The Sports Blogosphere's Underbelly is About to Get Seedier

SportsByBrooks put up a post late last night that has much of the sports blog world buzzing, and no, surprisingly enough it isn't about one of Tiger Woods's mistresses. It seems that TMZ's constant barrage of sports news lately is a precursor to TMZSports.com, a site that may or may not change the way sports fans follow gossip.

To those sports blogs that focus more on sports on the field, in the booth or, well, everywhere outside the South Beach and/or Vegas nightclub scene, this may have very little impact. If you want insight into the basketball games last night, you'll still have those sites to visit. If you want to know what the players were doing after the game was over, I suppose there will be a new sheriff in town.

As we've learned, TMZ is a machine with the backing of Warner Bros' immense bankroll that can spin the gossip world on its head, one grainy web-captured photo at a time. For the site to be launching a full-time effort into sports could absolutely uncover more infidelity or the drunken vagrancies of our favorite athletes on a daily basis. The next Tiger Woods could be anyone. I guess that's the thing about gossip rags: they don't care about the principles of anything -- even their own coverage -- so it's fair game for headlines and pageviews. Let the rest of the media sort out the moral transgressions. They've built a brand on this model for entertainment, so why, then, wouldn't this work for sports?

Of course it will, and it'll be fantastic. But it's not any different than what Deadspin is already doing, right? Or what the News of the World did when they paid some college kid for a cell phone image he stole that had Michael Phelps taking bong rips. Or, for that matter, what SportsByBrooks -- the very website that posted the following paragraph -- does every day:

TMZSports.com will be one of the few operations, if not the only, that can make a dent in ESPN’s brilliant business acumen. How large that dent will be depends on its editorial execution, but if TMZ.com is any indication, we may be looking at an industry game changer that could somewhat destabilize ESPN’s complete dominance over the field.

Sure, it helps sports coverage if there are competitors to ESPN, but I'm not as certain as Brooks that TMZ will be that competitor. It seems far more likely that Comcast and NBC Sports will be the WCW to ESPN's WWE. TMZ has one hugely-popular syndicated television show, while Comcast owns half the cable boxes in the country, and NBC has broadcast rights to some of the biggest sports properties in the world. Yes, I understand that TMZ has Warner Bros' money and, for the time being, AOL's audience, but I don't think either company will be mortgaging other properties to start up a fight with ESPN. Besides, I'm not sure reports of who LeBron James is schtupping on the side (I have no proof of anything, I'm just throwing out a name) will really make ESPN quiver.

But the blogs might quiver. TMZ is a brand unlike most on the internet, and delving into the world of sports gossip could steal pageviews from some other sites who trade in the Page Six-ish nature of sports. Who knows, this news could actually help some of the other sports gossip blogs, and one might expect a line out the door for bloggers and editors sending their clip files to Harvey Levin.

(UPDATES: First, Daulerio has a post at Deadspin that mentions, in bold letters, that in response to TMZ, Gawker may become looser with the smut purse strings.

Second, comes this email, sent out to a prominent independent sports blog (our tips account received a very similar email from them as well):

Hi guys,

TMZ is expanding its sports coverage and we wanted to know if you were
interested in working together. We’d like to be able to include you on
the emails we send out when we have relevant content and would like to
get a heads up from you as well when you have breaking news. Please
let me know if you’re interested and, if so, who the best contact
would be.

Looking forward to working with you.

Best,
Leslie

Interesting...)

One more interesting note on this move by TMZ: it seems to have been in the works for a while. The WHOIS listing says the record was created on December 16, 2009, but the domain expires on April 20, 2013, which means that the domain was likely registered on April 20, 2008 with a five-year contract. Per Network Solutions' pricing chart -- and man alive is this rampant speculation and totally inside baseball -- registrars are unable to reserve a domain name for four years, meaning this TMZsports.com idea has quite possibly been in the plans for a long time (in blog years).

And who can blame them? When countless pageviews were taken up by Erin Andrews -- remember that TMZ deployed someone to nab Andrews in the airport back in July after she was hit in the face with a ball, just five days before their first post about Andrew's hotel room videos came out, in what might not have been a total coincidence -- and Tiger Woods and Steve Phillips and Charles Barkley and a whole host of sports figures just this year alone, this is the kind of stuff we're in for. Whether it resonates with sports fans and changes the game for the rest of us, or just adds to the noise, remains to be seen.

Story developing ...

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