OT: Cowherd leaving ESPN | Page 2 | The Boneyard

OT: Cowherd leaving ESPN

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Mooch82 said:
I like Bilas, but I agree with you. I think people on here love Bilas because he's a Dukie that is generally unbiased and has been pretty pro-Uconn throughout his career. Most Boneyarders generally don't like the media if they aren't UConn cheerleaders.
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I don't like Cowherd because I find nothing that he has to say interesting or provocative, and most of his little pet theories have an easily verifiable alternative explanation based in actual facts.

I can't stand him - besides the dog whistle stuff he loves - because he thinks that using phrases like "coastal elites" and "revenue streams" reflects some kind of insight that the average fan lacks but he really just sounds like a little kid reading his dad's files. Don't insult my intelligence.

Honestly, the only sports radio I'll listen to now that SVP and Russillo are done is Lebatard when i stumble across him.
 
Jay Bilas was basically alone in calling out how ridiculous the APR nonsense was. This was when the rest of the college basketball media almost to a person was swallowing the premise that UConn was deficient in the classroom and stood alone as some kind of symbol of all that is wrong with college athletics. Bilas was having none of it. For that, he deserves no end of thanks.
 
TheRealKBuks said:
Is there anyone in the entire country this board actually approves of...smh
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bubba the love sponge
 
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I don't want the media to be cheerleaders but there are deniers and savages that refuse to acknowledge the reality of what has taken place in the past 20 years.
 
There's an article in today's Boston Globe on sports media (http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2...ar-coverage/pcJZRfqQ5hgDD3FzqNUEUM/story.html) theorizing that Cowherd, Simmons and Olberman were all pushed out by ESPN to save money. Here's the excerpt below. Best part was the last line. I almost spit out my water when I read that since I couldn't agree more.

It’s uncertain for now whether the exodus of big-name talent — Bill Simmons, Keith Olbermann, Colin Cowherd — from ESPN recently is coincidental or connected. But the instinct is to lean toward the latter, especially after The Hollywood Reporter revealed last week that Disney, ESPN’s parent company, has ordered a $100 million budget cut in 2016 and an astonishing $250 million the following year. Cowherd, a popular and controversial radio host, is the latest to depart, with the website The Big Lead breaking the news Wednesday while also reporting that he is expected to land at Fox Sports. If a media reporter may be permitted one subjective wish, it is this: Please let Skip Bayless be next.
 
Mooch82 said:
This board is so fricken negative when it comes to members of the media. I think Jay Bilas is the only guy people like. It's really annoying.

Cowherd has his schtick, and who knows if he even believes in what he's saying half the time, but it stirs debate and conversation. That's what he's paid to do and he's great at it. There's not a guy on the Boneyard who could provide anywhere near his level of entertainment as a one man sports talk show host. Get over yourselves.

I personally am a huge Cowherd fan, and used to listen to him all the time when I had a sales job where I was in the car all the time. Was by far the most entertaining of any sports talk show host out there. Just because you don't agree with him (again, this is part of his schtick) doesn't mean he isn't great at what he does.
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In general, I think much of the mainstream media is a joke. There's too much better independent content out there now.

Bilas gets the praise he does simply because he's better than the alternative. The level of mainstream college basketball analysis is shockingly bad right now. Not hard to stand out in a ship of fools.
 
Keep in mind that ESPN is only about 35 years old total and has really only been the primary driver of sports content for about a decade.
What we are seeing with the bloat of contracts for content and on-air talent is similar to what universities saw when they would routinely promote the head football coach up to AD as if it were some sort of transition in to full time retirement. That often ended in disaster. That's why it's no longer a given that a football coach has the skills to translate in to running complex athletic departments with hundreds of workers, complying with state and federal laws and running constrained budgets upwards of $100m.
ESPN was cute when they were the cutting edge cable substitute for network sports. Like many industries and corporations they are learning that there is a different skillset between new/growth and sustainment. They have leveled off in terms of size and they are finding out that the pyramid is now bottomed out.
 
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My goodness, that was the comment that got him taken off air? A little insensitive maybe, but for a shock jock that's pretty tame.
 
noeynox said:
My goodness, that was the comment that got him taken off air? A little insensitive maybe, but for a shock jock that's pretty tame.
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"Dominicans can play the sport, so it can't be complicated" is essentially what he said.

We've seen way worse, but as I said, it was just incredibly stupid. No way that couldn't have gone over bad. I wonder how fast he put his foot in his mouth.
 
