The Great Outdoor Games start tonight on ESPN. If you have somehow missed ESPN’s advertising campaign, which might best be described as “carpet bombing,” the games feature a wide variety of outdoor activities, such as fishing, shooting, various dog-related events and lumberjacking. Pardon me while I change the channel. I’m sure that lumberjacking is an important part of the American economy, and without lumberjacks, you wouldn’t be holding a newspaper in your hands right now, but frankly I don’t care about it. There is no way that cutting through wood with a chainsaw, no matter how quickly, is a sport. Unless Leatherface, star of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, is participating. I don’t really care which flannel-clad lumberjack finishes first, and which finishes 25th, almost two-tenths of a second slower. I suspect that it probably doesn’t really matter to anyone else, either. Competitors in these events take themselves a little too seriously for my taste. One competitor sounded a little bit like Lizzie Borden when he said, “I’m a very instinctive ax man. I try to be comfortable, don’t force it, just do things easy within myself.”I would be pretty careful anywhere with an ax, but especially within myself. Normally, I would simply ignore this type of idiocy, but I am starting to notice a disturbing trend on ESPN and its family of channels. I’ll call it the “MTV-ization” of the Extended Sports Programming Network.ESPN is starting to show less of what made it great: analysis and highlight shows as well as older NFL Films productions, and more of what makes me change the channel: Outdoor Games, X-Games and God forbid, the WNBA. MTV did the same thing about 10 years ago, going from an all (or at least mostly) music channel to a wretched mix of WebRiot, Daria and old episodes of The Real World. You can go an entire weekend without seeing an actual music video on MTV. I fear that the same thing will happen to ESPN, slowly melding it from a source for entertaining and informative shows such as Baseball Tonight to constant Mountain Dew commercials, punctuated occasionally by thrilling “Water skiing 2 Nite” highlights.If we nip this thing in the bud, simply by ignoring the Outdoor Games and all similar programming, it will hopefully just go away.

Some other things I think are worth mentioning:Newcastle United, a member of the English Premier League, played a match against the Columbus Crew on Wednesday at Crew Stadium. The English soccer leagues have a rule that at the end of every season, the bottom three teams from the Premier League move down to Division One (the top minor-league) and the top three teams from Division One move up to the Premier League. The same thing applies to the lower leagues as well. This is an absolutely phenomenal idea. Imagine the NBA adopting such a policy: The Clippers would be dumped down to the CBA so fast, Lamar Odom’s head would spin. This would also help make late-season games a little bit more interesting. Ditto for the MLS. The US Open Cup competition has shown that A-League teams can play on something close to an equal footing with MLS sides, so why not adopt the rule? Maybe the champion of the A-League could play a match against a team from the last-place side of the MLS for the right to be a member of MLS during the next season. It’s worth considering.

Ripping the WNBA is popular because it’s so easy. ESPN’s broadcasts of the league are almost unwatchable, although if they can talk Hank Williams, Jr. into recording an “Are you ready for missed lay-ups?” theme song, like the Monday Night Football song, maybe things will pick up. I’m still not sure it’s worth pre-empting the usual programming on the Lifetime channel to show the games, either, although the usual line-up is made up of shows with plot lines that all look suspiciously like the video “Good-bye Earl” from the Dixie Chicks. Has any man in history ever accomplished anything? Not according to Lifetime. Men are all drunk, stupid, unemployed wife-beaters who drag their families (and especially their wives) down with them. But that’s a story for another column.The WNBA is a league that advertises the fact that it is marginally better than a bunch of fat, middle-aged white guys ballin’ in the park. So are most decent boys’ high school teams. But good for you, ladies. Why am I so anti-WNBA? Because the game is played at a pitiful level. The Portland Fire spent the evening of June 30 scoring a whopping 39 points against Houston. That’s 39 points. In an entire game. Just to prove that it wasn’t a fluke, the ladies of Portland went out and dropped a huge 45 points on the New York Liberty just six days later. Soccer teams score more than that.Portland has already won four games this season without breaking 70 points in any of them. I love this game.It’s not just Portland, either. Seattle has fallen short of the 50-point plateau five times this season. In fact, in 24 games, Seattle has not scored 70 points. Not once. I have a suggestion for the WNBA’s next national commercial campaign: Wake me when it’s over.
Thomas Orr is a senior journalism major and the Lantern sports editor. He hopes one day to become the host of “Water skiing 2 Nite.”