On October 15, 2005, the University of Southern California (USC) came back and won 34-31 on the last play against Notre Dame. The game was touted by the idiot sports media as quite possibly the best college football game ever. USC is now supposedly the best college team to ever grace a football field with its presence. Trust me, this is completely wrong.

Now tell me this. How can the media portray this as the best game ever, when USC should have never won in the first place? That’s right, the God-like USC Trojans broke a rule on their final play, a QB sneak into the end zone for the game winning touchdown. According to rule 2.B, the running back cannot push the QB in a forward motion, which is exactly how they scored. Matt “Oh look at me, I’m such a good QB” Leinheart would have never scored without the boost he received from Reggie Bush, the running back. And how is Notre Dame even perceived as a top powerhouse school that was supposedly going to overthrow USC for the first time in two years? They had already lost to number 24 ranked Michigan State. How could the media think they would come out flying against the number one team in the nation? All I heard all week was how good Notre Dame has been this year, playing “powerhouses” such as unranked Pittsburgh, unranked Michigan, unranked Washington, and unranked Purdue. Speaking of cupcake schedules, USC has one of the easiest schedules in college football. It is perceived as a tough schedule by the Extra Stupid Person’s Network, aka ESPN, but they sugar coat it and say that teams are truly better than they really are. Unranked Arizona State a powerhouse? Yeah, sure.

In a sport where the media decides the rankings, why is there so much bias? Remember the national championship game two years ago?  Number-one-ranked Oklahoma versus number two LSU? Wait, you don’t remember that? What is that you say, all you have heard about from the media is how USC has won the national championship for two years in a row? Oh well surely they couldn’t have won the national championship game if they were not in it, right? WRONG! The AP poll, or Associated Press, voted USC as the number one team, and they managed to get away with a split national championship with LSU. I even remember that Sports Illustrated ignored the fact LSU had won the actual championship, and they only offered special “championship” packages of subscriptions to USC fans. You would feel left out if you were a LSU fan wouldn’t you?

Oh, and media bias doesn’t stop there. It is instilled in all major professional sports. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, by far. And what does the media do to try and spread this to the people of America? Any chance they get, they make jokes about the low scoring or the crazy fans or the ties, when really, at its core, soccer is a graceful game. The average American just doesn’t care about soccer, but who knows what would happen if it garnered just a little positive media.

Here we come to another popular international sport, hockey. The NHL, and hockey in general is always perceived as a violent game. Those players are not skilled, all they do is glide around and look to beat each other up! When Todd Bertuzzi hit Steve Moore from behind during a hockey game two years ago, the country was in an uproar. The media had a field day, and the nitwits on Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption thought that a chance to bash hockey like this would never come around again. So news was all over the front pages about how all hockey players have no limits on their thug-like aggression. Now, I am not saying that what happened in the game wasn’t horrible. It was definitely bad. But what about those Sundays when something cheap happened during a football game? One player led with his helmet for a big hit. I observed one Sunday when this happened. Monday’s newspaper, The Washington Post, had a tiny excerpt about it in the bottom corner of the third page. Where was the media outrage? Or is football just soooooo popular in America, it is untouchable by the media?

The NBA is also another sport that supposedly thrives on controversy, thanks to certain media outlets, like The Sporting News. When I opened up my preseason basketball edition, one of the first things I saw was the headline: “Kobe and Phil, Can They Get Along?” This is referring to Kobe Bryant, who plays for the Lakers, and Phil Jackson, who coaches the Lakers. According to media-made stories, they don’t get along too well, but they are currently trying to mend their differences. So why can’t the article’s headline be “Kobe and Phil, Trying Hard to Settle Differences?” I guess that’s too positive for the media to write. They thrive on controversy, and more issues of the magazine/newspaper are sold if what is coming out of it is negative.

Baseball is probably the most heavily followed sport in America by the media, because of its long schedule. But whenever I turned on Sports Center, even during the World Series, I was treated to another story about how much the Yankees hate the Red Sox. Guess what? WHO CARES! There were two perfectly hard working teams playing, but I guess that wasn’t enough for the media to report on. God forbid anything positive comes out of the world of baseball. Hey, why doesn’t the media take attention away from steroids, and focus it on more reports about the World Series. Once again, too positive.

I cannot even sit through a broadcast on ESPN, CBS, or ABC, because sports “personalities” and media always have a swing on things. You know, I really don’t want to hear the same story every quarter about how the quarterback for the home team did something when he was seven years old that didn’t affect anything in his life. You can’t even open up the sports page anymore without having a slant on a story. Simply put, there is no strait sports news anymore. There is no strait broadcasting anymore. It is all simply flushed down the toilet by greedy people who want to make a few extra dollars by getting the attention of maybe 10 more people in the world. I guess it is partly our fault though. We do flock to tragedy, or anything negative for that matter. From now on though, just report the darn sports, and tell it like it really is. No sugar coating. No nothing. Just sports.