the culminating event of the European Tour (last I checked Dubai is not in Europe, and I doubt it’s in a climate particularly conducive to golf courses). And American interest in soccer, at least European club soccer, could be shot down just as it’s getting off the ground by the whims of an Arab oil sheik.

Al Jazeera is best known to Americans as that group that aired Osama bin Laden’s tapes, and as such most Americans pretty much associate it with terrorists and thus its attempt to launch an English-language news network in the US has pretty much been a miserable failure. But over the past year it’s been on an astonishing run of acquiring US rights to international soccer leagues, winning rights to three of the five biggest leagues in Europe – Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, and France’s Ligue 1 – which it will use to launch two new channels on Wednesday called beIN Sport.

But of course, the big daddy of European soccer rights in the US by a long shot is the English Premier League, and that has to have people at Fox quaking in their boots. Fox has already lost the rights to MLS to NBC, and Serie A to the new beIN Sport operation. It still has rights to the UEFA Champions League and newly-acquired World Cup rights, but the English Premier League is the bread and butter of their Fox Soccer operation. Lose that, and you might as well move what’s left to a Fox Sports network and shutter Fox Soccer, convert it to Fox Sports 1 or 2, or sell it to the beIN Sport people. Already competitor GolTV has lost the rights to its own La Liga bread and butter, leaving it with not much more than the German Bundesliga, the Brazilian league, and some scattered international competition.

If Fox has to be worried about the prospect of these upstarts from Qatar stealing Premier League rights, American soccer fans have to be absolutely terrified. A lot of work has been done to get to the point where a substantial number of Americans are now interested in the Premier League and to a lesser extent European soccer in general, and beIN Sport could end up destroying all of it. Not even the NFL can launch a network from scratch in less than a year and get anything close to wide distribution, and even Fox Soccer doesn’t have as much distribution as you might think. How quickly can beIN Sport even get to Fox Soccer’s level? A year? Two years? Five years? (It doesn’t help that a lot that beIN Sport has done has been kept low-profile, almost secret, to the point that it’s not even clear what carriage agreements beIN Sport has signed, but the list of providers to call on their Web site indicates it includes none of the biggest ones.)

beIN Sport has already declared it has no plans to sublicence any games to anyone, meaning the sizable stateside fandom of Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid used to seeing games on GolTV and ESPN are already screwed. For the same to happen to the Premier League, so soon after Fox’s much-publicized experiment in airing every game of the Premier League’s final week, could be potentially catastrophic. And what of ESPN? They’ve gone on a full-court press promoting their embrace of soccer, even after losing the World Cup to Fox. But what if they can’t air Premier League or La Liga games anymore either? They’ll still have MLS, some National Team games, and the Euro tournament, but will that be worth it?

ESPN’s UK operation has already lost the rights to the Premier League, which could reduce ESPN’s motivation to keep airing it in the States. Fox will surely have motivation to keep the backbone of Fox Soccer, but will that be enough to counter seemingly bottomless piles of oil money? Soccer fans should enjoy the current relative glut of European soccer on television, especially the recent thrilling Premier League finish, while it lasts, because it might not for much longer. And they should root hard for Fox, as well as anyone else – ESPN, NBC, even CBS Sports Network or truTV, or a strange bedfellows alliance between two or more of them – in the sports TV wars interested in the Premier League rights, lest soccer in this country end up set back decades.

Then again, maybe beIN Sport can round up cable providers with no problems whatsoever… in which case the sports TV wars, and maybe the larger American media industry, might just have a new contender.

Introducing the Morgan Wick Fantasy Football Fifty Challenge!

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Last year, I decided to carry out a project called the Simulated Experts’ Fantasy League. I’d take the “big boards” of eight prominent fantasy sites and draft an eight-team league using each of them, then play out a season. It was an interesting experiment, but not one I’d like to try again with. I intended to run a second league, the Simulated Experts’ Auction Fantasy League. This league would attempt to hold an auction using several sites that listed recommended auction values for players.

