Rhetorical Analysis of ESPN.com parody site

Are sports even worthy of parody? On first glance, the idea that these pastimes influence our culture would seem to give far too much credit to sport, and little to our society. But it seems every dominant culture has its distractive elements: baseball, hockey, football and basketball are just the gladiator battles for this day and age. But they’re also more than that. The “information age” has led to a heretofore unprecedented amount of information for the public’s consumption. Major sports benefit greatly from this added exposure.

Baseball coverage used to end when the games were over. Now, the internet can follow players nearly year-round, and streaming audio links to coach’s comments can be linked right after each game. College football fans can follow and speculate on where a high school football player will sign, and predict and guess on where their favorite college players will go in the NFL draft during the off-season.

In an increasingly isolated world, sports are a common ground. The 86,000 plus that fill Sanford stadium may not agree on much, but they’re all happy (to varying degrees) when the Dawgs win. And, there’s a lot—a LOT—of money involved in sports now: from Alex Rodriguez’s 250 million-dollar contract, to the 14 million dollar BCS bowl payouts, to the 7 dollar beers sold at ballparks around the country, from a financial standpoint, sports are very big, and very influential. Two out of the three elements of Bahktin’s Carnivalesque are usually found at sporting events: ritual spectacle and abusive language.

Now, CNN/Sports illustrated.com and CBS.sportsline.com will disagree (maybe even FoxSports, but I doubt it), but ESPN is the single biggest name in sports, and ESPN.com is the most comprehensive source for nearly all things sport on the web. I’m very familiar with their site, and check it on a daily basis. I also almost religiously watch their premiere program, Sportscenter, and the best “talk show” on TV, Pardon the Interruption (where two Washington Post sports writers, one of whom, Tony Kornheiser, was an English major argue over the sports stories of the day), so it’s safe to say that from my perspective, total “resistance” to the hegemony of ESPN’s “live sport” view is futile.

This is not to say I love everything ESPN does and find what they do sacrosanct—while I love the information they provide, I’m not a fan of the apparent biases they have. Even when football season is started, basketball is getting ready to start; ESPN seems to devote way too much time to baseball, both on air and on their website. Now, I’ll admit, I have a bias here too. I haven’t been to a baseball game since the last strike, find baseball fairly boring, and wished the players had gone on strike this summer. So I’m not the biggest fan of baseball, and since I listen to Mark Richt’s press conference every Tuesday, and have been known to watch up to 12 hours of college football on Saturdays, I may be a bit biased towards the view that football is replacing baseball as our “national pastime.”

But I also take issue with ESPN’s handling of college football. Georgia and Notre Dame both started out winning by defense, special teams and, well, luck. But ESPN claimed Georgia was “overrated” and “lucky” and that Notre Dame “found a way to win.” Georgia is hardly nuevo-rich of the college football world, but Notre Dame is the Rockefeller family equivalent, and the bias shows. There also appears to be a general (but understandable) bias to judge teams on what they’ve done lately (which becomes a problem when team like Florida loses a great coach and replaces him with a Zook.)

I took the basic form of the ESPN site, and simplified it, to exaggerate the problems I saw. Instead of leaving the links of even size, I made sure to place them in hierarchic scale, with several massive baseball links (all to the same page) and the Notre Dame links bigger than the College football links.

Some bizarre mixes of “high and low culture” occur, as I let some of ESPN’s commentators take a Baudrillardian view of the past “never happening” as an excuse for why they never mention that Notre Dame’s head coach—whom they all seem to love—was actually the third choice at least by Notre Dame’s athletic director. I even have the usually ineloquent Beano Cook mention Baudrillard—something I just can’t see happening in “real life,” and therefore assuming.

I also make light of my own pro-UGA bias in linking to my article on the Red and Black, and in my “deconstructing” UGA section of the site—which parodies the biases of ESPN’s analysts, my pro-UGA bias (by contrast), and sort of makes fun of the idea of deconstruction by using it in a non literary way.

I link to actual portions of the site to prove that it’s not just baseless satire (most notably giving several, only a few days old links about Notre Dame, and the huge number of articles ESPN.com has about the World Series.) I don’t know that much about baseball, and don’t know the analysts well enough to mock them, so I simply represented what ESPN already has as a way of mocking them. With the college football site, I used the “chat wraps” to mock both Lee Corso and Beano Cook, but also the biases every die-hard college football fan has—and it also let me further illustrate the main themes about the pro-Notre Dame-but-we-don’t-remember-Ty-being-the-third-choice biases.

Basically, I’ve tried to make fun of everything (including shots at MSN, and Christina Aguilera—and Dee Snider) myself included. I think the best parody can make people skeptical, and that’s usually a good thing.

Also, the very nature of parodying ESPN.com exposes my own inability to resist. In order to know that Lee Corso almost always picks the wrong team to win, in order to know that there is an entire section of the site devoted to Notre Dame football, etc. I truly had to know a lot about ESPN. While I would certainly like to see some changes in ESPN’s overall coverage, there is no way I want to see the end of what they’re trying to accomplish. Sports and stats and the chance to follow it at any time make for a great time-waster, and escape.