?

Does it seem to anyone else that the sports media really, really needs Andrew Luck to be good? No doubt he has great talent, but I find it annoying how he gets a pass on everything that goes wrong, even more than proven guys like Brady and Manning. What's the deal?

Rise of the Machines

I happened to be looking at the sports feed on my Yahoo! homepage (not sure why it's still home, force of habit I guess) and noticed this article about Rajon Rondo and the Celtics. Now I don't particularly care about the NBA, the Celtics, or even Rondo and his Star Wars-ish name. What caught my eye was who, or what, wrote the article: Automated Insights.

Your next sports anchor?

You probably remember Automated Insights from the fantasy football season. They provide those fantasy matchup rundowns that appear after every game. That's a fun gimmick for a game, but it's a bit startling to see them providing recaps of actual contests. Is your local sports anchor soon to be obsolete? Could Sportsbot 5000 really take the place of the likes of Art Neil?

Hypocrisy

With the court cases going on, the Johnny Manziel autograph story, and the beginning of the college football season you're sure to hear plenty of sports writers and personalities (Jay Bilas and Michael Wilbon come to mind) opine on the "hypocrisy" of the NCAA making millions of dollars but not paying the players. I think there's plenty to be said about that, but it strikes me that all of these guys seem to have no problem working for businesses that derive a significant amount of their income from college sports and spend lots of time discussing them. You think Bilas hesitated for a second when he cashed his last paycheck from ESPN? Why not? Doesn't it make him complicit in the whole system he's railing against? It seems like cheap self-righteousness to me if these guys will criticize every chance they get but won't actually take a principled stand.