In their effort to ensure that SportsCenter will look every bit as antiseptic and devoid of human personality as other 24 hour cable news networks, ESPN has spent $125 million to update the look of the show.
Stuart Scott and Steve Levy were on hand to debut the new set which is complete with the requisite multitude of video monitors that no one can adequately pay attention to and a ton of backdrop space so one can confirm that Stuart Scott does wear pants to work.
114 video monitors are on hand compared to the previous 15 which could be considered overkill considering that SportsCenter doesn’t even go through 114 story lines during a single show.
A more fundamental change is the new SportsCenter ticker, which will now rotate continuously on a loop during the entirety of the show, a never ending stream of text that may or may not have anything to do with what is being said on the show at any given moment. The font has slightly changed to something called Swiss and it is slightly larger as well. The text boxes are also cleaner and more defined, which actually does help improve the quality of the program:
And despite the massive upgrade in their power bill, ESPN hasn’t really altered the format of SportsCenter to accommodate for the new huge space and infinite monitors. Part of that is likely due to the fact that it’s only been one show and the production team will need some time to fully take advantage of the new amenities. Part of it is likely due to the fact that no one should need 114 monitors to report the biggest sports stories of the day.
