Review of Bleacher Bloggers

Dave Aizer and Brent Popolizio may be familiar to Nickelodeon viewers for hosting shows like Figure It Out and U-Pick Live, but they also have expanded their audience beyond teens and tweens.  They produced and co-hosted a Spike TV pilot called The Men’s Room, which was a reality show with guys in bars talking about sports, women, and movies.

And since July 2007 they’ve been at Bleacher Bloggers, an online hub for sports talk that scours the web for the interesting insights into both major and minor league stories.  The site is owned and operated by Next New Networks, which has over a dozen websites for communities ranging from recent brides to car enthusiasts.

Bleacher Bloggers evolved out of Aizer and Popolizio’s mutual love for sports, as well as Aizer’s prior experience hosting Disney’s ESPN Club, where he interviewed the likes of Reggie Jackson, Barry Bonds, and Joe Namath.  He also had been a sports director and play-by-play broadcaster for WVUM, the student radio station at U of Miami.

Bleacher Bloggers serves those in need of “bragging, belly-aching and blogtificating” about sports.  It combines sports-related humor and commentary from other Internet sources along with postings made directly to the site.  And on each Tuesday and Friday it releases a new video co-hosted by Aizer and Popolizio, who discuss sports headlines while sitting in a tiny studio surrounded by sports caps and jerseys.  The timing of the video

releases is great for both leading into weekend games and sifting through Monday morning quarterbacking.  Dave is tanned and jock-like, though he also resembles Adam Carolla and is described on the Nick website as the “Carson Daly of Nickelodeon.”  Brent is nerdier, with bad hair and big glasses, but not without some wit and charm.

In the videos the guys mostly chat, make wisecracks, and show blogger sites and comments.  Sometimes they interview bloggers from sites like Yankees Chick or Blogging The Boys.  There are segments such as “Blog of the Day” and “Get Off the Bench,” the latter being a question posed to viewers, such as how they think their favorite football team will do this season.  Another segment about the likes of soccer and women’s basketball is called “Sports the Average American Fan Really Doesn’t Care About That Much But In the Interest of Drawing a Wider Fan Base We’ve Decided to Mention.”

Aizer and Popolizio say their site is “the greatest thing to happen to the Internet since those drunken pictures of David Hasselhoff.”  Self-mockery aside, they do help sports fans filter the growing mass of blog materials and connect with other fans who are writing, arguing, and sharing stories about their favorite teams and athletes.

See the episode that gives the results of their poll identifying the top five “crappiest sports movies ever.”  About one of them, Brent says “I think Charlie Sheen had a better performance in rehab.”