Changing the Audio on your Sports Broadcasts / by kevin murray

The thing about watching sports is that most people aren't watching sporting events for the sheer poetry or action of the particular sport in play, but instead find that they prefer to root for one team or possibly root against another team to make things more interesting, in particular in order to captivate and to excite themselves.  Additionally, most people are partial in favoring the team of the city that they reside in or perhaps they favor their collegiate hometown and so forth, while still others may have a vested interest in the outcome because of their fantasy league or their monetary bet or the sporting pool that they participate in.  That is all well and good, but often times during the season, a fan's interest may wane because his team is not all that good, after all, for every winner, there must be a loser, and in the end there can only be one champion, which is often not your team.  Additionally, fans may or may not buy into the commentators on the broadcast, they may prefer their own hometown broadcasters, they might prefer some other broadcasters, or they might not really care for any of the traditional broadcasters at all.  For instance, there are some circumstances to which I mute the TV, because the announcers are annoying the heck out of me and are either taking away from my enjoyment of the game or frustrating me. 

 

I do believe that there should be an alternative for those that would wish to hear a different audio to their TV sports programs.  This audio wouldn't need to be authorized by the major sport leagues; it would just need to be tolerated.  Probably the best commentators for this type of audio broadcast would be announcers that really love their team but prefer to be able to provide some real "color" commentary which I suspect would be welcomed by their listening audience.  I mean, how often, do you really want to hear the words that your team truly "sucks" while the traditional commentators are using just about every euphemism and metaphor around while simplicity itself knows that the action on the field could easily be summed up into just one word!

 

One of the problems with traditional broadcasts that mainstream media has is to trying not to offend anyone, whereas the audience really is actually wanting to hear something that is either truly meaningful, funny, poignant, offensive, or just plain crazy.   It comes down to the fact that if your team is losing, you at a minimum want desperately to be entertained.  The audio that I envision would be something akin to what is sort of done with the Mystery Science Theater 3000, but in this particular case, it would strictly be a play on the audio portion of the broadcast and not on the video.

 

I don't believe that the setup or the budget for this sort of audio would be too extensive as the simplest way to accomplish this is to bring the audio to the intended audience through the internet.  The best place to start with this sort of new commentary would be in traditional sport towns that have long histories of losing teams that are still well supported.  I do believe that they would welcome this comic relief at long last as something that salves the wounds.