I dont know if I'm adding anything to this conversation and I don't know much.
Espn has to brodcast and show things that get the best ratings. Rating drive everything. Thats why they cover the sox and yankees so much or they why went completely over-board in their coverage of Brett Farve. Its what gets ratings. Thats why only the good sitcoms last more than a year... they get ratings that the other sitcoms just dont't get. So yes espn is going to cover more than usc or ohio state more than they are going to cover Auburn there but there is 25 million people living in los angeles there is 4 million people living in the state of alabama. I'm willing to bet Fox and CBS and NBC are doing the same thing.
Again I'm not really sure I'm adding anything to this conversation
I think it's a chicken and egg thing. There is more so-called "interest" in the teams that ESPN busts a nut over, precisely BECAUSE ESPN busts said nut.
Look at the Barbaro saga. It was a fucking horse, for pete's sake. You eat one every time you go to McDonalds. Horses die every day. But because the media saturated the airwaves with Barbaro updates people were herded into believing that they cared. When the thing died, people were weeping in the street and having candlelight vigils.
But what would have happened if the media HADN'T effused over it? What if they'd shown the clip of the horse busting an ankle a couple of times on ESPN and just said "DAYUM, that had to hurt" and then not mentioned it again? When the horse finally died do you think you could have found ten people in the country who would have given half a shit either way? NO! It would have been, "oh, that horse died, didn't he run in that race with Secretariat? Too bad."
The question is who cared first? The media did. And they decided that you were going to care too. So you did.
Who is telling you that Ohio State has one of the best defenses in the country? The freaking media. Do they? By SEC standards we've already established that Ohio State = Vanderbilt, but that's ignored in the desire to feed whatever agenda ESPN desires to push. When OSU loses, it's in their own self-interest to justify it and make excuses.
THEY determine what we're going to care about. The media decided that we're going to care about Brett Favre, that we're going to want to know evefy time Nick Saban shits a peach pit, that Hussein Obama is the messiah ... and they're going to force feed that to us until we see it too. Until we DO care about everythign Brett Favre does. They are treating us like sheep and we are wandering where ever they tell us to.