PB1A

Nate Caldwell ENG 101-108 Zack De Piero When people tend to think of sports, the main focus is the athletic entertainment of the superstars and their ability to go out each night and perform for their fans. When sports first took off, the only media that was shown of them was the games and interviews here and there. As time went on, technology became more advanced. As the technology advanced, it gave viewers more light into the life of sports beyond the athletes, coaches, and games. For those who struggle to keep up with sports being recorded live, working through important games, and any other reason to miss a game, the media has answered their prayers. With new advances, the sports media platform is growing stronger and stronger. Sports have given people a sense of involvement in their lives on and off the court as a way to further connect. Most athletes have social media that keeps people updated on personal life as well as their athletic career. Beyond the athletes, you have commentators and analysts who both write and speak about any and ever sport they have current knowledge on. Some analysts are more credible than others. Some commentators are more credible than others. Each of these person’s has their own thought process and opinions on athletes, statistics, decisions that could impact teams, etc. The best form of commentary or reviews on sports are usually the ones that are written because they hold the full thoughts, as accurate as possible statistics, and opinions on everything sports related. As you sit and watch sport shows like ‘First Take’, ‘Pardon the Interruption’, and so on and so forth, all of the people you see on these shows are journalists. They've all done careful research on what they speak on when on the air and never change their opinions or views. They can keep their arguments and opinions strong because of the information they've written down. Some people think reading off of a paper during an argument is staged but it keeps thoughts separated and organized so not to be confused when hearing different names, numbers, or opinions on teams’ decisions. Each analyst has their own specialty when it comes to breaking down sports. Some choose to focus on statistics as their form of credibility because numbers never lie and are the most accurate. Others choose to focus on gameplay which is very varying between players and could be crippling to credibility because of everything being opinion based and changing from game to game. With reviews focused on gameplay, there are more detailed opinions that hold different types of information. Some sportscasts will give praise to players who continually have outstanding games. Others analysts will downplay an athlete’s ability to compete on a consistent level. They give credit to those who they believe earned it through their gameplay—basketball for example—with exceptional shooting percentages, ball movement, team work, defense, etc. The one thing is sports reviews that are all universal is that controversy could be started from a single piece of writing. In everyday life, sharing opinions can lead to debates around perspective and position on the argument. It's the same way in sports. If one analyst feels like a player is destined to be great and never has a bad game but another analyst writes all the negatives instead of the positive, this will cause controversy among analysts to get to the bottom of it all. At the end of everything, sports reviews hold many different conventions. Some of these conventions are easy to spot between different analysts and others are difficult until you can make comparisons between different articles. As long as the information is read carefully, thoroughly, and thought about fully, pointing out different aspects of sports and dissecting their labels as features becomes easier to notice and understand.