NBC Goes Into Bonehead Mode

Along with spending a lot of time with Charlotte and Chris these last two weeks, I have been able to watch a lot of the Olympic coverage on NBC, CNBC, MSNBC and the USA networks. For the most part the coverage has been great specifily the curling coverage. All of the US Men and womens matches have been telecast Live during the day. Obviously people must be watching or else NBC wouldn't cover it as much. However, NBC made a bonehead decision on Friday in regards to their coverage of the womens Russian-US match on the USA network. Russia had a 7-4 lead over the US heading into the 10th and final end (end is currling's version of a baseball inning), but the US didn't back down and scored 3 in the 10th to tie the match at the end of regulation. When there is a tie at the end of regulation you go into extra ends (extra innings in baseball). After the commercial break, USA Network host Bill Macatee announced that instead of showing the extra end, USA was going to switch to Women's hockey. Granted women's hockey is probably more of a money maker then Curling, but they switched to hockey 15 MINUTES before the puck was dropped. So instead of seeing the final end of curling, we had to watch all the pre-game hockey stuff and commercials. Why couldn't NBC/USA show the end of the Curling match, skip all the pre-game hockey stuff and if necessay, join the hockey game in progress? Well according to NBC spokesman Brian Walker "The curling team had not fared well to that point,...There was no definitive end in sight, and we had to make a decision. Had we stayed with the curling match, we would have missed the first five minutes of the hockey game."

I don't care if they are showing competitive knitting, if you are going to show any match/game and the game is close, you don't breakaway before going into overtime. If it was a blow out, fine, breakaway. But that was not the case. Besides, who cares if we miss the first 5 minutes of the hockey game. Here is another thought, how about showing the hockey game on one of the other 4 networks covering the Olympics and then switch when curling is over. Bottom line, USA/NBC made a BONEHEAD move.