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FiveHourMarathon  Listen to Pierre  2yr ago (text post)   1898 thread views

MONDAY MORNING MOTTErBack SPORTS THREAD

I know there are some other sports fans on here, and I thought a discussion thread might be fun, and Monday is the natural day coming after the weekend football (both varieties) games and without a side thread scheduled. What's going on with your favorite teams/players/etc? What fun media controversies in the microcosm of sports can tell us something about the broader world? What culture war bullshit do you want to discuss in a sporting context?

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Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.

It's exactly that. Though I'd add that people who are super knowledgable about KiwiFarms or Gamergate or 4chan Patois or the latest outrage bait on the internet are probably at best a sidegrade; as are some interests that I practice myself. Is the guy yapping about Urban Meyer's playbook choices because he listens to Barstool sports podcasts all day really any worse off than someone who listens to Blocked and Reported and can wax rhapsodic about whatever train drama is big on Twitter?

In Dodgeball the ESPN 8 "The Ocho" joke lands because that was ESPN when I was 9 or 10 years old, just always showing sports even if they were pretty stupid sports. The talk segments have grown while the live sports segments have shrunk seemingly every year since then. More gossip, more offseason drama for the NBA/NFL, less professional bowling and strongman, and less hockey and baseball. You could probably tie this into a broad cultural femeninization if you wanted to, with men being ever more interested in gossip and less interested in the action, or to trying to attract female viewers. But there's a chicken and egg thing to your observation of it: do these guys talk about this stuff because they are interested in it naturally, or are they interested in it because when they listen to sports podcasts/radio and watch ESPN it gets presented to them?

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