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I just heard Michael Vick might be playing some pick-up ball in the prison yard. Dangerous, potentially serious injury causing decision? Hell no! How about Fox’s newest reality show this fall?

The premise: Michael Vick is putting together a football team to take on the guards (ok, so I might have borrowed an idea or two for this one. Maybe we even call it “The Hardest Yard.”) There are tryouts, cuts, interviews, and some good old fashioned dramatic back-stabbing (literally.) Leavenworth puts together their toughest squad. Maybe they even import a guard or two (preferably an ex-college star.) Her are some ideas for the show:

- A prison style combine featuring:
WRs: Scaling the Wall in an Attempted Escape Vertical Jump test and Not Dropping the Soap Hand Skills test
OLs: Pass Blocking the Guards While Your Cellmate Stabs a Rival Gang Member test
LBs: How Quickly You Can Recover from a Taser Shock (shows toughness)
RBs and QBs: Outrunning Prison Dogs (sure, Vick can run 63 yards against an NFL caliber secondary, but try zig-zagging your way around bloodthirsty German Sheppards)
Des: Breaking the Tackle of 5 Men About to…. Well, you get the idea.

- Instead of agent signing and contract negotiation, how about lawyer hiring and plea bargaining?

- Special guest judges (I wonder what prisons Pacman Jones and Chris Henry will be in this fall? And for that matter, I wonder if it matters if it’s state or federal? I will have to contact Fox’s legal department and pull some strings.)

- The season accumulates in the Prison Bowl, which will be aired just like a real game the day of the Super Bowl.

- If the prisoners win, extra conjugal visits. If the gaurds win, extra baton privelages.

- And as an extra twist… if Vick wins, he gets to leave jail early for good behavior. If he loses, Vick goes into solitary confinement for two years.

Fox, I am waiting your phone call.

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Okay, I’m now convinced. ESPN is definitely screwing over local cable providers and their customers in order to pressure the providers into carrying ESPNU. That latest victims are a group of innocent Kansas City residents.

For months ESPN had been promising to let Metro Sports (a local Kansas City station) air a tape delayed broadcast of last Saturday’s Kansas-Missouri game (which was airing on ESPNU). Then on Friday, without explanation, ESPN told the network it wouldn’t be able to show the game.

Hmmm…is it possible ESPN was hoping hordes of angry Comcast subscribers (who get Metro Sports but not ESPNU) would call Comcast and demand that it start carrying ESPNU? Sounds a lot like what ESPN did to Connecticut residents three months ago when it broadcast two important UConn football games exclusively on ESPNU.

Listen up ESPN. I know you’re confused as to why some people out there always seem to be finding fault in the way you do things. Well, just in case you were wondering, this is why sports fans hate you. This is why bloggers hate you. This is why media critics hate you. You don’t care about fans—and now there’s actually evidence of this apart from your countless hours of shitty original programming.

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The other night I did something I almost never do. I’m not really sure what came over me—it just sort of happened. I sat down on the couch, and before I knew it I was watching Sportscenter. You remember Sportcenter. It’s that show which 10 years ago was the best sports news broadcast on the planet, but now is dumbed down by empty analysis, annoying anchors, and ratings ploys.

Anyway, something weird happened on my TV that night. Sportscenter was actually good. After a few minutes of watching, the reason why became obvious.

It was a slow news night.

That meant the show could take an extra 30 seconds and diagram a clever double screen that Jamar Butler used twice to hit open threes. It meant there was time to tell us that all four times LeBron has scored 50 points it has been on the road. It meant the show could follow up with Igor Olshansky to see how his goal of filling up the Patriots bulletin board is coming along. That’s the kind of stuff that once made Sportscenter great. Unique highlights, interesting numbers, and money quotes.

The big problem nowadays is that the internet has made Sportscenter obsolete as anything other than a highlight show, and nobody running the show seems to know it. The Sportscenter producers need to understand that we don’t want to see Sean Salisbury analyzing Sunday’s AFC Championship Game. By the time he comes on TV we’ve already read 10 different stories on the game by people with opinions we respect much more than Salisbury’s. Similarly, the show doesn’t need to tell us who the Falcons are considering hiring—everybody who cares already read about it on the internet five hours ago.

The result is that Sportscenter is no longer a staple of die-hard sports fans, it’s a staple of casual sports fans. That’s why there’s been such a backlash against ESPN from die-hard fans (read: bloggers). The show has no ghetto-loyalty. It’s abandoned the people who helped it get through its formative years in order to go after the big money.

All that from watching 40 minutes of Sportscenter. I better try and not let it happen again.

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Since it the WGA strike began, its affects have been felt in almost all aspects of the television industry. Fortunately, sports are one area that’s emerged relatively unscathed—until now. The lack of original prime time programming on network television is going to lead to an increase in broadcasts of figure skating.

A schedule change owing peripherally to the writers’ strike will give the sport two nights in prime time during the U.S. Championships later this month in St. Paul.

And NBC, the U.S. Figure Skating Association’s new broadcast partner, promises significant promotion of the telecasts, according to spokesman Mike McCarley.

Note to self: Do not watch NBC.

Why? That’s my question. Are Seinfeld re-runs that expensive? Why show figure skating? It’s the most boring television sport of all time—and that’s completely independent of the fact that I care more about the fate of Croatian national basketball team that I do about the World’s top 100 figure skaters combined.

