Sunday Night Sports

Usually I laugh at the product the local TV sports crew puts out, but for those of us in the Portland market KGW does a real nice job with their Sunday Night half-hour show. It's pretty much a must-see for local sports fans and does a great job covering the local scene from our pro teams to our preps. Kudos to Adam Bjaranson and his staff. Makes you wonder what this crew could do with a half-hour each night, or at least more than the 120 seconds most newscasts offer to sports.

 

The Grand Rapids NBC affiliate does a 40-minute show called Sports Overtime Sunday nights... often they'll have on Ty Hallock to talk about the Lions (he lives northeast of GR), plus the hosts take good care of preps with the GR Press.

 

WNYT in Albany, N.Y. Does a show called Big Board Sports on Sunday nights that's about a half hour long, and they do a real good job with it.

 

Bjaranson is horrible.

Great hair, though.

 

Don't get a chance to see it anymore, but I always enjoyed Fred Roggin's Sunday night show on KNBC in L.A. He's the guy who would do the Hall of Shame and Roggin's Heroes, and his end-of-the-year show were always a must-watch for me back in the day.

 

KOAM's Sunday-night show is called the "Sunday Night Sports Feed," but it's really just the sports segment cut away into its own show.

A local church has its Sunday morning show repeated Sunday night. It's contract with the station states that the repeat must be shown as close to 10:30 as possible. On some weekends when football overflows, this means the regular newscast wraps up after weather at, say, 10:40. Then the church show runs for an hour. Then it's the "Sunday Night Sports Feed" for 20 minutes at 11:40.

And, yeah, it's crap.

 

Local TV Sports News here is bad. They haven't broken since I can remember.
The one day a year they have to shine is Thanksgiving when they do football shows. Instead, they completely botch it up.

 

Our local TV sports includes an inordinate number of community college signings, complete with video and interviews. Of course, this is the 144th TV market or some such.

 

That was waay back in the day. I got tired of Roggin's routine because it became more about his sarcasm and dumb jokes than it did reporting the sports news. There were times when he was spending so much time laughing at his own jokes that he couldn't even talk.
When the talking head thinks he's more important than the news (are you listening, ESPN?) it's time to change the channel. I don't even watch the local sports news anymore. Jim Hill even makes too many flubs.

 

Jim Hill is an icon in L.A., but I think he has stayed at the dance too long.
It's mostly Lakers news, even when they played on Saturday, he leads off the Sunday 11:30 p.m. show with it.
He mispronounces just about every name.
He says "Meanwhile" as a lead-in to each different story. Before each commercial break, he says, "We're just getting started here so don't go anywhere."
Meanwhile, when two weeks in a row, he gave the "Atlanta Flames" score, I wanted to throw the remote at the TV screen.
But, "Keep the faith."

 

When I lived in Arizona, I enjoyed "12 Sports Tonight" on the NBC station. Always had good guests, from Charles Barkley to Joe Garagiola, plus a couple of ex-NFL players who had sportstalk shows in the Phoenix area to break down the Cardinals' game each week.

The real must-watch, though, was the "Friday Night Fever" high school highlight show at 11:35 p.m., right after Leno and before Conan (prime time is 7-10 in Arizona). They did it live and would have one of the teams, plus cheerleaders and an occasional band, in studio each week.

 

All the stations in the Central PA market have their own high school football friday shows, and while they're all the same, they're all pretty good. Pretty much the scenario you mentioned above, live with different bands, cheerleaders, and teams, and they all have studio guys as well who run scores in between live cuts.

Outside of those shows though, no high school sports TV here in Central PA.