Mark May Returns to Twitter Just in Time to See His Kind Go Extinct

By Johnny Ginter on May 13, 2016 at 2:10 pm
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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Mark May is back on Twitter, and our long national nightmare is over!

Finally, the words of a man who once said "I AM BACK !!! after some vile coward hacked my account legal is following up." can once more be read and disseminated to his 87 thousand followers on a regular basis with the kind of flair that can only come from a person who seems to tweet exclusively with hands sticky from a quickly melting cherry popsicle.

To commemorate this great day, I invite you to sample some of Mark May's Greatest Twitter Hits during this article, if only to show the caliber of individual that large sport networks feel are qualified to help you understand the intricacies of football or any of your favorite sports.

And look how successful they are! First Take is thriving, ESPN is essentially unchallenged on radio, as Mike and Mike continues to be one of the highest rated sports shows on the planet, and Fox Sports recently spent Scrooge McDuck money to acquire some of ESPNs heaviest hitters (pun kind of intended) to round out (okay now that's a little mean) their lineup of talking heads. It's a noble profession of talking down to people and making pithy remarks with nothing to back them up, and American sports media wouldn't be the same without them.

Basically, what these guys do and who they are can be boiled down to one concept: you are the dumb, unwashed masses, and they are the gatekeepers to sports knowledge.

The problem with this system is threefold.

One, people have seen this shtick for something like 30 years now. No one is fooled when some cube-headed squinty dumbass yells stats at us for seven seconds before spending five minutes ranting about the "clutch gene" or "grit" or "playing like a kid out there." In the three decades or so that the televised talking head has become ubiquitous, viewers have figured out that those precious moments of actual analysis were a product of a very sad person in a production booth fighting a losing war against the raging id of a porcine douchebag.

Second, even that precious little real information is now widely available. In the early 90s, if you wanted to find out the third down yards per carry of a third string MAC running back during the second half of away games, you might as well ask for a leprechaun to fart in a bucket to fill it up with truffles for as far as that would get you. Sports networks like ESPN really were the gatekeepers of knowledge, because that kind of information was only readily compiled by large organizations with the money, time, and personnel to put it together. Now, in 2016, no less than four sites can tell you anything you might want to know about that hypothetical MAC nobody and/or leprechaun flatulence.

Third, and this is connected to points one and two, talking heads like Mark May and Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith now need to know what the hell they're talking about. And no doubt: for the absolute layman, the collective knowledge of these hucksters is probably enough to satisfy their desire to feel informed. But unfortunately for them, people are becoming increasingly better informed about the sports that they love, and as a result are demanding better access, information, and analysis than most of the guys on First Take or Mark May are able to provide.

This is my favorite Skip Bayless video. Mark Cuban came on First Take in 2012 to yell at Bayless and Smith for being saying dumb things about the NBA finals, and it is a glorious deconstruction of everything that Mark May represents. You should watch all of it, but in particular you should watch the Ark of the Convenant-style face melting that Cuban gives to ol' Skip at around the 2:20 mark and lasts for a solid ten minutes.

The abridged version:

Cuban: You guys like to talk in complete generalities where no one can question you, right? ... First of all, you have a presumption that people care what you say. They don't.

Bayless: *GURGLING NOISES*

Cuban: ... Now, if you want to talk about double teams and how they were used, whether or not they should've played zone, what defensive structure was in place, that's a valid conversation. But just saying they 'wanted it more,' that's ridiculous.

Bayless: *SADLY SWIVELS BACK AND FORTH IN CHAIR*

Cuban: ... Like last year, did we 'play harder' than the Heat? Is that what you think it was?

Bayless: No, I don't. I think LeBron disappeared and shrank in crunch time in the 4th quarter...

Cuban: So we get no credit. ...

Bayless: ... That's all I saw. That was a lot of it.

Cuban: ... You're exactly right. That's all you saw. You didn't look.