After waiting for sites to have as up-to-date and relevant big boards as I could, possibly too long (Yahoo never did release a big board that reflected the end of the Chris Johnson holdout), I held the SEFL draft all day on Wednesday, the day before the start of the season. On Thursday, I woke up intending to hold the auction draft… and found that NFL.com had replaced its big board with Week 1 rankings. And there was no way to get the big board back, even though you could still draft a team right up to kickoff of the Kickoff Game.

I looked frantically for some way to get the big board back. NFL.com’s fantasy system has a feature where you can enter a draft – not a mock draft, a real live draft – just by clicking some buttons. As I would find, it’s a devious way for them to suck people into their fantasy football product. I entered a draft room to find that I could, in fact, get the big board back that way… but of course, it didn’t have what I actually needed, the auction values, and NFL.com is only supporting actual auction leagues starting this year. Nonetheless, over the course of the time I spent in there, I wound up drafting a team.

It was a strangely engrossing experience, and I decided to run a team in as many sites as I could, but I was only able to draft a team on ESPN before the Kickoff Game started. I’ve said before that I tend to go against the grain of what everyone else is doing, that I tend not to be caught up in whatever the current trend is, but in retrospect it’s kind of surprising that I hadn’t taken up fantasy football before; it involves just the sort of obsessive ordering, sorting, and categorization that’s right up my alley. For someone like me, who isn’t really a fan of any particular team, it’s really the perfect way to follow the NFL. For much of last season I was actually considering doing a live online radio show every Sunday of this year where I keep track of the developments in one specific fantasy league, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

(For the record, my impression was that the people on NFL.com were more prone to make boneheaded mistakes and massive reach picks than the more knowledgeable drafters on ESPN… so naturally my NFL.com team did horribly while my ESPN team dominated the league after Cam Newton basically fell into my lap and I turned out to have something like the two best running backs in the league, propelling me all the way to the championship game before getting crushed.)

Now that I know for a fact what my opinion of fantasy football is, I intend to take it to the next level, and finish what I briefly started last year, by running as many teams as I possibly can – a total of a whopping fifty at the same time. Why? Because I’m apparently insane and have decided that, after a summer I’d earmarked as a critical one with a number of projects I intended to get done that wound up progressing slower than I would have liked, and heading into a hardcore quarter at school where I’ll be taking a class that’s both critical and might end up demanding the most work of any I’ve taken, the best thing for me to do is to take one of the major saps on my time last fall and increase the work involved in it fivefold.

One of these leagues will be one of the MyFantasyLeague.com leagues from FantasySharks.com, despite my having no intention of using the actual advice on their site much – their ranking on FantasyPros.com, one of the sites in the SEFL, doesn’t lie, though their draft advice is of some use. So why am I doing it? Because FantasySharks.com has come up with a brilliant idea that I’m not entirely sure why no one has tried before: bringing promotion and relegation to fantasy football. At the top is the “Great White Shark League”, a 12-team league consisting of nine users of the site, two of the site’s top experts, and an automated team. The bottom four teams get relegated to one of two “Whale Shark Leagues”, which similarly each contain nine users, two experts, and an automated team, with the champion and the team with the most total points promoted to the Great White Shark. Below that are four “Hammerhead” leagues containing all users, then eight “Mako” leagues, then 16 “Blue” leagues, then the current lowest level, the 32 “Tiger” leagues (though there is a possibility that a new “Leopard” level could be added this year).

I love this concept in every way, from the way it raises the stakes on every level to the most important reason I’m actually participating in it, its usefulness as a yardstick of ability and success. I’ve actually expanded this idea out to one of a championship pyramid for all of fantasy football, a good 20 levels following the same power-of-2 structure, complete with a new-player-qualification scheme so new players don’t have to wait a lifetime to reach the top. For the limited competition that’s there now, I’ll be starting in Tiger League 3 with a team with the whimsically nerdy name of the “Green Lantern Corps“.

