Q: You’ve covered some golf at SI. Regarding Tiger Woods, what do you make of statements like ‘how could the golf writers not see this coming?’ and the parallels between Tiger and his many affairs to the baseball players and steroids, with writers of both sports kind of burying their heads in the sand?

A: I’ve covered golf probably for about eight years at SI. I do the Masters ever year, the US Open, and a lot of not-so-exciting tournaments in between.
Tiger? How could you tell? Tiger, being as private as he is … I think very people knew about it, period. The media isn’t going to know. The guy’s a billionaire athlete and extremely private and doesn’t let anyone in his personal life – he’s not like John Daly, where all you gotta do is show up at his trailer and you can drink a couple beers with him, which is something I’ve done. You’d never get that kind of access with Tiger. To think any golf writer was going to snuff this out … when his wife didn’t even know about it, is far-fetched, I think.

Q: Your Dad famously worked for Bill Clinton. I may have read in USA Today that you’re a Republican …

A: I’m what? You did not read that anywhere, I promise. I’m not a Republican.

Q: But obviously you’re into politics, right? How much did you pay attention to the Health Care debates Thursday?

A: I’m a junkie. I’m my father’s son. I had it on all day in the background. I’m definitely a political junkie.

Q: What is your news TV station of choice?

A: CSPAN.

Q: How very impartial of you.

A: It’s not even about … I don’t like opinion journalism, especially as it relates to politics. I find it very insulting and very demeaning and very pointless and very canned and everyone’s playing a part. CSPAN is the only place that I find that I’m just getting the information. We need more of that, not less of it. Unfortunately, the trends in the media, both in sports and in politics is more towards … there’s so much clutter, you have to shout to be heard. I don’t like to be shouted at when I’m watching television.

Q: How are you consuming your news these days? Vastly differently than you used to?

A: Nobody’s consuming news like they did 15 years ago … not even like they did two years ago. When I dipped my toe into twitter right around when basketball practice started up, I asked Stewart Mandel for some advice, and he said it was amazing: ‘twitter was something I didn’t even know existed six months ago, and now it’s my primary source of information.’ Twitter is the first thing that I go on in the morning when I come down and drink my coffee. It’s like designing your own website. You can have your news, your sports, your hoops and I can learn what happened the night before just by quickly scanning twitter. In a lot of ways, the change is for the better. For the consumer, there are a lot more places to go. But in a lot of ways it is changing for the worse – it’s becoming de-professionalized. The people who are really trying to do it well and advance in it are not seeing a return on their investment. Just this week ABC News was laying off a huge part of their workforce. That frightens everybody who wants to know what is going on in the world. Information is the grease that lubricates a democracy and it’s getting harder and harder to find good information.

Q: I read a piece somewhere last year that talked about how media consumers are now only getting their news from select sources – such as the people you follow on twitter – and less of a broad overview. Basically, people are reading about what they already know or what confirms their beliefs. This hurts in the long run, right?

A: Probably, but probably not. It’s a great point – I hated doing it, because I have friends who work for the New York Times, but I canceled my subscription. It’s just as easy to get on my computer in the morning and read the website than to have to go to the end of the driveway and pick up the paper and then bundle up the paper to throw it away. The upside of the paper is that you’re flipping through the pages and things are going to catch your attention that you may not have been looking for. You raise a terrific point because that’s what is being lost. Even though I am a voracious consumer of news, I tend to go to websites that reflect my viewpoint. And that’s not helping.

Q: Talk about your leap from the New Haven Register to Sports Illustrated.

A: I was hired at SI as a fact checker. It’s not that uncommon of a leap – most of the people who worked as fact-checkers get that job straight out of college. The job worked like this: a writer’s story lands on your desk and it is your job to deconstruct it word-by-word, line-by-line, and make sure everything is correct. Most of the time it started off by calling the writer and asking, ‘where did you get this, where did you get that’ and if you think about it, could there be a better way to learn how to do the job than to be a fact checker? It seemed very tedious at the time – you’re impatient , you want to write, you want to climb up the ladder, that’s your dream. You don’t realize how much you’re learning until maybe you make some progress and have some success and you think about where you learned it all. It was really the best day of professional life when the woman who was chief of reporters called me to go to SI.

It was really a dream come true for me. Growing up, all I wanted to do was write for the magazine.

Q: How did you go from fact checker to reporter?

A: Backstabbed and slept my way to the top. And I made myself useful. My advice is always follow opportunity. It was pretty natural for me to gravitate toward college basketball because I went to Duke and had a passion for the sport, and I had covered high school basketball at the New Haven paper. There wasn’t a big beat guy on college basketball when I got to SI. If there had been a Peter King on college basketball, I probably would have gone a different direction. They had some pretty good college basketball writers – Alex Wolff being the most obvious example – and some people who contributed from time-to-time, but nobody who was a junkie beat-guy. I kind of threw myself into that. After a couple of years of really working that beat, I got to the point that I knew more about the sport than the editors. And I became useful to them when they needed somebody who could report the beat.

Q: How did the CBS gig come about?

A: It’s like the old saying – it took me 20 years to become an overnight sensation. When I was in high school, I grew up watching the local guy, George Michael, doing sports. And I decided that was what I wanted to do. It looked like a fun job reading the highlights. I felt like I could do it. But I always had a passion for writing and reporting. When I got to Duke, it didn’t have journalism or communications as a major. And that worked to my advantage, because everybody wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer – they wanted to work for a living. I kind of had the run of the place to myself. When I was a sophomore, I was at the student TV station I said, ‘ya’ll got a show on the basketball team?’ And they said, ‘nope.’ And I said, ‘do you mind if I produce one and host one?’ And they said sure. So I started a show. And Coach K was my first guest.

The big break was when I was at SI, after a few years … don’t know if you remember the TV station CNN/SI, but it was the precursor to ESPNews. Part of the plan for the channel was to put SI writers on the air. But a lot of writers didn’t want to do TV, or weren’t that good at it. I had just got to the magazine and was hardly writing for it, but with my TV background I was going on CNN/SI and even the big CNN talking about college basketball.

I did quite a bit of TV before I was writing. I got a break with CBS when they invited me during the 2003 Final Four to talk about the coaching carousel. And then they just asked me the next season to join on. One thing I know for sure is that at some point you have to get lucky. And I’ve been really, really lucky twice. I got hired at SI and then I got a chance at CBS.

Q: What’s the story behind your broken nose during a pickup game?

A: It was at Chelsea Piers. John Walters used to write for SI, and he recently wrote for NBC Sports.com, and I blame him for the broken nose. He was playing on the SI basketball team, but he was on vacation one week. They asked me to fill in for him, and we played a team of guys who took it way too seriously and were overly intense. Some guy was driving by me and he swung his arm – obviously he swung his arm; otherwise, he couldn’t get by me because my foot speed is so good – and it hit me flush on the nose and it was one of those things where it hurt so much that I knew instantly it was broken. And if the feeling didn’t convince me, then the blood gushing out of my nose did. I went to the emergency room and I remember sitting there for like 3-4 hours and then a doctor came out, looked at me and said, ‘your nose is broken.’ My wife likes to bust my chops by saying, ‘you got a nose job.’ But I had to get surgery for a busted nose. And thus ended my basketball career. Well, I still play, but mostly half court 3-on-3.

Q: True or False: When we spoke to Josh Elliott, he claimed that the only reason he got a job at SI was because you took a summer off to write a book about camp.

A: Yes! Absolutely correct. I get all of the credit and all of the blame for foisting Josh Elliot onto the world. I think his plan was to be a screenwriter in California.

I went to this traditional Jewish summer camp in the Poconos. And I always had a dream to write a book about it. I asked the bosses at SI if I could have some time off to write a book about camp, and they told me sure. Josh was my temporary replacement. But he’s so talented and aggressive that he sunk his teeth into it, and within a year he was writing cover stories on the NFL. And he’s a natural talent on TV. I’m glad he gave me credit, but I don’t need to take credit, he’s a talented guy.

QUICK HITTERS

Q: How much of a loss was Billy Packer at CBS?
A: I think it was a big loss. Billy made you watch. Billy moved the needle … I thought Billy did a great job … he’s a great, great source for basketball. There’s nobody better to talk to about the history of the game than Billy Packer.
Q: Surprised he hasn’t landed anywhere?
A: No, because that’s his choice. He never considered himself a ’sportsguy.’ He’s a businessman who played the game and knows the game and likes the game. But he never saw himself as being identified by that.
Q: How come Roy Williams isn’t catching more heat for the terrible job he’s done this season? Between bitching at the fans for not showing up, throwing that fan out, and his team has quit on him … I know it’s just one year and they’ll be back next year …
A: You’d never know the guy has been to what, six Final Fours, won two National Championships! He sounds like a horrible coach to me! Let me disagree. I was down in North Carolina and he’s catching plenty of heat. Why should he catch more? Jim Calhoun’s team didn’t make the tournament a couple years ago. Why isn’t Ben Howland catching more heat? If anything, Roy ought to give himself a break. It’s one bad year.
Q: Did you feel obligated to say that as a Duke grad?
A: Ha! The number one question I get – is it hard for you to be impartial when talking about Duke? No. Because it’s my job to analyze, and it’s not hard to analyze. Roy knows I went to Duke – he reminds of that now and again – listen, I’m not going to lie to you, I root for Duke, and the Duke fan in my likes it when North Carolina loses. But the journalist/reporter in me has genuine affection – not just respect – for North Carolina. Fantastic school, program – I don’t know if there’s a finer man I’ve ever come across than Dean Smith.
Q: Big East Player of the Year?
A: Scottie Reynolds … I would put Harangody and then Wesley Johnson in there.
Q: ACC Player of the Year?
A: Jon Scheyer, that’s not even close …
Q: Ugh.
A: Exactly what makes you not a Jon Scheyer guy? Is it all the points he scores? The assists he gives out? The steals that he gets? The way he runs a team that is ranked 6th in the country? Which of those things are you not a fan of?
Q: He’s a nice player. He’s got a lot of talent around him, for sure.
A: And he’s a MOT, so we have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Member of the Tribe.
Q: What are the chances Coach K leaves for the NBA after this season?
A: Never happen. He can satisfy his NBA jones with USA Basketball. What team can he coach in the NBA that is going to be better than the one in USA basketball? He has the best of both worlds. He can win with Team USA, which he wouldn’t do with the New Jersey Nets or who else hires him. I feel pretty confident saying he’ll never coach in the NBA.
Q: Your thoughts on Dick Vitale as an announcer.
A: Great question. I really, really, really like him. But I can understand why some people might not like him. He does dominate a telecast. I think he has dialed it back a little bit. He works his tail off. He really does his homework. The substantive part kind of gets lost in his schtick.
Q: And Bob Knight as an announcer?
A: He’s gotten better, and quite quickly. I think he needs to prepare better. I don’t know that he is really baring down and doing his homework. I like Fran Fraschilla. I don’t  know that anybody works harder than Fran Fraschilla. I think Knight’s insights are terrific, he says what he thinks … whether you like him or don’t, and I’ve probaly been more critical of him than most people in the media, as a college basketball fan, I think you want to hear what he has to say.

