I'm not talking about teams/sports your genuinely passionate about, like Hokie football/basketball for example. I'm talking about sports that you're interested in, but don't have a lot of time to invest in it. Between work and kids, I just don't have the time or energy to keep up with baseball and hockey anymore. What I really miss is old-school Sportscenter, where I could take 30 minutes out of my day and be completely caught up in yesterday's stories. Is there something similar that will give you a quick narrative of each game and highlight the important (not just cool looking) plays/sequences?
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No kids (or wife/gf) for me at the moment, so not fair comparison, but I'll usually turn on 6 pm Sportscenter while I make dinner and then probably watch a game or two afterwards, usually hockey.
But of course I dick around on ESPN and other sport sites during work here and there, especially working from home now.
usually check the box scores on espn, if I have time read articles on nfl.com. life usually makes things busy. I get lots of stuff from here and another sports blog I am a member off as I don't have any social media so let others do my dirty work...
I keep up with sports news via twitter by following journalists who cover the teams I care about and few "general" insiders who break news. I also have The Athletic which sends me breaking news push notifications. I also listen to a few CFB, Soccer pods, and the Bill Simmons Podcast, to keep up with various sports narratives and such on my commutes and lunch breaks.
I keep up with sports discussion primarily through TKP and reddit, where I frequent the r/cfb and r/soccer forums, much of which I do during downtime at work. My workday is pretty erratic in terms of when and how much work I'm doing at any given time. It's rather easy to follow European football because it takes place on weekend mornings/early afternoons so it rarely interferes with social plans (not much an issue this past year anyway, for obvious reasons). Midweek matches and CL matches take place usually late in the workday and I'll just pull it up on my laptop and watch while I work.
College football is my most dedicated commitment. As an unmarried guy in his 20's I don't have many obligations to take care of on Saturdays, so if I'm not attending a game I will be holed up with multiple TV's watching all day. I watch with friends often, but I don't even need the social interaction as I'm more than happy to spend the whole day watching football by myself. It helps that college football is such a big deal around here, because it's pretty commonplace for most of my friends to adhere to a cfb focused schedule in the Fall, and we tend to have way more group weekend plans made in the Spring and Summer.
I mostly keep up with baseball via scores, or attending the occasional Braves game throughout the summer. I have friends who watch as many Braves games as possible, but I tend to either have it on the background or wait til later in the season to start following more closely. This is one that I definitely have sacrificed in terms of how closely I follow it.
The other ones I have sacrificed in terms of games watched is basketball, both NBA and college. I watch movies as many nights a week (my other passion) as I can, and thus have watched less VT basketball than in the past. I normally ramp up my basketball viewing come March Madness and NBA playoff time.
The "news" part isn't what I'm worried about. I get ESPN and CBS sports notifications for big trades/upsets/major highlights and I follow sports subreddits that give me the same. I've found that doesn't get me a good sense of what's going on in the day to day. The narrative highlights are what I really miss. In a minute or two, you get a good sense of the game flow, the major contributors, and of course the result.
Podcasts fill the narrative void for me. Bill Simmons pod does a pretty good job of keeping up with NBA and NFL headlines, culture, day to day stuff primarily. Then I listen to a couple VT podcasts, Split Zone Duo (great for keeping up with CFB narratives and broad perspective of the sport from smaller teams to coaching searches), and Cover 3 podcast (transitioned here recently from Barton and Bud, but I did so begrudgingly because I do not care for Danny Kanell, at all).
There are plenty of podcasts to choose from with different styles/cultures if you will on any sport you could want to keep up with. Some are shorter, some are longer. I listen to most of my sports podcasts on 1.5x speed as well to get through them quicker.
Another way I fill the narrative void is by following people like Mina Kimes, Katie Nolan, and similar personalities as they often participate in the narrative culture of several sports.
narrative highlights is a bit different than the "meta narrative" or storyline to me.
Simmons Pod is great at talking about the higher level stories, but he's not going to spend 30 seconds on each NBA game and give you a "The Mavs downed the Blazers last night and Luka Doncic went OFF with a 33-16-11 line" or something like that. This format is essentially what Rebecca Lowe does on the EPL roundup/halftime shows.
Curious what soccer podcasts you like I know you're a madrid fan so you probably don't get into the more mainstream podcasts that focus on the bigger euro clubs and the premier league. Personally I love the ESPN FC show and podcast and the caught offside one has become a fun thing every Tuesday and they're a bit more US centric following MLS more and all soccer in general.
I listen to Managing Madrid, and pay my very small patreon fee for all the pods. I also listen to Guardian Football Weekly, The Totally Football Show (these two are kind of redundant and I don't always listen to both, but I like multiple guys in each), and the 92.9FM Atlanta United Podcast "Off the Woodwork." I also listen to some adjacent podcasts on football history for no screen flights and such. Same with specific episodes of interest from Zonal Marking.
I've learned that the less attention I pay to sports and the less emotionally invested I get in them, the better off I am. So I pretty much only follow VT football, Iowa State football, Iditarod and Yukon Quest dogsledding and - during the Olympics - team USA volleyball. Was in a step challenge in February - which my team won! - and I was watching a bunch of old international volleyball matches on YouTube while spending hours on the treadmill, but that was an anomaly.
Just a general suggestion for many, not specifically to the OP, maybe give the 'step back' strategy a try. It helped my mental health and now I don't miss NFL, NHL, MLB ... at all.
I have stepped back for a long time. I barely pay attention to hockey and baseball anymore and haven't for a long time. I'm not looking to get emotionally invested, so it has no impact on my mental health. I miss knowing what's going on. I miss being able to turn on a game (or go to a game) and know who I'm watching. Though I don't miss it enough to comb through box scores or search out news on each game individually. Insert "aint nobody got time for that" gif.
