ESPN Controlling NFL Timeouts?

Go ahead and count me as not the least bit shocked at this latest blurring of sport and entertainment. During last night's Titans/ Jaguars massacre, Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher oddly decided to hand the ball of to Chris Johnson rather than take the customary knee with less than two minutes to go and a score of twenty-three to three. Now, typically this sorta thing would be more of a faux-pas than a scandal, like Woody Hayes going for two against Michigan up thirty points with just a few seconds to go, but alas, there may be more to this story than mere showboating.

During the coach's postgame interview, Jeff Fisher was asked directly why he chose to hand the ball off, and he said it was because the network needed a few more timeouts to get in all of their commercials. Let me stop there to make sure this point really gets hammered home. A coach in the National Football League admitted he altered game strategy for a television network because they decided to sell more advertising space than was ultimately needed. That is madness. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the NFL is investigating both the Chris Johnson handoff and Jaguars' coach Jack Del Rio's bizarre usage of his own timeouts during the fourth quarter.

Anyone who tells you broadcast television hasn't had an effect on professional sports is flat-out wrong. Until now, the proliferation of game film and the prescheduled television timeouts have been seen as a wash with neither side ever gaining a competitive advantage, but a network like ESPN influencing when and how a team's personal timeouts are used is a helmet of another color. We'll wait to point the finger until all the facts come out (ESPN has already denied the story), but something is certainly a little fishy here.