Heading into the strike the writers and the studios all had a set cost they were willing to endure. Obviously neither side has reached that cost, but perhaps they weren’t taking into account an increase in figure skating. Could this now make it worthwhile for them to end the strike and push the sides into agreement? We’ll have to wait and see.

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Life must be pretty easy backing up Tim Duncan. Not too much pressure or responsibility. Just come in, play your 15 minutes a game, go sit on the bench, and at the end of the season go get your championship ring. Seems simple enough….unless your name is Matt Bonner. I’m sure Matt was ridiculed a lot growing up for having a last name so close to the underrated word “boner”, so by now at age 27 he’s probably used to this sort of thing. Yes, you guessed it, Matt was mistakenly called Matt Boner in a photo caption.

Specifically, the correction points out:

ATTENTION EDITORS: Matt Bonner #15 of the San Antonio Spurs was incorrectly identified as Matt Boner within the captions of the following photos: GYI0051088925.jpg GYI0051088947.jpg GYI0051088955.jpg We apologize for any inconvenience. Corrected versions will follow.

The fact that a retraction was issued has to be somewhat disconcerting for Matt. I mean how many people do you think really noticed the caption on the originial photo? Now how many more people are going to read or hear about this because of Ghetty’s decision to issue a retraction? Poor Matt…Boner is it?

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Oh, those pesky ESPN.com polls. I always assumed nobody read them, and the guys who make the polls must have shared my opinion because an “inappropriate poll” made its way onto the site last week. Apparently it’s not acceptable to ask people if they want to see Kevin Garnett get injured.

The question posted last week asked whether voters would want to see:

• The Steelers beat the Patriots.

• Twins star Johan Santana be traded to a team other than the Red Sox.

• Kevin Garnett blow out his knee.

The poll was taken down and this week the site issued an apology. I haven’t seen the apology, but it better be for not including “Tom Brady contracts seven STDs in one week” and “God tells Curt Schilling he hates him” as potential answers.

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Nowadays it seems rather difficult to find anything of much significance coming out of Bristol worthy of considerable praise. This isn’t a bad start though…ESPN.com now has a college football playoff simulator. Using the top 16 teams from one of three polls, or you can even custom seed any of the top 25 teams, the simulator predicts the outcome of a college football playoff. Sure it is somewhat primitive, but considering we most likely won’t be seeing a college football playoff anytime soon, this is going to have to due. At least it could provide some non-LSU/Ohio State fans with some bragging rights, if you can construct a bracket in which your team ends up winning it all.

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Michael Jordan, Roger Clemens, Mario Lemieux…now Mini Me. At first I was hesitant to position myself alongside such an elite class of sports figures who retired then made glamorous comebacks within their respective sports, but after reading Easy’s not at all embellished post about my superhuman abilities as a writer I think I’m worthy of being mentioned with those athletes. Regardless, I’m back and this time with a somewhat renewed appreciation for American sports, particularly because I have spent the past four months dwelling in London (unfortunately no John Amaechi sighting yet). And Easy, don’t worry I won’t allow you to relinquish any of your soccer talk responsibilities to me because frankly I have profoundly rejected the sport. I did enjoy the Rugby World Cup though, but that’s for another post for another time.

Easy has done a great job with the site and I’m glad to be a member of the Shake Down Sports team.

P.S. I must confess that while sports blogging is a passion of mine and I’m happy to be here, this wasn’t my first choice. Unfortunately though, the University of Michigan felt I wasn’t qualified for their head coaching position…yes you can apply online! How desperate have things gotten in Ann Arbor?

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For many months I’ve been going at it alone here at Shakedownsports, but that’s all about to change. My dear friend Mini Me (you may remember him as the founder of the WBRS Sports Blog) has been bitten by the blogging bug once again and his poetic and insightful words will soon grace the pages of this site. In the past the two of us have worked together to entertain the countless Waltham residents who were within a 1.7 mile radius of our college radio station, and we formed one of the most legendary Division III basketball broadcasting teams of all time. I’m confident that this most recent collaboration be even better (and lead to a dramatic increase is Dallas Mavericks talk—hence the Dirk collage.)

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The ESPN poaching machine is at it again. Mark Fainaru-Wada, the man who is 50% responsible for Barry Bonds’ stress-induced diarrhea, is leaving the San Francisco Chronicle to join ESPN. I assume the hiring is part of the network’s most recent attempt to take stab at “real” news (i.e., launching E-60).

It’s obviously a good move for Fainaru-Wada (he gets to be on TV and suckle from the plentiful ESPN bosom), but I just don’t think it will pay real dividends for ESPN. Fainaru-Wada has already landed the greatest sports scoop of the last decade and he can’t be expected to come anywhere close to that ever again. There’s basically nowhere for him to go but down. It’s like hiring Woodward or Bernstein right after Watergate—there’s just no way Fainaru-Wada can live up to the expectations. In economic terms, instead of buying low (and selling high), ESPN is buying really, really, really high.

Fainaru-Wada is still one of the better investigative sports journalists around, but much like Rick Reilly, at this point he’s really just a name—his reputation is much more valuable than his work. That reputation will get ESPN some nice PR for a few weeks, but what’s going to happen when low ratings force them to replace E-60 with “The Skip Bayless Show” and completely abandon the “real reporting” kick they’re on? Will the sizable salary they’re paying Fainaru-Wada be worthwhile then? I say no.

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