Tim Brando on ESPN's Northeastern Bias Toward Southerners

I was listening the my local ESPN radio station yesterday ESPN 97.7.

Tim Brando who is a noted national sports talks show host, commentator for games for CBS sports, and journalist called into the local sports program Fox and Company.


Tim Brando still lives and does his show from Shreveport Louisiana and jets all over the place each week to do his other jobs.

He made a interesting observation on the show..

The State of Louisiana is currently in a huge uproar over the comments ESPN talks show host Colin Cowherd has made. Basically he said Saints fans were idiots because they viewed former Saints and long time New Orleans resident Archie Manning as a traitor for rooting for the Colts. The reason Archie is doing that is because his son is the quarterback.

Now the guys on the show made the common sense observation that out of all the calls they received they have never heard this viewpoint at all. Everyone understands why Arching Manning is rooting for the Colts. Louisiana folks are pretty upset that they are being portrayed this way.

Brando brought up a good point. He says what is important is not that Cowherd said it. The important thing to realize is that the talking points Cowherd talks about is wrote elsewhere.

Brando said based on a lifetime of experience with this when the Northeastern stereotype of the world does not see a result they envisioned they must substitute one.

In this case when there were no riots, no property damage, no acts of violence, no burning of cars in New Orleans after the Saints won the NFC this did not compute to the people up at ESPN headquarters in Connecticut . All national sports media is still largely a Northeast New York based operation.

Thus they had to substitute a story line to fit the stereotype. Brando said he has seen this for years working up there and it is a constant battle to fight against especially how the powers that be put in that anti South bias.

Anyway thought that was interesting.