Q: Has your tennis game improved since you met Andy?
A: Not at all. Not at all. I have taken one lesson. I figure if I’m not going to beat him at it, there’s no point in trying. Too competitive.

Q: Why’d you pick UNC over Duke when choosing your college basketball allegiance.
A: I grew up in North Carolina and I just like what UNC is about a little bit better. i love the campus, Michael Jordan, Dean Smith … i like the history there.

Q: Been a rough year for Roy. He’s thrown a few temper tantrums.
A: I don’t blame him … at this point, I’m just hoping they make the tournament.

Q: Do you watch Lost?
A: Noooooo.

Q: Athlete you met that left you in awe.
A: Evander Holyfield was pretty amazing. When i was growing up he had that whole controversy with Mike Tyson. Meeting Evander … the guy is kind of legendary.

Q: Best thing about living in Texas.
A: Well, I live in New York, too. In NY – I love my neighborhood – we just moved to Brooklyn two weeks ago. I’m really new to it. Texas … it’s the most homey place – in the comfortable sense.

Q: The buzz about you here seems to be that you’re not a typical model and you’re pretty smart and well-spoken.
A: I would like to say I’m more educated than I am, but I only have a high school education. I read a lot because I spend a lot of time traveling by myself. I just finished a cheesy book yesterday – Dear John. It’s a Nicholas Sparks book, but I had to read it because the movie is coming out. I read a lot of romantic novels – like the Time Traveler’s Wife. I also read some political books – like Hardball by Chris Matthews.

Q: I take it you’re an MSNBC viewer as opposed to Fox News?
A: Not really. It’s sort of like Machiavelli’s Prince …

Q: That has to be the first time any model has ever referenced Machiavelli’s Prince.
A: (Laughter.)

Q: We’ll start with the hoops game we played a couple weeks back. You’re pretty good and have a basketball background. Tell us about your high school and college stardom. Give us your starting five among basketball writers – actually, make that 4, we’ll take the shooting guard position. Ever play pickup with any NBA players?

A. The game was for the release of my book, which of course everyone should check out, buy for their dad/brother for Christmas, etc. and so on. (Okay, plug over).

As for hoops background, I was a two-guard for Marin Academy in the Bay Area and then played for a year at Pomona College, a liberal arts school outside LA. My time there fell precipitously short of stardom; I was low on the depth chart and my only dunk came in a JV game against Cal Tech (and I traveled on the play). I quickly realized that my best-case scenario would be as a 5th or 6th man by the time I was a senior. We had a stacked team and since it was a serious program for a DIII school – “chalk talk” at 7 AM during the week – it didn’t seem like it was worth the tradeoff. So I did what college kids do: I drank beer, played IM ball, spent a summer working at Yellowstone and wrote snarky sports columns for the school paper. Never regretted the decision. I’ve spent the ensuing 15 years playing in rec leagues, tournaments and anywhere else I can find a game (I’m the type of guy who allots 25% of his carry-on luggage space to hoops gear).

That said, the Pomona connection still pops up in ways I never could have imagined. For starters, I was there three years after Gregg Popovich was the coach. So when I first joined the NBA beat, Pop – who is tremendously loyal to Pomona – was always calling me “the Pomona kid” and messing with me (he got excited when I once gratuitously mentioned the school while on Charlie Rose). Then one of my Pomona teammates, Mike Budenholzer, ended up getting a job with the Spurs as a video coordinator. Mike was the kind of guy who had a coaching mentality even when he was in college – he used to pick me up full-court during preseason pick-up games – so it wasn’t a huge surprise when he worked his way up to become the lead assistant to Pop. Last year, his name came up when Phoenix was looking for a head coach, and down the road I think he might get a shot. Obviously I’m biased but I think he’d do a tremendous job.

It’s unlikely enough that one DIII teammate would work in the NBA but Jason Levien was also on that team and was one of the first people I met at school (we were workout partners). Jason is an exceedingly smart dude who was a Harvard Law fellow, worked as a speechwriter for Harold Ford Jr. and ended up as an agent – repping Kevin Martin and Udonis Haslem, among others. Earlier this year he joined the Sacramento Kings as their assistant GM. Clearly, he’s got his work cut out for him, but Tyreke Evans is a pretty good piece to build around.

Okay, Pomona digression over … To answer the starting five question: If this were back in the day you’d have to include Rick Telander, Jack McCallum (who played at Muhlenberg College and came out of 13 years of hoops retirement for that book-launch game), Alexander Wolff and Dan Patrick (who once shattered a backboard, then brought a cup of the glass into work and dumped it on the desk as proof). If we’re talking right now, based on guys I’ve played with, I’d have to include Chris Broussard of ESPN, Sean Gregory of Time Magazine and KC Johnson in Chicago. Any number of guys – you, Bucher, Ivan Carter, Wise, Abrams, Mannix, Abbott, Peterson – could fill out the roster from there.

As for NBA guys, I played at a camp in high school with Chris Webber, and Darnell Robinson set the California high school scoring record by posting up 6’4 guys in our small-school league. In pick-up/league games since then, the list would include Mo Cheeks, Lindsey Hunter and tons of cup-o-coffee/fringe guys like Steve Goodrich (former Princeton center who was still looking to feed guys from the high post at the Philly Y), Rod Benson, Sean Lampley, Demetrius “Hook” Mitchell (Oakland playground legend who was on my league team and could still unleash nasty dunks at 40) and Jason Cipolla. And for the book I engaged in a three-point shootout and played H-O-R-S-E with Steve Kerr, which went about as well you’d imagine it might.

Q: How’d you end up at SI?

A. Not the usual route (my only newspaper experience was interning at the Courier-Post in Camden, New Jersey). The year after graduating from college, I wrote a book called Hoops Nation: A Guide to America’s Best Pick-up Basketball that was inspired by Alex Wolff’s classic In-Your-Face Guide to Pick-up Basketball (and its less-heralded but also excellent sequel, The Back-in-Your-Face Guide to Pick-up Basketball).

It was one of those so-crazy-it-might-just-work ideas, and a publisher gave me the equivalent of pocket change to do it. I spent seven months driving around the country in a used Chevy van with my brother and two college teammates. We hit 48 states and visited over 1,000 courts, playing at the majority of them. It was no-frills stuff; we ate microwave meals and stayed at KOA campgrounds (once a week, to “splurge”, we all shared a room at a Motel 6).

We even had a very early version of a blog – this being 1996 – where I posted stories and photos from the road using a super-slow dial-up connection. Highlights included filming a segment with Dick Schaap at Venice Beach. Lowlights included having an opponent leave a game in Chicago to “go get my gun.”
The book sold about a dozen copies but received good reviews and jumpstarted my writing career. For a few years afterward I worked as a freelancer, writing for everyone from the New York Times to, ahem, Maxim (the mag funded a story called “24 Crazy Hours in Moscow”). In 1999, concerned I wasn’t evolving as a writer – as a freelancer you work in a vacuum – I headed to Columbia Journalism School and, from there, on the basis of a recommendation from former SI editor/mentor Sandy Padwe, to Sports Illustrated.

I was fortunate enough to join the mag in 2000, just before a series of hiring freezes, and a year after Josh Elliott, an old friend who gave me the lay of the land (he’d been my sports editor at UCSB, where I spent my freshman year, and had attended Columbia the year before me). You could tell, even back then, that Josh had a future on TV. On a moment’s notice he could generate a cogent argument on just about any topic and deliver it eloquently and convincingly.

Once at SI, I started on the NBA beat before gravitating toward longer features. Two years ago, I was asked to become part of a three-writer back-page rotation when Rick Reilly left. I grew up idolizing Rick, especially his long-form stuff, so I was honored/flattered/scared shitless. And I know Rick takes his lumps on the web these days but I can tell you that what he did at SI – writing that column every week, in a magazine format, with a readership as broad as SI’s and making it seem easy – required a staggering combination of skill and hard work.

Q: When was the last time you got into a discussion with someone about a dunk? In your book, you argue that sometimes a dunk is more than a dunk, and I agree with that. Non-basketball fans will counter with “a dunk is just worth two points.” Ever change anyone’s mind on dunking? Care to try now?

A. What I love about dunks today is that, by and large, the ones we care about are functional. There was a period of about 20 years when NBA fans went to games hoping to see dunks, usually something elaborate on a wide-open breakaway. And to me those are the most boring dunks in the game. If Vince Carter goes up for a 360 when there’s no one within 30 feet of him, it’s showboating. Really, that’s all it is. But when Carter used to drive the lane and dunk on a big man, it mattered.

And what’s happened is I think NBA fans have become, on the whole, much smarter about the game. As a result, they don’t care as much about those breakaway dunks – or, for the most part, the dunk contest – while valuing the meaningful ones even more. Let’s be honest: there remains no more electrifying play in sports than a nasty jam in traffic. Just in the last couple weeks, we’ve had Ty Lawson disgracing DJ Mbenga and Dwyane Wade with that ride-the-elevator one-hander on Varejao and Shannon Brown being Shannon Brown. I defy any sports fan to watch those plays and not immediately want to see a replay, or seven, from every angle. You can say that’s just another two points…. but I won’t believe you.

