It’s been an epidemic for decades in all professional sports. Sports on TV is mostly geared toward men. Men are pigs. So sports programmers, since the advent of television, look for unimaginative, dreadfully-obvious ways to give men an awkward combination of the two things they apparently like the most – games and hot chicks. This has resulted in tons of camera time for “cheerleaders” (who would be called exotic dancers in any other society), commercials for Hooters between every play and, most disturbing, the invention of the sideline reporter.
Very, very few things in life are more unnecessary than a football sideline reporter. Everyone hates talking to them and they always ask the same two or three questions, written either by Captain Obvious or Lieutenant Dumbass. Nothing of value can come from a screamed question asked of a coach jogging to the locker room. No insight can be gained from a three-second soundbite that happens between third and fourth down. No one’s gonna reveal some secret game strategy to the skinny blonde standing awkwardly behind the players’ bench.
The whole thing is like having a football game interrupted every fifteen minutes by your sister who wants to know the name of the team wearing the pretty green uniforms. It’s clichĂ© and pointless and mankind gets dumber with every interview and every sport on every network does it. Why?
Partly because all TV executives are sheep, they want to do what everybody else is doing and sideline reporters are now simply standard operating procedure, but mostly, they do it because they want to put sex into sports.
Almost all of these sideline reporters are women, especially in football. They tend to be blonde and while they might not all be super-model hot, they’re never fat. They get dressed up for the games like they’re going to a club on a date and by television law, the game announcers are required to get these gals on camera multiple times every game.
The sideline reporter adds zero to the game. Their existence is non-essential, the silly information they bring fans is nothing you need to know or will ever remember. So why do the networks waste their time and money? They think their male audiences are shallow Neanderthals and if they see a picture of any woman other than their wives, they will be less likely to walk away from their TVs during commercials.
On this, the TV guys have radically miscalculated. The fact is that men generally like football a lot more than they like women or sex. They don’t want to mix the two and if they are forced to, their brains could malfunction.
Of course, it’s possible that the sideline reporter phenomenon is just a politically-correct maneuver aimed at placating woman so they can say that sports like football are sensitive and inclusive and hiring women. If that’s the case then I would think we should be seeing more average-looking fat chicks … No, I’m pretty sure that the sideline reporter exists so that the male workers will have someone to make inappropriate sexual advances toward and so that the male viewing public can get a pornographic timeout.
In the final analysis, I think there’s a pretty obvious win-win here. We can just abolish the concept of a sideline reporter, starting first with football. This would give football fans fewer unnecessary interruptions, fewer stupid questions and it would bring the woman’s movement a little closer to life as something other than a sex object.
Photo on VisualHunt.com