They’re testing the links, the formatting, the overall stability of the page. Anytime you know ahead of time you’ll be putting up a high profile page you throw a dummy version up on the live server first to make sure it all works happy on the live server. The nice part about the internet is that until you link to the page it’s just there, so you can do whatever you want. The bad part about the internet is people can find you test pages by doing directory listings and looking for pages you haven’t linked to yet.
Most of those football pages are a good 4 minutes behind the actual game. And I’ve seen them not work, just a couple of weeks ago ESPN during the SNF game got weird and insisted a field goal had been a two point conversion. And it stayed stuck that way for a while.
Thank you. Excellent response, and information.
I love it when I’m wrong.