Random Weekend Thoughts

-Congrats to the St. Louis Cardinals, your 2006 World Series champs. At the outset of the playoffs, I was cheering for the Cards and the Tigers. As a Braves fan, I'm used to disappointment in October, so I was pleasantly surprised that the match-up I had hoped for actually materialized. The Series itself was pretty boring, as the best story was a brown smear on somebody's hand. I would have been happy to see the long suffering Tigers win, but St. Louis is a great baseball town and they've been due a clutch playoff performance for a while.

-Orson has already jumped all over the headline possibilities for the USC loss. I guess everyone figured USC was going to lose some time this year, but I wonder how many thought O St. would beat them. For a few minutes there, you thought they might pull it out somehow the way they did last year a few times.

-Last year, The New York Times started publishing a sports magazine every quarter. While I would imagine that almost no one buys the Times for its sports coverage, the magazine always has some interesting articles. This past Sunday was no exception. "Play," as the magazine is called, has a feature on Bill Parcells as its cover story. I haven't read it yet, but the author is Michael Lewis, so I feel quite safe in recommending it.

The most interesting article I saw in Play was an article on Rivals.com, a network of websites for college sports. I admit that I am a Rivals subscriber and relay on the UGA site for news on the Dawgs. Some Rivals sites are better than others, but the Georgia site is fantastic. I also think this article portends the future of sports media. As team specific sites grow, as general sports media declines, and as teams assert more control over their product, fans will become more and more focused on their team only. Why sit through three hours of the Dan Patrick show for a ten minute segment, at best, on your team while you can download a three hour podcast devoted solely to your team?

Of course, there is a powerful counterargument to my theory, fantasy sports. Since everybody plays a fantasy sport, one has to become a fan of a league not just a team. So here's the future of sports media: one big national sports outlet (ESPN) with a massively specialized secondary tier for team oriented fans (Rivals.com).