February 3rd is signing day for all the little high school seniors who have been offered scholarships to play football in the NCAA. It's a huge day for those kids and their parents - they will be signing letters of intent, binding them to attend and play football for the school that they choose for the next four or five years. It's also a big day for rabid college football fans who see the future of their teams in the recruiting classes that come in each February.
Fans following recruiting has become a big business with sites like Rivals and Scout covering recruiting almost exclusively - even ESPN has setup a bush-league recruiting news division to compete. But recruit ratings and stars are hardly a measure of how good the player will actually be a couple years down the road. And some fan bases might go just a bit too far in their love of their team.
Those fans are Alabama Crimson Tide fans. Alabama is good at football, very good, the school revolves around it and lives and dies by their success on the gridiron. That's all well and good except for that the whole book-learnin' thing goes by the wayside - as evidenced here.
This year, Alabama's athletic dept took signing day to a new level - they setup a live webcam stream of the fax machine in the football offices... the only purpose of which was to allow Alabamans a chance to sit and stare at a picture of an inert machine and then watch pieces of paper come out (recruits fax their letters of intent to their school). If this sounds awesome, then you are retarded and should be fired from the job at which you were staring at a picture of a fax machine.
I can recreate this experience in living color at my office right here, in fact I can do it in three different rooms with different models of fax machine. I see no reason why anyone would spend time watching a video of a fax machine; it probably saves you about 5 seconds of time seeing a letter come in versus waiting for an intern to pull the piece of paper out and post the news online.
I believe the only logical next move for Alabama is to stream a video of paint drying after they paint a new A on the athletic department wall - and I'm sure the viewership would be high as Alabamans tuned in to see the action. Perhaps they will go with a spring football coverage webcam of the turf in their stadium so that people can watch that green, green grass grow. Oh boy...
Here is the link in case you're interested. I warn you, it's JUST A STUPID FAX MACHINE!!
Fans following recruiting has become a big business with sites like Rivals and Scout covering recruiting almost exclusively - even ESPN has setup a bush-league recruiting news division to compete. But recruit ratings and stars are hardly a measure of how good the player will actually be a couple years down the road. And some fan bases might go just a bit too far in their love of their team.Those fans are Alabama Crimson Tide fans. Alabama is good at football, very good, the school revolves around it and lives and dies by their success on the gridiron. That's all well and good except for that the whole book-learnin' thing goes by the wayside - as evidenced here.
This year, Alabama's athletic dept took signing day to a new level - they setup a live webcam stream of the fax machine in the football offices... the only purpose of which was to allow Alabamans a chance to sit and stare at a picture of an inert machine and then watch pieces of paper come out (recruits fax their letters of intent to their school). If this sounds awesome, then you are retarded and should be fired from the job at which you were staring at a picture of a fax machine.
I can recreate this experience in living color at my office right here, in fact I can do it in three different rooms with different models of fax machine. I see no reason why anyone would spend time watching a video of a fax machine; it probably saves you about 5 seconds of time seeing a letter come in versus waiting for an intern to pull the piece of paper out and post the news online.I believe the only logical next move for Alabama is to stream a video of paint drying after they paint a new A on the athletic department wall - and I'm sure the viewership would be high as Alabamans tuned in to see the action. Perhaps they will go with a spring football coverage webcam of the turf in their stadium so that people can watch that green, green grass grow. Oh boy...
Here is the link in case you're interested. I warn you, it's JUST A STUPID FAX MACHINE!!
0 comments:
Post a Comment