Q: The casual sports fan will turn on a basketball game and invariably see … tattoos. Lots of them. Sometimes, jarring tattoos, like on players such as Delonte West, Chris Anderson and Kenyon Martin. And the casual sports fan – at least the ones we talk to – are usually turned off. Despite David Stern’s best efforts at an image overhaul, the “thuggish” look persists. Do you feel that this is an image problem needs to cleaned up to lure in on-the-fence fans?

A. Personally, not at all. My feeling is that if you care what basketball players look like then you’re probably not a fan of the game to begin with. Bill Walton looked like some Sasquatch Woodstock dropout. Dennis Rodman looked like a carnival freak on X. And Mike Miller has some atrocious basketball hair going on these days that calls to mind a 13-year-old girls soccer team. But that’s not what I associate with each. I loved the way Walton played, Rodman is one of my favorite players ever and I’d take Miller on my squad any day, as he’s unselfish and can really shoot it.

Plus, tattoos have become so commonplace now that I wonder how much of a “thug” connotation remains. I live in Berkeley and two out of every three white, bespectacled hipsters here has a tattoo.

Q: David Stern gives you the power to change one thing about the NBA. Three-point line, hand-checking, illegal defense, fouls … what’s your move?

A. Well, if it’s ultimate power I’m going to contract the league – see ya, Memphis, Charlotte, New Orleans, Toronto, New Jersey and Oklahoma City – and shorten the season to, say, 60 games. Next, bring back the best-of-five first round series, embrace the Warkentien/Simmons model of a playoff for the final spot and aim for transparency when it comes to refs.

If we’re talking solely game rules I’d probably address stops in the action. The reason basketball is more fun to watch (most of the time) than other sports is because of the flow, but casual fans often become frustrated when games bog down, and understandably so. There are a lot of ways to do this but a small, easy one would be to get rid of the technical free throw and just award a point. Illegal defense? Give em a point and inbound the ball. Guy gets T’d up? Chalk it up and let’s start playing again. I’d also eliminate jump balls, which are ridiculously antiquated.

Q: Can you remember the last rookie to have a better three weeks to open the season than Brandon Jennings? He’s seemingly turned the Bucks’ fortunes around, he’s got Knicks fans pulling their hair out, and he’s made everyone forget about Ricky Rubio (and, for the time being, Blake Griffin). He obviously won’t keep this up, but how’d he fall this far? And how’d a team that bricked so badly in the 2008 draft (Joe Alexander), get this draft right?

A. You’re right; a surreal start to the season but it might not benefit him in the long run. After all, expectations have soared, Milwaukee is being labeled a playoff team and Jennings dubbed an All-Star. And it’s way too early for that. The Bucks still have to figure out how to integrate Michael Redd when he comes back, they just lost Bogut and there’s no way Jennings will continue to shoot this well. One just hopes his head doesn’t get too big, and fans don’t feel let down when he inevitably comes back to earth.

As for why he fell so far in the draft, my guess is because of his lackluster performance overseas. Which makes me wonder if there will be an overcorrection (like when Dirk and Pau became studs so everyone started drafting guys like Darko and Maciej Lampe). Because of the Jennings model, will GMs assume that Jeremy Tyler is worth a high draft pick even if he continues to flounder? Be interesting to see.

Q: Is is actually possible that Chris Kaman and Roy Hibbert could have better NBA careers than Greg Oden? I know Oden’s two months shy of 22, and Kaman and Hibbert don’t possess his upside … but how much longer should we wait for him? It almost feels like everyone wants him to fail.

A. First off, I like both those guys. I saw Hibbert play recently and was impressed. Soft right block jump hook, better passer than I expected and an aggressive, if methodical rebounder. And Kaman has the best off-hand of any big man in the NBA.

That said, I think Oden will end up being better, barring further injury (and that’s a big caveat, obviously). To me, the tipoff is that he has occasional monster games. And I’m talking impactful monster games, where he changes the defensive and/or offensive tone. Only a handful of big men in the league are capable of that and he’s already one of them. He’ll need to learn how to stay out of foul trouble, and refine his offense, but there’s no reason he shouldn’t be one of the top three defensive centers for the next ten years – it’s up to him.

Q: Obligatory Lebron in 2010 question … how annoyed are you with scribes churning out so many silly potential landing spots? How long before some clown writes that Sacramento is in the mix? Or Memphis? Oh, and where’s he headed?

A. Well, you’re talking to the guy who wrote for SI last week that James should sign for the minimum, so I’m guilty on that count. That said, my advice was he do so in Cleveland – based on a Steve Jobs analogy – and that’s where I think he’ll end up. Though I bet Levien would love to hear that Sacto theory.

Q: The last player-scribe locker room incident/argument you’ve seen? The best?

A. Can’t say that I’ve witnessed many, to be honest. Though I once had Mark Madsen run after me and grab me to say that, hey, he knew I was working on a Kobe Bryant story and if I needed anyone to say anything nice about Kobe, he was my guy! (He was being sincere too).

That said, TJ Simers is consistently entertaining to be around. I’ll sometimes attend press conferences – which are often useless for the purposes of a mag writer – just to hear TJ pepper the coach/player/prima donna with brutally honest questions. I’ve never seen anyone snap – Phil Jackson seems to actually enjoy the repartee – but there can be some uncomfortable moments.

Quick hitters:

Q: Favorite basketball movie of all-time. Hoosiers followed by Hoosiers.

Q: Basketball player’s reality show you’d watch, and Ron Artest is not an
acceptable answer because everyone would watch Ron Artest’s reality
show.

I’m not a reality show guy – I’d rather watch the first season of Deadwood again – so maybe I’m not the best person to answer this. That said, I might go with Damon Jones (who is very, very funny and has a totally inappropriate view of his own talent), Kobe (though only if he didn’t know he was being taped, so he wouldn’t manage his image like he did for Spike) or Tim Duncan (because it might be boring but I’m fascinated by Tim).

Q: Team that could actually use Allen Iverson right now.

A. That presupposes there are any, and I don’t think there are unless Iverson comes to grips with the fact that he’s not a star anymore. Adrian Wojnarowski had a great piece recently in which he quoted Iverson telling Detroit teammates last year that he felt he was still one of the top three players in the league alongside Kobe and LeBron “and not necessarily in that order.” I’m all for self-confidence, but that is amazing. Is there any team where that attitude could help? Can you imagine any business where you’d hire a guy who had that kind of warped self-image?

Q: Chris Bosh will be playing for _____ in 2010. No idea. Could be Toronto, could be Miami. Way too early on all the free agency talk.

Q: The best player in the league who is also the biggest punk?

A. Ah, now this is one I probably shouldn’t answer, seeing as I cover the league, but rest assured there are good stories to be told. Instead I’ll give you my list of eight guys in the NBA who could hang out with anyone, from your mom to your little brother to an IRS agent, and have a great conversation: Malik Rose, Adonal Foyle, Ron Artest (seriously), Shane Battier, Tyson Chandler, Matt Bonner, Ray Allen and Derek Fisher.

Q: We once heard a great story from a friend – he spotted you in a restaurant eating breakfast and went up to say what a big fan he was. You took down his address and two weeks later he received this huge box containing assorted basketball paraphernalia. Is this something you do regularly?

Vitale: I love people. I’ve been very blessed in my life. Things like that are a regular occurrence. I was at a banquet last night and someone asked me if I could send an autographed picture to a girl who was battling cancer, and I said ’sure, no problem.’ She doesn’t know it, but I’m going to send her a lot of other basketball-related things, like a basketball, the picture, and whatever else I can throw in. The way i look at it, I’ve been very blessed in my life, and a lot of good things have happened financially and every other way, and I love giving back.

To be good to people has been an important part of my makeup from the time I was raised by my mom and dad. My mother and father were uneducated factory workers in Jersey, in Bergen County, lived in Elmwood Park, and really had hearts of gold. I’ve been in the Hall of Fame all my life. I’ve been in the Hall of Fame because my mom and dad were Hall of Famers in the game of life. They taught me if you’re good to people, people are going to be good to you.

Q: Did you see that ESPN could possibly be getting the Final 4? It could happen if the NCAA backs out from its current deal with CBS. I looked up your contract and you’ve got four more years at ESPN …

Vitale: I hope I’ve got more than four to tell you the truth!

Q: How much longer do you want to work? You just turned 70 this summer …

Vitale: My idols are people like Vin Scully and Ernie Harwell. You work as long as you possibly can. Physically, emotionally, if you can handle the travel … Obviously ESPN has become a big-time player in all sports now, but I think it’s going to be really tough for CBS to give the NCAA tournament up.

Q: Do anything big for your 70th?

Vitale: I’m 70, but I act about 12. People say, “I can’t believe it when you say you’re 70!” And I tell them I’m 70 but I’ll match any 25-year-old for energy and enthusiasm. We had a special party for my 70th party. It was probably the greatest tribute I ever received in my entire life. It might bring me to tears now … my daughters and my wife had a party with friends from our area here – maybe 40-50 people. My two girls got up to speak. Now, I tell people this – I got a body by linguine, I can’t run, I can’t jump, I can’t shoot, yet I’m in nine Hall of Fames. The greatest tribute I ever received was when my two girls got up and spoke. They said, ‘to us, you’ve been such a role model and father for us to live our life the right way, teaching us about love, discipline and family.’ That was the greatest tribute of any honor I ever received. It’s more important to be a Hall of Fame dad than a Hall of Famer with a microphone.  I was touched. It brought my to tears.

Q: This summer, two coaches dominated the headlines – Pitino and Calipari. How damaged are their legacies after Pitino’s sex scandal and Calipari had another Final Four scrubbed from the books?

