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| The Smartest Guys At ESPN |
March is the time of year we start to see the snow melt, we
drink green alcohol and the word bracket as well as the terms “Bracketology”
and “Bracket busters” start appearing in Pizza commercials, local news
broadcasts and out of the mouth of that guy at work who once a year talks to you about sports. March Madness indeed.
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| PHD In Bracketology |
Do a bracket or don’t.
Watch the tournament or don’t.
But could we please dispense of the cliché’s? Could people who don’t care about sports
please not talk about this? And for the
love of all things holy, could ESPN stop.
I get that people look forward to this and filling out a bracket and
watching it crumble gives a person a connection they otherwise wouldn’t have
adding to the interest in the actual tournament. That’s all fine. But we need to mandate some cultural change
to this time of year and this tournament.
The talking heads on local and national news need to drop
the personal anecdotes. I doubt your 4
year old daughter did better with her picks than most like you claim every
year. I doubt a 4 year old could fill out a complete bracket correctly by them self. And
even if she did that’s really just a story about you having a kid and trust
me. No one fucking cares that Dave Dahl
has a kid. What’s your point anyway? That even someone as stupid as your kid has a
chance? And if you do work for the news
but don’t cover sports, don’t talk about the tournament on air unless it ties
into an actual story you would cover.
That story can’t be about how much time is lost in the work
space every year because of the tournament.
If you don’t think that has been covered you are fucking retarded.
The term Bracketology and Bracketologist can only be used in
jest or satirically. In other words
ESPN, you cannot interview someone you are crediting as a bracketologist. It’s not a thing. Where did he get his degree? It’s fine if Pizza Hut wants to make it part
of some sort of two topping large pizza promotion, but you, ESPN, are supposed
to actually cover this event. You sound
like a moron when you refer to a grown man as a bracketologist.
Currently there are 68 teams in the tournament. Which is plenty. Stop talking about who got snubbed. No one got snubbed. There are no snubs. At best there are 20 good teams. Trust me.
They all got in. If your team didn’t
make it then your team isn’t any good. And
if you made it 70 teams, there would still be just as many teams claiming they
were snubbed. There would still be just
as much air time dedicated to who got snubbed.
Just drop it.
The reporting and coverage of this event should be
better. Not more. Better.
Lazy reporting should result in people getting less opportunity. Less air time. Losing their jobs. If your job is to regurgitate cliché’s, then
you aren’t very good at your job. If you
don’t have something unique to say, it doesn’t need to be said. And if you read a teleprompter for a living
understand this. YOU ARE NOT THE
STORY. That pretty much applies to
everything you cover. We don’t care that
you have a kid, a husband, a wife or a dog.
Your personal anecdotes do not add to the story they distract from
it. And considering how unimportant the
NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is, it shouldn’t be that hard to stick your stupid,
made up story about how your Yorkie picked the best bracket in your pool, up
your ass.
Go Duke!
HATE MAIL
It’s not uncommon for someone to say I have too much time on
my hands. It’s usually in reference to
some pop culture instance they find too trivial to have even a modest opinion
on. Like how irritated I get when a
newscaster pronounces the word straight with an invisible “H” (SHTRAIGHT). For my money if your job is to talk for a
living, being able to properly pronounce words should be towards the top of the
list of job requirements. And the
inability to not shove an “H” into the beginning of any word that starts with
the letters S and T is the talking head equivalent of a surgeon who can’t stop
his hands from shaking. And my personal
ability to process that thought is in no way a testament to individual
perseverance. It just happens.
And it does matter.
Why does no one care that it makes no sense to describe this year’s
Winter as “never ending” in the first week of February? Why does no one care that Nick Simmons thinks "Cabin Fever" means you're tired? Or that local yokel Mark Rosen thinks Star Wars is a cult movie? So it was largely predictable when Ashton
Kutcher denounced the absence of baby changing stations in ANY men’s room, no
one bothered to question whether he was correct about that. Oh sure the morning talk shows discussed it. But not in the sense that he was just wrong
and they are probably in close to as many men’s rooms as women’s rooms. No.
That would be honest and make Ashton look like a moron. The talking point was this. “Is Ashton right? Should there be baby changing stations in
men’s rooms?” To which I can only say
“You mean in addition to the ones already in there?” 
I took my rant to facebook.
And the blowback I got ranged from people disputing my claim to saying
that they are in some public men’s rooms but not most. I accepted the challenge. For the next week, anytime I was somewhere
with a men’s room, I checked. And what
did my research uncover. Were they
nonexistent as Ashton proclaimed?
Or were they somewhat available but largely not as many of my friends on facebook contended? Hardly.
9 is the number. 9 out of 11 men's public restroom's contained a baby changing station. Slightly more than 80%. Including one liquor store. In other words "most" had one. And in one of the “nots” I even got
confirmation that there was also not one in the woman’s room. Meaning my intense research concluded what I
already thought to be true. You are just
as likely to find them in a men’s restroom as you are a woman’s. 
I took pictures to prove it and shared them on
facebook. And while it was mostly fun
some of the feedback was of the “You have too much time on your hands”
variety. Even if that was true why isn’t
this important? When is the truth ever
optional? Ashton Kutcher is wrong. And he probably knows it. But he also knows no one will actually bother
to expose his bullshit. People will
cowtow and he will look like a great guy who just wants to do his part when it
comes to the dirty work of having a baby.
He’s sooo dreamy. 
It’s also been mentioned that Ashton probably isn’t talking
about the places I went to as he’s too big time to shop at Target or World Market. Or that quite possibly he
wasn’t saying never but just that he thinks they need to be mandatory. But here’s the thing. That’s not what he said. And… WORDS MEAN THINGS! And to prove he meant what I thought he
meant, he’s got a fucking petition. And
I have one thing to say to anyone who will sign it…
