Sports

ESPN, SCHOOLS INVITE TROUBLE

YET again, what once would have been out of the question as a matter of common sense and common decency, has arrived, delivered by TV, and headed in the direction of that’s just the way it is, no big deal.

After dark, Jersey City becomes a very tough town. With a 2005 population of 239,603, its crime numbers that year show 3,136 reported violent crimes, broken down to include 38 murders, 43 rapes, 1,642 robberies and 1,413 assaults.

This past Thursday night, two high school basketball national powerhouses, American Christian of Pennsylvania and St. Anthony’s of Jersey City, played in Jersey City.

They played for and on ESPN, which continues to invest more and more money and attention in big-time high school sports, mostly to the benefit of those schools that have turned high school sports into another win-at-all-costs, poll-obsessed, sneaker-moneyed, recruitment-infested, adult-corrupted enterprise. Like big-time college sports.

Thursday night’s game, played on and for ESPN, tipped off at nine, after most high school games have ended, and ended at 10:35.

Spectators, including high school kids – high school kids can reasonably be expected to attend high school games – then emptied the gym to travel the streets of Jersey City, shortly before 11 p.m. on a Thursday night.

Do you think that there’s even one ESPN executive who would be eager to have his or her child out and about in Jersey City late on a winter’s Thursday night? Would even one of them allow their kids to invite such peril?

How many ESPN executives have walked the streets of Jersey City late at night, even once, the last 20 years? How many ESPN execs, after scheduling Thursday night’s high school game, would have allowed their kid to attend it?

And how many ESPN execs, with their kids due in school the next day, would demand that their children be home from a high school ballgame by or before 10 p.m. – no matter where it was played?

Do you think that in scheduling this game, ESPN’s executives made any value judgments other than that they could make a TV game between two national powerhouses?

In Bristol, Conn., population 61,000 and the home of ESPN, the violent crime rate is roughly one-third the national average. In Jersey City, where a late Thursday night high school basketball game was played on and for ESPN, the violent crime rate is more than twice the national average.

On Saturday, Feb. 9, two other high school basketball powerhouses, Oak Hill of Virginia and St. Patrick’s of Elizabeth, NJ, played each other on and for ESPN’s ESPNU network. The tip was scheduled for 10 p.m., but the game didn’t start until almost 10:30.

The game was played in Trenton, where the violent crime rate is three times the national average.

It ended at midnight.

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The NFL Network keeps taking on water. The satellite Dish Network, which made NFLN available to all 12 million of its subscribers, has moved it to an additional pay tier, which has four million fewer subs.

That drops the NFL Network’s current reach, entering its third season, to just 31 million of the nation’s 113 million TV households.

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For all the attention ESPN pays to basketball, it still goes out of its way to prove that it doesn’t know very much about basketball.

ESPN remains in the silly habit of equating points-allowed with team defense. Thus, it regularly presents info crawls such as last week’s when it ranked the Big Ten’s team defenses based on average points-allowed. But points-allowed generally has at least as much do with a team’s offense as its defense.

Consider that for years ESPN, along with many others, proclaimed that Pete Carril’s and then Bill Carmody’s Princeton teams were always among the nation’s best defensive teams – based on allowing the fewest points. But that had nothing to do with defense.

Princeton’s extremely deliberate offense ran the shot clock way down on nearly every possession, minimizing the number of possessions both teams would have, thus keeping the score very low.

On the flip side, the Lakers’ championship teams of the 1980s played exceptionally strong defense but were never given statistical credit because their fast-paced offenses – fast-break points off of steals and blocked shots – maximized possessions and created high-scoring games.

But most genuine basketball fans already know this; they already know what ESPN’s numbers grinders don’t. If you’re looking for a defensive stat based more in reality, Georgetown, holding opponents to a 35.7 field-goal shooting percentage, is the best Div. I team.

phil.mushnick@nypost.com