Vitale: It certainly doesn’t help their image, or their resume, and it brings the doubters out in full force. However – remember this – Rick Pitino has said it once, twice, 20 times, 50 times: He made a mistake. He made an absolute mistake. No doubt whatsoever. What he did, as a married guy, he knows was wrong. However – saying all that … he was a victim of an extortion attempt. The trial is coming up. This woman has been charged with extortion, which is a criminal offense.

Rick, when I talked to him [Friday] … is so dedicated to two factors: Family and Louisville basketball. That’s all he wants to concentrate on and that’s all he wants to do. As long he has admitted to his wife and kids what a mistake he made … you know, people make mistakes.

Now, Calipari. They vacated his Final Four with Memphis and I think that’s a crime. I don’t think that should be vacated. On three occasions, the NCAA clearinghouse was there in Memphis and cleared Derrick Rose to play. Flat out said, ‘play him, he’s eligible.’ Why have a clearinghouse? If they tell you somebody is eligible … don’t you have to take some responsibility as the clearinghouse? I don’t think they have any right to take away that banner. You said he was eligible.

I think Memphis got a raw deal, and I’d be very surprised if Memphis doesn’t win that appeal. I know 90 percent of time you don’t win appeal, but I have a funny feeling here … Memphis has a legit argument in this cause.

Q: But this is the 2nd time Calipari’s had a Final Four scrubbed away.

Vitale: I’m trying to defend what’s right – in [the Massachusetts] case, the NCAA came in and said John Calipari, in no way, shape or form, was involved in the problem with Marcus Camby. He got involved with an agent, took things he shouldn’t have taken, but Calipari and his people were not aware of it. In today’s day and age, whenever you recruit the question mark student who is a great, great player, and he’s surrounded by an entourage, you are now opening yourself up for incredible scrutiny because you have no control of that entourage. You think you do, but you don’t. You don’t know what’s going on, you can’t live with a kid 24-7.

Until someone comes to me and proves without a doubt that Calipari is involved in those shenanigans and is involved … I can’t hold them guilty. If you’re anti-Calipari, you’re going to use that to bury him. If you’re a guy who just looks at what’s right, and see what he’s done, and about the graduation – that’s another thing he gets a bum rap for … his kids have graduated; he’s got a terrific graduation rate – but yet nobody wants to hear that.

Q: John Chaney once said that you can’t go 15 seconds without mentioning UNC or Duke during a telecast. I’m sure you get this a lot, but how do you address the claims that you show a heavy bias toward Duke and North Carolina?

Vitale: Who do I hear that from? Come on now – I’ve been doing games for 30 years, and I’ve done a lot of games that involve Duke and Carolina … I don’t force my bosses to put me on those games. They put me on those games. Why? Because they’re the most visible games out there! So obviously I have to talk about them. When you look at Duke and North Carolina … bias …  I laugh when people say that … it’s hilarious.

I’m … biased? I’m telling the truth. They’re two of the great programs in America. They win. They graduate players. If you’re talking college basketball today, you have to talk Duke and Carolina. You can’t talk basketball without them. They’re a standard that a lot of schools try to emulate. I have no guilt. I might if they were 14-14 every year and I was singing their praises, but they’re 30-3 or 31-5.

Oh, I talk about Duke … I do 12 Duke games a year! If you got an argument, take it up with my bosses.

Q: I think some of it may come from fans who are watching, say, a Georgetown-Syracuse game and you seem to weave in a mention of Duke, UNC or Coach K.

Vitale: Who’s going to say that? Five or six people? If you listen to a telecast for two hours … the only reason I’ll bring in Duke or Carolina is because maybe we’re making a comparison. Or maybe because my producer is in my ear, saying, ‘hey, Dick, we have Duke coming up tomorrow, give them a pop. We have Carolina on Saturday.’ We’re in this business to get people to watch television. To promote a game, we have to talk about them. People are telling me in my ear to promote an upcoming game.

Q: One-and-done seems to be a problem plaguing college hoops right now – the latest ESPN 2010 mock draft has seven freshman going in the lottery. What needs to be done?

Vitale: I don’t like the one-and-done. I think it’s a disgrace to the game. I think it embarrasses the term “student-athlete.” It makes that a farce. Kids like Rose and Beasley – there’s no way in the world those kids wanted to be in college. Why should we deny them the NBA?

I’d like to see this plan, we can call it the V Plan – I would love to see a panel of experts – Jerry West, Larry Bird – guys that are GMs and presidents in the NBA and have great knowledge of players’ ability – designate 5-6 kids a year that they think are legit 1st round draft choices. Those kids should have an option – college or pros. But if they go to college, they should not be allowed out until they complete their 3rd year.

One and done is a joke.

Q: Since you’re such a huge baseball fan – rough year for the Rays. Are you monitoring the stadium issue?

Vitale: I just sent in my check for another year of season tickets, I think its our 11th or 12th year. I love baseball, I go to maybe 40-50 games a year. And not just in Tampa, all over the place, like New York or Wrigley, I love baseball. I think there’s no doubt it would be great here if they built a modern stadium, but it gets down to dollars. And fan interest and putting people in the seats. I dont blame the owners – how you going to spend csh and you’re not getting people out? That becomes a domino effect. That becomes a problem. I think eventually we’ll get a new ballpark. I’m trying to be optimistic. with a new ballpark and the environment to make it so exciting to come. I mean, Yankee stadium is like a museum.

Q: Your path to the Big 10 Network could be called unusual – Phi Beta Kappa at Northwestern, financial analyst for a year in New York, ESPN, and now the Big 10 Network. Was announcing sports always the dream?

I had always wanted to be a sportscaster. I think I was one of those classic stories of a kid who is about 7 or 8 years old and figures out they love sports but they aren’t necessarily going to make a living playing sports. So what else can you do? I was one of those kids who would turn down the sound on the television and call play-by-play.

But by the time I got to college, I had talked to enough people and was realistic enough to know that a sportscaster job was a bit of a crap shoot, so I knew that I needed other stuff to fall back on. I was a European history major in college and I didn’t take a single broadcasting course. But I did play-by-play for the radio station, and I tried to get involved in internships to keep my hand in it because I knew it was something I wanted to do.

I have deferred every graduate school under the sun. At one point I was deferring law school, business school and journalism school all simultaneously. After I got hired at ESPN, I got a random phone call from some guy who goes, ‘I’m your roommate at Penn law school.’ I said, ‘I got great news for you man, you got a single!’

I didn’t want to do something where I’d languish and find myself unhappy and be 30 years old and have to start all over. I just don’t have the patience for that. So I kept giving myself artificial deadlines. ‘Ok, if I haven’t moved on in a year, then I”ll look to go to grad school.’ I was really fortunate – three years in the business and I got to ESPN. I kind of lucked out – it was at a time when the business was really expanding

Q: How did you wind up at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York after college?

A: It’s a bit of a long story – I went abroad for a year after getting this scholarship through the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship program. If you kind of mumble it, it sounds like you’re a Rhodes Schloar. That was the first thing that was appealing about it. It was sponsored by the local rotary club and they pay for you to spend an entire year aboard. You have to live in a country where you speak the language. Since the only language I speak is the one we’re speaking now, I was somewhat limited in my options.

I went to Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and was an ambassador of goodwill and understanding. You speak at rotary clubs and tell people about yourself … and then you get home and go to rotary clubs and speak about what you learned. It is a fantastic program. While over there, I was applying to law school because I thought that was where I might be headed. Had I got into Yale, I would have gone there. But they did not accept me. I got weight listed at Harvard and I didn’t get into Stanford, and I decided to differ the best place I got in, which turned out to be Penn, and figure out what I wanted to do in the interim.

I wanted to be in New York due to a relationship I was involved in – of course, that whole thing exploded about four months after I got there. I was in New York and there was a recession going on, and there weren’t a ton of jobs. I got one as a financial analyst in the corporate sector of the bank. Honestly, I don’t know what the heck I did there. I kind of sat at a computer and waited for the day to end so I could get the heck out of there. I was absolutely miserable.

It reinforced for me that you have to like what you do. I figured out that I wasn’t cut out for that kind of world.

Q: You left ESPN in 2007. How would you characterize your 11 years in Bristol at ESPN?

A: Fantastic. A great learning experience. The brainpower around that place is great – they totally understand what they are doing. You’re kind of at the epicenter. And hey – they plucked me from total obscurity. I was the weekend guy at the worst station in the 88th market in the country.

They just know what they’re doing. I know there are people who aren’t crazy about their product and the “ESPN-ification” of sports, but at the end of the day, they are really savvy business people. I think they understand what fans want. There may be some fans who don’t want what ESPN is giving them. But in the aggregate, its what fans want, otherwise it wouldn’t be as successful as it is.

Q: Did you see any of that culture that has occasionally plagued the network over the last decade, resulting in the firing of some high-profile on-air talent? We keep hearing that a decade ago, pre-blogs, cell-phone cameras and youtube, it was much more bawdy than it is today.

A: I really didn’t. But I’m the wrong guy to ask – I’m not one who would be .. my girlfriend, now my wife, had moved there with me. I kind of led a boring, suburban, Connecticut existence. I would say … there’s obviously some stuff going on there. But it’s no different … I worked at Chase and they sent me on a business trip and I’m with some VP about an hour outside of Tampa. They get us a car to go into Tampa and this guy orders three bottles of Dom and gets so hammered that he was puking at the side of the road on the way home. I had to help the driver drag the guy up to his hotel room. The next day he was so physically ill, I had to represent Chase in the meeting because he was passed out.

I guess my point is that there are people who do that stuff everywhere. It’s just higher profile at ESPN. I’m not saying it’s unfair to point that stuff out – you’re a public figure. I guess I’m saying, I think there are a lot of corporate cultures where you’re going to find isolated people who perhaps don’t necessarily have their moral compass aligned in exactly the right way.

Q: Do you think anything needs to be done at ESPN to clean this up? The continued public relations hits lately have been pretty bad. Or do these problems just come with the territory?

There’s a responsibility that comes with a job like that. Each individual person needs to know that they are representing the company – ESPN or whatever company – and needs to make good decisions. I think we’re all in positions all the time where you’re in a public and you just have to understand that people are watching you whether you know it or not. And you have to make the right decisions. If you make poor decisions, there are going to be ramifications, and I think that’s what we’re seeing here.