For the other 49 teams, I’ll be drafting as many teams as I can on every single free fantasy football website. NFL.com has a maximum of six, CBS three, ESPN and Fox ten each. Yahoo and Fleaflicker have no limit, so ten teams on each of those sites brings me to an even 50. All of these drafts, except the FantasySharks league whose draft will start this Monday and has a 12-hour timer so it could last upwards of a week, will be held over Labor Day Weekend and in the run-up to kickoff. To reduce the effect on my time during the school year, I will stop actively maintaining any team that starts 0-4 or 1-5, but I will maintain at least one team on every site and under no circumstances will I abandon the Shark team. I’ll track my progress over the course of the season and give my quick impressions of each site as I go along, on Twitter and on Da Blog.

Here are the times I intend to hold the draft for each league. All times Pacific.

August 13:
6 AM: MyFantasyLeague/FantasySharks.com

September 1:
9 AM: NFL
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Fox
Noon: Yahoo
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: CBS
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fox
6 PM: Fleaflicker
7 PM: ESPN
8 PM: Yahoo

September 2:
9 AM: Yahoo
10 AM: Fox
11 AM: ESPN
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Fox
3 PM: CBS
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fleaflicker
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: NFL
8 PM: Fox

September 3:
9 AM: Fox
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Yahoo
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Yahoo
3 PM: Fox
4 PM: Fleaflicker
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: NFL
7 PM: CBS
8 PM: Fleaflicker

September 4:
Noon: ESPN
1 PM: Fox
2 PM: Fleaflicker
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: Fox
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: Fleaflicker
8 PM: NFL

September 5:
Noon: Fleaflicker
1 PM:  Yahoo
2 PM:  Fox
3 PM:  ESPN

Sizing up NBC’s new French Open contract

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After NBC lost the Wimbledon contract, I expected it to be only a matter of time before it lost the contract to the French Open. If NBC didn’t decide it was time to get out of one of the lesser grand slams after losing the premier grand slam to cable, Roland-Garros surely would award it to ESPN rather than put everyone through excruciating tape delays. That’s why Sunday, NBC signed a deal to broadcast the French Open for another twelve years… wait, what?!?

Yep, and there are no signs that NBC is stopping with its tape delays either. Not only that, NBC is expanding its coverage to levels more akin to what it used to do for Wimbledon or what CBS does with the US Open.

I can’t help but wonder how much of this has to do with the Tennis Channel being the official cable partner, which might complicate ESPN’s ability to take NBC’s package. More broadly, the timing of the broadcast deal vis-a-vis the cable deal clearly is huge. NBC lost Wimbledon almost solely because it would have to wait for two more years to put games on the NBC Sports Network. With the French Open, the cable deal came first, meaning ESPN’s position was already locked in for the long haul. I have to imagine the confluence of these two items boxed ESPN out and gave NBC all the leverage (unless CBS was interested).

Sport-Specific Networks
8 11.5 4.5 4.5 0 1.5

Tying a bow on the Canadian Olympic rights negotiations

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Canada’s long national nightmare is over. CBC will be sole broadcaster of the 2014 and 2016 Olympic Games.

You may recall how acrimonious the prior negotiations with the IOC were, with CBC’s union with Bell the sole bidders and far apart from what the IOC wanted, raising the specter of Canadians having to watch the Games on NBC or on the Internet. One of the bigger hang-ups – whether NHL players would be in Sochi – hasn’t been resolved yet, so I can’t help but wonder what changed to get the deal done.

I’d like to see some numbers on how much CBC paid. Did the IOC look at the landscape and realize the bleak future facing the Games in Canada if they didn’t take CBC’s offer? Did the IOC see that CBC was paying less than the combined bid and attempt to save face by lowering their demand down to the level of the combined bid? Did CBC realize the PR hit both sides were getting in Canada (and, possibly, see the ratings for the 2012 Games) and up the ante to make sure the Games could be seen on a normal platform?

Regardless, Canada has dodged a bullet, and combined with the complaints of poor quality for NBC’s streaming of big events (which the IOC may also have been looking at when considering a potential Yahoo bid), it’s a sign that we’re probably still at least a decade away from streaming being the norm for viewing sports.

