NFL Ncaa Basketball Media Watch

I can't remember any other football commentator facing the kind of criticism that ESPN's Emmitt Smith has gotten this year. Smith is one of the league's all-time great running backs, but his malapropisms and non sequiturs make it hard to remember that he must actually know a lot about football.

But it's now gotten so bad for Smith that even people in other sports are taking shots at him. A Charlotte Observer profile of UNC-Charlotte point guard DiJuan Harris concludes with this:

What he would like to do after college: "I think I would like to be an ESPN analyst because I could do just as good a job as Emmitt Smith does when he's commentating. Half the stuff he says is incorrect, so I think I can do that."

Ouch. Kind of a low blow from Harris there, but not totally unwarranted.

Hat tip: Pro Football Talk.

I'm not sure why ESPN puts Dick Vitale on the radio when it's not college basketball season, but the Worldwide Leader might want to re-think that programming decision.

Vitale was on Mike and Mike in the Morning today. You'd think that if he's coming on and there are no college hoops games to discuss, he'd be talking about USA Basketball or maybe two Memphis players getting arrested. Instead, he talked about football.

But he doesn't know football. (To his credit, I guess, he freely acknowledged at the outset that he doesn't know football.) And then he proceeded to tell us about how Browns quarterback Brady Quinn is going to be a superstar, and that his skills as a quarterback are comparable to those of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. And at one point during Vitale's"stock up, stock down" segment, he said the Indianapolis' Colts' stock is down because Rodney Harrison admitted to using human growth hormone, apparently not knowing that Harrison plays for the New England Patriots.

So, my humble advice to Dickie V: Either find some basketball news to discuss during the off-season, or wait until the games start before you hit the airwaves.

Back when I was in high school, a marketing teacher of mine quaintly said that in the near future we will be able to pay for gas using cash at the pump, sort of like how a vending machine works. He said that the new credit card slots at the pump have been such a great addition that it is inevitable that the cash slot will come soon.

That was 1993. Instead, we have all kinds of stupid little things attached to our gas pumps to distract us [the best is that picture of a cop telling me that driving off without paying for my fuel is a crime]. Soon, we will have ESPN at the pumps to keep us busy.

According to USAToday, ESPNews will be coming to your gas pumping experience via something called Gas Station TV [click on that link to see happy patrons watching it].

There's a reason drivers pull out of traffic and park it at select high volume pumps: GSTV. Gas Station TV entertains, informs and advertises directly to customers as they fuel up their rides. Daylight viewable LCD screens perched above the pump provide a constant shout out of targeted, first-rate ABC and ESPN programming and sponsored messages down to each individual gas station. There are no clickers handy to surf with or DVR's to slide by the targeted ad content, just one channel, one driver.

Why not? We have TVs plopped throughout shopping centers, lines at the amusement parks, restaurants, banks, the doctor's office and pretty much every menial task we have to do every day. So why wouldn't gas stations try to avert us from watching how much our gas is costing us? The only cool thing here is that it's ESPNews up there and, well, when the wife makes you pump the gas you can catch up on what's going on. I mean, that's a bit better than the ol' sports-section-above-the-urinal trick.

We already knew that ESPN's Stuart Scott has some odd opinions about the Don Imus-"nappy-headed hos" controversy. Last month Scott said on ESPN Radio that sometimes when men call women "hos," they mean it affectionately, and then he went back on the radio a couple days later to backtrack -- kind of.

But now Scott has said something very strange. Both Joe Sports Fan and Council of the Gees have noted an odd comment attributed to Scott in ESPN the Magazine regarding Imus and Tennessee Titans cornerback Pacman Jones.

"I'll take Pacman's indiscretions over those of Imus."

Let's make sure we're clear about what the "indiscretions" of Imus and Jones are. Imus had a radio show on which he often made offensive, racist jokes. The last of his comments was calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."

Jones is accused of multiple violent crimes, the latest of which was starting a fight in a strip club that resulted in a shooting in which a man was paralyzed.

Would Stuart Scott care to explain to the paralyzed man, Tommy Urbanski, how Pacman Jones is better than Don Imus?

I don't think anyone understands sexism in the world of sports better than New York Daily News columnist Lisa Olson. In 1990, when Olson was a 26-year-old reporter for the Boston Herald, three New England Patriots players sexually harassed her, making lewd comments and fondling their genitals inches from her face. When Olson went public about it, she received threatening phone calls and was called a "bitch" by then-Patriots owner Victor Kiam.

So Olson's opinions about the Don Imus matter are of particular interest. And in her column today, Olson says of the Imus controversy,

it's forced us to ask the hard questions, like what's on our iPods? Can 50 Cent stay? How about Eminem? Most important, what sort of slippery slope are we navigating when we attempt to censor offensive words rather than ignore them?

I think there are two salient points here. One is that question of why so many people who denounce Imus don't object to the same words being uttered in music or movies. I touched on that regarding Snoop Dogg yesterday.