Q: You’re at the Big 10 Network, so I’m sure you hear critiques like this often – Big 10 football is plodding and boring and heavy on the defense. The games are often ugly. What is your opinion on state of Big 10 football?

It’s pretty cyclical. We’re only about three years removed from, at the end of the year, having a game between No. 1 and No. 2, an absolute classic between Michigan and Ohio State. At the end of that game, people were saying, ‘you know what? It’d be pretty good if that were the national championship.’ This stuff is cyclical.

Is the plodding stereotype fair? The teams right now in the big 10 – Ohio State, Iowa, Penn State – they rely more on defense than offense for their success. But if you look back through the years, Purdue was innovative offensively in this decade, Northwestern was, too. Troy Smith won a Heisman trophy … I think we always want to paint with a broad brush and say ‘this is what the Big 10 is, or this is what the SEC is.’

There was a low-scoring, somewhat plodding SEC game last week between Tennessee and Alabama. The Florida-LSU game was low-scoring … I guess I feel like for whatever reason, that is the perception of the Big 10 right now. Whether that’s fair or not is another question.

Q: The SEC has been unwatchable at times recently. Alabama-Ole Miss was dreadful, too. Florida-LSU was a snoozer.

A: I think so. Ole Miss turned out to be a bit of a fraud.

Q: What about the sentiment that cold weather affects Big 10 recruiting? That athletes from warm-weather locales aren’t going to want to go to cold-weather cities to play college football? That the elite athletes would rather bask in the sun in Southern California or Florida?

I’m not sure it’s so much the weather, but rather the distance. The population centers have kind of shifted. I think there’s a trend – if you look at recruiting – of kids wanting to stay closer to home as a general rule. It’s not always the case; you can find exceptions. But by and large I think kids want to stay close to home. A kid living in Florida might say he’s not going further than LSU or Alabama … how do you woo that kid up to Penn State or Ohio State? I think that’s more of an issue.

To me … look, buy a coat. I can understand wanting to be close to home and wanting your parents to be able to drive and see all your games. I think that’s a bigger challenge for the Big 10 than the weather.

Q: Does the Big 10 need a championship game like the SEC has, like the Big 12 has, and like the ACC has?

No. I think if anything, a championship game might hurt the Big 10. Look at the success the Big 10 has had getting two teams into the BCS. You go through the years – nobody has had more success than the Big 10 doing that. That’s ultimately where you’re going to get your biggest financial windfall. Why would you want to jeopardize that for the sake of having a championship game? Now if you can get the right team – Notre Dame, let’s say – to join your conference then its a totally different story. But just for the sheer sake of having a championship game? No. I don’t see what advantage there is.

Q: What about Notre Dame in the Big 10? This has been discussed for a few years … are you a fan of this move? Would you like to see it happen?

A: Commissioner Delaney made no secret of the fact that the league extended Notre Dame an invitation and Notre Dame turned it down. I think if Notre Dame goes a number of years without reaching the BCS, and given the nature of their TV contract … does NBC continue to re-up for Notre Dame football? It all depends on the ratings and whether or not it is financially worth it for NBC. If that contract isn’t worth as much as it once was … given the favorable TV deal the Big 10 has, maybe Notre Dame’s position changes, and maybe it feels like it needs a conference, whether it be the Big 10 or someone else.

I think Notre Dame is the most logical fit in the Big 10, there’s no question about it.

Q: Who needs who more? Does the Big 10 need Notre Dame more, or could Notre Dame, which has been down for a few years, use the Big 10?

A: I think you could make an argument either way. Notre Dame is the Tiger Woods, the New York Yankees … even when they’re not all that relevant in terms of wins and losses, they’re still relevant because everyone has an opinion on them. You either love them or you hate them. From that point of view, Notre Dame would help any conference.

Does Notre Dame need a conference? They’ve been wildly successful for all those years … now, if you get the right guy in there and you’re 12-0, 11-1 and playing in a BCS game game every year, then you don’t need a conference. But might a conference help them? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to be an expert on finances at Notre Dame, and ultimately, that’s what all of this stuff comes down to.

QUICK HITTERS:

Q: Three favorite cities in Big 10 country. Chicago. Madison, Wisconsin. And State College in Pennsylvania.
Q: Should there be a college football playoff? If yes, how many teams?: I would say no. The only playoff I could see is one with four teams. That’s the max.
Q: Favorite Harold Baines baseball moment. I did love Harold Baines growing up. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any great individual moments because the teams were so bad. I just loved his consistency and the fact that he went about his business. He just came in and did his job.
Q: Scariest movie you’ve ever seen. Not really a big scary movie guy. Let’s go with The Shining.
Q: You are fraternity brothers with MLB veteran 2B Mark Loretta. Got a good Mark Loretta story? We had this incredible intramural football team. Loretta didn’t play all year, but then he showed up for the Championship game. He was the backup QB. We had an awfully good QB.

Q: So the Braylon Edwards trade just broke about 90 minutes ago. I’m a thrilled Jets fan. Any initial thoughts about it?

King: If the Jets are a 10-win team, the [3rd round] draft choice is going to be somewhere in the high 80s. I think that for the third pick in the draft five years ago, who has had two very good years, and two not very good years, it is probably a good risk. As far as Cleveland goes, it has made three big moves since last spring. They’ve gotten rid of two problem children in Edwards and Winslow, and they’ve traded down from a high pick to get the Jets Sanchez. They’ve gotten 12 players out of those three trades. Obviously you can’t make any judgment on that yet.

Q: Your MMQB column often mentions brands and hotels .. Conan O’Brien has joked that when he mentions a brand, he gets cases of food or razors or Frosted Flakes or whatever shipped to him. That ever happen to you?

King: People always say, ‘what do you get from Starbucks?’ I’ve never gotten a damn thing from Starbucks. I heard from a VP once when I mentioned something critical about one of their coffee blends, but I’ve never gotten anything. The only thing I got one time was some distributor sent me a case of Heineken Lite after i said ‘thank goodness I can drink more Heineken without fear of calories.’ People have said ‘hey, i want to send you …’ such and such, but i have not taken it. The beer just showed up on my doorstep one day in NJ.

Q: Has the way you put the column together changed at all since joining NBC?

A: It has changed a lot. It used to be that I was at a game, and I’d write … I’d say four years ago, my average column was about 4,000 words. Maybe half of which were from the game I had just covered for SI. Now, my column is about 8,000 words and I try as best I can – this is a readership survey thing – to write about 32 teams. I can’t. And I don’t. This past week I didn’t write about the Dolphins and I got about 20 tweets or emails, ‘how could you avoid the Dolphins on the week we crush Buffalo?’ It is impossible for me to look at 15 games (when there are no byes) and to digest and make comments that are more than cursory on 15 football games.

When I’m at NBC I can watch nine at a time, but you can’t watch nine football games at a time. Last week, I wish I had talked more about Cameron Wake, the guy from the Canadian Football League that the Dolphins signed in free agency this year. They got three sacks out of him on Sunday. It didn’t hit my radar screen until i was looking over the box scores on Monday morning and I saw that.

Q: In the book, you name the Top 100 players of all-time. Your No. 1 player is Don Hutson, the WR. How difficult is it to compare guys from the 30s and 60s to guys in the 1990s? Isn’t it impossible because they are three completely different eras?

A: If you sat down and asked a very big baseball fan, ‘who is the best baseball player of all-time?’ I don’t know that he’d say Babe Ruth, but he’d be in the discussion. Whenever I say that I think the two best football players of all-time are Don Hutson and Otto Graham, people look at me like I have three heads. I’m trying to respect history. I’m trying to judge apples with apples. Otto Graham played 10 years of pro football. Seven of those years, he quarterbacked his team to the Championship. Seven of those 10 years, he was the leading passer in his league. You could argue about Joe Montana and say he played against better players and all that stuff, it’s a fine argument. But the thing that I can’t understand is when people dismiss that when Don Hudson retired, when passing was a nascent thing … when he retired, he had three times as many touchdowns as anybody else in the first 30 years, and twice as many receptions and yards. His touchdown record lasted until 1989. People totally dismiss that.

It’s possible that if we compared everything and talked to people, that everybody, with the exception of me, would say that Jerry Rice is the best receiver of all-time. And quite possibly the best player of all-time. That’s fine. That’s why we all have opinions. I don’t begrudge anybody their opinion. But to dismiss Don Hutson as possibly the greatest receiver of all-time would be the same thing as to dismiss the fact that Babe Ruth shouldn’t be considered the greatest player of all-time. Or that Gordie Howe shouldn’t be considered the greatest hockey player of all-time.

Q: Some of your peers have said your first love was baseball. Was there ever a time you left writing about football to cover baseball?

A: I love baseball. I was asked, maybe 8 or 10 years ago to write the baseball column for SI. I thought about it, but … when I worked in Cincinnati from 1980-1985 for the Cincinnati Enquirer, I was the backup guy on the Reds. I went on a few road trips – this was at the tail end of the Big Red Machine. I loved it. I loved the baseball life. It was so much fun. I like the rhythm of covering a team, even though I didn’t do it for longer than say, two weeks at a time. I really thought it was something I wanted to do.

But the three most recent baseball writers at the Cincinnati Enquirer had all gotten divorced. I looked at it … I was married in 1980, we had our first child in 1983 … in 1984 I covered the Bengals for the first year. I thought, ‘it’s a more sane lifestyle.’ My love for baseball never died. I still love the game. I lived and died [Tuesday] night watching that great, great baseball game between Detroit and Minnesota. I had no rooting interest, but it was one of those games where you couldn’t look away.

I felt over time, as you get to know the people and the life and the regiment of the NFL, it is a tremendous sport to cover. If they had seven games a week, and I was cover it everyday, I think it would be difficult for me because I like to have a personal life. I like to be married. I like to do things other than write.

I have tremendous admiration for the great baseball writers. They’re such workhorses. I grew up in Northern Connecticut wanting to be Peter Gammons. I’d get the Globe in the morning and say, “gosh, I’d love to be as good as this guy.”