The state of the college football playoff’s TV rights

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The so-called “Champions Bowl” may not have a venue or even a proper name, but it does have a TV deal. ESPN will reportedly pay the SEC and Big 12 Rose Bowl money to show the game over the duration of the new playoff format.

Make no bones about it: this puts ESPN in a dominating position to land the entire college football playoff, especially if it also lands the Orange Bowl. The BCS wants to take advantage of the increased and higher-value inventory to pit networks against one another and drive up the price, but ESPN will now have two of the five most prominent games in the new system, maybe two of the top three. Fox and CBS will need to do a lot to convince the BCS to split up the new postseason. I’m not sure they can even put enough pressure on ESPN to force them to put the new playoff (and, presumably, the Rose and Champions Bowls) on ABC, meaning we might be in for more national championship games on cable for another twelve years. At best, I would expect ESPN or ABC to alternate with Fox or CBS for the championship game, even if they don’t officially win the rest of the new postseason contract. Reportedly, CBS hadn’t even shown interest when the Rose Bowl deal was announced, meaning Fox must fight ESPN alone.

(I don’t see NBC being a factor, because they need to save their money for sports that can help build the NBC Sports Network, especially if they lose the baseball rights. They might be a dark horse for the Orange Bowl if Notre Dame agrees to an arrangement with it, similar to when they showed the Gator Bowl when Notre Dame had an arrangement with them, and I think they will because the selection committee could be selecting as few as two teams that aren’t in the playoff to go to other bowls, and the Rose Bowl reportedly would like that to be substantially more often the case than six, meaning Notre Dame needs to do something to protect their elevated stature in college football. I also think this removed whatever slim chance Turner, with their lack of college football and not being a broadcast network or ESPN, had to land any part of the new playoff.)

To put it simply, the new college football playoff is ESPN’s to lose. Fox and CBS have one heck of an uphill climb ahead of them.

Sport-Specific Networks
8 10.5 4.5 4.5 0 1.5

Two lesser football leagues complete TV deals

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CBS Sports Network continues its acquisition of every professional league no one else wants, completing the long-rumored agreement with the UFL, that league everyone’s heard about but that couldn’t even complete a four-team season last year. I’m not sure whether to count the CFL towards NBC Sports Network’s total (added in the middle of the season!); for now I’m not because it’s not a primary arrangement and no one stateside (or hell, even in Canada) cares about the CFL. Both deals seem to shut down speculation I had read that indicated that the AFL and CFL were on NFL Network because of the NFL’s influence on its TV partners; NBCSN used to air CFL and UFL games in the past, but stopped doing so around the time Comcast acquired NBC.

Sport-Specific Networks
7 10.5 4.5 4.5 0 1.5

A modest proposal (I really need to stop overusing that particular phrase, this is serious):

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So David Stern wants to make the Olympic basketball tournament an under-23 affair like the soccer tournament, partly to increase the prominence of FIBA’s World Cup of Basketball, formerly the World Championships. That would greatly minimize the number of NBA players who went to the Olympics.

Baseball got kicked out of the Olympics mostly because no MLB players would leave their teams in the middle of the season to go to the Olympics.

So why not expressly make the Olympic baseball tournament an under-23 affair?

Granted, it’s still the middle of the baseball season, and players are even more likely to go to the majors early in baseball – I don’t know if baseball and especially the Angels and Nationals would particularly like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper leaving their teams in the middle of the season to play for Team USA, though it would certainly spike interest in the tournament…

Sports graphics roundup on the eve of the Olympics

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I’m way overdue for a sports graphics roundup, so let’s get a quick one out of the way before the Olympics start.

You may recall how mystified I was at FSN’s new basketball graphic, wondering why they would spell out team names and use a bulky tab for bonus indicators on the NBA but not college. Well, said graphic subsequently appeared on FSN’s college basketball broadcasts, complete with timeout indicators. I think FSN may have even gone as far as to put timeout indicators on its NBA graphics.