And then Mark Cuban goes on napalm the set of First Take from orbit as he explains in excruciating detail exactly what the Dallas Mavericks did to limit LeBron in their Finals matchup. Skip Bayless touches the white phosphorous and is rendered inert for the remainder of the segment while Stephen A. Smith gets to pretend to be the somewhat informed, semi-sane one for about 12 minutes.

It wasn't exactly Jon Stewart on Crossfire (which actually did kill that show in a roundabout way), but it should say something that billionaire weirdo Mark Cuban can waltz on to a mid-day talk show wearing a Smurfs t-shirt while talking matchup minutiae and still be the most relatable person on the set.

A lot of this comes with caveats. First Take is a complete dumpster fire of sadness and yelling, but it is consistently a highly rated show that has seen its viewership go up as the rest of ESPN has seen its ratings go down. As psychically painful as it is to watch two of the dumbest people on television talk past each other for two hours, people tune in.

I have a theory for why they do this, and it ties into a good portion of Mark May's aforementioned 87 thousand Twitter followers: some people really just love to watch stuff that makes them mad. And while that's really, really stupid, Bayless is at least smart enough to know that his bread is buttered by mentioning LeBron at every possible opportunity to generate maximum rage. It's the same reason why you've been frantically scrolling down this page to find a tweet from Mark May about Ohio State. Even if you know it's coming, you want to see just how angry some moron giggling to himself on a toilet in Bristol is going to make you.

As new Fox Sports 1 exec Michael Horowitz puts it (somewhat more diplomatically):

This is the mission: two thoughtful guys in a format that allows them to say incisive things that other people hadn't considered or weren't exposed to.

"Incisive" is a cool word for "incredibly stupid" but Horowitz doesn't really mind either way. It's why he recently snatched up Skip Bayless for an estimated $5 million or so a year to try and replicate the ratings bonanza that First Take has been for the Worldwide Leader.

What Michael Horowitz doesn't understand is that it's never been about Stephen and Skip, or Mike and Mike, or Mark and Dr. Lou. Yes, people have tuned in to hatewatch these guys, but they only do so because the ESPN label gives these personalities the gravitas necessary for people to pay attention. Skip Bayless without First Take suddenly becomes the guy in your gym who wants to bug you about the Cavs when you're trying to go home. Colin Cowherd without ESPN is now the douchebag in the grocery line who wants to make a comment about everything he sees in your cart. Jason Whitlock is... well, he's pretty much the same.

FS1 seems to think that the combination of star power and yelling will be enough to carry them to victory over ESPN, and in that they are wrong. First Take is a singular fluke that ESPN hasn't been able to replicate in their other shows (PTI might have some similarities in terms of format but is tonally much different), and making it harder for FS1 is that fans are more informed than ever, and are now starting to demand more media and content that reflects that knowledge.

And that's where Eleven Warriors jumps in.

I mean, not just us. That's a little arrogant. We try and provide you with content that is entertaining and thoughtful, but we're hardly the only sports site to do that. In fact, our combination of fun with sober analysis and reporting is the same template that a lot of sports blogs (because that's really what 11W was only a few years ago) have had to follow to gain the kind of credibility that ESPN and their ilk have squandered over the years.

Eleven Warriors and sites like us are increasingly offering comparable (or better) content than what is being provided by the huge sports entertainment conglomerates. Right now the biggest advantage they have is convenience, but much like cable unbundling, consumers of sports are starting to decentralize their information to just the essentials. If you're a hardcore fan of Ohio State football and not much else, it's possible that you're starting to be less inclined to check out any place but here on football Saturdays.

There will eventually come a tipping point. ESPN has lost millions of subscribers in the last few years, and FS1 has made an extremely expensive bet that if they hire enough blowhards, they'll get ratings.

They're both in trouble, especially if they can't find a way to bottle the kind of magic present within Mark May's Twitter feed; that special blend of overconfidence and stupidity that can only survive in the fragile environment that is the petri dish of major cable sports television.

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