Super Bowl Coverage: E–S–P–N or H-Y-P-E?

Is it just me, or does the Worldwide Leader in HYPE need to be stopped?

I spent much of Saturday and Sunday like I do every other weekend; watching college and NBA hoops on the Worldwide Leader.

This past weekend was overloaded with Super Bowl information. Every eight minutes or so, my eyes scanned the bottom line for pertinent information only to read...

"Tom Brady seen attending Patriots send-off walking without protective boot and with no noticeable limp."

SERIOUSLY?? THAT is news?!?

So, in other words, ESPN said, "Nothing to report about Brady's ankle so we are going to report that all is fine."

Great. Thanks. Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East and set in the West. New York will be three hours ahead of Los Angeles. Unbelievable.

ESPN makes it very hard to follow sports at times. From "naming" every damn week during the college hoops season, to shoving women's basketball—both college and WNBA—down our throats whether we want it or not, to over-hyping the painfully obvious, being a born and bred sports fanatic is becoming difficult in 2008.

We have "Judgment Week" and "Rivalry Week" and "Week of Annihilation" or whatever. Why can't we just watch the games and decide after the game how important it was? What happened to watching the games and letting them play out before us? I think that we can all appreciate some build up for the big games—Duke-Carolina being one of them, and Auburn-Alabama in football being another.

But for the love of all that is holy, if I have to watch all 19 Red Sox-Yankees games this year, each one being bigger than the last, I'm going to take an axe to my 42" plasma TV. 

I love the access I have to all the information all over the internet and on TV. I love the fact that I can follow my favorite school's recruits over the course of their season to see how they are progressing and if they are truly deserving of the praise they've received before they have even stepped foot on campus.

So please don't take this rant as a rant against progress or information or the Freedom of Information Act (Houston Nutt knows all too well about that last one).

Take this as a rant for some normalcy. Let me watch UConn-Syracuse on Big Monday next week without telling me how big a game it is. Allow the 26,000 fans in attendance to dictate that to me. Allow the faces of the players playing in that game for the first time tell me how "big" the game truly is.

Let us watch one of those players get floor burns going for a loose ball during the first five minutes of action to show what the game truly means. It's not about presenting the action by Bud Light. It's not about the Acura halftime scoreboard. Or the Tuff-Actin'-Tinactin keys to the game.

It's about what goes on out on the floor. It's about the game itself. I don't ever want to lose sight of that fact.