Bomani Jones, PTI, and The Curse of Knowitallism

Bomani Jones is right about most things. But he’s not right about everything.

During this year’s national title game, Bomani made a pretty ridiculous claims — that Urban Meyer had taken Ohio State to new heights after Jim Tressel. I didn’t understand or agree. Tressel won as many national titles, went to more title games, and developed just as many pros. Ohio St went to 8 BCS games in 9 years under Tressel and was a Top 5 program for a decade after he cleaned up the John Cooper mess. What new heights was he talking about?

As a follower of Bomani, I usually just scroll past opinions I don’t agree with. However, this one ended with a weird sentence. “There’s no way to deny that.”

Really? You can’t deny that Jim Tressel did more for Ohio State than Urban Meyer? I’m not a fan of Tressel, or Ohio State, but that’s seems like a very reasonable and easy position to take.

So, I told Bomani that. He disagreed with me. That’s fine.

Then he blocked me. And that felt odd.

Whether or not you agree with Bomani is beside the point — the point is that of course you can deny his point. It’s literally just an opinion! So why did this ESPN star take time away from the National Championship to argue with some random guy on Twitter?

It’s a symptom of what’s wrong with sports “analysis” from years crystallized down to its purest form. It doesn’t matter what your opinion is, you must defend it to the bitter end. And loudly.

Look, I know I’m not exactly covering new ground here, but it’s become more prevalent as we witnessed the impact of this same type of “analysis” from cable news shows over the past four years. Now I don’t think Bomani being wrong about Jim Tressel will lead to five deaths during an insurrection. It does, however, contribute to the downfall of our social discourse where everything is you vs me and we must always argue about it.

The entire episode with Bomani got me thinking further about the only analysis show I watch on a daily basis, Pardon the Interruption, as I have since it debuted about 20 years ago. The reasons that Tony & Mike are still the kings of the format — and why no one has come close to dethroning them — are the antithesis of…