The Games 2012: NBC-U-Later

Olympics on NBC (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The biggest story of the London Olympic Games thus far hasn't been the United States women's gymnastics team winning a gold medal, Michael Phelps setting a record for most individual medals, Hope Solo's tweets criticizing Brandi Chastain's criticism, soldiers and schoolchildren filling empty seats at the venues, or even the emergence of Queen Elizabeth, Action Hero at the opening ceremonies.

No, it's the unofficial Olympic sport of NBC-bashing that's taking center stage.  In spite of all the technological advances and the addition of cable networks through mergers and acquisitions, it's still all about money and the highest ratings possible for the Peacock Network when it comes to Olympics coverage.

The howling from social media began Friday when NBC decided to tape-delay the opening ceremonies, which the rest of the world had already watched live.  Apparently, advertisers don't pay top dollar for a glorified prime time highlights show (especially if the Olympics are held outside North America) unless there's exclusive content that hasn't previously been shown.

When NBC did roll the tape, it was like an extended version of the "Today" show in prime time.  Following a brief discussion between Bob Costas and Tom Brokaw about security preparedness to open the broadcast (an important topic, to be sure.  But it could have been handled better.), the parade of athletes and nations  was punctuated by snarky comments from Costas, Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera, plus commercials every couple of minutes--which made the ceremonies seem longer than they really were.

But what really set people off was when NBC chose to substitute a musical tribute to the victims of the terrorist bombings in London on July 7, 2005.  Instead, we got Ryan Seacrest interviewing Phelps (which begs the question:  What's Seacrest doing here?).  NBC's explanation was that they were trying to "Americanize" the coverage, so they didn't think anyone would be interested in the tribute.  Care to explain that one to the victims' families?

It gets worse.  You can watch soccer, basketball, tennis, volleyball and water polo live on the channels NBC is employing for the Games.  You can't watch track, swimming, gymnastics and the closing ceremonies live, not even on your computer or mobile device.  That's what the prime time show is for, even though the results have been known for hours.

Ratingswise, NBC couldn't be happier with the results.  Its coverage of the opening ceremonies was the top-rated show of the summer, and the subsequent prime time shows racked up good numbers.

Viewers complaining that any other network could have done a better job on the Olympics is like complaining about negative political advertising.  It has been 14 years since anyone other than NBC has covered the Games, and it'll be eight more (at least) before anyone else will.  NBC has the American TV rights through 2020.

It's not as if any other network would have deviated from NBC's tape-delayed, hearts-and-flowers approach.  Les Moonves, the head of CBS, has said as much.  Since American TV coverage of the Olympics began in 1960, viewers usually saw an hour or two of highlights in prime time, and more extensively on weekend afternoons.   The Games didn't start commanding massive amounts of network time until the 1980s.

So keep those e-mails and tweets coming, folks.  NBC doesn't seem to care what people think of how they're covering the Olympics, so long as the ratings and the money roll in.  Is this a great country, or what?

The Games 2012: This . . . Is London

Cropped transparent version of Image:Olympic flag.svg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The British are used to celebrations by now.  First there was the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, followed by the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.  You might have heard about those.

Now London is hosting the Summer Olympics for the first time since 1948, with all the pomposity and circumstance and track and field they can handle.

Security has been Topic A in the run-up to the Games.  It's been that way since June 2005, when three subway trains and a bus exploded during rush hour, killing 56 people.  That was one day after London was awarded the 2012 Summer Games.

So the British go overboard in protecting the people from terrorists, using missiles on rooftops and a huge military presence compensating for the security company they hired that came up short.  You'd think this was London during World War II, and the enemy was Nazi Germany and not al-Qaeda..

Where's Edward R. Murrow when you really need him?  Unfortunately for American TV viewers, we're stuck with Bob Costas.  NBC is showing at least 5000 hours of Olympics coverage across several of the networks parent company Comcast owns.  As usual, they'll save the best events for its prime time coverage, hours after everybody's heard the results.  After the hearts-and-flowers profiles, commercials for official Olympic sponsors and plugs for NBC's stellar fall line-up, maybe then you'll see some actual competition.

As for the athletes, well, whoever makes the biggest splash in the next couple of weeks will get their share of glory.  Then there is the unwanted glory.  Take Usian Bolt, reputed to be the fastest human in the world.  So why is actor Mickey Rourke claiming he beat Bolt in a middle-of-the-night race?  And then there's the Greek female track star who was booted from the Games because of a racist tweet she made.

The biggest controversy the United States team has had, besides Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney slamming London's preparation for the Games, has to do with the wardrobe for the Opening Ceremonies.  It seems that those Ralph Lauren-branded clothes were actually made in China, and members of both political parties--in a rare show of bipartisanship-- hollered that it was just plain unpatriotic.  Since so many of our products are now made in China, it's not as big a deal as it used to be.

