No shit skip, of course they shouldn’t turn the ball over, or get red cards, or what the fuck ever. Passing gas in the bathroom and think it’s perfume; literally shitty analysis I just heard on ESPN.
Why don’t sports commentators actually break down plays and strategy?
Only one I can think of is jomboy breaks down pitches sometimes. Showed that the pitcher was releasing at the top of the throw for like 4 pitches of sliders then released like 20 degrees sidearm with another slider but because it was released differently it caught the batter and struck them out. Beautiful breakdown and I appreciated the sport and gamesmanship even more.
Because most viewers don’t want actual analysis, they just want meaningless drama. ESPN has more or less turned sports fandom into the real housewives for men imo.
It is really frustrating. I blame Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless. Kidding, but seriously. That style of commentary is absolute crap. Yelling is not an affective way to get your point across.
TO ME THAT’S ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS
NO YOU’RE RIDICULOUS! PIMENTO64 HAS NO HEART! THEY’RE A CHUMP! A CHUMP I TELL YOU! HOW MANY RINGS DOES PIMENTO64 EVEN HAVE??!?!?!
I’m really into hockey, and I feel the reddit sub is 99% hockey-themed soap opera content, like what players are getting divorced from their wives and such. It’s so boring to me. I just want to see highlights, trades, stats, etc. But it’s very clear that the sub wants to see this type of content, so I guess give the people what they want.
When the regular season starts it will probably get better.
I’ve done sports announcing, and come from a journalism family where my dad taught radio broadcasting.
Sports casting is hard. Like really, really hard. It is very easy to criticize the way someone does it, but it is incredibly difficult to fill hours of silence. I did live commentary for college wrestling, and I was a very knowledgeable high school wrestler, but frankly sometimes there just isn’t something exciting or even describable happening. Jockeying for control, positioning, or feeling out an opponent - sometimes the announcing is “they continue struggling!” Then you think of a sport that isn’t nonstop action like American football, or God forbid, baseball? Huge swaths of time where there is nothing to say. This is why professional sports casts on major networks have huge teams. They can pull up obscure stats that don’t really mean anything, instant replay analysis done nearly live, and a ton of graphics to keep things moving and exciting.
Then you have the issue others have talked about, where your audience may have almost no knowledge of what to you is a deeply technical sport. So every time you explain a wrestling move, or defensive pass coverage, you have to assume no knowledge. You have to explain why someone is doing something, but luckily that actually fills up a bit more time because God forbid you have dead air on a broadcast, so of course you do it. And the type of deep analysis a knowledgeable fan might want is actually really hard to not only come up with live, but while watching something live without the benefit of watching a replay or a better camera angle.
Anyway, my point is that you should try to do an entry level sports broadcasting exercise. Turn the sound off on a game, and try to cast it and record yourself. You will be absolutely shocked at how much silence there is, or how many asinine things you say. Even the “worst” broadcasters that you experience on any major network have such insanely deep knowledge and an ability to just keep spewing information and anecdotes out that I promise you would be so much more impressive if you heard an amateur, or better, tried to do it yourself.
For the same reason there has never been a mainstream esports show.
Announcers and the vast majority of commentators aren’t there to perform deep analysis. They are there to make sure the audience can follow along. You have a good understanding of whatever sport you are talking about. Not everyone watching does. And a lot of the less knowledgeable viewers are there as part of a party and might not be intently focusing, so repetition helps.
