Joel Bulkley
The Belichick era at UNC began with big crowds and excitement before the TCU game in Chapel Hill. The ESPN GameDay crew (Saban, McAfee, Bruschi) favored UNC. They sound more sentimental than practical.
Local TV stations did live pre-game reports from the campus. Everyone got into the act including NBC which doesn’t broadcast college football, Wall Street Journal, etc.
The broadcast crew (Herbstreit, Davis) wasn’t the A team but the game wasn’t A level either. Fowler was doing U.S. Open tennis in New York. Davis did a good job on UNC players despite a lack of personnel info and depth chart from UNC. The game got out of hand and Herbstreit later brought in his new dog to help. The game was a bust for the packed UNC stadium.
The game had the fifth largest viewership (6.1M) of the college football weekend, miles behind Texas/Ohio State’s 16.6M, but was the highest for ESPN’s weekend. The others were Fox or ABC games. Print stories/Twitter bombed Coach B and UNC.
Credit to Lee Corso on his retirement, plus getting all four of his final GameDay game picks correct at Ohio State. Credit to the private foundations stepping up to offer $37M in support of media–PBS and NPR.
The Raleigh area is being mentioned in connection with two new MLB franchises. Reports said the commissioner wants to expand baseball by two teams, one in the east and another in the west, before he retires.
Nashville and Salt Lake City are said to be the leaders, with Orlando, Raleigh, Charlotte, Austin, Portland in the mix. Tom Dundon of Hurricane fame is the leader here, but there’s no stadium site or agreement about paying for it. Nonetheless, some stories put Raleigh as the third strongest candidate.
UNC hoops fans can get a good preview of the upcoming season in the Basket Under Review podcast with video, by Kevin Sweeney and Eric Fawcett on YouTube. Unlike many preseason reports I’ve seen, this one covers all or nearly all the new players.
Local high school sports TV coverage is getting more competitive. News 17 and WRAL keep moving the Friday night score updates earlier in the 11 p.m. news to get them on the air before the other station.
Personnel news. Ian Darke, a former ESPN broadcaster, joins Fox’s World Cup coverage as play-by-play announcer. Shelby Swanson is the new UNC beat reporter for the N&O. She’s a former DTH sports editor and was a freelancer for the Raleigh paper last year and probably will be the youngest key staffer by decades. Analyst Jay Wright leaves CBS/TNT basketball to devote more time to his new administrative job at Villanova. Del Snow, founder of The Local Reporter digital paper in Chapel Hill, passed away. ACC Network added Dave Clawson, former coach at Wake Forest and Bryce Love, former running back at Stanford, as studio analysts.
The Athletic.com reported fans could spend more than $631 to watch all major NFL games for five months. That includes cable and streaming services. Games will be on ten different platforms. Thankfully, theYouTube TV game (Kansas City/LA Chargers) was free.
The largest illegal sports streaming platform (StreamEast) reportedly was shut down by authorities. It was a network of 50+ pirate channels that broadcast major sports games and PPV events worldwide and even sold ads. Front Office Sports said the shutdown of the pirate platform was greatly exaggerated.
Chapel Hill recently mailed a satisfaction survey on recreation services to some residents. If you got one, fill it out carefully. The format isn’t the easiest to follow on how to rate programs or services, plus there’s no blank space to personally add things the town doesn’t have like splash pads, lighted sand volleyball courts that you’d like to see. And they likely will use the results from the survey to push what they want for the new recreation master plan, a blueprint for future rec spending, rather than what you or the public at large may want since there’s no more recreation advisory board to advocate on your behalf.
Remember, Penny for Parks, both the term and commitment, were eliminated in the new city budget. Instead the council approved spending $979,000 for recreation projects and parks maintenance. PFP would have provided $1,321,000.