Friday Night Sports: A Paradoxical Dilemma

target audience

Or, “How ESPN Is an Attritional Purgatory”

There are two kinds of people and two kinds of people only: those who are willing to sacrifice a Friday night to televised sports viewing and those who are not.

Now it stands to reason that as one ages – and particularly when one reaches the legal drinking age – the prospect of watching Jon Barry and Mike Jones narrate an NBA showcase pitting LaMarcus Aldridge against Monta Ellis loses much of its discretionary appeal and, thus, a significant portion of its young male audience.

This seems especially true of the second game of a Friday night double-header, wherein the latter program exhausts its marginal utility as would a second bulletproof vest or bowl Corn Flakes. Yet, in addition to age, a number of other life circumstances factor in to whether or not one will pledge this particular allegiance to the 9:15 tip-off of, say, Grizz-Thunder. Work environs are chief among these, as a grueling five-day stretch of clusterf*cks and paper-pushing could very well render the blue-collar knowledge worker a comatose couch potato come game time… Though, lest they be overlooked, friends, fandom, television size, home aesthetics and pizza all play a role as well.

Given said variables, we may reasonably assume that Friday night sports viewing appeals to three select, predominantly-heterosexual male camps: the adolescent sports junkie (i.e. The 6th Grade Me), the wedded breadwinner and, of course, the avowed fans of the teams involved.

And yet, there I was just last night, plugged into 52 high-definition inches of Memphis-OKC – a competitive event I’d liken to, in lesser superhero terms, Sabertooth v. Nightcrawler – whittling away my valuable hours of freedom as my best friend took out his alleged sleepiness on a 14-inch thin crust. I’m subsequently led to believe that all mid-to-late night broadcasts on ESPN and its offshoot networks work simply as exercises in attritional limbo, sustaining themselves ratings-wise by drawing in a fourth group of potential viewers: the weak-willed paralysist who would very much like to spend his night drinking downtown, but has been consumed against his will by a vortex of mitigating factors (contiguous apathy, lazy acquaintances and cheap pseudo-thrills, principally).

Presumably the higher minds at ESPN have already, in their shadowy marketing lairs, pegged this last group as the media behemoth’s bread and butter – that which, from an eyeballs standpoint, sets the Worldwide Leader apart from the hardly consequential likes of Fox SportsNet and Versus. The more interesting question, though – especially from an advertiser’s perspective – relates to the state of the four distinct viewerships. Namely, do Disney executives realize that only two of these, the adolescent and fan contingents, actually retain consciousness through an event’s entirety?

I bowed out after the third quarter. Philip had eaten himself into indifference minutes earlier. And so I ask: Gillette must know sixth graders and shaggy Oklahomans don’t buy razors…

Right?