ESPN Debuts New Score Bug for College Football Playoff

Big games call for all the available bells and whistles and ESPN, continuing in a proud recent tradition of so, unveiled a new score bug for today's College Football Playoff semifinals.

Here's what it looks like in a still:

And here's what it looks like with a supremely large human being hurdling over another elite athlete and essentially rendering the Alabama-Notre Dame game over before it really got going.

There are a few tweaks to like. Muting the team-centric color coding is a smart move. It's become increasingly difficult to negotiate which team is which with the proliferation of alternate jerseys, which often haven't matched whatever was represented on the bug. And stacking the timeouts vertically is a unique look, using the space effectively without asking viewers to negotiate small dots or dashes at 45-degree angles.

Overall, there's an admirable expensiveness at work, perhaps most punctuated by the gold-plated down-and-distance field. But here is where the main quibble arises. For reasons beyond my personal comprehension, there's been a great push to use colors in the yellowish part of the spectrum here, which simply could not be worse because our brains have been trained to watch for the flag indicator in this position.

That said, the textured, marbled vibe is quite classy and expensive-looking.