Colin Cowherd is one of the most intelligent, and articulate radio personalities in America. Compared to the dreck we get on WFAN, ESPN Radio, and Mad Dog Radio, Cowherd is a genius. This is why he is getting a big new spot with (probably) Fox. Like any radio commentator, if you don't like him, change the channel. Keep listening to idiots complaining with call-ins. His show today included Bill Parcels, Geno, and Jake Gyllenhall. Cowherd can listen which is a rare trait of radio personalities. Auriemma pointed this out today.
 
If you're bored with the radio, I recommend the Paul Finebaum show. He's kind of boring, but the people who call into the show are a train wreck. It's generally about SEC football so you get a good sampling of the more ignorant fanbases in the country. It's like going to the people of Walmart site but with audio instead of pictures.
 
Rocklander said:
Colin Cowherd is one of the most intelligent, and articulate radio personalities in America. Compared to the dreck we get on WFAN, ESPN Radio, and Mad Dog Radio, Cowherd is a genius. This is why he is getting a big new spot with (probably) Fox. Like any radio commentator, if you don't like him, change the channel. Keep listening to idiots complaining with call-ins. His show today included Bill Parcels, Geno, and Jake Gyllenhall. Cowherd can listen which is a rare trait of radio personalities. Auriemma pointed this out today.
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Colin can't hold Mike Francessa's jock when it comes to sports talk. Cowherd is a DOPE
 
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Rocktheworld said:
"Dominicans can play the sport, so it can't be complicated" is essentially what he said.

We've seen way worse, but as I said, it was just incredibly stupid. No way that couldn't have gone over bad. I wonder how fast he put his foot in his mouth.
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If you've ever been to the DR, and left the resort, you'd know that they have had issues educating the population. When I was there about a decade ago, the president got elected by vowing to provide education to all children. When I asked a child who was asking to shine my sneakers for a dollar why he wasn't in school, he told me he had evening school, his classes started at 2pm.

His comments were insensitive, but they struck me as coming from someone who has been there and traveled off the resort.
 
Rocklander said:
Colin Cowherd is one of the most intelligent, and articulate radio personalities in America. Compared to the dreck we get on WFAN, ESPN Radio, and Mad Dog Radio, Cowherd is a genius. This is why he is getting a big new spot with (probably) Fox. Like any radio commentator, if you don't like him, change the channel. Keep listening to idiots complaining with call-ins. His show today included Bill Parcels, Geno, and Jake Gyllenhall. Cowherd can listen which is a rare trait of radio personalities. Auriemma pointed this out today.
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Thanks Mrs. Cowherd.
 
noeynox said:
If you've ever been to the DR, and left the resort, you'd know that they have had issues educating the population. When I was there about a decade ago, the president got elected by vowing to provide education to all children. When I asked a child who was asking to shine my sneakers for a dollar why he wasn't in school, he told me he had evening school, his classes started at 2pm.

His comments were insensitive, but they struck me as coming from someone who has been there and traveled off the resort.
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Nobody needs to travel to the Dominican to know there are serious socioeconomic and educational problems.

You're failing to realize that he's unnecessarily belittling an entire people to make a point, or to realize that that is wrong. Either way.... it's a little concerning.
 
Rocktheworld said:
Apparently they kicked him out for certain comments regarding Dominican baseball players. FS1 is picking him up. What a stupid thing for him to say

Cowherd said Thursday that he didn't believe baseball was complex, saying a third of the sport was from the Dominican Republic, which had ''not been known, in my lifetime, as having, you know, world-class academic abilities.''

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/mlb-says-cowherd-owes-dominicans-apology-remarks-185453392--mlb.html
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He said this after the announcement was made about him leaving. Completely unrelated. I also don't understand what is so terrible about saying that a country that has a history of underfunded and underperforming education, doesn't have great education. Perhaps the way he delivered the message was clunky and lazy, but it's not racism, as the blogs are calling it.
 
Rocktheworld said:
Nobody needs to travel to the Dominican to know there are serious socioeconomic and educational problems.

You're failing to realize that he's unnecessarily belittling an entire people to make a point, or to realize that that is wrong. Either way.... it's a little concerning.
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You're right. He shouldn't have said it, just feel too much is made when people say something insensitive.
 
I liked Simmons, Cowherd (especially when he was on SportsNation), and SVP because they all spoke their mind. Yeah their opinions may have pissed me off occasionally, but I still enjoyed listening to them.
 
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Even if there are elements of truth to what he said about Dominican's educational opportunities, there are things now that can't be said regarding race and ethnicity. Hulk Hogan was let go by WWE for a clip uncovered from years ago in which black friends called him the N word and he joked back to them, he meant nothing at all by it but the world's press brings to light and jumps on everything nowadays. The Latin population is a large, strong element and consumer group in society and companies don't want to lose them. Wonder if Colin gets another gig after this? My bet is eventually with a bigger apology.
 
