When last we met, the Jerry Sandusky trial was largely ignored, the Heat were once again all over SportsCenter, and hey, ESPN did a good job covering a perfect games and a no-hitter. What would this week bring?
Total time: 505.25 minutes
Time (minus commercials): 379.5
TIME DEVOTED TO INDIVIDUAL SPORTS
NBA: 178.75 minutes (47.1%) (last week: 48.1%)
MLB: 75.5 (19.9%) (last week: 15.4%)
Golf: 41.25 (10.9%) (last week: 7.1%)
SportsCenter staples (things like the "Top 10," "Encore," "What 2 Watch 4," etc.): 38.5 (10.1%) (last week: 10.4%)
College Baseball: 12.75 (3.4%) (last week: 1.4%)
NASCAR: 10.5 (2.8%) (last week: 1%)
NFL: 9.5 (2.5%) (last week: 1.8%)
Soccer: 8 (2.1%) (last week: 2.7%)
Other sports: 2.25 (0.6%) (last week: 3.1%)
College football: 2 (0.5%) (last week: 0.8%)
NHL: 0.5 (0.1%) (last week: 7.8%)
College basketball: 0 (0%) (last week: 0%)
MOST-COVERED TEAMS BY SPORT
Miami Heat (NBA): 143.25 minutes (37.7%)
New York Yankees & Washington Nationals (MLB): 10.5 each (2.8%)
San Diego Chargers (NFL): 3.25 (0.9%)
Penn State Nittany Lions (college football): 1 (0.2%)
MOST-MENTIONED SPORTS FIGURES
Rather than break down the amount of time a specific athlete or figure was covered, we counted how frequently names were mentioned in the transcripts from the week. The 15 most-mentioned sports people for June 15-21:
LeBron James: 280
Kevin Durant: 113
Dwyane Wade: 83
Russell Westbrook: 81
Tiger Woods: 54
James Harden: 47
Mario Chalmers: 34
Chris Bosh: 28
Mike Miller: 28
Webb Simpson: 28
Dale Earnhardt Jr.: 26
Shane Battier: 25
R.A. Dickey: 23
Jim Furyk: 22
Serge Ibaka: 19
CUMULATIVE STATISTICS: JAN. 7-JUNE 21
Total time: 10889.5 minutes
Time (minus commercials): 8213.25
NBA: 2,471.75 minutes (30%)
SportsCenter staples: 1,151 (14%)
NFL: 1,131.75 (13.8%)
MLB: 1111.25 (13.5%)
College basketball: 1035 (13.2%)
Other: 725 (8.8%)
NHL: 441.5 (5.38%)
College football: 146 (1.8%)
Notes
Roger Clemens is more important than Jerry Sandusky: ESPN spent six minutes covering the Roger Clemens perjury trial, including a report from the courthouse and input from baseball minds like Tim Kurkjian on the important issues, like Clemens's Hall of Fame chances. You know, stuff that really matters.
Meanwhile, the Sandusky case (note: our stats run through Thursday's show, the night before Sandusky was found guilty on most county) got precisely one minute of airtime, again had no reporter on the scene or analysis from legal experts, and ESPN completely omitted the revelation regarding Matt Sandusky's claims of abuse from his adopted father. I guess ESPN just didn't want to ruin anyone's weekend.
The NBA season ends:The Miami Heat, for nearly two months, swallowed up SportsCenter. They are the team equivalent of Tim Tebow, shoehorning themselves into everything ESPN touches. For the third week in a row, they got more than 100 minutes of coverage, and received more airtime in the past four weeks than the NHL received for all of 2012 (495.75 minutes to 441.5). Now that MLB is the only league in-season, we should probably see a massive jump in baseball coverage, along with the beginning of football talk, both college and pro.
Rick Reilly reuses jokes on TV, too: We've chronicled several instances of Reilly re-issuing his patented dad jokes in print, but this was the first time I noticed him self-plagiarize a quip he'd already made on SportsCenter. On the Super Bowl postgame show on Feb. 5, Reilly did a braindead piece on why the Giants and Patriots should play each other every year in the Super Bowl, and made this "joke:"
"These two teams play games that are so good, they should hang in the Louvre."
Hilarious. Fast forward to this week, when Reilly offered an equally terrible editorial on how LeBron James and Tiger Woods are exactly alike (cheating on your wife with porn stars and going to a new team are basically the same thing, since there's no law against either, you see?). Reilly had this to say about LeBron:
"It is not enough for LeBron James to dispatch the Boston Celtics in two do or die games with performances that should hang in the Louvre of basketball."
Rick Reilly: purveyor of art museum metaphors and teeth jokes.