Wide Left Podcast: Spring Training, Jeremy Lin, College Hoops, Live TV & More

Happy President's Day. Nick Tarnowski and me usually cover five topics on Monday, but we really stick to four this week, unless you count pitchers as one topic and catchers as the other.

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There's a lot of baseball talk to start the show. We focus on the Red Sox and the Yankees, but I promise that won't become a habit.

Hello, the Media

We talk about ESPN's unfortunate "Chink in the Armor" headline and why the headline writer had to be fired. We also talk about the need for his name to come out, which it has, in a story in the New York Daily News. It may have been a mistake, but you cannot make that mistake.

It also leads to the general nature of "Lin puns" and why so many have straddled the line of what's acceptable. If you haven't seen the SNL parody yet, you should do so.

College Hoops

If Michigan State doesn't make the Final Four, I will eat someone's hat. We talk about the lay of the college hoops land in an extended preview for my favorite week of the year—conference tournament time.

Dad, Can I Watch a Show?

My daughter is home for President's Day and she makes a brief cameo on the show while Nick and me talk about TV ratings and how the networks are getting marginalized by other options and DVR usage. The last frontier of live TV is sports, and more and more money is being dumped into sports advertising because it's the only way companies can guarantee getting an audience that isn't forwarding through the commercials.

Should there actually be more sports on network TV?

Thanks for listening. Leave your thoughts in the comments.