In the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” department, the NFL has rolled out a new site design and so far, it gets an “F” grade in my book. Way, way, way, way, way too much eye candy. Everything is glossy and reflective and looks good enough to eat. Lots of flashy multimedia, including a horizontal scrolling scoreboard with color coding. (Scrolling only gets you the last two games, which makes the whole menu seem senseless and makes you wonder why they just didn’t design it for all the games to fit.) And it’s all SO SLOW. This is just opening night with only one game being played. It will surely crash on Sunday with a full slate of games. For much of the first quarter of the game after the Colts’ touchdown, the site read Colts 1, Saints 0. In case you’re not football-literate, it’s impossible to have a 1-0 score in a football game. Ever. Apparently 4 weeks of preseason testing wasn’t enough. As for game stats, nothing has been updated past the first 20-or-so plays of the first quarter (it’s now halftime as I write).
The last time the NFL went through these pains (a few years ago), they eventually ironed out a great site that had all the information you needed, updated fairly quickly and reliably, and didn’t have a lot of splashy eye candy to slow the site down. The new site is a big step backwards in many ways.
Of course, being the fantasy football fanatic that I am, I need the stats. So I switch over to CBS Sportsline where they had their own hiccups. The first Indianapolis touchdown was attributed to the wrong wide receiver, and for a while was stuck indicating the play was “under review.” (There was no review on the field.) CBS eventually got it corrected and now has up-to-date stats.
CBS is also using the worst web term ever: Glog.
From what I can gather, the “Live Glog” is an inline game log, or game blog, written by CBS Sports writers and fans. You can filter by “CBS Glogger only” or “All Gloggers.” I have no idea how one becomes a glogger … I feel strained and icky just typing the word. I really like the idea of a real-time game blog, but still: Glog? Why oh why call it that? It a word that feels so forced and totally unhip. No question. Worst web term ever.
