YOESTING: Deadspin report sheds light on ESPN’s priorities

Published 8:31 pm Sunday, July 28, 2013

It’s official.

ESPN truly is sports’ version of FOX News.

Fair and balanced? Hardly.

A recent study released by Deadspin.com analyzed the nightly SportsCenter every day for all of 2012 and the results, while not surprising, are highly intriguing.

For starters, let’s just get the obvious out of the way. ESPN does not care about hockey — at all.

The NHL received 2.7 percent of SportsCenter’s coverage, 0.6 percent less than golf and a tenth of what the NFL receives.

More interesting, to me anyway, was that the NFL was not as highly prioritized as I would have thought. While the biggest league does lead the way with 23.3 percent of the SportsCenter minutes, the NBA isn’t far behind at 19.2 and boasts eight of the top 12 most mentioned athletes.

Baseball comes in third at 16.8 percent, despite its long season and being the only sport on during stretches in the summer.

SportsCenter filler such as “Top 10” and “What 2 Watch 4” grabs 13.2 percent of the minutes, followed by college football (7.7) and college basketball (6.8).

Soccer, the world’s most popular sport, received a grand total of 217.75 minutes in 2012, or about as much as the Alabama football team.

Breaking it down further, Deadspin studied how winning related to SportsCenter coverage and determined that there was a direction correlation.

However, when compared to the relationship between teams’ Forbes value and airtime, a stronger correlation was discovered. That’s good news for you Cowboys fans, but media coverage has never been lacking for America’s Team.

While football received the most coverage on SportsCenter, the Deadspin study pointed out how focused ESPN is on stars and celebrity.

As mentioned above, the most star-driven sport, basketball, dominates the list of most-mentioned athletes. LeBron James received 1,930 mentions, easily outdistancing second-place Kobe Bryant’s 1,345 mentions.

Peyton Manning was third (1,218) followed by Dwyane Wade and Kevin Durant. Rounding out the top ten were Tiger Woods, Tim Tebow, Tom Brady, Jeremy Lin and Derrick Rose.

Additionally, the Miami Heat ate up 29 percent of the NBA coverage. In comparison, the most-covered teams in the NFL (Giants) and MLB (Yankees) garnered only 9 and 14 percent in their respective sports.

Finally, the author examined common word associations from the SportsCenter transcripts, revealing the two terms most associated with God were “me” and “my.”

Most interesting was the final bit of word association, which sums up what ESPN is all about.

“The two most common words mentioned with “hockey” were, of all things, the first names of SportsCenter anchors Linda Cohn and Steve Levy,” Patrick Burns wrote. “It truly doesn’t exist.”