ESPN, NBC Blow Wimbledon Coverage

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ESPN, NBC Blow Wimbledon Coverage

Filed on July 2nd, 2008 in Sports Media ⋅ ⋅

In an attempt to yet again cater to East Coast viewers, ESPN and NBC have completely screwed viewers on the West Coast with their awful, awful coverage of this year’s Wimbledon tournament. After having average to good coverage for the first week of the tournament, NBC and the Worldwide Leader have combined to rise to a new level of ridiculousness and incompetency with the week two coverage.

Here’s the situation from where I live:

ESPN2 airs Wimbledon tennis from 4am to 7am. Usually, I’m a big fan of live sports at this hour, and during the first week of Wimbledon, this is an enjoyable programming block. Problem is, in the second week, particularly when you get to the quarterfinals, there is no live singles matches at this hour. So this is an empty block as far as I’m concerned. (The day you can start betting on doubles is the day I care if it’s on TV. I can’t, so I don’t)

That means that the men’s and women’s singles matches are on later in the day. On the East Coast, NBC airs Wimbledon from 10am to 1pm. At that point, ESPN2 picks up the coverage until 5pm. Not bad, right? Seven hours of coverage, enough to cover all of the big matches of a day, as well as highlights of the rest.

So what do we get on the West Coast? NBC also begins at 10am here — with a TAPE DELAY of the live events from the 10am East Coast airing. Meanwhile, ESPN2 is airing the continuation of the events at 10am (1pm ET). On DirecTV, that means ESPN2 is BLACKED OUT, because NBC has the priority. So today, while Rafael Nadal was playing Andy Murray, and the Internet already told me that Roger Federer won, I had to watch NBC replay a RAIN DELAY before the Federer match, while the Nadal match was blacked out live on ESPN2. ESPN2 mighty white-ily lifts the blackout at 1:00, allowing us a whole hour of additional coverage (which today was a replay of the same Federer match, but with different announcers).

So, let me sum up:

East Coast: Seven hours of live coverage.
West Coast: Three hours of tape delay coverage, three hours of simultaneous blackout, one hour of something I already saw on tape delay (tape-tape delay or tape delay-delay?)

As much as I’d love to throw DirecTV under the bus, I think this one is all on NBC and ESPN. This ridiculous need to please the East Coast viewer is just stupid. I lived on the East Coast half of my life, and on the West Coast the other half. All the things I heard about a West Coast bias have turned out to be frighteningly true. It’s not just the college football fan that feels it, it’s the live sports fan in general.

Live sports need to be aired live. In today’s world of Internets and cell phones, there is no point in tape delaying sports. If we already know what happened, it’s not entertaining anymore.

Let’s hope this is not a sign of things to come for the Olympics, but I think we all remember NBC screwing up the last Olympics with tape delays, thus screwing all of it’s viewers. These networks need to get with the times. If NBC is going to pay seven gazillion dollars for the rights to the Olympics, show the damn Olympics, and do it live. ESPN is not going to wait for you to show it before giving the results.

If CBS is going to pay a shitload of money to air a Kimbo Slice fight, show it live. You are showing an Internet phenomenon on television. Who is your target audience? Internet users, maybe? That means all of the potential audience on the West Coast knew what happened already. I know I went out before it came on TV because I knew the results.

ESPN, NBC and the uppity folks at Wimbledon need to take some lessons from the people who bring us the French Open and the Australian Open. At least with them, if I want to watch a match when it happens, I can — even at three in the morning.

ESPN and NBC have failed miserably with their 2008 Wimbledon coverage. Anyone else long for the days when Wimbledon was on HBO, and they showed non-stop commercial free coverage? Me too.

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