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FiveHourMarathon  You can get anything here except red ink  1yr ago (text post)   1657 thread views

MONDAY MORNING MOTTErBack SPORTS THREAD

I know there are some other sports fans on here, and I thought a discussion thread might be fun, and Monday is the natural day coming after the weekend football (both varieties) games and without a side thread scheduled. What's going on with your favorite teams/players/etc? What fun media controversies in the microcosm of sports can tell us something about the broader world? What culture war bullshit do you want to discuss in a sporting context?

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I used to sneer at "sportsball" as a teenager but started to enjoy casually watching games in college. I have a college football and NFL team that I follow and I'll occasionally watch a baseball game.

What I still don't understand is how people keep up with all of the names of the coaches, the players, the interpersonal drama between them, scores, etc. When I watch a game with someone and they ask me what team I follow and I say $NFL_TEAM_NAME, I sometimes get a response like "Oh man how about that thing with your QB last week during that press conference? And do you think John Doe is going to play again this season after that epididymis injury? What do you think of Coach Fillintheblank getting fired? And what about his replacement Coach Newguy?" And I just shrug and say I don't follow them that closely.

Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama? Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to. Baseball stat nerds at least make sense to me, but I don't understand the drama people at all. Maybe there's more to it than that?

Edit: Thanks for all the awesome responses. I think I have a better understanding of the appeal now.

Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.

It's exactly that. Though I'd add that people who are super knowledgable about KiwiFarms or Gamergate or 4chan Patois or the latest outrage bait on the internet are probably at best a sidegrade; as are some interests that I practice myself. Is the guy yapping about Urban Meyer's playbook choices because he listens to Barstool sports podcasts all day really any worse off than someone who listens to Blocked and Reported and can wax rhapsodic about whatever train drama is big on Twitter?

In Dodgeball the ESPN 8 "The Ocho" joke lands because that was ESPN when I was 9 or 10 years old, just always showing sports even if they were pretty stupid sports. The talk segments have grown while the live sports segments have shrunk seemingly every year since then. More gossip, more offseason drama for the NBA/NFL, less professional bowling and strongman, and less hockey and baseball. You could probably tie this into a broad cultural femeninization if you wanted to, with men being ever more interested in gossip and less interested in the action, or to trying to attract female viewers. But there's a chicken and egg thing to your observation of it: do these guys talk about this stuff because they are interested in it naturally, or are they interested in it because when they listen to sports podcasts/radio and watch ESPN it gets presented to them?

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