Posts from the Nfl Media Watch Category at FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

Former Kansas City Chiefs defensive lineman and Fox TV announcer Bill Maas gave two lengthy interviews to the Kansas City Star in which he discussed the drug and legal problems that ended his broadcasting career, and the most interesting revelation is that concussions suffered playing football have left him permanently brain damaged:

The frontal lobe of his brain is damaged. Doctors say it's a direct result of his NFL career and has caused him depression, minor speech problems and extreme loss of short-term memory.

It's one of the conditions that drove him online, buying hydrocodone and other painkillers from pharmacies he knew probably weren't legitimate. He says his drug use began when his broadcasting career went downhill; a source says it was the other way around.

Maas doesn't come across like a guy who wants to blame the NFL for his personal problems, but he does sound like a guy who wants to get back into the game he loves.

Dan Cook, the San Antonio Express-News writer who coined one of the best-known phrases in sports, has died at age 81.

Cook is credited in Bartlett's Quotations with first uttering, "The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings" in a 1978 television broadcast; he later said that it was a phrase he had coined in a previous newspaper column.

Cook's sports writing career with the Express-News lasted more than a half century, and he covered sports figures including Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Bear Bryant and Tom Landry. The Express-News reported his death early today.

NFL players are constantly and increasingly warned to beware the all-seeing eye of the Internet and its resourceful inhabitants. The league itself might want to heed that lesson a little bit, as well.

The league has taken a sorta progressive stance compared to other leagues on offering online video (although a package to watch games online might, you know, be a good idea), but they recently got caught with their guard down. NFL.com streamed the live NFL Network feed of Michael Strahan's retirement press conference on June 9th and then ... forgot to close the feed.

The result: some tubes nerd discovered that by visiting the URL for the Strahan conference, he/she could watch the NFL Network, for free, in glorious real time. Rampant message-boarding ensued. The stream remained for almost an entire month, until it was shut down yesterday. The error is significant, given the vigilance the league usually maintains over its content online, the NFL Network's treatment by the league as a precious commodity, and its struggles with cable over distribution. It also came at a bad time as each side continues to fight for leverage, with the NFL already losing more and more everyday.

I was tipped off to this a couple of weeks ago but kept quiet here because my market is sans-NFLN and I was enjoying the taste while it lasted I wanted to see how long before the league caught on on its own. With it no longer, I contacted the league for a response and it seemed they were still a little confused by it all. They did tell me, however, that they didn't think that the bootlegging was widespread (Google disagrees) and that they hope we "enjoyed the NFL Network freeview." Thank you, we did. I love stickin' it to the man.

A writer named Shannon J. Owens had an article in the Orlando Sentinel this weekend that is so stupid that it would be offensive if it weren't so easy to dismiss.

Under the headline, "NFL's Shaun Alexander Seemingly Pays Price for Having Interests Other Than Football," Owens suggests that the reason former Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander is not currently under contract to an NFL team is that he's a devout Christian. Owens writes that Alexander's devotion to his church makes him "a pariah to some NFL general managers."

That is absurd. He's a pariah to NFL general managers because he's a bad player. He's averaged three and a half yards a carry the last two years, and he turns 31 before the season starts.

As Mike Sando of ESPN.com writes, Alexander was just as vocal about his Christian faith two years ago, when he got an $11.5 million signing bonus, as he is now. The difference between now and then is that he's not a good player anymore.

The majority of NFL owners, general managers, coaches and players are Christians. There is no anti-Christian bias in the NFL. There's an anti-bad player bias. If you're a bad football player, you can't get a job. That's Alexander's problem.

NBC re-aired the first Saturday Night Live last night in memory of the show's first host, George Carlin. Here's the first minute of his opening monologue:

Carlin made one of his trademark play-on-words jokes regarding the hashmarks on a football field, and then he said he thinks Americans like football because it's a game of land acquisition.

That monologue is a reminder that Carlin was, as King Kaufman wrote, one of the best sports humorists around. Carlin was remembered last week for his brilliance in skewering politics and religion and language, but sports were also a major source of material for one of America's great comedians.

And now for the geekiest thing you'll read on FanHouse all day.

The NFL and ESPN have told FCC that they would like to test "white space" devices during live NFL games. The goal is to see if and how the wireless internet devices might interfere with wireless microphones and local TV signals in a real-world environment.

If you're not familiar with white space devices, here's some background for you. When the FCC handed broadcasters free analog TV spectrum back in the day, they required that there be "buffers," or white spaces, in between spectrum allocations, so as to avoid interference between channels. Now that analog TV signals are set to be switched off and replaced with all-digital TV signals next February, a few tech companies see an opportunity to use those white spaces to deliver wireless internet on the cheap -- the theory being that digital signal is much less susceptible to interference.

The hitch is that broadcasters are terrified that white space internet signals will interfere with TV signals. The National Association of Broadcasters wants to ban the devices, while White Spaces Coalition members are accusing the NAB of engaging in empty rhetoric. Unfortunately, NAB has the upper hand right now, as several white space devices tested by the FCC haven't worked very well.

The whole Don Imus/Adam "Pacman" Jones uproar didn't last very long, did it? It was like one minute everyone was getting upset, and the next minute everyone was asking, "Why should we care what this guy says?" Even Al Sharpton seems to have moved on.

But Jason Whitlock has a column at FoxSports.com in which he argues that while we shouldn't care about Imus, it actually is worth addressing the point that Imus claimed he was trying to make in asking "What color" Jones is.

Neil Best of Newday is reporting that NFL Network has hired Bob Papa to handle play-by-play on its slate of eight regular-season games, replacing Bryant Gumbel as the top in-game broadcaster on the league-operated cable channel.

By hiring Papa, NFL Network has basically gone the exact opposite route it went when it hired Gumbel: Papa is an old pro who has a firm understanding of the job but isn't well known outside New York; Gumbel is a big name who had no experience calling play-by-play.

Tom Hammond was thought to be the front-runner for the gig but was apparently passed over. NFL Network wanted Al Michaels but couldn't afford him.

On NFL Network Papa will work with analyst Cris Collinsworth. Papa's primary job is as the Giants' radio play-by-play man. He is also the lead announcer for HBO's Boxing After Dark.

Chicago Bears center Olin Kreutz seems like one of the NFL's hardest players to figure out.

On the one hand, he's obviously smart, a hard-working team player, and a charitable man who has contributed money to retired players who have had health and financial problems. On the other hand, he has broken teammates' jaws in fights on two different occasions.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander has a wide-ranging interview with The Big Lead today in which he addresses his own history with Kreutz, and how he thinks a columnist gains credibility in criticizing an athlete if he'll meet that athlete face to face.

Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who said last week that he used steroids when he played for the Steelers, has now clarified his comments. The New York Daily News reports:

"I'm not bodybuilding here," Bradshaw said, laughing about the confusion that stemmed from the interview. "They were not those kind of steroids. They were anti-inflammatories."

This is tricky because in medicine, the word "steroid" just refers to a general class of chemical substances. But in sports, saying "we did steroids," as Bradshaw said last week on Dan Patrick's radio show, is almost always meant to refer to anabolic steroids, which were widely used in the NFL duing Bradshaw's playing days and have since been banned by every major sports league.

Bradshaw would be wise to choose his words more carefully -- especially considering how prevalent "those kind of steroids" were on the 1970s Steelers.