Media and college sports

As I have said before I am currently a student at the University of Idaho, therefore I will start this blog by saying last night I went to the Vandals preseason exhibition game. I know these are always games the bigger team should win by 30, which we came close to doing. I think they are a great way to get fans involved test out transfer or freshman students and see who is going to play well with who. In other words this game is basically for the fans!

Why then do we still have the media timeouts. Why is there media timeouts in college sports at all!? I must say I am tired of going to college sporting events and having one team get on a roll start making 3's and getting stops only to have the ball go out of bounds and thus a media timeout. I understand the need in the professional sports area where the game is all about marketing, and making money. However I don't think it is at all correct to have media timeouts in the middle of college games. All this does is take away from built up momentum for one team or another. It also gets the fans of the home team out of the game because there are stretches where nothing is going on even though neither team wanted or needed to call a timeout.

College sports like no other area of sports the fans are crazy, they will not sit down or shut up even if their team is down by 20 with 6 minutes to go. They will not go quietly, they are going to take the other team down as much as they can, yelling on every free throw chanting defense every time down the floor.

By putting media timeouts into the college game away from the people who really matter in college sports, the fans. Those people who bleed their teams colors, and that isn't a joke the people who when they cut themselves their blood as a tinge of blue in it because they have painted their entire bodies for every game in the last two months!

Other people will argue that by using media timeouts the athletes themselves are being taken advantage of, and this may or may not be true. In my opinion by putting the athletes on TV you are giving them exposure, and thus the college arena becomes similar to tryouts for the professional game it their future. I don't believe this is or should be the spirit of the game however it is hard for me to argue that college athletes are being taken advantage of.

My argument has to do with the pace and intensity of the game. When the athletes are out there playing hard constantly the fans get into the game there is less interruption for the players, it also makes depth and endurance more key factors. There is no need for media timeouts the coaches get enough normal timeouts as it is, if they feel their players need a break make them call the timeout, and get things back to what they need. In my opinion college basketball is hurting itself by having as many timeouts as they do.