HEY! Don't you like SPORTS?

Of course you don't! You just pretend to like sports because it's a conduit for the exciting off the field drama and irrelevant bullshit that really make your dick hard! Celebrity gossip is too feminine for your tastes (and that suddenly hard dick you've got). You and your halfwit friends wouldn't be caught dead sitting around watching reality TV; but a football game on a football field? Now that's footballtaining! Of course, I'm talking about the storylines and trash talk and hissy fits and other thrilling events that don't really have anything to do with the games being played. The games themselves are like "eh." Here, I'll stop trying to explain you to yourself and just show you a screencap of ESPN's front page stories right now.

Let's take a look, going down the list in order.

#1: Fair enough, that's sports. It's part of RIVALRY WEEK full of RIVALRY GAMES like this one, during which most of the country was not rooting for either team but was in fact rooting for THE METEOR.

#2: Also sports... a tragic, pathetic part of the world of sports right now but still legitimate sports topic all the same.

#3: I don't think I have to explain to you what's going on here.

#4 and #5: You're cool, although the obnoxious crescendo of will he won't he omg what's he going to do stories is just about as fun as the same stories Carmelo generated last year at this time.

#6: Well, there are two really really important stories that came out of the Super Bowl. I'm sure you'll agree with me that they are 1) what the losing QB's wife had to say about the QB's teammates and 2) what the winning team's backup RB had to say about 1).

#7: Holy shit, is that a soccer story? Of course it's fairly common knowledge that ESPN has invested heavily in soccer broadcasting rights in recent years, but if you didn't know that, this would be a good clue to you that it were the case.

#8: Oh, one last really important story from Super Bowl weekend- what some asshole who hasn't played in four years thinks about what a current player did once the season was over.

#9: Actual sports. BORRRRRIIIIING

#10: Not mindless gossip or "drama," but utterly devoid of substance and merely posted on the front page because it contains the word Kobe.

#11: Is he talking about the Minnesota Timberwolves? What league are they in again?

I wish I had grabbed the screenshot about 4 hours earlier, before the evening's games were complete. Then we could have also discussed "Jets to pay Holmes $15.25M guaranteed," which is not actually about sports but about his RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS TEAM WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT BE GOOD, and "Suh is fourth on Forbes' most-disliked list" which may shock you but is in fact about something besides sports. This is where we are in the year 2012, people. The country's loudest sports network covers the country's most popular league by shoveling complete garbage down viewers' throats. In theory this practice occurs because the market demands it; those stories get clicked millions of times so they go on the font page. In practice, I suspect ESPN is shaping the market just as much as they're reacting to it. If they can get sports fans that are more interested in interview sound bites than what actually happens on the field and in front offices, it's that much easier for them to generate content. It takes a lot of work to report on real stories. It takes almost no work at all to say oooooooh look at what X said about Y! Isn't that captivating?!?!?!

Fuck it, this weekend I'm going back to writing TMQRs. At least that guy cares about the games.

I should also admit, I'm a little over-focused on ESPN when it comes to this kind of awfulness. I cruised around to some other big network sites today and they're pretty much peddling the same crap. Maybe ESPN isn't actually shaping the market as much as I think, maybe it really is all organic. Christ. I hate everyone.