COMMENTARY: "Proposed TV deal proves it: Hype bigger than sport"

Tag : TV Blanket
Finally, an answer to the timeless chicken-or-the-egg question.

For years, ESPN has been the dominant force in sports media, fromtelevision to print to the Web, while the NFL has commanded theattention and devotion of sports fans, even with the poorly namedSpygate scandal brewing for almost a year now.

Some argue that ESPN has earned its place thanks to its blanketcoverage of the NFL, while others argue the NFL has been atop theAmerican sporting landscape because of the very same blanketcoverage, making it hard to avoid the league even in the offseason.(For example, the annual over-hyped NFL draft.)

Well, debate no more.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that ESPN and the NFLNetwork are in talks to form a partnership that would signal theend of the league's strategy of forcing cable companies to pay thedesired fee for Bryant Gumbel and their own network. The two sidesare attempting to have the eight games that the NFL Network setaside to exclusively broadcast aired on one of ESPN's family ofnetworks, with ESPN Classic as the chosen medium.

For fans, assuming the partnership goes through, it means no moreheading to your local bar to catch a Thursday night game becauseyou don't subscribe to DirecTV, the main service carrying the NFLNetwork. Instead, you can stay home and drink while tuning intoESPN Classic, which reportedly reaches 22 million more homes thanthe NFL Network.

For the landscape of American sports, this means that not even theNFL - the biggest, baddest and, at times, most bull-headed sportingleague in the U.S. - can exist without the help of ESPN's perfectedhype machine.

It turns out that the key to the success of American football allalong has been ESPN and not the country's borderline obsessive loveof the sport. If football truly was the cause, their experiment ofa network would have been able to make its controlling demands ofthe cable companies - 70 cents per subscriber despite only airingeight games - and no one would have called them on it.

Instead, Time Warner and Comcast wouldn't budge, and now the NFL islooking to ESPN for a little help, since they now realize theydidn't make ESPN; ESPN made them.

Apparently, four letters in your acronym is better than three, andthe NFL gets added to the network's resume, which already includesNASCAR and the World Series of Poker.