Pining for the Old Sportscenter

The Fastest 3 Minutes was just on. That's the segment immediately after the end of the 1st half on Monday Night Football when Chris Berman rips through highlights from most of Sunday's football games. I always tune in for it, usually focusing even more than I had the entire first half. Partly, it's Boomer at his best. But tonight I realized that even more broadly, it's well-edited highlights well-delivered. In other words, it's what Sportscenter used to be.

If you've been reading ESPN's Ombudsmen's monthly columns, you might have caught her discussing the same issue. Sportscenter has changed in the 21st century. Even its producers admit it, claiming that the current version gets better ratings. I find it hard to believe. My generation used to watch Sportscenter before going to school in the morning. We'd wake up in time to catch the last couple minutes of the 6:00 am show including Did You Know? and, if it was Friday, Plays of the Week. Then we'd get the first segment that was full of all the key highlights from the night before. Caught up, we rolled out the door to catch the bus.

Nowadays, the first segment is fully geared towards one big story, and usually it doesn't even involve an actual game. The rest of the show seems to be mostly PTI-like opinion segments. The bottom line, where do we now go for sports news? ESPNews, which 10 years ago was like water to Sportscenter's wine. It's still water, but Sportscenter is an empty glass.

To reiterate: Fastest 3 Minutes is great.

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In other news, my collaborators for the greatest NCAA preview ever in The Sports Sauna history submitted their portions to me within a couple hours of each other this afternoon. My portion is just about done. Look for it to pop up by tomorrow night if it doesn't arrive sooner.