Whitlock undresses ESPN

Really the attacks on Fowler killed this for me. Someone mentioned the attacks on the BSU prez, and those seemed to at least serve a point -- illustrating what a good story this football team was -- but the Fowler stuff, it was just too much. It ended up reading like message board material.
Not to totally bash the column -- it definitely had some redeeming values (and I don't mind the "we" stuff that much because he at least did play for BSU) but the attacks of Folwer went overboard. He deserved maybe one graph, not to be made the face of ESPN's sucktitude.

 

No way. LeFevour is a really good QB, but Davis' arm makes him the better guy.

 

Tracy Roller was not an enjoyable person to interview or to watch throw temper tantrums on the sideline.

 

That whole Fowler/jock strap thing continues to piss me off.

Expanding Whitlock's logic, he shouldn't be allowed to be critical of Fowler's GameDay Top 25 because Whitlock never did a weekly Top 25 while hosting GameDay.

 

Fowler's okay with me.
When he was host of the high school sports show on ESPN, he put my high school's mascot in the show's mascot hall of fame.
Awesome.
Back to Whitlock, I kept thinking about, "ramble on" sung in the Led Zeppelin style.
It rolled off with him being on Oprah and then had some points, wandered off into a personal attack, wandered back into something on relevant, and then rambled again on something wholly unrelated.
A good editor would have made that a great, great column, instead it reads like Whitlock gets paid by the word and he needed some extra money for the holidays.

 

Uggggggh. That was not a good column.

 

That was the one thing that really struck me about all of this rant against ESPN. Ball State has played five or six games on one of the family of networks. Isn't that good for Ball State? Doesn't that give them the exposure that the MAC didn't have five or so years ago? Didn't the MAC sell its soul to get some of this exposure in the hopes that it would make the on the field product better?

If Ball State had gone unbeaten in 1989 or whatever, does anyone outside of the Midwest, and really just Delaware County, Ind., care? Instead, it was plastered across the top of ESPN.com, many regional football fans have probably seen more complete Ball State games than they have of some BCS contenders like Oregon State?

And since when does being the best pro prospect at a position, like Whitlock (maybe rightfully) claims Davis is mean he's going to get the Heisman? It's almost never been that way, as many as you have said. Isn't Davis just like Ben Roethlisberger a few years ago in the MAC...or Chad Pennington...or Byron Leftwich?

I certainly have my problems, like anyone, with ESPN....but Ball State/Nate Davis certainly isn't the vessel you'd use to float an "undressing" of the WWL.

 

Great point, Jay.
FYI it's 2327 words.

I liked his ending, but like other points, it gets lost.

 

BTW, Nate Davis' older brother Jose set all kinds of school QB records at Kent State and went to the CFL. He was also a member of the Cleveland Gladiators Arena League team this past season.

 

Agreed. My attention was lost early on and I didn't bother to finish.

 

1. Columnist has large ego (check)

2. Columnist has personal ax to grind against former employer (check)

3. Columnist has personal stake in story he's bitching about (check)

4. Columnist lacks an editor to streamline his angry, sometimes incoherent rambling. (check)


Add them all together and what do you get?

 

Yeah, hard to argue any of those points...