But I said last time that we would get some ugly graphics, and CBS proved me right twice over. First, we got this graphic during the regular season, with the spelled-out “DBL BONUS” that appears towards the end of overtime. (Not all CBS games used this graphic with the bulky tab, so it was probably a late addition that the graphic wasn’t designed for.)

That was nothing, though, compared to the graphic that appeared for March Madness with the bulky tab hanging below the otherwise-fairly-elegant banner. I kinda-sorta like how the bonus indicator would change to read “1-and-1” or “2 Shots” after a foul (though I am worried about dumbing things down), but with the extra vertical space the network logo takes up, couldn’t you have nudged the score up and added a full-length tab below it?

Onward to baseball, where Fox’s return to using logos only to identify teams in its NFL graphic has proven so successful that they surprised me by letting it spread to its baseball coverage, including on its FSN affiliates.

The Mets’ SNY has gone to the same sort of two-line box used by its Northeastern brethren YES and NESN, though for some unfathomable reason they decided their use of dots to indicate balls and strikes would be so much more successful than when ESPN tried it.

Root Sports’ baseball graphics reflect baseball’s status as their only major professional sport shared across multiple RSNs let alone all three, with the use of logos alongside abbreviations. Clearly economic use of space was a priority, with the use of dots to indicate outs (though they seem to have missed a lesson Fox learned, that the third dot isn’t necessary) and the use of just a number to indicate pitch speed.

TBS’ regular-season logo fits oddly in the graphic introduced last postseason, but we all know the trouble with finding a source for that.

ESPN’s attempt at mimicking the Euro 2012 world feed graphics was surprisingly accurate, considering how ornate they were (and considering how off they were at Euro 2008 and how they didn’t even try at the 2010 and 2011 World Cups), with the only way of telling which was which being how they came in and out. But the score graphic was just plain weird. (And yes, this was the best video I could come up with to show it off.)

Nothing much to say about Root Sports’ soccer graphics…

…or about NBC Sports Network’s either.

NBCSN’s graphics for IndyCar and the Tour de France are pretty much straight swaps of Versus’ graphics.

For completeness’ sake, here’s NBCSN’s graphics for its boxing cards.

Overall, my opinion of NBC’s new graphics hasn’t changed; I’m still greatly disappointed. After seeing their application for the French Open, I really do think they’re transitioning out of tennis after losing Wimbledon.

And that’ll be it until next time, which I suspect will be after the NFL season starts.

A random rant.

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In most programming guides, ESPN scheduled two hours for the Home Run Derby.

At 10 PM ET, two hours into the window, we were late in the second round.

Prince Fielder had advanced to the second round with a grand total of five home runs. It’s not like they were hitting them out of the park all over the place.

I can’t imagine how powerless a two-hour Home Run Derby would have to be. This affects the plausibility of scheduling the softball game right afterwards, because the result is SportsCenter coming on at midnight ET and airing on ESPN2 in the meantime.

If not a full three hours, how bad would it be to lengthen the Derby’s timeslot to two and a half?

But that’s nothing compared to Fox’s All-Star Game window, which has always been three hours despite the fact that Fox wastes a half hour on pomp, circumstance, and starting lineups. Why baseball insists on listing the game’s start time when it does when all parties involved KNOW the first pitch won’t be thrown for another half hour is beyond me.

This year, at least, Fox’s time slot has been moved back a half hour to start at 7:30 ET. But the time slot is STILL only three hours and there is STILL no mention of the game itself beginning at 8, despite the fact that all parties involved know even MORE that the game won’t start for a half hour, because ESPN’s Baseball Tonight pregame show will still be a full hour ending at 8 ET.

What’s more, in this case it’s completely pointless; why not lengthen the time slot by a half hour? To bamboozle affiliates into thinking they’ll be able to start local news at a time they clearly won’t?

There’s no reason to think the game is going to be any shorter than a normal game. If anything, the All-Star Game tends to last longer.

Probably this isn’t interesting to any of you, but I wanted to get it off my chest.