I've been thinking about this a lot as well. I don't even have kids yet, and I feel like I have to 'make time' to watch a weeknight sporting event. Still don't know how I was able to watch random NBA games every night when I was in college.
Anyways, I'd recommend listening to The Lead: https://theathletic.com/podcast/99-the-lead/
It's like the NYT Daily, but for sports, by The Athletic. You should be able to get it on any podcasting app for free.
Lots knock on twitter because of the garbage out there, but it really is the best source for breaking news and live updates. The key is to only follow the things that you want to see. If you start following garbage then you will find more garbage. Also don't even consider the stock twitter client. They think they know how you want to see different things, and it gets crazy annoying. Android has a client called Fenix and then Tweetbot for iOS will allow you to filter out the riffraff you don't want to see and will show you the most recent stuff first without having to navigate to a seperate feed. Great for sports, because there isn't a team out there that doesn't have someone reporting on everything they do.
Recently took a job that's based on the west coast, and at night, so my ability to watch live during the week is pretty much nonexistent. I've filled that with twitter highlights, Reddit (particularly r/hockey, r/nba, and r/mls since football is thankfully on the weekends mostly), and YouTube. YouTube has been great with the NHL and NBA putting up 9 minute long full-game recaps, and football has gotten better with that as well.
There are a handful of writers I follow on Twitter, and I read ESPN and The Athletic a lot. Even though my time spent watching is down, my sports media consumption is probably up because I'm bored as hell sitting in my apartment most days... at least the Pittsburgh weather is finally not shitty.
Twitter keeps me up to date. It's insanely full of endless drivel, but it's really the only way to keep up with everything going on nowadays.
Urinatingtree, his YouTube videos (especially his "Hater's Guide to (X)), and r/Urinatingtree.
Wonder if his Stillers will be the new Factory of Sadness after what's happening there and Browns not Browning or the Bungles taking that spot for destroying Joe Burrow's career without an O-line.
uh..... you're looking at it
I follow much like Chris does, just I'm not as much of a podcast guy. Reddit, twitter, some national sites like espn and theringer.
ALSO, and this is one of sports-nerdiest things about me, is that me and two close friends (TKPers Brad and CB.vb.VT) do a teams draft of each major season: NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, EPL, and March Madness. We draft teams right before the season starts, and whoever's teams have the best combined record over the course of the year wins that season. (3 pts for a win, 2 for second, 1 for third). Then there is a separate standings where we tabulate our points from the various seasons. Brad is currently leading on the back of a wildly successful NFL regular season and post season, but if NBA+NHL regular season results hold, I'll be right back in it. Anyhow, I update the standings in a google doc almost daily. So its easy to keep track of what teams are doing well (and then easy to have a starting point to find out why if i want to). We call it Splordts, as a hilarious and immature-sounding portmanteau of Sports Lord
also playing fantasy sports is a good incentive/way to stay on top of things (if you stay on top of things)
TKP for VT stuff and Twitter for everything else. Once I set my preferences for what teams I follow Twitter just blows everything out of the water in terms of the sheer volume of content to consume.
Much less than I used to. At one point, I was heavily invested in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and the NHL on top of college sports. I tuned out of MLB when the Yankees dropped Don Mattingly for Tino Martinez (good move, but still broke this fan's heart.) As I have gotten older, Sunday flag football and fishing limited my ability to watch the NFL. I loved the early 90s Knicks, so their demise basically killed my taste for the NBA. As my calendar filled up, I needed source material on my top priorities.
Nowadays, that means coming here and following the whole Twitter crew (at least the credible ones.) For the Rangers, I am a member of a private site that has chatted up about the team since the late 90s (I have gone to games with most of the members at the Garden.) I follow the Rangers beat reporters on Twitter and a handful of select bloggers. I used to listen to WFAN, but when they lost the Rangers to ESPN New York, my sports talk radio consumption went way down.
This is a good time to get back on the Knicks bandwagon! RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley are starting to break out. Julius Randle took a big step forward this year. Finally have a competent front office. Make sure you check them out!
Similar boat - family, lots of work responsibility, and grad school. Short answer is I really dont keep up. ESPN is my general go to for major sporting news, but then I pretty much rely solely on TKP for VT stuff, and MLB.com during the season. I dont make much of attempt to keep up with everything (part of the reason why my NCAA bracket looks so bad) - i just dont have the time to really invest in more than a couple sports anything deeper than surface level.
My entire bracket strategy was a champion hedge with a lot of random gut picks because I've watched so little basketball this year. I felt pretty confident that Baylor was the best team I watched this year (1.5 Baylor games watched pre-tournament), but both pools I am in, TKP and my office pool, are pretty large, both of which have Baylor/Gonzaga as an extreme majority of champion picks, so instead of trying to win off the rest of my bracket being excellent, I went for the champion hedge. I'll basically be guaranteed to win both brackets now if Bama completes the Natty double.
edit: Looks like it will actually be a very close one between CatticusFinch and me if Bama wins.
I just check scores/box scores online and pretty much everything else from podcasts
TKP, if it isn't here then I dont really care!
more and more, I don't. I haven't watched a game live in years, my heart can't take it. Tried a couple different outlets for following the Hokies, this one has been by far the most consistently good. Used to be a regular in other online communities as well but it was having a bad effect on my mental health, and I wasn't getting along with other fans of the teams I root for and that was just majorly bumming me out.
Plus, you know, most of them suck right now.
So I mostly just check my facebook feed and my phone for scores. Knowledge is a burden, and I'm much better off being a casual fan. The decrease in my posting since my return reflects the level I care about Hokie sports at the moment