The other is whether we're too quick to silence language that we'd be better off engaging in debate -- or simply ignoring. Did Al Sharpton really make the world a more tolerant place by getting Imus off the air? Maybe. But to paraphrase Thoreau, instead of studying how to make it worth CBS's while to silence Imus's offensive comments, Sharpton should have studied rather how to avoid the necessity of hearing them.

Previously at FanHouse:
Snoop Dogg: Don't Compare Me to Don Imus
Stuart Scott on 'Ho': 'I Didn't Say That It's a Good Thing'
Stuart Scott Says Calling a Woman a Ho Is 'Affectionate'
Annika Sorenstam: Don Imus? Rutgers? Never Heard of Them
Who's Worse, Don Imus or Billy Packer?

With a few simple words on his radio show last week, Colin Cowherd used his ESPN microphone to shut down TheBigLead.com for more than 48 hours. Cowherd urged his listeners all to go to the site at the same time, and that was enough traffic to knock the site offline.

Now ESPN ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber says the Worldwide Leader has implemented a policy that ESPN's airwaves are not to be used to ruin anyone's business. I'm a little surprised that policy needs to be spelled out explicitly -- do they also have a specific policy against torturing farm animals on company time? -- but it's a good policy.

Still, there are some issues that are unresolved, starting with why Cowherd did this. Schreiber described Big Lead as "a sports blog that is sometimes unmercifully critical of ESPN," but I read Big Lead (who also blogs at FanHouse) and I've never thought his criticisms of ESPN are anything outside the norm in the sports blogosphere. (He did quote a former ESPN employee whose criticisms of ESPN were outside the norm, but if ESPN has a problem with that, its problem is with Jason Whitlock, not the site that interviewed him.)

And, unfortunately, there's one other issue we should note: Cowherd got what he wanted here. He showed that he's more powerful than a blogger. In Big Lead's first post after coming back online, he wrote, "we'll be spending the better part of today looking for a new host." So, congrats, Colin Cowherd. Your total number of listeners exceeds the volume of traffic that Big Lead's host can handle. I take it this makes you feel big. I think it makes you look small.

Previously at FanHouse:
Colin Cowherd has Listeners?
ESPN's New Ombudsman Another Tony Kornheiser Pal
Too Close to Tony Kornheiser? ESPN Ombudsman Responds

Suppose you're a second-tier ESPN radio host. Maybe one with a past history of antagonizing the blogosophere. You've got millions of listeners, many of whom are simply too lazy to change the channel. How should you spend your Thursday? How about crashing a high-profile blog just because you can.

Earlier today, Colin Cowherd decided to celebrate his power and virility by sending all of his listeners to The Big Lead. You may have heard of it--it's one of those edgy, investigative blogs that makes the mainstream media uncomfortable, and its author is a FanHouse contributor. Anyway, a few minutes into this audio, you can hear him order his audience to visit TBL right away, hoping he can shut it down. Cowherd has nothing against TBL, hasn't ever read it. He just wants to prove a point about ... I don't know, his need to prove his power and virility in public. Draw your own conclusions.

I can't even begin to describe what a cheap shot this is. I know that blogs scare people like Cowherd, and I get that if we tangle with them, there might be consequences. That would matter if, you know, Cowherd had any reason for doing what he did. Instead, well, let's just say that history does not look kindly upon bullies and intimidators.

Oh, and make sure to read Deadspin's seething take on the matter.

"When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times." -Mark Twain

Cincinnati deserves to be dumped on a times. It's a nice city with great tradition, interesting people and their own ways of doing things ... but this comment attributed to Mark Twain pretty much should be the caption underneath the Nati's skyline. Cincy operates in it's own little world and anything from outside doesn't resonate too well here. As a transplant from Charlotte, leaving the city to see my family makes me feel as if I'm leaving the woods and revisiting the outside world again. Sorry, guys, but I'm one of the few people that actually moved to the Cincinnati area ... not from.

That's where ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd comes in. Cowherd's show, The Herd with Colin Cowherd, spent several minutes ripping the city of Cincinnati [you can listen to the rant here]. Cowherd does a number on the city by commenting on a news story about an airplane forced to land because a smoker goes crazy. That flight was from Cincinnati to Hawaii ... and Cowherd just runs smack all over the city. Listen to it, and you can't fight him on it.

He calls out the entire town, including the sports scene. The Bengals arrests, Bobby Huggins running a rogue Bearcat program, Marge Schott and Pete Rose fire-storming the biggest gambling scandal in baseball. He also talks about Hustler's Larry Flynt being from the city and former mayor Jerry Springer. And he, of course, touched off on the current mayor of Cincinnati's pitch on Monday:

"What is it with Cincinnati? ... For how small a city it is, is it me or does Cincinnati have a disproportionate number of bottom-feeders and low-level gutterballs?"

"Jerry Springer, Pete Rose, the Bengals, Bob Huggins, wild chick on an airplane, Larry Flynt ... They're not serial killers, they just have no class."

"I mean, it's just boring. People get in trouble. It's just boring."

"A similar sized city is Hartford. Charlotte. They're not in the news this much."

"Just a mess."