News@Noon(ish): Signing Day Fun, BP Reboot, NFL Labor, ‘Burgh QBs, Groundhog Day

Very busy day with two shows (go listen to them) and a host of other things going on. So…to the links. • Signing day? Follow EDSBS, where they likely won’t break any recruiting news, but you can see a rubber duck covered in sludge. And other hilarious college footballish things. (this is less link and more PSA. You’re welcome.)

• It’s almost Super Bowl time, so let’s get depressed about the likelihood of a lockout. Stephanie Stradley — a fellow BFL participant this season — has a rundown at her Chron.com blog Texans Chick.

• For this year’s game, I was starting to hope Pittsburgh wins just to get the on-air exchange between Terry Bradshaw and Ben Roethlisberger. Bradshaw is handing out the Lombardi Trophy and it would be hilarious to see Roethlisberger take the trophy from him and the two deck each other, then hug it out like Rick Vaughn and Roger Dorn at the end of Major League.

Alas, it happened already; the meeting, not the deck and hug. From Dan Wetzel at Yahoo:

They were face-to-faceREAD MORE

DL513: Josh Zerkle on Pro Bowl Reform, BEN, Super Bowl Plans & Is Ines Sainz Still A Story?

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Josh Zerkle of With Leather, KSK and the House of Punte Podcast joins the show to preview Super Bowl week. Not the Super Bowl, but the week leading up to the Super Bowl which can be, in a way, as entertaining as the game.

First we talk about the Pro Bowl and give a huge rundown of suggestions for how to make the game better. We cover everything from helmet cams to a skills competition to Zerkle suggesting the game be played between free agent veterans and rookie wage scalers with the winning team getting a bigger piece of the contract pie.

That, and robots. Exploding robots.

We talk a lot about Ben Roethlisberger and if fans really care that he was an accused rapist a few months ago. Is it a big storyline heading into the Super Bowl? Of course it is, because there isn’t much else to talk about this week. But will it be an awkward moment after the game between Ben and Terry Bradshaw, and does Roger Goodell really wantREAD MORE

DL510: Cutler, Twitter, BEN, Rodgers, Jets, Football, Super Bowl

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Where is show 509, you ask? Well, it’s a lost episode, for now.

That said, we’re back with show 510 talking about the media talking about Jay Cutler and spending a good amount of time on the fact that people were quick to rip him for “quitting” without finding out the real story. A product of the immediacy of Twitter, or more a story about the other shoe dropping on a guy most in the NFL really, really don’t like?

And can we please stop with the Philip Rivers comparisons? Rivers was terrible in the AFC title game he played with a torn ACL. It’s also hilarious that Maurice Jones-Drew had the guts to rip Cutler, saying, “All I’m saying is that he can finish the game on a hurt knee… I played the whole season on one…”

Really, MJD? The WHOLE season? In what amounted to a playoff game in week 15, Jones-Drew had six second-half touches (three run, three pass) for 16 yards. The lesson: being hurt and playing poorly isREAD MORE

Does Mike Florio Really Think Mike Wise Should Be Fired? We Asked.

Mike Florio has a big hammer in our internet media world. He’s earned everything he gets as he built PFT from nothing to a verifiable internet monster. Some people are giving Florio credit today for Mike Wise’s one-month suspension from the Washington Post. Whether or not that’s true (note: I don’t believe it is) Florio, himself, wrote this on PFT:

Frankly, Wise should be glad he wasn’t fired.  Armed with the relevant Postpersonnel policies, including the one regarding the use of social media, a semi-competent lawyer (or me) would have Wise admitting within five minutes or less that his employment should be terminated for cause.

That seemed awfully heavy handed to me, considering it was a joke. A terrible joke (for which Wise has apologized on this site, his own radio show and on Twitter). Wise learned the first rule of being funny: be funny.