Here's what we think will happen during the Olympics:

• Somebody other than the U.S. will win the gold medal in men's basketball.  After a compressed NBA schedule caused by last year's lockout, the current squad has too many injuries to key players, and too much competitive balance among the rest of the field to make them a favorite.
• The U.S. women's soccer and basketball teams will cruise to gold medals.  Unless they don't.
• Michael Phelps will put down his Subway sandwiches long enough to win a few medals in swimming.  Just not as many as there were in 2008.
• At least one athlete will lose his/her medal because that person didn't do a good job of hiding the illegal substance they used to win that event.

One more thing:  The 40th anniversary of the night in Munich when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were massacred by Arab terrorists is coming up.  Like they did in 1972, the International Olympic Committee has decided to bury its head in the sand by not acknowledging the tragedy at these Games.  They'd better hope nothing goes wrong here, or it really will be like London during wartime.  Didn't Winston Churchill say something once about blood, sweat and tears?

Penn State Gets Life Sentence

The Lion Shrine at Penn State. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We didn't think the National Collegiate Athletic Association had it in them, but they did.  As judge, jury and executioner of college sports in America, the NCAA handed down what amounted to a life sentence for the Penn State University football program in the wake of the child sex scandal there.

The NCAA showed a little mercy in not shutting down football for a year or two, as some observers wanted them to do.  Instead, they said they based their sanctions on the information contained in the recently-released Freeh Report.  In it, the report said that then-football coach Joe Paterno and other Penn State officials had conspired for over a decade to hide allegations of child sexual abuse against then-assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for fear of negative publicity.  Because they are Penn State.

Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse last month, and is awaiting sentencing.  Paterno died last January.

Here are the highlights of the Penn State sanctions:

• A $60 million fine, which would go into (as the NCAA puts it) "external programs preventing child sexual abuse or assisting victims and may not be used to fund such programs at the university".  We'll believe it when we see it.
• No bowl games for four years.  No conference championship games either, as the Big Ten conference has tacked on its own penalties.
• Athletic department gets five-year probation.  Apparently, the other sports at PSU need to share the pain too.
• Scholarship reductions over four years.  Not to state the obvious, but that will definitely affect recruiting.
• Player transfers.  Those with the remotest NFL aspirations would be wise to take their talents somewhere else ASAP.
• Victories from 1998-2011 erased.  That's 112 wins, including conference championships and bowl appearances.  It also means that Paterno is no longer the winningest coach in major college football, with his record being cut from 409 wins to 298.  Former Florida State coach Bobby Bowden now leads with 377.  (It should be noted that Eddie Robinson of Grambling State, now deceased, holds the overall NCAA Division I record with 408.)

With Paterno's reputation all but destroyed, PSU officials decided to remove his statue to parts unknown.  Maybe they'll just become parts.  But there's still the issue of what to do with a library named for the former coach.

So to sum up:  More than a decade of Penn State football and the work that the coaches and what the NCAA likes to call "student-athletes" have put in have gone up in smoke, because a legendary head coach and his university higher-ups chose to enable an assistant coach who couldn't keep it in his pants around young boys.

The NCAA has made sure that Penn State will not have a competitive football program for at least a decade.  (Even in its diminished state, they would still be more competitive than the University of Minnesota.)  This is an extraordinary situation, to be sure.  But one has to wonder what the NCAA would do about other holier-than-thou athletic programs accused of wrongdoing.  Let's see how serious they really are about putting sports in the proper perspective.

Penn State: Truth and Consequences

Joe Paterno (Photo credit: seng1011)

Jerry Sandusky, former assistant football coach at Penn State University, is on his way to prison having been convicted of molesting boys in incidents dating back 15 years.  Joe Paterno, who had been PSU's head football coach since the 1960s until he was fired, has been dead for a few months.

Both were named in a report released Thursday by former FBI director Louis Freeh, which pointed the finger at PSU officials--Paterno especially--for covering up and passing the buck on Sandusky's misdeeds.

Now there are calls for Penn State to suspend its football program for a year or two, and to tear down Paterno's statue, which currently sticks out like a sore thumb on its campus.  That big, hulking football stadium which stands as a monument to Paterno even without the statue can just sit idle and grow weeds.

The NCAA, which has the power to strip its member schools of its football programs--something they last did with Southern Methodist University for less heinous crimes back in the 1980s, is considering doing the same thing with Penn State.  But they probably won't, because in college football the NCAA has much less power and influence than it used to have.  Conferences such as the Big Ten (of which Penn State is a member), who recently set up a post-season football playoff without the NCAA's help, run the show now.  And football, along with the television money that comes with it, is what floats the boat on schools' athletic budgets.

Joe Paterno's legacy has taken a major hit in the past few months since the scandal broke.  He's gone from being a legendary coach who won national championships and who graduated most of his players on time, to a world-class manipulator former President Richard Nixon would have been proud of.  Paterno claimed up and down in interviews before his death that he didn't know how to handle Sandusky's preference for young boys, when the Freeh report said he did know and didn't do anything about it.

