NBC's "Boss Button" Fail And General Commentary On Their Horrendous Vancouver Performance Thus Far

It is well documented how awesome CBS incorporates the "Boss Button" when it comes to their NCAA March Madness coverage. The pie charts are exceptional and while I don't know how it looks to your boss if you are not supposed to be looking at a pie chart or your job does not involve pie charts or how your boss will follow up on you once they see the pie chart, it still beats the heck out of what NBC is legitimately giving you with their boss button for their Winter Olympics coverage.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, NBC's attempt to deceive your boss!

Ugh.........wow.

Let's dissect this now. It's a screenshot on Windows 7 of a blank Excel spreadsheet that is only covering a 3rd of the screen. Can you count the number of things wrong in that last statement?

First of all, how many offices have Windows 7? Secondly, doesn't a BLANK spreadsheet sort of defeat the purpose of the intention of the boss button, which is to, oh, you know, make you look like you are doing something productive! And lastly, the spreadsheet taking up a 3rd of the screen does a great job in highlighting the Windows 7 that your boss and company may or may not have. Sure if you are really savvy enough you can pass it off as Vista, but how many people even use Vista? It sucked monkey testicles so much that people in Vista's heyday, people were paying extra money to downgrade to Windows XP!

Alas, that NBC would throw up such a half-assed boss button is hardly describing. If I were to describe NBC's coverage in only one word.............DreadfullyPainstakinglyUnprofessionallyAwful.

From showing the death of Nodar Kumaritišvili over and over again in slow-mo in primetime the day that he died to spoiling its own events on Twitter before they are aired (even on the east coast) to the all-around awful announcers they hired to somehow thinking that we care about the words and reports of Cris Collinsworth on the Winter Olympics to only streaming hockey and curling on NBCOlympics.com while CTV is trying to stream every single and minute event to the complete debacle of their schedule (more on that in a bit), it has just been a complete disaster. An indefensible disaster.

Take last night for example. At 7:30 PM ET, the Canada-Norway hockey game was supposed to start on CNBC, however, a close women's curling match between the United States and Japan was going on. Now I understand not wanting to cut away from a close curling match featuring the United States and I am not going to complain about that. Too bad that was the only thing NBC did right in handling the situation.

I forget what USA was running at the time, but on MSNBC at the time of Canada's faceoff with Norway was a women's hockey game between the USA and Russia. Now, again, normally I would say don't cutaway from a U.S. hockey game, but when it is in the 2nd half of the 3rd period and the score is 13-0 USA, I think it is a safe assumption to make that a very small portion of the population will be pissed off if you cutaway from that blowout to show the men's Team Canada hockey team in action for the first time in the 2010 Olympics. You know, the same Team Canada team that was mentioned more during the U.S.-Switzerland game than the U.S. and Switzerland were combined.

Okay, so no TV channels available for them at faceoff. Even though it would be an inconvenience to some, NBC can just go directly to streaming the game online at NBCOlympics.com until the games on MSNBC or CNBC concludes, right? Well either they had technical difficulties with the system or the feed, the technology itself is bad (and I find that highly doubtful with Microsoft Silverlight), or the people at NBC are just incompetent morons, but whatever the answer is, NBC did not have a stream up until at least 5 minutes after the puck was dropped.

Now the U.S. women's ice hockey blowout is over and MSNBC does temporarily flip to the Canada-Norway game. At 7:58 PM ET, Mike Emrick announces that the game can now be seen on its originally schedules channel, CNBC. Thus the first thought that pops into my mind is that curling is over and CNBC is now showing the game.

Wrong. Some studio guy was still talking about the curling on CNBC followed by an extended 5-minute commercial break.

Does MSNBC stick with the hockey game until CNBC is finished with their required advertising (despite the fact that the time after a curling match and before you JIP a hockey match is never a good time for an extended commercial)? Of course not! This is NBC we are talking about people and you know what 8:00 on MSNBC means, don't you? It's Countdown with Keith Olbermann's Overblown Ego! Whoopee!

Whose decision this was, I have no idea. Is it possible that Keith Olbermann's ego got in the way and asked that his show not be preempted for 5 minutes so that MSNBC can satisfy a greater audience by airing a Team Canada men's ice hockey game? Absolutely, it is possible. Is it possible that it is somehow in his contract that his show is more important than the Olympics? Just as possible. Could it have just been awful communicating between the sister stations, MSNBC and CNBC? Probably the most likely of events, yes, but regardless, NBC morons made sure that it's television audience missed another 5 minutes of hockey in addition to the beginning of the game that was cutoff just in case the Russian women make one of those ever common 13-goal comebacks that you read about everyday in the papers.

Eventually with 2 minutes left in the 1st period, CNBC started airing Canada vs. Norway.

Again, I am not going to fault CNBC for sticking with a close curling match involving the USA, but something does need to be done about this. For the summer Olympics they had separate channels dedicated to just soccer and baseball, why not do the same here? Why not dedicate a channel just to hockey or a channel just to curling? That way you avoid compressing too much into too small a time frame and thus you risk having to join-in-progress pretty much every sporting event on cable which is what NBC-U did last night. It was just bad. And they even cutoff the first 2 minutes of the Russia-Latvia game for the conclusion of Finland-China women's ice hockey game. Get another channel, have the IOC space out games more, change something because this is the kind of Olympics coverage I would expect with a bunch of high schoolers running the show, not a major American broadcast network, even if it is NBC. This has been pathetic even for them.

What's my overall point in this post? Basically that NBC is a disgrace and should, by law, never be allowed to cover the Olympics again.