Playmade

Over the past weekend, I borrowed the Playmakers season DVD set from a buddy and proceeded to spend my time watching all eleven episodes of the series.

For those of you who don't know, Playmakers was a show that ran on ESPN for one season. The series followed the lives of the players on a fictional team called the Cougars. The show received really good reviews and I personally loved it.

Unfortunately, the NFL was none too happy with the way its league and players were being portrayed in the TV show and basically threatened to not allow ESPN use its game coverage and such on SportsCenter and other great ESPN programming.

So that meant no more Playmakers.

Which is really too bad. The series ended on kind of a down note with the Cougars winning out and possibly securing a play-off berth only to have the Phoenix franchise (a team that had to lose for the Cougars to make the play-offs) pull out a Michael Vick-esque win.

And that was it.

Nothing beyond that.

The show was done. Eleven episodes and a semi-cliff hanger ending.

Thanks, guys, thank a lot.

I realize that I'm about two, three years late to jump on this bandwagon but ESPN really dropped the ball by cancelling Playmakers. Way to cave into the all mighty National Football League.

What would've happened had ESPN stood its ground on the show? Would the NFL really've stripped the network of rights to use the NFL? And would the viewing public really've tolerated such a thing actually happening?

I highly doubt it. The way I see it, ESPN could've kept going with Playmakers and called the NFL's bluff on this one. Imagine the biggest sports network not having rights to the biggest sports league?

Wouldn't've happened. For the NFL, that would've been a huge PR disaster. Huge.

For all sports fans and all fans of good TV, the loss of Playmakers was tragic. I rank this along with the loss of another great show - Sports Night.

I miss you, Sports Night.

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