The report also mentioned that there were janitors who said they witnessed what Sandusky and his young male partner were doing in the locker room showers, but did not report it for fear of losing their jobs.

OK, folks.  Put yourself in the janitors' shoes.  If you had witnessed what they did, what would you have done?

The correct answer, of course, is to report the incident to the police and the proper authorities.  But out here in the real world, you'd be wise to keep your mouth shut.  Say one word about it and you can lose your job, get threatening phone calls, and your family might be harassed.

This is why whistleblowers go into hiding, in spite of new laws that supposedly protect them.  This is why some murder cases go unsolved, because witnesses either have a severe mistrust of law enforcement, or a fear of ending up dead themselves.  In other words:  Don't snitch, if you know what's good for you.

For the victims of Jerry Sandusky, most of whom are grown men now, the damage has already been done.  They must live with this the rest of their lives, whether anyone was brave enough to stop the abuse or not.

The football games will go on at Penn State sooner or later, because people tend to have short memories.  Students and boosters alike will put aside the horrors of young boys being abused while university officials looked the other way, as the pride of the school is put to the test on the football field.  Because that's college football.

Twins 2012: Perception Isn't Reality

Justin Morneau (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you've listened to Dick Bremer and Bert Blyleven (and sometimes Ron Coomer or Roy Smalley) on Minnesota Twins baseball telecasts long enough this season, you might be under the impression that if the team caught a few breaks, they could actually have a shot at an American League playoff spot.

The reality is that, with another slow start out of the gate, the Twins are again bringing up the rear in the AL Central division after the All-Star break.  They are 36-49, eleven games in back of the division-leading Chicago White Sox.  That's not as bad as the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners in terms of who's the worst teams in Major League Baseball, but it's pretty close.

The offense on the Twins has improved because Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer have been relatively healthy for the first time in quite awhile.  Newcomers Josh Willingham and Trevor Plouffe have also shown an ability to hit the ball beyond the fences.  They won't make anyone forget Jim Thome (now with the Baltimore Orioles), but still . . .

As for the pitching--well, where do we start?  There have been 11 different starters so far this season, due mainly to injury or ineffectiveness, which has prompted the Twins to call up Cole DeVries and Samuel Deduno from their Rochester, N.Y. minor league team.  Francisco Liriano, an embarrassment at the start of the season, is now pitching well enough to possibly get traded to a contender.  And Glen Perkins has done a so-so job as the team's closer while Matt Capps nurses an injury.

By the time you see this, some of these players may be traded elsewhere or let go on waivers.  General manager Terry Ryan is having a tough time deciding whether or not the Twins should be buyers or sellers.  It comes down to this:  If you think you have a shot at the playoffs, then you'd better get yourself some starting pitching.  If you don't, then start getting rid of your high-priced talent in favor of prospects.

Unless you've moved on to your Netflix account, or are counting the days until the NFL training camps open, try this exercise.  The next time Dick and Bert (and Ron and Roy) give even the slightest hint of optimism about the Twins' play, clap your hands and make a wish.  It won't actually work miracles, but you might feel better about yourself and the baseball team you've been watching.

Wild Take Fourth of July Gamble

English: Zach Parise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the hottest July 4th in Twin Cities history (101 degrees), the Minnesota Wild threw a firecracker at the rest of the National Hockey League by signing two of the most coveted free agents this year.

Zach Parise of the New Jersey Devils and Ryan Suter of the Nashville Predators agreed to terms with the Wild, each armed with 13-year, $98 million contracts.  Both are from (or have ties to) Minnesota, and wanted to play together.  Both rejected offers from other NHL teams that have winning traditions and/or deeper pockets.

Wild owner Craig Leipold was finally willing to spend his way out of mediocrity in going all out to land Parise and Suter.  Suddenly, the team is a Stanley Cup contender after having missed the playoffs for the last four seasons.  Ticket and jersey sales are stating to pick up.

Are Parise and Suter really worth all that money?  Who knows?  Other NHL teams who have locked up their best players in contracts that last at least a decade have had varying results.  No wonder, as the new collective bargaining agreement is being negotiated, some NHL owners tend to plead poverty.  TV money can only take you so far.

Then there's the unavoidable fact that, once a player signs a big contract, his career goes downhill and his team is stuck with a financial albatross.  Look no further than the Minnesota Twins, who signed Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer to long-term deals just to keep them from going elsewhere in free agency.   Injuries have prevented Morneau and Mauer from being more productive on the field.  And Mauer's contract has become a financial impediment for a now-struggling Twins franchise.

The Wild had better hope they got what they paid for with the acquisition of Parise and Suter.  Otherwise, this could turn out to be a long-term dud, if the franchise doesn't go bankrupt first.  Thirteen years is a long time.