Q: One of the big knocks on Sports Illustrated this decade has been that the magazine was slow to embrace the internet. Do you agree or disagree?

A: Going back to 1997, I remember when my editor said – and I’m paraphrasing – ‘hey, there’s this thing called the internet, and we want to start doing some things with it and we want our writers to start writing for it.’ I had been used to being a newspaper guy. And the amount we had to write at SI was microscopic compared to the amount we had to write at newspapers. So I said, ‘hey, why not. I’ll do it.’

I think for years, the culture at the magazine – and other magazines, too, not just Sports Illustrated – was quality over quantity. So a lot of people didn’t want to go to the website and do website stuff at the beginning. How slow and fast we were … I don’t know. It’s not like ESPN Magazine existed and then guys went to ESPN.com. It’s different.

I don’t think anybody at the time knew how massive and 24/7 the internet would be.

Q: What do you make of your longtime colleague Rick Reilly leaving for ESPN? Have you spoken with him? Seen him on Sportscenter?

A: I turned on the TV one night and he was doing Sportscenter. He was really, really good. I thought he was excellent. I really like Rick. I never knew him well and I haven’t talked to him since he left, but i think everybody at SI would say they loved him writing the backpage. He did it like nobody else could. He was tremendous.

But in our world these days … I noticed when Mike Reiss went from the Boston Globe to ESPN Boston – I know Mike pretty well, and I talked to him about it … and, look … if you’re a writer, the opportunity to hit the lottery – I’m not saying ESPN is the lottery – and better your own personal way of life … that is something that we’re probably not going to overlook. It’s the same thing with me. If you have a chance to make a lot of money doing something … if I’m going to work the same amount of time with the same amount of productivity and output, and I can make x vs half of x, why wouldn’t I do it? I just think ESPN is basically out to conquer the world, and they’re going to take everybody who they can away from the competition, and so I think it’s pretty understandable what happened.

Q: One of the polarizing topics in your column are the non-NFL items, like airplane rides, or your daughters’ athletic endeavors. How much of the reaction do you read? Have your daughters ever told you not to write about something?

A: If my daughters ever said don’t write about it – and there were times they said, ‘don’t write about this’ – I would’t. When I was asked to do this column 12 years, SI’s Steve Robinson told me point blank, “I want you to put some of yourself in there. What is your week like? What is your job like?” The thing I always say to people – if you counted up the words of every single MMQB column, 85 percent of the words would be about pro football.

I understand that some point don’t like that other stuff – but it’s America, we’re not going to please everybody. My attitude has always been – if you come to a section that you don’t like – whether it is about what happened to me on an airplane last week, or it is my daughter’s scoring the winning goal in a field hockey game – then just move on. Go and read the next section.

I don’t get angry about people saying whatever they want to say .. it’s a free country. I don’t understand the vitriol that goes with it. But that’s life. That’s the way it is.

Q: Ever have an altercation with an athlete? Anything close to one?

A: Kevin Gogan of the San Francisco 49ers. I forget what year it would be – the first year he got to San Francsico [1997]. He was a guard, he had been on Oakland, he had been on Dallas. And I called him, in an SI story, a journeyman. The next time I was in the 49ers locker room a couple of weeks later in Santa Clara, he flipped out. He went crazy. He came at me screaming, ‘JOURNEYMAN! JOURNEYMAN! and he would not let me do my job around the locker room. Gogan is a big guy, and he came after me. He was never going to hit me, but he had fire in his eyes.

Sometimes people disagree with what I’m going to say. Braylon Edwards didn’t like that I predicted the Browns would be the worst team football this year. When I saw him in training camp – and I know him pretty well – he treated me like the dirt on the bottom of his shoe. But that’s just the way the business is. If you fear people’s reaction to whatever it is you’re going to write, you probably are not going to last very long in this business.

Q: You didn’t make a pick yet for the World Series … who do you like?

A: I’d pick the Angels. I think Kazmir and Figgins are going to be the difference. I love Figgins, and I think Kazmir, whether it is against the Red Sox or Yankees, I think he’s going to be the difference.

Q: You rarely write about college football. Is it safe to say you like baseball more than college football?

A: I used to cover college football in Cincinnati. I absolutely loved it. Over the years, I began either taking Saturday off, or working Saturday at a game site with the visiting team that was coming in. There are many times that I’ll be sitting in a hotel Saturday night writing the first couple thousand words of MMQB – what I do now is on Saturday night, around 8 or 9 at night, after dinner, I’ll start writing MMQB, and I’ll have a game on in the background.

College football is fantastic. But there are only so many things that you can really be into. If I’m going to watch 98 percent of the at-bats in 162 Red Sox games, it is hard to say, “I can’t wait to see Alabama-Auburn.” I’m at a little bit of a disadvantage come February-March when I go to the scouting combine. A lot of my peers know who all these guys are, and I don’t. I have to start from scratch on a lot of these guys. I just don’t devote the time during the season to studying college football like Rick Gosselin and Pete Prisco do. It’s just not something I do until after the NFL season.

Q: Might as well begin with a Hall of Fame question. Does Kurt Warner get your vote?

Young: I said at the Super Bowl last year ‘yes.’ There were some doldrums in the middle of his career, but the story [of where he came from] and what he did taking two teams that were historically doormats, to the Super Bowl … that’s unprecedented. Who is a QB that could take the Arizona Cardinals and St. Louis Rams to the Super Bowl, and actually win one of them? [With Warner] you tend to want to think no on the Hall, but I think you’d be foolish at this point.

Q: Sticking to QBs … taking age into account, who are the top five QBs right now that you would build a franchise around?

Young: Peyton and Tom are the two guys that you’d want to take. They have made it an art form. They’re going to give you that gritty, tough, yet cutting edge performance. They embody so many parts of QBs that we like. That next wave … I’ve said this for 3-4 years – Drew Brees. Whenever I watch him play he does things subtly that show me that he’s like Tom and Peyton and playing ahead of the game. He plays ahead of everybody. He’s underestimated, I think, dramatically. Brett Favre and Warner are kind of in similar situations in their careers and what they are doing. With weapons and protection, you have to put those two guys [in the top five]. They’re not as vibrant as Ben and Eli and Philip, so I give that caveat, and there’s an asterisk next to both. But when they get protected, especially early in the season, they should be up there.

I was more impressed [Sunday] than I have been in a long time with Eli. I thought it was a gutsy, heady win. He’s now the older guy, taking younger players and making them better.

Q: How would you grade your Monday Night Football with the two Mikes last week? Were you pleased? Is that something you’d want to do again?

Young: I [wouldn't grade myself]. I don’t do that as a profession. As I told the guys at ESPN, if you’re going to have me [be an analyst] once, you have to do it twice. The first time, you’re like, ‘oh, I get it,’ and then you do it one more time. When you do that job, you have to have the mindset, ‘I’m sitting at home, what do I need to hear?’ I tend to get very technical. I want to talk about QBs and protections and defenses and coverages … and I think you can overdo that stuff. Over time, you figure out how to manage that. So it’s a no grade cause I don’t do it enough.

Q: Will there be a 2nd time?

Young: I don’t know. I have no idea. I’ve always thought of doing it, and ESPN has thought maybe I should do it, but it hasn’t worked out that way. But it’s a lot more travel and time away from home … I don’t know. I’d welcome other opportunities but I’ve found my niche that I kind of enjoy and I don’t need to be away from home as much.

Q: You suffered a few concussions in your career. Many players are struggling physically just a few years after they have left the game. Carson Palmer told Peter King that “somebody is going to die here in the NFL.” How much concern do you have that prior concussions could impact you down the road?

Young: You don’t know … but I don’t think so. I don’t think I had the numbers or the severity. And also the side effects that I’m hearing are everyday events for a lot of guys that played. I’m appalled hearing the stories … I just never had them. I had a series of very minor concussions that I healed from and got better and never had side effects or lasting effects. I think I’m ok … we’ll find out. But I’m hearing about a lot of guys my age and younger who are suffering dramatically.

Q: Do you think the league is providing enough for former players in their advanced age?

Young: It’s hard. The game takes a toll. The league’s insurance and pensions is getting better … it was horrid for many years. I think Gene Upshaw did a nice job to finally figure out how to do retirement. I think it is getting better but it is still far away from what MLB and basketball have.

Q: Are you aware of the statistics on athletes who are broke five and 10 years after they retire? The numbers are staggering.

Young: Of course. Everybody faces the same challenges of budget and how to live your life … bad decisions and bad timing and living not within your means … there’s no secret there. There’s no secret to what puts you in a jam. When you hear the stories and read about them, its amazing that people put themselves in that kind of spot.

Q: Surely you’re aware of athletes on twitter … any thoughts on Rodney Harrison blasting Kerry Rhodes of the Jets and then Rhodes responding on twitter? Any overall thoughts on the media, athletes and new media?

Young: I know about twitter, but I didn’t hear [about Harrison vs. Rhodes].

[Laughter]

Whatever. There’s just no way to slow that train down. There’s just too many avenues for communcation. The thing is, now all those forms are very public. Maybe that’s good or bad, you could make the argument … but there are no secrets anymore. I suspect we’re going to see more chaotic communication.

Q: There is a moral obligation that anyone who interviews a former QB between now and the 2010 NFL draft must ask about Florida’s Tim Tebow. So how about his pro prospects?

Young: Do not allow the running and the physicality of his game to fool you. Wipe that out. That means nothing to the negative. It is all positive in my mind. There’s no reason to study him as a possible pro prospect and talk about his running. There’s nothing negative to it.

What you need to talk about is his ability in the pocket to deliver the football accurately and on time. I don’t see anything that tells me he can’t do that. I think there’s a sense that because he does this other stuff, that it somehow obfuscates his ability to play QB in the NFL. I think the kid’s a competitor, a studier, and I think he’ll thrive in some system. I don’t see why he can’t thrive in the NFL. I’ve see the quarterbacking in this league, and Tim Tebow could play QB.

