Without Sports, ESPN Turns To Emergency Solution: The Ocho

March 23rd, 2020 - 2:26 PM EDT by Adam Downer

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Cotton and Pepper from ESPN 8 the Ocho in Dodgeball

One can only imagine how difficult it is to find programming to air in the time of Coronavirus when you have a monopoly on sports broadcasting and there are no sports to broadcast.

ESPN and its various subsidiary channels, which includes ESPN 2, ESPN U, and ESPN News, have pulled the emergency switch now that all sporting events have been postponed or canceled as a public safety precaution and gone to airing ESPN 8: The Ocho.

The Ocho, if you're too young to remember the great Dodgeball: An Underdog Story craze of 2004, was a gag channel in the film which would bring "the Finest in Seldom Seen Sports.” Helmed by Cotton McKnight and Pepper Brooks (Gary Cole and Jason Bateman), the channel covered the dodgeball tournament that served as the climax of the film. The gag has resonated throughout the following two decades; it is the source of the Bold Move Cotton meme and ESPN made an annual habit of paying homage to the gag by airing seldom-seen sports like Ping Pong and dart-throwing every August 8th since 2017.

With literally no sports happening, ESPN had to move the annual ESPN 8 day up a few months, and on Sunday, ESPN 2 held an "Ocho" day, airing cornhole, arm wrestling, robot fighting, Jelle's Marble Runs, and other oddities in the sporting world.

Naturally, the sports-deprived of the world absolutely loved it.

Hopefully, ESPN runs the Ocho until this is all over, because if there's one thing the world needs now, its seldom-seen sports.



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