I’m worried about Jay Bilas’s job.<\/p>\n
For those who aren’t college basketball junkies, Jay Bilas is a former Duke player who is currently the best college basketball analyst in the business. He’s smart, well-spoken, funny (listen to him banter with Bill Raftery and Sean McDonough when the three of them work games together), and extremely knowledgable about the game. Whenever he does a game, he clearly does his homework, and learns more than the token one or two facts about each team that most announcers do. When he does studio analysis, he always has his facts in line, and while he sometimes takes strong positions, he’s never obnoxious about it.<\/p>\n
You might think that this would guarantee him a career as a college basketball analyst. The problem is, Bilas works for ESPN, and the Worldwide Leader in Sports doesn’t have what I’d call a good track record when it comes to quality analysts…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I mean, look at the history of their football show. A few years back, they had put together what was absolutely the best NFL pre-game show in the business, with a line-up of Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, Sterling Sharpe, Steve Young, and Chris Mortenson. Those guys did a fantastic job of breaking down the games for the week, with enough banter to keep things light, but not so much that they slid into shtick.<\/p>\n
Now look at what they’re putting on air this year: Berman and Jackson are still there, but now they’re matched with Michael Irvin, Mike Ditka, and Ron Jaworski. With the exception of Berman and Jackson, they’ve gotten louder and dumber at every position.<\/p>\n
Or look at their NBA coverage. They used to have David Aldridge, who was the best pro basketball analyst going: cool, calm, always in command of the facts. They dumped him, and replaced him with Stephen A. Smith, who is quite frankly the most annoying jackass on ESPN, which is really saying something considering that they employ both Michael Irvin and Woody Paige. Again, the trend is always toward louder and dumber.<\/p>\n
I look at Jay Bilas, and I can’t help thinking his days are numbered. He’s articulate, well-informed, and the picture of class: he’s David Aldridge to Doug Gottlieb’s Stephen A. Smith. It’s only a matter of time.<\/p>\n
So, how much time does he have left? Leave a guess in the comments, or try to convince me that I’m wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m worried about Jay Bilas’s job. For those who aren’t college basketball junkies, Jay Bilas is a former Duke player who is currently the best college basketball analyst in the business. He’s smart, well-spoken, funny (listen to him banter with Bill Raftery and Sean McDonough when the three of them work games together), and extremely… Continue reading Jay Bilas Survival Pool<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,31,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","category-football","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}