No GameDay – verified
Well, the news broke today that ABC/ESPN will be sending their GameDay crew (not to be confused with TV coverage of the game), to Virginia Tech instead of Berkeley for week 1 of the season. See the announcement from Virginia Tech here. That’s what I suspected was going to happen all along but The Bear Insider article a couple months ago got everyone excited. This is definitely a black eye for them because not only did they write the errant article, they also defended it in their message board long after it was clear that the decision had not been made.
Of course I’m disappointed, but at the same time, I understand ABC/ESPN’s motives. Hopefully we’ll have GameDay in Berkeley for the USC game.
June 27th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Wow. I think this is a monumental mistake. Let’s start off another “exciting” season of college football with the happy reminder of a college shooting tragedy. People are going to tune into the VT/ECU game for the first 15 minutes to see the pre-game show and the moment of silence before changing the channel to one of the other more exciting games.
June 28th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Definitely. As one person on a message board said, it’ll seem like the right decision to the ABC execs until it airs and they realize that it’s a very awkward situation to be talking about how excited they are to start the football season… amongst tragedy.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:38 am
Exploiting tragedy for ratings is awesome.
Go Gameday!
June 29th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
While the cynic in me appreciates the exploitation factor involved with the choice of “the Mouse” to put Gameday at VT, the reality is the story won’t be about how excited they are to start the football season amongst tragedy. It’ll be about how the glorious game of football transcends the game to bring a community, scarred, can overcome their grief thanks to the pigskin. ALA Monday night football in the big easy this year.
From a broadcasters perspective it makes all kinds of sense:
– the corporate goons will get to have 15 minutes on air while they donate a meaningless check to a victims association.
– Barbara Walters will get to do a special 20/20 segment talking to the “survivors”.
– we’ll get to hear at least 15 times about how great it is for gameday to be there to help in the healing process, and how they all should be nominated for sainthood.
– Jack Thompson and pundits will get 15 minutes to speak about the evils of video games despite the fact there has been no proven correlation between violent video games and this particular school shooting.
– Grey’s Anatomy will have a special tear-jerker season debut where there is a school shooting with Mickey Rooney having a special guest appearance, and we’ll have endless promo’s for that.
– Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson could reconcile on air thanks to their realization about how short life is thanks to this tragedy and how important it is to be with the people you really love, and then promo their upcoming middle america appeasing tv special.
– a mini montage of other tragedies involving sports like the Marshall program, the stanford marching band, Baylor University’s headhunting basketball coach.
– President Bush will make another soul pleasing speech about how we’re fighting for the freedom of democracy, and won’t let the terrorists prevent us from playing good old fashioned football.
It goes on and on. Come-on, how could Berkeley top this?
BTW, weren’t these math questions supposed to be easy? Like 1+2=3? I had to break out a slider ruler for the last question!
June 29th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
LOL. The Latchy/Simpson bullet was unexpected yet hilarious.
As for the double-digit math, the spammers hit me so hard that they were getting lucky and hitting the “right” number about 3-5 times a day. By going to double-digit math, it’s down to a couple a week.
July 9th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
And here I was making my personal “Herbstreit and Jim Tressel in bed” mural. Oh well. Next year.