I’m somewhere in the middle on the whole “journalistic integrity” thing though. ETHICS have become a four-lettter word. Heck, a site that linked to our interview with Wise yesterday took every single quote I transcribedREAD MORE

DL426: Mike Wise on Big Ben Tweet, ProFootballTalk, Social Media

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Thanks to the quick work of Kogod, I was able to talk with Mike Wise of the Washington Post this afternoon about becoming public enemy #1 on Twitter today after posting this tweet: “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told.”

It’s unsourced, and was followed by other erroneous and misleading tweets, as part of a bit for his radio show. The problem? Not everyone was listening to his radio show. Most notably, ProFootballTalk. They are not fans of Mike Wise today.

Listen to the audio below, but here are some of Wise’s comments about the situation. First, technology failed him, and cause a lot of people a lot of wasted energy tracking down (and writing about) this news.

“Where I screwed up was, I literally put a tweet right after that saying, ‘can’t reveal my sources…oh yeah, it’s a casino employee in Lake Tahoe’ and so I get this ‘Twitter is over-booked, try back later.’ So the actual secondary tweet doesn’t go come out until…a  half hour to an hour later and IREAD MORE

Cowher: Big Ben Has Matured, Liked In Locker Room – When He Wins

Here’s a note worth posting: Bill Cowher of CBS talked yesterday and, of course, the topic turned to his former quarterback, Big Ben Roethlisberger. Standard conversation about how he’s grown up and when he was coaching the quarterback it was all about winning games and rings and now he’s finally realized that it’s more about “how you carry yourself off the field.”

“”Yeah,” Cowher said to Associated Press on Tuesday, “but there’s more to it than that. It’s the whole body of work. It’s you as a person, what kind of legacy you want to leave. I really think he understands that now.

“I think he realizes that now. I really think you’re going to see a different person.”

That quote comes via PFT who quoted Cowher from the Associated Press. Almost the exact same quotes were used in a post on WashingtonPost.com, but attributed to Cowher’s appearance on WFAN radio’s Boomer and Carton show in New York. Boomer, of course, is Boomer Esiason, a media personality with whom Cowher shares a CBS set on Sundays. Perhaps the APREAD MORE

DL411: Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, Roethlisberger, Shaq, Rafael Marquez, Tim Tebow

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What do Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, Ben Roethlisberger, Jeff Pearlman, Deadspin and the giant weekend feud between Phillies bloggers and traditional media all have in common?

You’d be amazed, but they all (somewhat seamlessly) fit into our first segment.

For a point of reference, read this piece at SI from Pearlman. It’s a launching point into a conversation about how much is too much to remain a fan of someone famous.

With celebrities, the gossip is the game and the other stuff (actual movies/TV and other things that actors do) is secondary. Sure, you can make a ton of money doing a movie, but you’re not going to get on the cover of any magazines unless you show up drunk somewhere or adopt 50 kids or, yes, go to jail. But how much is too much?

Is Mel Gibson a bigger star this month than last, or did he go too far and is his career over?

And how does this translate to sports, where the game is the most important thing and the gossipREAD MORE

DL362: NHL, Legal Analysis of Roethlisberger Case & Pulit…SURPRISE!

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All apologies for the short recaps this week. Eh, be happy there’s a show at all, because frankly, I’m not. I just want this boy to show up already.

Anyway, We talk about three things today.

First, Nick and I discuss the NHL! We talk about why shootouts in sports are okay in certain instances, and then talk about how the Devils and Flyers are playing zero games on national TV when, as Nick points out, every other series has at least three games on national TV. Make sense? Does everyone hate these two teams that much?

COURT REPORT:

Neil Jacobs, a Washington, D.C. defense attorney and our legal analyst, joins the show to talk about Ben Roethlisberger’s situation. Would he, as a defense attorney, eat the prosecution alive with the circumstantial nature of this case, and is that why the prosecutor can’t do much more than come out with a presser talking about Ben being a bad guy and “if he were my son, I’d tell him to grow up.”

We also get someREAD MORE