ESPN's East Coast Bias on Full Display

A lot of us turn to ESPN for our football news.  We love football, we miss it for six months.  In the world of supply and demand, because there are so few games (relative to other sports), our passionate love affair raises our demand for anything NFL.  That's what we watch something as brainless as the NFL draft.

ESPN, especially in their baseball coverage, has long been subjected to complains about having an East Coast bias.  Based in Bristol, CT, the network has spent the better part of the last decade broadcasting every Yankees-Red Sox clash in prime time.  Those two teams lead off Sportscenter an inordinate amount of times, even when their games are ordinary.

Those of us on the west coast bitch about it but nothing changes.  Sure, they throw us an apple (that tastes bland) by now having Sportscenter Los Angeles.

I get that ratings drive stories in entertainment, so I haven't been much into that east coast bias argument.

But the Chris Mortensen bus tour around NFL camps has me peeved.  The NFL is not like other sports, where you have the haves and have-nots.  Sure, there are the Giants and Patriots and Jets.  But even the "small market" teams like Green Bay and San Diego and Kansas City have huge, passionate fan bases.  Every team has rabid interest.

So when ESPN unveiled their top NFL reporter's travel schedule - all the while promoting the hell out of it and begging us to tune in - they conveniently left out, well, HALF OF THE NATION!

How the hell can we expect this to be a full NFL snapshot of training camp when Dallas is the furthest west Mort is traveling?

- Hey San Francisco, who cares that you have probably the most interesting first-year coach in Mike Singletary trying to right the ship in the Bay Area!

- Oakland, nobody needs to see if your controversial first-round WR pick is going to catch balls from JaMarcus Russell (first overall pick 2 years ago) or Jeff Garcia (he's not a guy you sign to be on the bench)!

- I'm lookin' at you, San Diego, and telling you ESPN doesn't think the Is-LT-Done? saga or the return of Shawne Merriman means anything to viewers!

- Hey Seattle, you have a new coach (Mora) and a quarterback (Hasselbeck) who claims he is finally healthy and ready to lead you back to atop the NFC West? Yawn!

- Dear Denver.  Please trade away your stud QB (Cutler), spend the whole offseason fighting controversies with your new coach, and deal with an unhappy #1 WR (Marshall).  But do it quietly because we don't care how it turns out in training camp!

- Arizona, you've just come off your best season ever, where you shocked the nation by going tothe Super Bowl.  You nearly won it, and brought back your aging QB (Warner) and unhappy receiver (Boldin) for one last crack at it.  But nah, nobody wants to see you in training camp.

To be fair, Buffalo, Carolina, Cincinnati, Houston, and Kansas City missed the cut too.

But to tell me the stories in MIami/Jacksonville/Atlanta are more important than, say, Denver's soap opera, is just silly.

One look at the map, and you can see where E$PN's heart is.

I refuse to tune in.