On Monday night, for the first time in my two-plus years at Georgetown, school was in session and I was not at the Verizon Center for a men’s basketball game. When the Hoyas played Tulane, I had plans I couldn’t change, so I missed my first home game while school was in session.
Of course, I was hardly going to let the fact that I was somewhere else from 7 to 9 p.m. on Monday prevent me from watching the game. As soon as I got home, I turned on my television, fired up my Xbox, opened the ESPN app, and streamed the Hoyas’ 69-53 victory in its entirety.
I took all of this, more or less, for granted.
The vast majority of the time, I find it totally normal that a relatively obscure college basketball game is being nationally televised exclusively over the Internet and that I can pull it up any time after the fact on a video game console to watch from my couch. It is 2010, after all.
But in those few moments where I do pause and consider how I’m accessing that game, my level of awe is roughly equivalent to the Insane Clown Posse’s in “Miracles.” Maybe it’s not on the level of long-necked giraffes or magnets, but the way I watch sports now is mind-blowing. Even compared to how many options I had a few years ago, the near limitless choice and availability of sporting events to watch is absurd.
ESPN and its online streaming service, ESPN3.com, is only a small part of that. Sure, it gives me more access to Russian-league hockey and top-flight international cricket than I ever wanted (and, of course, it has the Hoyas). But ESPN3 seems like a logical extension for the ever-expanding sports monolith in Bristol. We’re getting dangerously close to Dodgeball’s ESPN8 “The Ocho” at this point.
More revolutionary are online portals like ATDHE.net that aggregate a near-comprehensive list of the day’s sporting events, complete with links to (almost definitely illegal) streams of their broadcast channels. I don’t know who is setting up an illicit stream for a basketball game between the Citadel and Charleston Southern, or how they broadcast the JumboTron feed for Georgetown’s season opener at Old Dominion, but I thank them.
At least I think I do. This kind of access is what I’ve always assumed I wanted. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been frustrated by the inexplicable choices the wizards at ESPN make about programming or the authoritarian broadcast restrictions on NFL games. Sites like ATDHE offer NFL Sunday Ticket, NBA League Pass, and pretty much every other sports package for free anywhere there’s an Internet connection. That’s unquestionably a good thing. (I’ll ignore the obvious ethical and legal concerns until the offseason).
There is a problem though, and it’s me. I’m simply not equipped to deal with this bounty. All I need to do is click a few buttons and I can watch any game that I find even remotely interesting. Why not pull up the games of every one of my fantasy players? Do I need to watch the four concurrent March Madness games simultaneously? Does it matter? I can, so I will. After all, it’s just another window open, easy enough to throw in the background while I do something else.
The more I watch sports in this way, however, the more I see how detrimental it can be. Not to my productivity or anything—I don’t need online sports to ruin that—but to the actual experience of being a spectator. It’s convenient that I can time-shift the Georgetown game to whenever I want to watch it, but its value is diminished by the fact that the game ended an hour earlier and I know the final score. I love being able to track whether Carmelo Anthony scores the 20 points I need him to while doing ten other things online, but that same multitasking mentality starts creeping into games I actually care about.
I’m sure I’ll manage to adjust. After all, it’s not like I haven’t done it before. Sports is just the latest domino to fall in the never-ending digital revolution. As with television on Hulu and YouTube, and with music long before that, this explosion of sports content will eventually shift from awe-inspiring and overwhelming to commonplace and manageable.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to keep my sports consumption from becoming too much. Just because I can watch it doesn’t mean I’m going to. But I am grateful for it. After all, without ESPN3, how will I be able to enjoy it again and again when the Hoyas knock off Syracuse?
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