ESPN - The Leader in Sports?
Hate to beat a dead horse but after multiple errors all season long both by announcers and their graphics team, I didn't think it could get much worse.
This was probably the worst televised game I've ever seen. I don't know if they have anything to do with this effort to fit a 7pm (east) game into 2 hours before 9 but I suspect they do. My locale (and I suspect all locales) tuned in nearly 5 minutes into the game. The constant "in-game" interruptions. The repetitive "advertising" of their other networks. And the repeated losing of a signal were quite embarassing.
I've seen a real drop-off with this outfit since ABC took over.
Perhaps I shouldn't complain b/c without them I'd see only about 1/2 the games but the quality sure has dropped.
Vitale and Other Announcers
You know, as tiresome as it is to listen to Vitale, at least he KNOWS how to pronounce players' names. There's really no excuse for Mike Patrick to keep referring to "Roberts" and Packer to keep saying "Schreyer". Same goes for Majerus and the rest of them. Good Lord, these guys are supposed to be professionals. And as much as I like (and have always liked) Len Elmore, he has a definite chip on his shoulder where Duke is concerned (and I have really tried to give him the benefit of the doubt).
So I'd almost rather listen to Vitale rant about Britney than hear the name-mangling and bias of the rest of the "professionals".
Pagliuca's moment lost forever
The real shame of losing the video feed is that Joe Pagliuca was sent in to play what will probably be his last minutes as a senior and none of his friends or family saw it. As I sat there staring at a full-screen graphic, my heart nearly broke when I heard Patrick announce that he was coming in.
At one point, Patrick actually attempted to call the action like a radio feed but Vitale was totally oblivious and kept blathering on about peripherals.
ESPN Re-broadcast the next day
ESPN replayed the game on ESPN-U the next day at 2:00 and it had all the footage that was missed due to the UCONN game. It also had most of the footage that was lost due to "technical difficulties".
I do wish, when they rebroadcast a game, they would just rebroadcast the whole thing and not skip time and say "due to time constraints, we move ahead in our broadcast". Step up and commit 2.5 hours to the game, or cut out some of those ridiculous "Working from home has changed my life" commercials.:)
I have ben collecting Duke games since 1986 and have converted much of my collection to DVD (over 200 games). I actually had to cut and paste from two different broadcasts to get something close to a complete game. Very frustrating.