That said, alternate commentary/streams/radio shows are increasingly popular if you want something more focused on you.
watch euro lol casters versus american
it’s a us thing
This is hilariously false. It’s a major vs minor sport thing and having a population of talent to draw on. Top top top euro soccer announcers are just as amazing as top top top US basketball and football announcers, but as soon as you start watching a handball broadcast there is very little separating it from a rowing broadcast or a darts broadcast or whatever. Sometimes you get a good play by play announcer but color is almost always rough, because it’s insanely hard, not because Americans are bad at it lol.
so you genuinely think there isn’t a styalistic difference in us sports broadcasting versus eu?
when the big paying sports in the us choose a more drama focused / player driven narrative you think this isn’t by choice?
or do you think the rest of the world does this too?
because it’s super noticeable in multiple types of sports and not all of them are smalltime
I think what they’re saying is that there is a certain tolerance for silence from the Play-by-play and analyst in a football (soccer) broadcast in Europe. Part of it is style, but another part is simply the cadence of the game and the way crowd noise works. American fans tend not to (sonically speaking, and in aggregate) sort of hum and buzz in time with the tension of the play, and frankly most of our sports don’t have that same rhythm. Gridiron football and baseball in particular would be bad TV if they were announced the way soccer can be, doubly so with the weight of audience expectation. I do think an ice hockey broadcast can sort of sound like a soccer broadcast on meth, though, and thinking about the structure and cadence of play, that makes sense. In some sense, they’re the same sport with a different config file. :-)
They get paid to talk - being good at it is just bonus points. So while, if they notice something in the strategy they’ll break it down, but if they don’t notice or can’t think of anything to say, they’ll just state the obvious to keep the commentary going. That’s one thing I appreciate about the Formula 1 announcers, one of them has racing experience so they constantly break down and analyse the strategy in real time, and very rarely add useless filler talk.
Sometimes they do. You have two major commentators for sports.
Analysts, which do break down plays, but usually during breaks and halftime/intermissions because analysis takes longer and is HARD to do in real time.
Then you have color commentators who call the game live and are really there to fill the dead air and bring excitement to the broadcast. Their job is not to do analysis, it’s to call the game in real time and bring excitement to it.
In regards to Jomboy, his videos are great and in depth, but it takes a few days after something happens for him to get that video out. In depth analysis like that is not something you can do in real time.
If you want analysis there’s a ton of it out there. Just not in real time.
Some of them do break down plays and strategy during the game to an extent. The issue with having more analysis during the game is that it takes time to explain details, which isn’t always a luxury that sports commentators have. The last thing most people want is for the broadcast to miss an exciting play because the commentators were too busy explaining the previous play in detail.
the pitcher was releasing at the top of the throw for like 4 pitches of sliders then released like 20 degrees sidearm with another slider but because it was released differently it caught the batter and struck them out. Beautiful breakdown and I appreciated the sport and gamesmanship even more.
The only people who want that are baseball fans. Hockey fans will put up with about 10% of that, football fans will put up with about 5% of it, and basketball fans won’t even listen in the first place. Sports fandom hasn’t grown as fast the population, and the people who do like sports don’t like them in the same way they traditionally used to. Sports coverage now has to be as surface-level as possible to retain an audience who will flip channels once you start talking about catch probability and wRC+, exacerbated by E!SPN aggressively marketing down to the lowest possible denominator and withholding coverage of sports they consider to be too complicated.
tl;dr the dumb masses don’t want to listen to no book larnin from no city slicker
I think the fans do like actual in-depth analysis, it’s just no always possible real-time.
Jomboy’s breakdowns are fantastic, but he’s not able to do that during a live broadcast.
The NFL pioneered game analysis with John Madden and the telestrator, and that is used in all sports broadcasts now. For that, you need the camera work to see and record the action, the expertise to realize there is something to analyse, and the ability to analyse it, and you need the time to show the analysis in a break in play or during an intermission
They keep it at the level of sophistication that the average sports viewer can grasp.
“He’s a real physical player!”
Yeah, I didn’t think the NFL fielded ghosts.
I’m now imagining some sort of cross between Ghostbusters and Angels in the Outfield, but with football.
Some do, but it is rare to find people who can be good on camera as well as on the field. These are usually former players or coaches who were put in front of a camera. Joe Madden is usually considered a decent example of this.
However, in most cases, sports journalism is really more about finding the entertaining story behind the game to drum up interest. When you are trying to tell a story, parts of the game no longer matter.