Inyatkin said:
Jay Bilas was basically alone in calling out how ridiculous the APR nonsense was. This was when the rest of the college basketball media almost to a person was swallowing the premise that UConn was deficient in the classroom and stood alone as some kind of symbol of all that is wrong with college athletics. Bilas was having none of it. For that, he deserves no end of thanks.
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he also went on espn when uconn won in 2011 and defended calhoun, he's neutral and hates the ncaa... i love bilas even though some things every once in awhile i disagree with
 
Rocktheworld said:
Apparently they kicked him out for certain comments regarding Dominican baseball players. FS1 is picking him up. What a stupid thing for him to say

Cowherd said Thursday that he didn't believe baseball was complex, saying a third of the sport was from the Dominican Republic, which had ''not been known, in my lifetime, as having, you know, world-class academic abilities.''

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/mlb-says-cowherd-owes-dominicans-apology-remarks-185453392--mlb.html
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ESPN needs to get off its high horse. What they aren't mentioning is that his last scheduled on air show was next Friday. So they are cutting him a week early. If they were so sensitive to what their on-air talent was saying, they would have let Stephen A. walk a long time ago. Instead, he keeps being an idiot and they extended him at 3mil per.
 
This isn't about racism.
This is about corporatism.
The developing PC of the last 40 years has been more about corporatism than correctness - at least outside of academia and politics. The common thread among all of these cases is the preservation of income. Cowherd is more of a tw@t than ever, but the comment in question was really a generic comment that "Baseball can't be complicated because people from countries with horrible education systems play it just fine." He used the DR as an obvious example, because they have so many players in MLB, but there was no contextual implication that he was picking on that one ethnicity, and, further, there is no contextual implication that he was making an ethic/racial argument that Dominicans are stupid.
His follow up sentence is critical:
The Dominican Republic has not been known in my lifetime as having world class academic abilities. A lot of those kids come from rough backgrounds and have not had opportunities academically that other kids from other countries have.
He lays out very clearly that he's not making a genetic argument - "come from rough backgrounds and have not had the opportunities . . . ." Can't be any clearer than that. He's saying the DR schools suck, they produce poorly educated kids, those kids go on to play MLB baseball, they do fine, ergo playing MLB baseball does not require a good education, ergo playing MLB is not complicated. The logic is poor, but it's not racist or xenophobic.
This is about money, which is what much of PC code is now. ESPN doesn't want to lose any viewers, CC was on his way out anyway, so the very easy call was to fire him. Makes ESPN - a soulless corporation formed exclusively and explicitly to profiteer - appear to have some sort of social conscience.
PC in politics is about electability and preservation of power.
PC in academia is about thought control and entrenchment of ideology.
PC everywhere else is about maximization of profit.
PC does not exist where it can do none of the above, and that's why NASCAR hasn't yet banned the confederate flag - because it would hurt the bottom line. If it would help the bottom line, they'd ban the flags in a nano-second and put out some PC tripe about "inclusivity" and the "values" of NASCAR.
I'm not sure why anybody is surprised anymore when somebody gets suspended/axed for ho-hum language that some group or another finds offensive according to one or more alleged representatives of that group or another. It's not about the content of the indicted speech. It's not about the belief structure held by the person enunciating the indicted speech.
It's about the power/ideology/money that's impacted by the speech, which means this is an effect-driven phenomenon, not a sensitivity-driven phenomenon.
Hogan getting fired for comments made 8 years ago in a private conversation is just the latest iteration of effect-driven "correctness."
 
UConn990411 said:
Not here to defend Cowherd, who's generally horrible. But it's interesting to see who ESPN seems to be showing the door to. More specifically, they seem to be getting rid of their most opinionated talent, probably since those employees are most likely to ruffle the NFL's feathers. It's a shame to see what's happened to what used to be a truly great company. But I'm enjoying watching them struggle.
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I would imagine to some extent it is money. Radio revenues are flattish to down mostly and top talent wants to be paid more every time they re-up. Key guys get paid. There are always other factors involved also, but if he was actually killing his day part they probably would have worked things out (not necessarily after this latest thing but before he signed with Fox).
 
J187Money said:
I would imagine to some extent it is money. Radio revenues are flattish to down mostly and top talent wants to be paid more every time they re-up. Key guys get paid. There are always other factors involved also, but if he was actually killing his day part they probably would have worked things out (not necessarily after this latest thing but before he signed with Fox).
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Money's the convenient excuse for ESPN. They want fewer people who will force them to answer to Goodell and co.
 
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