Each new year is a beginning, or so the mystics say. But the mystics say something else, as well. As one poet famously put it, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
And so it is that with the end of 2021, it comes time to lament the passing of NBC Sports Network, which went off the air Friday night, and went off the air for good.
We weren’t NBCSN diehards here at The Barking Crow, but it was useful now and then. It broadcast (poorly in 2020, adequately in 2021) some NASCAR races. I think it was the channel for Burnley’s upset of Liverpool last season. I always dreamed of watching a Senators game on there, but the Senators never made it to whatever’s the tier of cable below “basic cable,” or if they did once (I think they did once), I was busy.
NBCSN began as OLN, or Outdoor Life Network, and was known for broadcasting the Tour de France. It continued as Versus, which was a great channel partly because it gave us this commercial (which still gets me riled up) and partly because it had a few good college football games. All the way back in 2012 (it feels so much more recent), Versus became NBCSN, and then on Friday night, NBCSN became no more.
Much of the NBCSN content will continue on USA Network, by which I mean it sounds like USA’s getting some NHL broadcasts and some Premier League broadcasts, which is funny because those are, combined, mainly international sports, and therefore not under the natural jurisdiction of USA Network, which by name should consist of Little League baseball interrupted only by that Applebee’s TikTok commercial (tell me you wouldn’t watch a rerun of that Kyle Carter team’s title game against Japan from 2006).
So au revoir, NBCSN. I don’t know what this says about the sports media landscape. I hope it doesn’t say that diehard American college sports fans are uninterested in Burnley and the Ottawa Senators and NASCAR. If it says that, we, The Barking Crow, are fucked.
