What they saw, among other things, was a down-and-distance graphic that, according to The Ringer's Danny Heifetz, was an attempt to fix something that wasn't broken. At first glance, you wouldn't think that something as simple as down-and-distance could cause much controversy, unless it was telling you that your team had 3rd down and 49 yards to go. Because that's what it is: a simple graphic that tells you what down it is, and how many yards for a first down. As I said, simple—right?
Not for the graphics department at ESPN, apparently. On Monday night's game, the network inaugurated a new down marker, one that caused football fans, used to having to dealing with massive amounts of graphic information at a glance—not just down and distance, but score, game clock time, play clock time, and first down line—all without losing track of what's happening on the field. And for the first half of Monday night's game, that new down graphic caused massive amounts of reactive confusion, because, with its black lettering against a yellow background, it looked too much like the universal graphic for a penalty.* Fans have been conditioned by years of viewing to see a flash of yellow and immediately think, "Penalty!" And now they were seeing it on every play!
*Except in Canada, where penalty flags are red. They also have a 55-yard line, and spell "center" with an -re, but that's another matter.
To the network's credit, it only took one half of online ridicule to rectify the situation. By the start of the second half, a new graphic had been born:
It's a little thing, really, which makes one wonder why ESPN felt the need to fool around with it at all. As Heifetz says, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And it does speak to a rare instance where a large corporation (or network) responds instantly to a potential faux pas, rather than stubbornly refusing to admit a mistake.
But this isn't really about football, as you might expect by virtue of me writing about it; there's a larger point to be made, and Heifetz makes it at the end of his article, when he mentions, in the course of discussing the "graphics arms race" that technology has made possible, how "Amazon experimented with allowing Prime users to choose between two sets of announcers for Thursday Night Football last year." This isn't anything new for the sports fan; viewers watching the NCAA basketball finals can choose from three different sets of announcers (each team's announcers, plus those of the network), and ESPN+ frequently allows a similar choice of team broadcasts for its weekday baseball games. And during the heyday of Monday Night Football, back when Howard Cosell was one of the announcers, fans (like me) regularly turned down the sound and listened to Jack Buck and Hank Stram on the radio.
And there's nothing wrong with that; I frequently wish I could choose a different set of announcers when I'm watching a good game being spoiled by bad announcers. There is, however, an unintended consequence, to which Heifetz alludes in his conclusion: "Something we take for granted—having the same viewing experience with the millions watching a sports game—may go away. Let’s enjoy the time we can all complain about the same thing while we still can." Yes, it's the end of the shared experience.
Since conveniences like DVRs, streaming video, and social media and habits like binge viewing have pretty much allowed us all to become our own programming directors, there's been a loose consensus that sports and breaking news represent the last best hope for a communal, talk-about-it-around-the-water-cooler-tomorrow viewing experience. Now, we're faced with the possibility that the more enjoyable of those two types may be going away. And before you accuse me of reading too much into this (and if you haven't, just play along), let me explain why the loss of sports as a truly shared experience would serve as a microcosm of today's social problems.
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Now, let's suppose that instead of soccer, we're watching a political speech. One of us sees it on MSNBC, the other on Fox. After the speech, we're equally convinced of what we heard, even though our opinions may be diametrically opposed to each other. And we wonder, so opposite are our reactions: did we even hear the same speech? In fact, our biases, whatever they might be, are so reinforced, so justified, by the commentary on our chosen media outlet, that for all practical purposes we haven't listened to the same speech. See what I mean? Again, this is nothing new. We've had partisan analysis of the news for as long as newspapers have existed. But in our currently fragmented and inflamed state, when each of us is living on the equivalent of a desert island filtering out whatever we disagree with, the last thing we need is another source of confirmation bias, another opportunity to be divided rather than united.
This is not to put too fine a point on things. I doubt that the effects of tailor-made sports broadcasting are going to be quite that catastrophic. Nonetheless, I've gotten to the point in life where individuality goes only so far; it would be nice, at least once in a while, for all of us to start out on the same page. And when sports becomes less of a shared experience and more of an occasion for social media warfare, when we filter the outcome through a lens that accepts no derivation from the party (or team) line, when we can use the gospel truth as parroted by our favorite commentators to make our point that it has to be this way, then we've well and truly lost one more thing that once brought us together and now drives us apart.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that. It's a loss we can ill-afford in this day and age. TV