ESPN Got Bullied Into Changing The Down & Distance Graphic That Looked Like Every Play Was A Penalty After One Half Of Football
Out of the many, many, manyyyyyy mistakes the Connecticut Leader In Sports has made over the years, this graphic has to be near the top of the list. And in terms of Monday Night Football blunders, this has to be number 1. Higher than Dennis Miller in the booth, higher than the Boogermobile, higher than whatever weird ass theme song with Jason Derulo and the Florida Georgia Line. You know why? Because you could just Mute those problems away.
However, that scorebug was pure psychological torture on every play because my feeble Football Fan brain instinctively fears the color yellow during a football game like a bull instinctively hates the color red*. The only explanation that graphic made it onto TV for the first game of the season is that the people who designed it just straight up do not watch football. I was a quality assurance analyst for five years at ESPN and sometimes you would deal with developers that didn’t know sports. They thought a high ERA was a good thing or something. But there is no way I could see a scenario where I would have possibly allowed a product to go out where the color yellow showed up every play where a penalty usually shows up. Out of all the colors in the rainbow, they chose the one color that means something good or bad happened on the play, depending on who you are rooting for. The craziest part of all is that when there actually is a penalty, that’s when the least amount of yellow shows up!
As a wise man once said, that is BUH-NAH-NUHS. People obviously took to Twitter and complained about it. You will have to take my word for it because every time I search for it, 1000 new tweets come in screaming about it. Luckily the alleged “Worldwide Leader In Sports” realized it was a bad idea to make fans think a penalty was happening every play and changed it at halftime.
Good job guys and congrats on passing your first class of Football 101! Hopefully your next trick will be to stop calling a music video a Halftime Show.
The only way I would find this entire ordeal entertaining is if ESPN did it to troll Saints fans who clearly still aren’t over that whole “Blown pass interference call that probably robbed them of a trip to the Super Bowl” thing and are on edge every time a flag is thrown.
*Bulls don’t actually get angered by the color red. Instead they get fired up by the waving of the cape. So all of those cartoons that told us different were lying to us, which is pretty fucked up since we were just kids
