Colin Cowherd and Radio Maxim
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by user Stumptown
I love sports and I’m not generally a cranky guy, but getting a fresh dose of my least favorite sports talk guy on this morning’s commute must have put me over the edge because I find myself itching to complain about a few things I hate in the world of sports at the moment. Not a complete list. Not in ranked order. Just a few things off the top of my head.
1) The Herd - The afore mentioned disfavored sports talk guy is none other than Portland’s own Colin Cowherd. Actually I don’t think he’s from Portland, just made an idiot of himself here for a while before ESPN inexplicably picked him up. My dislike for him started when he began referring to himself as a local media icon. I think that’s kind of like being a genius in that if you have to tell people, chances are real good that you are not. The Herd does know football, I will give him that. He seems to have a very keen eye for who is legit on the gridiron and cuts through a lot of the nonsense that floats around from pundit to pundit. Plus he talks about it year ‘round which I appreciate. The problem is, that is all he knows about. He knows nothing about any other sport and so is left to try to do a mini-stand up routine about every sports headline, often doing little more than showing off his immense ignorance. If he were funny, that would almost be forgivable if it weren’t for the additional fact that he is often obnoxious just for the sake of being obnoxious. His rude and abrasive style is so obviously a gimmick that I tire of it in less time than it takes for him to dismiss anyone that disagrees with him. This morning he went off about how he has no use for the NBA (which I love) and is instead trying to embrace soccer. That’s like your personal chef telling you he is going to give up on choice cuts of Grade A premium beef in exchange for Spam. I know, I know, no one is making me listen and it’s not like I’m paying for it, but he is my one sports option on the commute, so if it isn’t Cowherd it is the latest remix of Akon’s continuing and mysteriously popular Chipmunks impression on pop stations or NPR where I’m at constant risk of a Frank DeFord interview and I just can’t take that.
2) Steroids in baseball – I just don’t think it matters. I mean, they should have had testing and they should have it now, but I’m sick of hearing about it because I think it is a non-story. It wasn’t against the rules. The general term “steroids” now covers a pharmacy worth of different drugs each of which have a different desired effect and outcome. So, you never even really know what is being discussed. I mean even though we’ve heard about them a million times can you tell me the difference between the “clear” and the “cream”? Can you tell me whether either of them makes it easier to hit a baseball? There is no evidence I have seen that they make anyone a better baseball player and even if they do I don’t think the effect is dramatic enough to really be an issue for Baseball’s hallowed records. Look, I’m anti steroids, I just don’t want to keep hearing about them. It is depressing and largely irrelevant. Let’s move on already.
3) Athlete Predictions – This week it was apparently news that the starting QB for the Detroit Lions (an irrelevant sports franchise) thinks his team is going to win more than 10 games next year. What??? That’s news? How? I mean, let’s do a survey of QBs around the league and see how many think their team is going to be above .500 next year? If any of them say, “no way, not us”, that guy should be canned immediately. Of course Kitna thinks they are going to win. Who freakin’ cares? Just ridiculous. All of these “stories” drive me crazy. Every time an athlete who is drilled constantly to be confident predicts his own or his team’s success in public we make a story out of it. I blame Namath of course. Isn’t the athlete guarantee of victory the dumbest thing in the history of dumb things? Does it suggest, he’s going to try extra hard so his team will win? Why wasn’t he already trying as hard as he could? Plus, what if he’s wrong? Is he going to refund my ticket, cable bill, DirecTV sports package? Of course not. So how is it a guarantee exactly? When a player thinks he’s going to win, it isn’t a story. It should be a story if some guy says he thinks his team has no shot.
4) Radio Maxim – Here in Portland we have one sports talk radio station. For at least one hour in the afternoon, the hosts stop talking about sports and move to topics like who was the hottest sitcom mom of the ‘80s. Now maybe that’s a perfectly legitimate debate (no way Merrideth Baxter Berney doesn’t win), but if I want to hear about that topic, I’ll turn on VH1. If I want to hear about who’s the prettiest and what’s the best pickup line and who has the best embarrassing sex story, I will read Maxim. I don’t want my only radio sports information source to suddenly cut me off from sports so a couple juvenile sports guys can rant and rave about pop culture that I’m apparently supposed to care about just because I’m a red-blooded American male. I hate it. And everyone from Cowherd to Rome does this and I can take a little, but I wish the sports guys would stick to sports and not decide that because they know about one thing guys like, they clearly know about everything guys like. Absurd.
Ok, I feel better now.
