cnnsi.com continuation, questions

One feature I found appealing on espn.com was the logging in feature that allowed me to save my favorite teams, and get their scores highlighted at the top of the screen whenever I visited the site. cnnsi.com allows you to set cookies in order to follow your favorite teams, but it is not a login, and whenever cookies are cleared, those preferences need to be reset. I saw that firsthand this morning. I also liked that espn.com color coded the scores at the top of the screen, highlighting one's favorite teams, which cnnsi.com does not do. espn.com also offers scores from tennis and golf at the top of the screen, at least during major events, and I find myself digging a bit more for such information on cnnsi.com.

I read Richard Deitsch's media column yesterday, and so much of it was devoted to issues and personalities related to ESPN that I wondered if I was breaking my vow by simply reading his column. I guess that's the point, though; so much of what is out there in sports media comes from ESPN, and of course a media column will reflect that. I see ESPN referenced almost every place I visit, and it's easy enough to avoid clicking on links in blogs and stories elsewhere, no matter how tempting they might be, but the content even without the link still essentially comes from ESPN. I find I appreciate journalism that originates elsewhere a bit more now, and recognize how hard that seems to be nowadays.

NBA Draft updates

I moved between cnnsi.com, cbssports.com, nba.com, and finally, a chat on seattletimes.com to keep up with the later portion of the draft. Of the first three sites, nba.com was the runaway leader in updating picks quickly, and appeared to be doing so in close to real time. At least I thought so until I stumbled upon a chat with the University of Washington men's basketball reporter, in which the participants were generally hoping for one or more of the eligible Washington players to be drafted late in the second round. As the round continued, and as foreigners no one has ever heard of were drafted, it was clear that while nba.com seemed efficient, they were two or three minutes behind real time, based on the chat I saw. Percy Allen learned of Isaiah Thomas's selection by Sacramento via Twitter first, and the chat came fast and furious when the selection was announced, for a couple of minutes before nba.com was updated, in case anyone is interested.

First Replacement: cnnsi.com

If I am to remain a sports fan without ESPN, I will still need sources for news and information. I'm also looking for a new home page, and the first site I am trying out for that spot is cnnsi.com. The presence of the Sports Illustrated brand, and access to writers and photographs from the magazine, certainly should appeal to the sports fan. I'm on the site this morning, following the NBA Draft, and will comment on their coverage of it, but first some general overall impressions are in order.

espn.com has what I have found to be as close to real time score updating as one would have a right to expect. cnnsi.com appears to lag a bit behind, or so my instincts tell me. A couple of weeks ago, I had up their real time NBA Finals box score, and the score in the header information was behind that in the article itself. (I have not made any direct comparisons between sites, since I would now have to break my vow to do so.)

I also note that I had to refresh my screen to learn that Kyrie Irving was the first pick in the draft; apparently their home page will not automatically refresh, which is surprising.

As for layout, ESPN seems to have set the standard for sports sites, and cnnsi.com falls in line. The lead story at the moment one accesses the site is front and center, and the other headlines of the day are to the right of the lead story box. Scores and current action updates (like the NBA draft tonight) are at the top of the screen, as well as links to specific sports and various SI places of interest (which have a slightly odd position, above the links for specific sports). How frequently are the scores updated, and where is that information?

Maybe the presence of the draft information influences my thoughts here, but cnnsi.com seems a bit cluttered to me. I also find the presence of, shall we say, less than hard news links, so near the top of the screen a bit disconcerting. However, the listing of relevant articles from SI writers underneath the main story of the day is handy (again, just as ESPN does it), and the ads for SI publications seamlessly integrate into the site and look like they belong there.

Continuing with the story of the night, the NBA draft, cnnsi.com seems to be sticking with facts, so any talk of trades on the site seems to be limited to deals actually announced. That's not so bad, really, although armchair general managing can be one of the highlights of a draft.

I will comment on other aspects of the site (how specific sports are handled, the mySI personalization, specific writers of note) in my next post.

random weekend musings

I had an email over the weekend from the ESPN Poker team, which made me realize how difficult it is to completely expunge all ESPN material from my Internet presence, and also reminded me that any coverage of poker I followed online was through espn.com. I've never played poker outside of home low stakes games, but as a card player (I play bridge as my primary gaming activity), I appreciate poker, and have always wondered if I could make money playing the game. Of course, with the US shutdown of the largest online poker sites, that's not likely to happen any time soon.

