ESPN's Gimmicks Just Keep Getting Worse

By Brian Powell

Last December, I came across a press release that introduced yet another stunt by ESPN in an attempt to gain (or perhaps keep) viewers. There have been many previous attempts ("Who's Now?," "Budweiser Hot Seat," "Four Downs," etc.), but none that seemed quite as pointless as "The Greatest Highlight."

ESPN viewers and dot-commers were tabbed with the arduous task of voting 100 of the best highlights in sports history (not just the ones aired on SportsCenter) down to a field of 16. Once that was done, Chris Berman would intro each match-up on SportsCenter every night from February 11th through the 18th.

Seems like a simple concept and one that is obviously in place to take up time now that football is over, but what I didn't know was that Berman was going to do the play-by-play for each clip as if the highlight had just happened that night. The result is painful and, really, it's just more pathetic than anything:


Berman's "stay over there!" call for Fisk's home-run is certainly far superior to the original call.

It's not that the concept is stale or that similar segments have been done before (see: Best Damn Sports Show's countdown specials) or that Berman is hosting the segment. No, the worst part is that ESPN is essentially taking clips that never originally aired on SportsCenter and claiming them for their own by adding the uber-annoying Berman yelling "back, back, back ... gone" over the top of them.

Consider the clip above. Both of those events took place before SportsCenter's inception in 1979. For the first few years of the show, they didn't even show highlights, it was just sports commentary. Now I know it's taboo to pick on ESPN these days, but I really find it hard when they try to past nonsense like this off as a segment.

Hopefully people respond to this with the same negativity they did to "Who's Now?" last summer. Maybe someday ESPN will think twice before adding another segment to the over 50 that they currently have. Although that's certainly just wishful thinking.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.