Q: There’s been some talk of Tim Tebow’s political aspirations … how about you? You spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2000 …

Young: [Laughter] I took as many beatings as I’m going to take in the NFL. That’s a rough crowd.

Q: Take us inside a Saturday in September/October for you. Are you up early and traveling? Are there breaks? Glued to a TV for 12 hours?

This season, I’ll be the sideline reporter for every ESPN Radio National Game of the week on Saturdays. Working with Bill Rosinski and Dennis Franchione has been great so far. On most weeks, I travel into the college town of the home team on Thursday and we meet with coaches and players on Friday. Being a part of a broadcast team gives me a great opportunity to interact with these people on a different level. I also enjoy watching games from field-level and being able to listen into what coaches and players say to each other in the heat of the moment. I’m sure the sometimes 100,000-people in the stands would do almost anything to be in that enviable position. It’s something I probably don’t think about enough. Obviously I watch games all week as well as before and after our game, whichever it may be. Before I leave for the radio broadcast, I appear on ESPN shows like College Football Live, Sportscenter and ESPNEWS. This week I’ll be with the radio team at Auburn (hosting West Virginia) and look forward to seeing the War Eagle under the lights as it is one of my favorite venues.

Q: How much of a leap was it from newspapers to ESPN? You went from covering a team as a writer to covering a sport – on TV – for ESPN. You were kinda of thrust onto TV rather quickly. Did you take any TV classes? Did anyone help guide you through the world of TV?

It’s hard to believe this is my fifth season covering college football at ESPN and being on TV. Honestly, I never thought I would be on TV. My primary ambitions were always to be a writer for newspapers and magazines and to write a book (which I have not done yet). I had and still have a passion for writing. But equally I have passions for newsbreaking, reporting and storytelling. What I’ve learned is the power of the medium of television. With so many of my talented friends in the newspaper writing business looking for work, it appears I made a move at the right time. I’ve also learned that something you say in 30 seconds on TV or perhaps in a three-minute feature piece can be as powerful, moving or impactful as a 3,000-word story. As for the transition, it definitely took some time. I was constantly reminded that some of my peers at ESPN weren’t particularly “smooth” in their first few years at ESPN but that it becomes easier. I’ve made mistakes. And I’m sure I felt at times that I wish those mistakes hadn’t been on the biggest of stages. You obviously open yourself up to criticism, some of which I’m sure was warranted. You have to figure things out. I definitely feel more comfortable than ever in front of the camera and that’s mostly the result of time, I think. You have to try to be yourself as much as possible. I’ve also been impressed that my company now has developed a support system of resources for talent that will help people like me if they were to now make the transition from print to ESPN.

Q: One of the primary roadblocks we foresaw happening with ESPN’s blog idea was the potential of stepping on toes when it comes to sources. You, with an SEC history, became the national guy with the TV presence. How did you, Chris Low, Mark Schlabach and the rest of the bloggers deal with potential source issues?

Each of us has and will continue to develop our own relationships and sources. Sometimes there is communication between reporters and our supervisors to ensure that we are not overlapping or hammering a school with the same questions on a particular story, for example. But for the most part, we are all on our own to break the stories we can get first. I’ve always thought that internal competition is healthy. And, at its best, teamwork on a story of significance, can be impactful.

Q: Apparently, you’re credited with discovering Jeff Darlington of the Miami Herald while he was a UF undergrad. How’d you find him?

When I covered the Florida Gators for the Orlando Sentinel, many of the seven-or-so newspaper reporters based in Gainesville were allowed to select an undergraduate that would be paid by our newspaper as a “correspondent.” Having a competent “correspondent” was actually more significant than you might image, so the pressure was on to find one as early as possible. I read one story Jeff wrote for the student newspaper, The Alligator, and knew he had the natural talent to be someone worth mentoring. I actually went to the next Florida gymnastics event, offered him the position and the rest is history. Jeff is one of my best friends and will actually be a groomsman in my wedding next June. He’s as good a friend as he is a reporter.

Q: The fall from grace for Teddy Dupay has been swift, sad, and he can’t find a parachute to save his life. You covered Dupay during his time in Florida? What was he like off-the-court?

I actually really liked Teddy Dupay because he had an interesting personality (I remember he once saved the life of a classmate who had an allergic reaction to a bee sting) and he was an overachiever. He was scrappy, gritty and determined, a lights-out shooter and was hated by opposing fans, which I thought was cool. Even though I was a part of the newspaper investigating that led to Dupay’s dismissal on gambling-related charges, I’ll respect that Dupay was always respectful to me. Even when I saw him after at “The Swamp” restaurant in Gainesville, he was cool. I think Teddy realized I had a job to do, and even though he might not have loved everything I reported, he respected I worked hard, too. Steve Spurrier was like that, too. He might not have loved if you found out one of his players had failed a drug test. But he wouldn’t lie to you when you pulled him off to the side. He’d say, “Well, looks like you did your homework there…”

Q: Why hasn’t Steve Spurrier been able to find any success at South Carolina? Do you think the the school invested wisely in him? The TV appearances are there, and they’ve played in some bowl games, but they still lack that breakthrough season, and remain an afterthought in the loaded SEC.

Spurrier has one of the more difficult coaching jobs in the SEC. It’s easier to win at: 1) Florida 2) Alabama 3) Georgia 4) LSU 5) Tennessee and 6) Auburn. That means, that, at best, Spurrier has the seventh-most difficult coaching job in the SEC, and the fourth-most difficult college coaching job in the SEC East. Spurrier’s coaching record at South Carolina is actually favorable compared to all coaches of recent past. I think it is also fair to say that the lack of a star QB has hurt him, although Stephen Garcia looked improved last week. Unfortunately for Spurrier, when the Gators won a national championship, most of the recruits he’s trying to lure now were just kids. Fortunately for Spurrier, he did recently land a strong recruiting class that gives him hope.

Q: Ohio State’s Jim Tressel is 0-6 in his last six games against Top 5 opponents. He beats Michigan, dominates in the Big 10, and before 2007, he had success in bowl games. What has been his problem since the 2007 bowl loss to Florida that began this downfall?

Well, firstly, quality of opponent. Obviously Jim Tressel has built a program that can consistently be in the Top 10 or 15 programs in America each season. But does he have the athletic offensive linemen and overall speed to match up with what SEC and USC, for example, have brought into those matchups? If you look at the record of many coaches against Top 5 opponents (Pete Carroll is an exception, and his success against top opponents is remarkable) they’ll be skewed to the negative because of the quality of opponent. Also consider conference play. Perhaps the level of competition in the Big Ten hasn’t been on par with that in the SEC and Big 12, for example.

QUICK HITTERS:

Q: As a St. John’s graduate, who is your favorite basketball player in Redmen/Red Storm history? 1) Malik Sealy 2) Ron Artest 3) Chris Mullin.

Q: If you were a single guy looking to enjoy a weekend in an SEC town, where would you advise this person go? 1) Oxford, Mississippi 2) Gainesville, Florida 3) Athens, Georgia 4) Knoxville, Tennessee 5) Baton Rouge, La. You must check out The Grove at Ole Miss before you die.

Q: You’re the Pac-10 commish for a day. How much of a suspension would you have given Oregon’s LeGarrette Blount? I would have given him 10 games, with the possibility of re-evaluating it after eight games based on his progress with anger management, etc. I think you want to give Blount a carrot at the end of the road, a glimmer of hope to play again. That said, I understand fully Chip Kelly’s actions. He’ s a first-year coach who can’t tolerate that type of behavior. After all, it was his first game. And he can’t have THAT be the precedent.

Q: Is Charlie Weis coaching Notre Dame next year? If not, who is? Yes, because Notre Dame wins nine or ten games.

Q: Please, please tell us you are in favor of scrapping this lame BCS business and implementing a playoff system? Of course I’m in favor of a 4- or 8-team playoff system. Aren’t we all?

1. Best city for Gameday.
There’s different levels of best city. There’s the buildup of the game, the food on Friday night, the atmosphere around the set … the SEC is so interchangable …the SEC is typically where our most passionate, rabid Gameday experiences are. It’s hard for me to single out just one, but I’d say the SEC in general … [Ed. after some prodding ...] if I had to pick one, I would probably say Baton Rouge.

2. Old men making picks: Beano and Holtz like Notre Dame. Haven’t heard from Corso yet. Is there a trend here?
I don’t think so. The challenge with making picks in July and August – you can go with the chalk and do what everyone else is doing. But then everyone rolls their eyes and says, ‘who couldn’t have picked that?’ Or you make a crazy pick and October you look like a moron. Last year I picked Florida to beat USC in the National title game and my tendency is to want to go against Florida this year because anytime something is so obvious in this sport, you go the other way … but in this case, it’s just too hard. I have to stick with Florida.

3. Heisman darkhorse not named Colt, Tebow or Bradford.
Jevan Snead at Ole Miss.

4. How many wins for Notre Dame? BCS game?
10. Yes.

5. Ohio State-Miami in the 2002 National Championship game … was that pass interference? And do you have a The Photo framed and on a wall in your house?
Ummmm, this was pre-instant replay. What I always tell Miami fans – there was a pass play to Chris Gamble, in regulation, on a 3rd-and-seven. He made a catch and he got his foot down and they called him out of bounds. The next play, OSU punted to Roscoe Parrish, and he returned it like 80 yards to set up the eventual game-tying field goal. Without that punt return, the game’s over, it’s a first down, and Ohio State kills the clock and there is no pass interference call.
[The pass interference] was such a gray area … the way the official first reacted, he should not have called pass interference. You could make an argument that there was contact early on the play, when the ball was in the air. But later in the play, there was no contact, it was a no-call. The way he reacted initially, I don’t know why all of a sudden later, he decided to throw the flag.
[The Photo] … Three or four different people sent it to me. I don’t have it framed personally. When I’m on the air, I would challenge anybody to watch me when I do a game and try to figure out what school I went to. When I’m off the air … I’m an Ohio State fan. Sorry. I went to school there, I was a captain there, my kids wear their Ohio State jerseys almost everyday. They wake up singing the fight song. We’re an Ohio State family. [About the photo] I wasn’t on the air, I’m going to go crazy. My work speaks for itself. The way I’m fair and objective – sometimes I probably go too far in being critical toward Ohio State, but I had a ton of people send me that photo.

