Everyone should have the DirecTV sports pack

After ESPN SportsCenter's "Who's Now?" fiasco last summer, I swore off the show. It had become bloated with commentary and slim of actual highlights, along with spending too much time on crap that no one cares about (Olympics, NASCAR, WNBA, NHL, etc.). Then there are all of the human interest stories, interviews, and various Salisbury-laced analysis segments. All I want are highlights of the prior night and straight news of trades, you fools! Do you think I give two poops about John Kruk thinks about a free-agent signing? I know more about baseball transaction analysis than he does.

All of that isn't even getting into how self-congratulatory the show had become. The anchors were all about themselves and the network. And the show is 1 hour long, 1.5 hours on Sunday night/Monday morning. That's just not necessary, and it leads to much of the bloat.

Anyway, I quickly found ESPN News as a nice alternative last summer. It is kind of SportsCenter light since they only have a half-hour to work with. As a result, they just don't have time to unload most of the useless stuff on us. It still has its flaws (such as spending too much time on sports no one cares about and analysis), but it is good enough. Plus, I can wrap it up in half an hour without missing anything.

The flaw in the channel is that they still have too much of the junk in the show, so there are whole baseball games (keep in mind there is NOTHING ELSE GOING ON right now) they completely ignore. Since the White Sox aren't exactly a media darling, they often are in those games. I can only imagine being a Royals fan...

I guess ESPN management has gotten pissed about people bailing on SportsCenter (the network's flagship show, mind you) in the morning to watch ESPN News, because they have started showing a live video broadcast of their ESPN Radio show Mike and Mike.

Setting aside the merits of the show, which I have never heard, why would they possibly do a video broadcast of it? Everyone in the country gets it on the radio, and people are free to listen to it at home. Anyone can do so with an old AM radio stolen from one's grandparents' house. My only guess (as I wrote above) is that the ratings differential between SportsCenter and ESPN News in the morning has become embarrassing. (I have not seen any ratings, so it's just conjecture.)

What was I to do? Watching 2 minutes of SportsCenter reminded me why I hated it. We do have Comcast Sports Channel here, but since they have no national affiliation the sports highlight show is all Chicago stuff. Jeez, I don't need 15 minutes of highlights, interviews, and analysis of a Sox game I watched half of the night before. So that was out. A solution appeared before me...

Last spring I purchased the sports pack on DirecTV, which gives access to all of the regional sports channels (blacking out games on the MLB, NBA, and NHL packages, of course). I always thought most of the channels were useless other than having ESPNU for college basketball and Fox Soccer Channel for EPL games.

Given my dilemma a few weeks ago, I hoped that the array of local Fox Sports Channels had a national highlight show. And it did! It's called The Final Score. Here are my favorite things about it:

It's only a half hour long.

They show highlights to every game.

There is NO analysis by so-called "experts".

Interviews clips are brief.

There is a crawler on screen showing what the next few topics are.

There are TWO score crawlers at the bottom. One is just scores (and it moves fast) and the other has some news mixed in, like Bobby Jenks going on the DL yesterday.

There is only one anchor, at a time, so there is no stupid banter between them.

They only show things that a regular sports fan cares about. NASCAR, golf, tennis, Olympics, and whatnot are all brief. They know the reason for their existence is to show highlights of games we care about.

Here are the downsides:

I am nitpicking here, but I could do without the highlight of the day at the end of the show, or whatever it's called. But that only takes about 10 seconds, so it's no big deal.

That's it. No other negatives!

Best of all, they actually showed a WNBA highlight today, and the anchor was making fun of it! First, it was the last highlight of the show (which is good because NO ONE CARES). Second, he starts off with saying, "How about a WNBA highlight?" is a fake serious voice. Third, he said something about the game and followed it with, "in front of dozens!" with the camera showing a sea of empty seats behind the court.

(Now, as a digression, this is fantastic. The mainstream sports media is as liberal as any other aspect of the media. [A cursory viewing of SportsCenter would make this clear to anyone.] They are deathly afraid of making fun of the WNBA, even though it is clearly deserving of ridicule. No one attends the games, the ratings are horrible, and the action sucks. Example #1: Check out how newspaper articles/columns will rip MLS or NHL TV ratings, without ever mentioning that the WNBA does even worse. Example #2: Remember the XFL? The MSM hates Vince McMahon, so they loved hammering him and the league for any failing of it, be it ratings, level of play, etc. Some of that was brought on by Vince himself, but how come the WNBA never faces that kind of scrutiny? Why does the media never make fun of David Stern for standing behind it so ferociously?)

Clearly, this show is for regular sports fans. They aren't out to win any reporting awards for their lame-ass stories about blind cyclists or whatever, and they certainly aren't full of political-correctness.

I highly recommend this show to every sports fan tired of the ESPN culture. If you can, order the sports pack. If you don't have DirecTV, I am sorry. No joke.

(Here's an article mentioning everything above! It's too bad we are stuck here in Chicago without FSN, though it may be on cable.)

UPDATE: I see that Comcast Chicago does show it, but only the live version at 12:30 AM. Since I need it in the morning, I always use MSG+, which is channel 624 on DirecTV.