For some reason, ESPN feels obligated to decide things like “Eli Manning is an elite quarterback” based primarily upon the last few games that some analyst watched. Probably because arbitrary nomenclature is just vague enough to mean anything, but sounds like decisive “analysis.” Of course, this is the same company that decided that employing Rick Reilly was a good idea, and supporting that notion by claiming he gets a lot of page views. (Challenge: If anyone who works at ESPN happens to read this, give me Reilly’s spot on the front page and tell me if more people read me than him. Go ahead. I dare you). What makes so little sense about having Trent “please don’t remember how terrible I was” Dilfer spouting nonsense about Tom Brady or Eli Manning is that there are a lot of really good writers and analysts who work for ESPN. Buster Olney’s blog with a cup of coffee might be the best part of any morning. KC Joyner is really pretty good talking about college or pro football intelligently. Keith Law has a fairly strong cult following with good reason, and John Hollinger might be the best basketball writer who ever lived. It’s gotten to the point, though, that when people hear “ESPN” all they think about are inane discussions about worthless top 10 lists.

Of course, if you are a sports fan, there is also Fox Sports, the new NBC Sports Network, and an increasing number of people who look simply to Twitter for their sports news. I confess that during the winter meetings I was attracted to Twitter like drunks to Taco Bell — and I really mean that in the sense that I usually avoid Twitter, but during the winter meetings my standards dropped considerably. Lightning news is occasionally better than well-written, fully verified news (note: I may not be the best person to ask since I am an Angels fan and the reward for my temporary Twitter madness was Albert Pujols). In a lot of ways, we live in the golden age of sports fandom. Of course, all of what I have said so far can be applied to traditional news. I can know who won the Republican primary in whatever state a full five minutes — five minutes! — before CNN has it up on their front page. Heck, it is possible to know news mere hours before it is verified as completely false.

The point I am trying to make is that overindulgence is usually a sign that something is terrible. History Channel is in the middle of a ratings golden age because Alien Pawn Swamp or whatever garbage has replaced it has a supposed niche in the market. There are currently 1,432 lame cop shows (as Greg Easterbrook recently pointed out in his prodigious Tuesday Morning Quarterback column) because people watch three or four of them a week. For all the people who scream at the top of their lungs about how terrible ESPN is need not to look at evil executives at Disney diving Scrooge McDuck-style into piles of money. Dollars to donuts, many of the people who work at ESPN would rather watch old reels of baseball games and Steve Sabol NFL films. Executives, producers, directors and writers show us things we don’t like because we watch it. They get hired and fired and raises based off of how much we watch them, which means we incentivize them.

The best we can do when we have a career is do its function to the limit of its potential. A pro bowler should be able to bowl pretty close to 300 regularly. A high school English teacher should turn out a lot of students who know grammar with a high efficiency. A project manager is judged based primarily off of how much money he saves on costs versus how much they bid. A student is “supposed” to get good grades. Just about every profession has some metric to measure performance for this reason. For all this talk about “99 percent” that just won’t go away, I wonder if fundamentally a successful economy doesn’t necessarily include people who flout the rules or find loop holes like they are Nick Saban recruiting 127 people for 25 scholarships. If you accept that there are only so many people who can be legitimately good at making money, it figures that people who can look like they legitimately make money might fill in the gaps.

— Gregory Bearringer is a graduate student in medieval studies. He can be reached at gbearrin@utk.edu.