In my search for other sources of sports information (which I hope to start detailing here this week), I went to mlb.com Saturday, and was pleasantly surprised to find the site provides a free live stream of one game per day. I was even more pleasantly surprised to learn the Saturday game featured the Mariners in action, with Felix Hernandez on the mound against the Phillies. I had not watched a baseball game since the 2010 World Series, which I paid to stream online. The result wasn't what I hoped, but the Mariners have already exceeded my expectations for the entire year, so it's hard to complain. It's also a measure of success for my experiment, since I cannot say if I would have found this game if I had just been keeping up with the score on espn.com.

Without ESPN International (and its subsidiary in Asia, Star Sports), I will miss all of Wimbledon these next two weeks. While the symbolism of the event is without peer, I can't help but think as a two week sporting event, it's a bit overrated. How many men's champions have there been since Andre Agassi won in 1992? Sampras won seven or so, Federer has won, what, 7 times, Nadal has not lost at Wimbledon since 2007, I think, leaving room for a stray Richard Krajicek, and the years between Sampras and Federer (Lleyton Hewitt, Goran Ivanisevic), the only time since Agassi that the tournament felt wide open. While there have been great matches, those in the first week, with the Isner - Mahut match last year the prime example, of course, really don't matter in the determination of a champion. And as for the women, when's the last time a non-Williams sister won the title? If a Williams sister wins this year, after neither has played in months because of injury, I'm not sure if that's an indictment of the tournament or of the women's field in general.

The US Open

I would have thought the US Open at Congressional this week would have been another test of sorts of my resolve to avoid the ESPN media product, but after tracking yet another bogey from Phil Mickelson on the back nine (through usopen.com), it is clear I won't miss it.

I do not say that lightly, since the first golf tournament I ever attended was the 1997 US Open at Congressional. My girlfriend at the time (now wife) got us tickets for the first round, and we got there bright and early to get a prime spot on the par 3 7th hole. I don't remember why we chose that hole, but we were right on the green, with no one in front of us, allowing us a prime view of the best players in the world. Almost all of them had trouble negotiating the green, interestingly. The usopen.com description mentions wanting to stay below the hole, and even 14 years ago, that was true. The one person that stayed below the hole was a young Tiger Woods, as it turned out; his was the only birdie I recall seeing on that hole that morning.

We then walked the course to see some of the holes in person; I remember the 18th when it was a par 3 (that appears to be #10 now), and the very tough 17th, which appears to be the new 18th hole. One of the holes that looked visually striking at the time was the 6th. The approach with water on the right looks intimidating to high handicap players like me, but it is playing as the easiest hole on the course. I'm not sure such statistics would have been as easily accessible on espn.com, but it was just two reasonably obvious mouse clicks away on usopen.com, which I might not have thought to access otherwise.

Now I am missing the tournament. I had better move on to other thoughts...

Since the rights to the US Open internationally are held by ESPN, I do not have access to the event on TV, anyway. It's strange that the third most important golf tournament in the world is not available to subscribers of the largest cable system in a golf playing country, if I think about it. And... that's enough thinking about it...

The NBA Finals

So my first test of my vow to avoid ESPN was here before I started, with the NBA Finals front and center this week. While the Finals were being shown on another channel here in Singapore, and while the graphics for the international telecast were provided by NBA TV, the feed and announcers were still from ESPN, so in the end I decided I could not watch. Part of the ESPN influence, and perhaps the hardest to avoid, is that the network owns the rights to many different sports, and if one wants to watch an event, there is a good chance that ESPN will be the source of that programming.

So congratulations to the Dallas Mavericks. I don't have any rooting interest, except, perhaps, against LeBron James, but championships are still worth watching.

So what events will I miss while I embark on this challenge? The date I have circled on my calendar, virtually, is December 6. The team I follow the most religiously, the University of Washington men's basketball team, gets their yearly game on ESPN (or so it seems) against Marquette in Madison Square Garden in the Jimmy V Classic. How will I not watch UW on ESPN then?

(As an aside, I contribute yearly to the Jimmy V Foundation, and really believe in the work done by the foundation. So many ESPN personalities have given so much to this foundation, and the work Dick Vitale has done for this cause was chronicled in a story by Andy Staples on cnnsi.com recently. All the good works championed by ESPN make this vow all that much harder to keep.)

College basketball will be the biggest test of this grand experiment of mine, but when we return to the US, the US Open tennis tournament and college football will have their own temptations.

What I will miss from ESPN.com

I embark on this quest with an understanding that there will be some things I will miss because I do not have access to ESPN services. For now, and for the next few weeks, the blog will concentrate on the Web, so what will I miss from ESPN.com?

ESPN employs a number of great writers and journalists, and some of their efforts are already missed.

Andy Katz: His coverage of the entire nation's college basketball stories has always been appreciated here.
Jay Bilas: His opinions and commentary on my favorite sport always has me nodding in agreement. His tweets about my other favorite college basketball analyst, Bill Raftery (another huge loss, and the subject of a blog post later, no doubt) have been hysterical.

