I and many others last night we not thrilled with the constant Cincy love-fest throughout the game or even in the ending with them talking more about Cincy and give the Arkansas win sorta an “Oh by the way Cincy is really good and Arkansas only won cause they managed to out tough then for a brief stretch”
Now as the late great Paul Harvey use to say… time for the rest of the story.
Most of the constant cincy man love was coming from the color guy on the broadcast team. Well, I didn’t catch it the first time I watched the game but I did the second time. During a stretch of the game they mentions a Kansas City Chief player (TE - Travis Kelce) was in attendance supporting his old alma mater. The color guy then said the only thing he had in common with Kelsey was they both went to Cincy. So it seems the color guy was a Cincy grad. No wonder all he wanted to talk about was Cincy.
Now we know the rest of the story.
It doesn’t make the constant Cincy love easier to stomach, but at least I know why it was being spoon fed to us.
Wednesday trivia. Nearly 50% of the US population lives within 500 miles of Columbus Ohio. Cincy is only 100 miles from that origin. I suspect the announcers were speaking to that audience.
What does that have to do with anything? They’re a national broadcast outlet. The population of Ohio is less than 4% of the nation, and I daresay even most of Ohio isn’t UC fans. The same treatment of tOSU would be equally unacceptable and there are a lot more Suckeye fans than Bearcat fans.
Metro Cincinnati (which crosses over into Kentucky and Indiana) has about 75% of the population of Arkansas.
I always expect a home crew announcing a game, and I expect their bias to come thru in the broadcast. If it were in Fayetteville the crew would have our local flavor, with very slight bias ( very small tho, cause we pay attention to such things and wouldn’t want out of state complaints) against our foe.
Manny Watkins has called a couple of our streamed games in Fayetteville this year. I was expecting some favorable or slightly biased commentating from the former Hog, but he really seems to do a good job of being a neutral commentator, just calls the shots as they are.
WHile I’m sure that’s true, the fact is he’s paid to announce the game, not prop up one team over the other.
My biggest complaint more than the love fest with Cincy, is how he praised individual Cincy players when they got beat by our players and then praised them when we stopped them. It’s like the guy has never seen a basketball game before. When Pat Bradley used to announce games for Arkansas, he would talk about Arkansas when asked about personal stories, but he didn’t prop Arkansas up over the other team.
