Today is one of those fun days in the sports and entertainment world where there is so much to choose from. We pick a little from many different places.

First, not fun at all, we discuss the passing of Ed McMahon. This show has turned into a living obituary section. Yes, the irony of that last statement is not lost on me. Spencer Hall did a clever tribute to the ultimate sidekick over at the Sporting Blog, which leads to our question -- what is McMahon’s legacy? Most will remember him sitting next to Johnny Carson, but to our generation, is McMahon more well known for Star Search? Or Publishers Clearinghouse?

And why did we get an envelope every year telling us we just won 10 million dollars yet we NEVER won ten million dollars? We also come to find out in discussing the legacy of McMahon that Nick never watched Larry Sanders. Hey now! He’s missing out.

We turn to look at today’s events, including our preview of the US soccer match against Spain in the Confederations Cup. How important will a win be to the United States, and will the story be bigger in America if the US pulls the upset, or will the story be bigger in the rest of the world?

Not to overstate things, but if the US can win today, it will do more for soccer in this country than any other result in the last 60 years. Nick wonders how many chances on the big stage the US team will get, and deserves for that matter. But isn’t that the beauty of international competition...every few years you get another chance to make history.  At some point, we hope, the US soccer team takes advantage of one of those chances, regardless of how they got it. Win today and everything changes. No excuses if you lose.

Print’s Not Dead:

Dan Steinberg wrote at the DC Sports Bog and the Sporting Blog (the ol’ bloggy double dip) about Tony Kornheiser’s interview on SportsTalk 980 in DC. Kornheiser spoke with Kevin Sheehan about, well, much of what he talked about with us a few weeks ago. Steinberg must have needed some non Wizard-trade material for the Bog.

But the point to take out of the interview, and what Steinberg wrote, is that Kornheiser is still upset about his departure from the Washington Post. He feels he was ‘dumped’ by the people at the Post. He took a buyout, but was still on contract to do Talking Points, the Post’s web version of PTI. Kornheiser’s point is that the duo of he and Wilbon are a brand name and if it works for ESPN and it worked for the Post for nearly 30 years, why all of the sudden is it not working anymore?

What he fails to realize is that Talking Points didn’t work BECAUSE of PTI. If people wanted to watch PTI, they’d just watch PTI. People don’t need to watch it again, in Tony’s dressing room, the next morning. They rarely talked about different topics, even if they tried every-so-often to skew local. The show should have been all local all the time. They should have only talked about local issues in the DC area.

The problem with that...Kornheiser and Wilbon don’t cover the local teams. They aren’t aware of the local issues anymore. They are national pundits who live in Washington. That doesn’t make for great local sports expertise.

So the model didn’t work. Why would someone deal with the hassle of watching something online (keep in mind most people still don’t know what a podcast is, let alone vidcast or whatever you want to call Talking Points) when you can watch a version with more bells and whistles on TV? And as great as PTI is, it only gets around one million viewers a day. Trust me, for cable TV at 5:30 that number is huge, so I shouldn’t

say only, but it’s not like 10 million of us watch PTI every day. How many of those people are from DC? Even if the number is 10%, that’s still only 100,000 people. If the Post could get 10% of those people to their website to watch Talking Points every day, that’d be 10,000 viewers, which would have been a lot for that show.

Those would be lofty goals to capture that much of the local PTI audience to washingtonpost.com just for Talking Points every day. And frankly, Kornheiser and Wilbon didn’t seem to care enough about the show to make people care enough to watch it. We know that’s Tony’s schtick -- he’s even done it on our show -- but at some point people will stop caring if they think you’ve stopped caring. And until the Post pulled the plug on Talking Points, it seemed to be an annoyance to Kornheiser.

To me, THAT’S why it’s gone.

Political Safari:

We talk about the Brooklyn Cyclones becoming the Baracklyn Cyclones last night. Why? What’s the point of doing that, other than the clever pun on your name? Is it smart business for a minor league team to seem so politically partisan with a give-away, just for a little national publicity?

Perhaps not, as reports are coming out that at least 200 people have returned their season tickets in protest of the giveaway. Regardless of your political affiliation, it’s a bizarre giveaway at this point in the year. The election is long over, and even though Brooklyn just started their season, Obama has been President for almost six months. Heck, he’s 1/8th of the way through his first term already. Should this have been one of those “hey, good idea, but no” ideas and not one of the “yes, let’s do this” ideas?

We pose the question to you, what giveaway would make you turn in your seats?

Housekeeping:

We hope to talk some basketball tomorrow in advance of the draft. And also, there has been much blog discussion about terrible ads lately, so what are some of your least favorite commercials? We’ll discuss tomorrow.

Thanks as always. I hope my voice didn’t annoy you as much today.

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