Espn.com is pretty much the go-to Web site for sports fans. We all know this. Yahoo.com may do some business, attract some eyeballs, and so do cnnsi.com and cbssportsline.com … but espn.com is the gold standard of the industry.

But the site is doing its best to tarnish that reputation … and drive at least one devoted fan into checking out those other sites.

How are they accomplishing this?

With massively intrusive home page advertising and news links that give you video — whether or not you want it — often prefaced by more ads. By putting up a home page so complicated, so loaded with junk, that it actually can slow down a computer.

Espn.com has hit a new low, today. And it may have begun yesterday.

The insult is a screen-wide trailer for the DVD release of a movie named “Taken” — which looks completely wretched. The movie. I was unlikely to see a movie with the pompous yet wooden Liam Neeson as an outraged father. But you know it’s a lousy movie when all they can do for a catch phrase, the line that is supposed to drive us to buy the disc, is “If you don’t let my daughter go now … I will kill you.”

Ooh. We’re scared.

So, yeah, sure, we’re going to rush out to see Liam Neeson, who is 56, evidently playing James Bond with ninja skills … especially after he has broken into my morning a half-dozen times.

Anyway, espn.com is ticking me off because it has taken selling out to a new height. I can stand ads everywhere. The banners, the strips down the side. Because they are easy to ignore. Just like the ads on this blog. If you don’t want to see them, you don’t.

This “Taken” thing, however, is different. Vile and infinitely more intrusive.

You cannot get to the espn.com home page without having the “Taken” trailer commandeer half your screen and without hearing the voice of Liam Neeson making threats.

It gets worse. It’s not just the first time you come to espn.com’s home page that you get Liam Neeson in your face — it’s every time you come back to the home page.

And it gets even worse than that: If you walk away from your computer with espn.com’s home page still up? It’s going to play that effin’ trailer every few minutes. Without you doing anything. It just goes off. Like a fart in cyberspace.

Yes. You can hover over your computer and click on the tiny “close” button in the upper-right corner of the trailer, which devours your screen about three seconds after getting to the home page.

You can do that, over and over … and maybe you can even disable it. Though I’m not savvy enough to know how to do that.

What you also can do is go to another Web site. Like I am. Now.

As soon as I click on “publish” … I’m going to punch up cnnsi.com.