Sportscaster Dave Revsine (Big 10 Network) Joins Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast to Discuss the Role of Sports in Pop Culture

How is spec­ta­tor sports dif­fer­ent from oth­er types of enter­tain­ment? Dave Rev­sine (lead stu­dio host for the Big Ten Net­work and for­mer ESPN anchor) joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the var­i­ous sources of appeal, team iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, exist­ing in a sports-filled world as a non-fan, watch­ing vs. play­ing, human inter­est sto­ries, sports films, and more.

Some of the arti­cles we looked at to pre­pare includ­ed:

• “Why Do We Care About Sports So Much” by Chris­tine Emba
• “The Sci­ence Behind Our Love of March Mad­ness” by Mar­co Iacoboni
• “Try­ing to Under­stand 50% of Amer­i­ca: Sports Fans” by Car­olyn Canet­ti
• “5 Rea­sons Peo­ple Hate Sports — That Sports Fans Secret­ly Under­stand” by Logan Rhoad­es
• “The Art of Telling Human Inter­est Sto­ries at the Olympics” from The Frame
• “10 Great Sports Movies For Non-Sports Fans” by Jason Bai­ley (there are sev­er­al oth­er arti­cles out there on this if you want to search for them)
• “The Non-Foot­ball Fan’s Guide to Enjoy­ing the Super Bowl” by Dan Stein­berg

The first two links above were part of a series of 2016 edi­to­ri­als in the Wash­ing­ton Post coin­cid­ing with March Mad­ness. As the whole series is def­i­nite­ly worth a look, just fol­low the links at the bot­tom of those arti­cles.

Dave wrote a book you might want to look at called The Open­ing Kick­off: The Tumul­tuous Birth of a Foot­ball Nation. Fol­low him on Twit­ter @BTNDaveRevsine.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.