Q: Think back to your journalism days at Michigan State. Was Yahoo Sports even considered a mainstream media outlet? Were you like nearly everyone else who went to college for journalism, thinking that you’d be writing for a newspaper/magazine for your entire career? What was the turning point that made you think maybe you could become a web guy?

I had no concept of Yahoo Sports in college. If you told me that’s where I would be nine years later, I would have asked, ‘What the hell happened to my plan?’

When I left Michigan State, we were among that last wave of graduates where newspapers were still clearly the most sensible goal. Journalism still had that coal town mentality when it came to newspapers – everyone worked in the mine, so you would do it, too. And you just assumed that a 40-year career would always be there.

I felt that way until Dan Wetzel opened my eyes. I was a sports enterprise reporter at the Orlando Sentinel in 2003, right about the time Dan was leaving CBSsportsline.com to become the national columnist at Yahoo Sports. Even then, I don’t think anyone considered Yahoo a sports media destination. And when it came to the big breaking news stories, newspaper reporters were just starting to get their skulls caved in by internet outlets. The sanctimonious newspaper attitudes still hadn’t worn off in most places.

But you could see the landscape shifting. So when Dan went to Yahoo, it began a yearlong dialogue between he and I about internet journalism. The boundless nature of it was definitely appealing. And Dan did a good job of selling Yahoo’s mentality, which was “If there’s a good story, go get it. Don’t worry about anything else.” That’s a hell of a pitch, particularly at a time when newspaper budgets and space were shrinking.

When Yahoo offered me their NFL columnist job, I wish I could say I had the foresight that the place was ready to blossom as a sports media entity. But in reality, I was only 26 and it was just a great opportunity for me. The bosses at Yahoo sold this really aggressive five-year plan that seemed unlikely, but it made the risk of leaving newspapers appealing. And to their credit, all of the major points of that five year plan were actually achieved in four years – things like taking the lead from ESPN.com in overall traffic, hiring some of the best reporters and writers in the business, and breaking big investigative pieces.

Really, the only downside was how of some of my newspaper bosses reacted. The executive sports editor at the Sentinel at the time, Van McKenzie, was away from the paper battling cancer. I’d like to think my departure would have been a little more positive if he had been in the office. But he wasn’t, and some of the other editors at the paper really slammed the move. A few years later, a friend told me a story about how some Tribune Company editors and reporters had spent a night at a bar at the Athens Olympics trashing me for thinking of taking the Yahoo job. I’m guessing things turned out a little differently than they expected.

Q: Much has been made about the demise of the traditional sports columnist. The NY Times seems ready to bail on columnists altogether. What seems to make Yahoo’s columnists successful is the ability to blend reporting and column writing. Do you see this becoming a trend? Were you surprised to see Fanhouse gobble up a bunch of columnists and then have the majority of them do little or no reporting?

It will always depend on the news outlet and the individuals. But in general, I do think the traditional sports columnists are a dying breed. It’s sad, because most of us grew up reading sports columnists who understood the DNA of their market. I used to live in Detroit, and there will never be a day when a national columnist can write something more poignant about Detroit sports than what Joe Falls was writing during his prime.

But things have changed. Having roots in a city and being able to wax eloquently about it just isn’t enough anymore. Especially on the internet. If you’re going to thrive, you have to be able to break news, give good analysis, and also be able to deliver a sharp column when a story calls for it. The internet audience is just too varied to offer them one skill and hope they keep coming back.

I don’t know what the mission is at Fanhouse. They do have a collection of unique voices and strong opinions. Maybe they will show that is a recipe for success. Or maybe they’ll branch into more reporting as time goes on. We’ll see. Personally, I’m glad I work with a lot of the all-terrain assassins – hybrid journalists like Wetzel, Adrian Wojnarowski, Josh Peter, Jeff Passan, etc. They all have a universal skill set that makes them special.

Q: What was your take on ESPN’s coverage of the Brett Favre saga? If you had to give it a grade on the A-F scale, what where would you rank it? And are you more into the Favre return, or the Mike Vick return? If both were playing at different times in opposite cities, and you could cover one for the weekend, which would it be?

Can I give ESPN three grades for the Favre stuff? Let me put it this way:

An “A” for effort, since nobody can saturate the living hell out of a story like ESPN.

A “C” for content, since it seemed like 90-percent of what they were reporting was the same news with a different reporter attached to it. (Seriously, how many people did ESPN have on the Favre beat – 50?)

And an “F” for results, because after devoting all that time, effort and money into the story, Fox’s Jay Glazer swooped in and beat them on it. That had to be particularly tough to take at ESPN, because I don’t think I ever saw Glazer standing on Favre’s lawn in Mississippi, or in front of the Vikings’ practice facility, or doing an interview with Favre’s wife. Just goes to show you, the right source trumps all comers.

As for Favre vs. Vick, Vick is more interesting because of all the dynamics in play. At this point, Favre is just a fading wishy washy icon who is clinging to professional football. Vick’s story is a sociologist’s wet dream. Regardless of what he does on the football, he has arguably become a vast social commentary on race, economics, honesty, fame – you could just go on and on with him.

Q: The blind items you’ve posted on twitter have seemed to generate some interest. How do your bosses feel about blind items? Have you run into front office-types or agents who have known their player was the subject of a blind item? What is the reaction you’ve gotten from fans about them?

The reason those blind items don’t run on Yahoo is because nobody would know where to put them. What do you do with a one-paragraph nugget about an NFL player who smothered his body in Ben-Gay to cover up the smell of drinking all night? And like all things on the internet, if you can’t figure out where to put it, it gets banished to the island of misfit toys – otherwise known as twitter.

But readers do love them, because they are pure ‘news of the weird’. Like the rookie who kept bouncing checks because he never had a bank account and didn’t understand checks weren’t real money. The first time I heard that story, I laughed so hard I cried. But how do you report it without absolutely humiliating the guy? And how could you justify it?

So I put them out there and omit details to protect the innocent. I have yet to run into an agent or executive who was pissed about one of the items, but I tend to know which stories I can share without triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Q: Do you think that Tony Kornheiser’s voyage to the MNF booth will have an impact – positively or negatively – about sportswriters landing a high profile game-analyst gig in the future? Or will that field remain mostly the domain of a play-by-play guy with a former athlete or two? While we’re on announcers, who are some of your favorites in football?

I don’t think Kornheiser’s performance really matters, because most network executives know sportswriters make terrible game analysts. When was the last time you sat in a press box and thought one of the other hacks would be a great TV analyst? Most of the time we’re telling each other to shut up so we can figure out the down and distance. That field belongs to the people who played the game or were trained to be on-air analysts. And that’s how it should be.

As for who I like, pound-for-pound Ron Jaworski is the best in the business. He gives me something great every time out. I like Cris Collinsworth because he isn’t afraid to be critical. Another guy I like – and it’s still early with him – is Jon Gruden. There are times when he gets excited and it sounds like Jack Torrance from The Shining is in the booth. One more thing: I would have said Al Michaels, but he lost me in the 1990s when he did those god-awful turns in BASEketball and Jerry MaGuire. I hope he fired his agent for that crap.

Q: Have you seen anyone fall as far and fast as Vince Young has? Are we looking at a Ryan Leaf-type flameout here?

You might have to go into another genre to compare Vince’s plummet. I think he’s in the Vanilla Ice/Milli Vanilli/Bernie Madoff bracket. Or maybe the chick who sang that song on Britian’s Got Talent and then ended up being institutionalized. What was her name? Susan Boyle?

In all seriousness, it’s framing up to be one of the most mind-boggling collapses we’ve seen in a long time. That three-year run – his last two years at Texas and his rookie season in the NFL – had a lot of smart football people believing he was going to change the pro game. Now he’s the poster-child executives point to when they worry about a guy’s mental toughness. The guy still has a wealth of talent. Maybe he’ll turn himself around. But I don’t know that you could find many veterans in the Tennessee locker room who could ever believe in him again as a leader.

QUICK HITTERS:

Q: Your favorite athlete in Michigan State history. I think it’s written somewhere on my diploma that I’m supposed to say Magic Johnson. To hell with that. Give me Plaxico Burress. When I was covering him for the student paper, he once told Jemele Hill, “I don’t mind reporters, but I hate that motherfucker Charles Robinson.” Despite my sincerest efforts, he hasn’t spoken to me since – almost 10 years. There is something admirable about a guy who says ‘screw you’ and sticks to it.

Q: If you had to project the rookie year of Mark Sanchez, would you guess closer to the 1st year of Flacco, Leinart, or Matt Ryan? As long as the measuring stick isn’t co-eds in hot tubs, he’ll be better than Leinart. He’s not Matt Ryan. What Ryan did was extremely special for a variety of reasons. I’m thinking Sanchez will be Flacco-lite. Solid rookie numbers thanks to the defense and other pieces around him, but he’ll miss the playoffs.

Q: Based on email responses, which set of NFL fans are the most annoying? New England Patriots fans, but only because a group of them once tried to get me fired for writing about a practice they thought I hadn’t attended. Unfortunately for them, video captured me talking to Corey Dillon. (Side note: This was the only time I was actually glad I talked to Corey Dillon.) Anyway, I have been forwarding my hatemail from Patriots fans to Gregg Doyel ever since.

Q: If you’re the judge in the Plaxico case, what would you have done in terms of punishment? A three month jail term, a hefty fine, and 500 hours community service. New York statute or not, two years in the hoosegow for accidentally shooting yourself is harsh. If it had been Stephon Marbury, they would have thrown a ticker tape parade.

Q: Obligatory Tim Tebow question: He gets drafted in _ round and his most comparable NFL comparison is _. Third round. A more athletic Jay Riemersma, once he moves to tight end. (Someone call Gregg Doyel and tell him I’m forwarding my University of Florida hatemail, too.)