Keith Law: Am I allowed to still visit his non-affiliated blog? I know very little about his specialty, the MLB draft and associated prospects, but his commentary always piques my interest, and his knowledge of food and board games is always welcome.
Buster Olney: He kind of already reports on what I am trying to do here; his comprehensive coverage of local baseball writers gives ESPN's baseball coverage a unique perspective.
Jayson Stark: Why do I find his style so entertaining to read (not to mention his appearances on ESPN Radio over the years)?

Bob Harig and Jason Sobel: It's nice to have some reliable voices to read about golf, even if way too much coverage of the sport revolves around Tiger Woods.

Greg Garber: He's written many solid pieces for ESPN, and it was nice to know his thoughts would be available to me when tennis matters (the majors, mostly, of course).

John Clayton: I pay very little attention to the NFL (as noted in my initial post), but for some reason, I like reading his work anyway.

Ted Miller: College football is a regional sport (three years living in SEC country taught me that), so I would naturally gravitate toward the West Coast writer, but his balance and understanding of the rest of the country helps put the Pac-10, or shall I say Pac-12, into a reasonable light.

I'm probably missing some people (the NBA writing team, the regional college basketball writers, to suggest a few), but these are the people whose insights and style I suspect will be hardest to replace as I start this experiment.

Sports Without ESPN: My Introduction

I was reading the new book about ESPN on my Kindle this past week, and while their business model and product are certainly the envy of many in the industry, I found myself wondering if the network was getting, well, too big for its britches. Does ESPN have too much influence over sports in the United States?

So I found myself asking the question: Can one follow US sports without utilizing ESPN products? What does one lose, if anything, by doing so? The only way to find out, perhaps, is to try to do so. So for the next few months, I will be foregoing use of any product with the ESPN label, yet will still try to follow sports as I normally do. The results of my efforts will be detailed here, for anyone interested.

Such an effort may be perceived as a criticism of the ESPN brand, but I do not intend it as such. I lived for the times when I could watch Australian Rules football on the network when it first started (my family could not afford this newfangled invention called cable TV). I found a place to watch one of the Georgetown-St. John's college basketball clashes in the 1985-86 season. When I got my first job after college, my first investment was in a TV so that I finally had full access to ESPN. The ESPN Sports Net and its successors have been my home page since my first computer. I had to have XM Radio when I bought my most recent car just for ESPN Radio. I just want to see how much I will miss it.

I may be perceived as having an inherent bias, so here are my sporting interests. I am originally from the West Coast, having grown up in the state of Washington. So I follow a number of Seattle sports, the Mariners, the University of Washington basketball and football. I very much miss the Sonics, and the late Mariner broadcaster Dave Niehaus, as part of this heritage. My primary sport used to be baseball, but has morphed over the years to college basketball; my wife graduated from Michigan State, so that works for us. I follow tennis and golf whenever I can, and like college sports in general.

The one way I differ from most US sports fans is that I am not a follower of the National Football League. I followed the game intently when I was growing up, as a fan of the Oakland Raiders, since their games were available on a Seattle radio station before the Seahawks came into existence. However, I grew tired of the media fascination with the game, first in Seattle, as the Seahawks grew their franchise, then in the Washington D.C. area, where I worked after college. Perhaps the effort is similar: I do not want the media defining what I like and how I follow it.

So the ground rules for my effort are:

No ESPN on television. This is easy for me right now, since I live in Singapore, and the cable system in our apartment lost ESPN to a cable competitor about a year ago. However, any ESPN product I might otherwise see, such as the NBA finals, is also off limits.

The ESPN I used to receive here was ESPN International, which of course is nothing like ESPN in the US. I was surprised to learn that I did not miss it nearly as much as I imagined when the network moved off our cable system, which may also have contributed to the genesis of this blog.

No ESPN Radio. As with ESPN television, this isn't so difficult when living overseas, but when I lived in the US, I would have it on whenever I was in my car. I would still occasionally call up ESPN Radio streaming on the Internet after we moved to Singapore, but will avoid it now.

Both these platforms will become far more ubiquitous for me in just over six weeks, when my family returns to the United States, so this blog will have much more to say on these platforms in the coming weeks.

No ESPN.com or any of its affiliates. This is a harder presence to squelch, since their brand exists on Facebook, and Twitter, and is the home page on every browser on every computer I may access in my house. I'm not sure my scrub is complete, but will report on that, too.

Obviously in my current situation, I will miss the ESPN.com brand the most, and will detail what I will miss and what I will look to replace in Internet media circles in my next post.