from Allan Muir of Sports Illustrated,

Well, an article on Deadspin today suggests that maybe the Worldwide Leader isn’t thumbing its nose at us after all … at least, not as blatantly as we thought.

I can’t comment on this myself because I haven’t watched an American SportsCenter broadcast since the early ’90s. But Patrick Burns devoted a year of his life to cataloging every minute of every broadcast and parsing out the data in a way that would make the fancy stats geeks proud.

I suspect a little piece of him died every day.

A lot of what he uncovered won’t exactly be news to anyone who watches the show. SportsCenter likes to cover the NFL. A lot. LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning got mentioned more often for crossing the street than most athletes did for making game-winning plays. They’ll throw down the adjective “elite” to describe anything from a prospect to a haircut.

Where Burns’ sacrifice starts paying off is when he examines the treatment of hockey on the program. Now we all know it is an afterthought, falling just below Tim Tebow’s dating life and just above Little League baseball and arena football. His numbers bear out that belief. Out of a total broadcast time of 23,052.75 minutes last year, SportsCenter devoted all of 459.5 to covering the NHL.

That’s a whopping 2.7 percent of its airtime.

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