I’m curious to see how much time and space ESPN and ESPN.com will dedicate to next weekend’s UFC 100. It’s just a number, after all, but ESPN loves to make a big deal out of those nice round numbers. And why not? It is a milestone and is being presented as such, with two titles on the line and a stacked card.
I’m curious because I’ve heard ESPN voices say several times that they failed to give the sport, in particular the UFC, the coverage it deserved. They didn’t predict it’s rising popularity. Fair enough. Most didn’t. But I haven’t seen too much of a change in coverage. Little time is dedicated to the sport on TV, and ESPN.com hides it on a back page, which gets its content primarily from Sherdog.com.
Horse racing, I would imagine, is not a sport on the rise. Yet today there is a horse racing headline on ESPN’s home page. I won’t bore you with the headline. We all know what the story says.
“Some horse ran faster than some other horse. The slower horse was shot in the head.”
I don’t really have anything against horse racing. It’s fun to watch a big race, or a small race that you have big money riding on, and the horses are impressive athletes. I just want ESPN to up their game a bit. There’s no avoiding ESPN if you’re a sports fan. It would be nice to not have to look past them all the time to hear about MMA. The sports nation needs to have high standards for the sports leaders.
We can’t forget the fact that the WWL forgets about the whole West coast, and Midwest for that matter, come baseball season. The South is disregarded in football and are there any basketball teams outside of California and the Tri-State area? ESPN coverage is geared toward the East coast fan, mostly Red Sox and Celtics lovers. Nothing wrong with that — for them. It’s weird that they started a West coast version of Sportscenter to address this issue, fitted in a Los Angeles studio, but that was just a band-aid on a gash. They’re just not dedicating resources to small market teams and for that matter, niche sports. Is ESPN smart enough to fix that? I’m not sure. I guess I don’t have much faith in them.
ESPN, how could they miss this sport. It has become a mainstream sport right under their noses. Maybe they choose to ignore it because it’s by far the most violent mainstream sport since boxing. It kinda reminds me of Street fighter the video game, but with only Sagat or the big wrestler to watch.