We all give out about commentators and analysts. They’re boring, their biased, they don’t understand the game, they’re there just because they played. Revulsion of Joe Brolly’s latest outburst or George Hook’s inanities is a national past time. In a land of blind monkeys, Gary Neville is the one-eyed monkey thanks to his ability to string two sentences together and sound interesting.

You think it’s bad now? It’s about to get a whole lot worse.

For those who don’t know, ESPN is a goliath that strides the American sports landscape. The cable TV channel hoovers up rights to show sporting events, including NFL Monday Night Football, College Football, NBA, College Basketball, Major League Baseball, US Soccer internationals, Tennis, Golf and many others. If ESPN doesn’t have the rights to your sport, like they don’t with the National Hockey League, they ignore your sport and you suffer a huge publicity deficit.

Imagine if RTE only showed Gaelic Football, not Hurling, and ignored Hurling existed apart from thirty-second clips on the Six-One News. Do you think it’d stifle Hurling’s popularity?

See if you can find a common thread among these three items of news.

Item A: Bill Simmons, editor-in-chief of the ESPN offshoot website Grantland is one of the fathers of internet sports writing. His fusion of acerbic wit, pop culture references, deep homerism for his Boston teams (the man calls himself a homersexual) and deep love of sport, especially the NBA, has influenced and informed so many of us who write about sport on-line. Simmons has long been a critic of NFL President Roger Goodell, particularly for Goodell’s response to players involved in domestic violence cases. In September 2014 Simmons was suspended after this podcast, where he attacks Goodell for his press conference discussing the Ray Rice domestic violence case.

On May 8, ESPN announced that they would not be renewing the contract of Bill Simmons.

So, a writer loses his highly paid job. If he’s as good as I say he is, he’ll get another, right? So what? Read on.

Item B: Keith Olbermann is one of the most incendiary voices in American broadcasting. Starting off as an anchor on ESPN’s legendary SportsCenter show, Olbermann moved to MSNBC to become the most vocal and outrageous critic of George W. Bush’s White House administration. The title for this video says it all:

In 2013, Olbermann returned to sports casting on ESPN with his eponymous show. For two years, Olbermann brought his sharp wit and crushing hatred of idiocy to the sports world. Keith Olbermann has also been critic of NFL President Roger Goodell, most notably for Goodell’s responses to players involved in domestic violence cases, and to the growing body of evidence that huge swathes of NFL players are suffering life-altering brain damage due to ignored concussions they are getting on the field.

At the beginning of July, The Hollywood Reporter reported that ESPN was making it a key term of contract negotiations that Olbermann would be reigning in his commentary.

On July 8, ESPN announced that they would not be renewing the contract of Keith Olbermann.

OK, so that’s two, and they both were critical of the NFL, but so what again?

Item 3: On July 9, Matt Bonesteel (yes that is his real name, and yes I want that name) of the Washington Post’s sports blog Early Post posted how people are questioning if the NFL put pressure on ESPN to get rid of Simmons and Olbermann. He quoted two major sources Ben Koo on Awful Announcing, renowned for breaking big stories on the inner workings of the sport business, alleged insiders at ESPN feared the NFL was punishing the channel with a weak slate of games for their flagship Monday Night Football show.

“It was reported that ESPN’s lacklustre upcoming slate of Monday Night games was believed to be retribution for Bill Simmons and Olbermann’s criticism of the league and Goodell. To that end, we’re hearing there are some ESPN folks who think the league denied a request for a Monday Night Football match-up featuring the (Dallas) Cowboys against a specific opponent due to Simmons and Olbermann’s vocal criticism this past year.”

In Vanity Fair John Andrew Millar, author of the book on the inner workings of ESPN, “Those Guys Have All The Fun”, wrote that;

“In recent weeks, rumour had it that ESPN executives were increasingly concerned about Olbermann’s commentaries and his strafing of Goodell, whose league has a lucrative partnership with the network to broadcast Monday Night Football through 2021.”

Well… huh?

Television sports rights are becoming the most valuable commodity in the TV business today. Sporting events are the only television experiences which are DVR/Later viewing proof, as no one wants to watch a match that has already happened, and are genuine cultural events as they happen.

British Telecom (BT) has built their internet business and re-built their phone dominance in the UK through packaging these services along with exclusive sporting events on their BT Sport channel. Yearly, the biggest events on RTE are the All-Ireland finals and International rugby and football internationals.

If sporting organisations can exert their influence to the point where dissenting voices are quelled for fear of losing business, the very idea of televisual analysis is dead. Take the recent FIFA scandals (it’s never good when you have “scandals” plural).

The BBC and ITV hold the British television rights for the World Cup. Imagine if they were scared to report on Sepp Blatter’s amazing array of apparent corruption for fear they’d lose their ability to show the games? What if Channel 4 decided that for two years they were going to run puff pieces on FIFA, praising Blatter the humanitarian, and sweetened FIFA up to get the rights?

Could the GAA force Joe Brolly off the television for his continuous assaults of the character of the Association on RTE with the threat of TV3 and Sky Sports? (Actually, this’d be an upside of the whole thing. Uachtarán O’Neill, get on the phone to Montrose and turn that screw right now!)

Ultimately, television analysts will have to stop criticising the organisations. If commentators won’t be able to criticise what’s going on off the pitch, will they be allowed to criticise what’s happening on the pitch?

It seems apparent in years to come that if you want true analysis, you’re going to have to look on-line. I’m not saying we here at Pundit Arena are all virtue and light (Sepp, I’ll take my bribes in unmarked bills inside a large brown bag with a green “$” sign).

However, internet writing is ultimately going to be the only mass forum where dissenting voices will be allowed to grow. The dying of the newspaper industry will mean that they’ll have to cosy up more than ever. It’s only on-line that the freedom will exist to delve deeply into the workings of the organisations, and to break down what’s happening when the teams come out to play.

If you want honest opinions and criticisms, it’s the likes of here you’ll need to be.

Read More About: American Football, Bill Simmons, Commentary, FIFA, fifa corruption, Football, GAA, Keith Olbermann, NFL, nfl season, Television, Top Story