I had a little bit of a bug yesterday that kept me house bound through the afternoon. So I was reduced to the utter indignity of flipping around the TV on the remote.
Channel 11 (KPLR) is showing St. Louis JFL (Junior Football Leauge) games on Saturday afternooon. Since it was night when the game was played, I am assuming the game was actually played the night before, but didn’t want to show it until the next afternoon. After all, ten-year old boys chasing a ball isn’t as important as sitcoms/slobcoms/slutcoms where 24-year old men and women pretend to be 16-year old teenagers that 15-year old girl TV viewers can slobber over.
What is the wisdom of televising 10-year old boys playing football? I know that Kevin Slaten is opposed to putting the Little League World Series on national television. He never said why, but making inferences from things he has said before, I think his reason has to do with the soundbyteization of politics, the powerpointization of business, and the highlightreelization of sports. Politician has to compress his statements down to a clever one-liner that will play over and over again on the prime time gab shows. Sales Manager has to convince people to open accounts with his company based on 20 cartoon slides. And professional athlete can’t be bothered to do something routine and boring to help his team win; Oh no. He has to slam it in the hole or swing for the fences so that ESPN can play it 50 times in the next 24 hours.
I think Slaten is worried that televising 12-year olds playing baseball will induce them to swing for the fences to make the highlight reel. If there’s a runner on first, and no outs, and you’re a mediocre hitter at the plate, dropping a bunt to move the runner over to second is decidedly un-sexy, and won’t make the highlight reel. But, speaking in terms of probability, it is way more likely a run will score that way than it would if he and his wonderful .250 average swung for the fences. LLWS games on TV encourage swinging for the fences; if they weren’t on TV, the un-sexy work would be the order of the day.
I don’t know if it follows that this is the reason not to put youth football on TV. After all, from what I saw, just from the scant few minutes watching it, neither team seemed to have anything more than a two-page playbook. It was either QB hands off to the RB, or QB play-actions to the RB and runs it himself. It’s just that one team was way more successful (19-0 in the 4th quarter when I was watching) than the other at it. Ten year old boys don’t seem to have the ability to pull a Hail Mary to the end zone, or anything other than the decidedly un-sexy deja le meme chose. I get the feeling that the kickers were rarely used; each touchdown was followed by a 2-point attempt. A score of 19-0 probably means that at least one successful FG was kicked.
