FanHouse SportsCenter

The FanHouse Podcast: Because bloggers are much sexier on the phone.

Kathleen Hessert, the President of Sports Media Challenge, had a vision in 2004 of a technologically superior method of determining the "buzz" surrounding a particular athlete, organization or team. It finally came to full-on fruition this past week when ESPN began running their "Blog Buzz" segments during the morning SportsCenter.

Perhaps even more impressively, Kathleen is also responsible for bringing Shaquille O'Neal into the world of Twitter. And she was kind enough to take some time out of her busy schedule to talk with Ryan Wilson and me about the changing world of sports media, athletes on Twitter (and why Wilson should sign up; I'm already there as is FanHouse), the vision and history behind the "Buzz Manager," and the importance of fan-driven media in today's sports world.

If you care about the emergence of blogs and their co-existence with mainstream media, you'd be doing yourself a disservice not to listen.

Yesterday was Father's Day, and as is fitting with the political season, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a confrontational speech at a Chicago church about fatherhood and responsibility, a speech the New York Times said "would be difficult for a white candidate to make." It was one of those.

The message itself is a universal one -- fathers need to be responsible for the children they help create -- but it's probably not of interest to the FanHouse crowd specifically. That is, it wasn't, until Barack assailed dormant dads with a not-so-thinly veiled jab at ESPN's flagship program:

We previously noted that ESPN had hired Hannah Storm to serve as a morning SportsCenter anchor, and now the Worldwide Leader has offered more details.

ESPN has decided to cease its longstanding practice of re-running the previous night's SportsCenter all morning long and will now instead offer live broadcasts from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Starting August 11 (which is the first Monday of the Summer Olympics), SportsCenter will be live throughout the morning. The nine-hour SportsCenter block will feature three teams of two anchors, with the early shows giving more of the scores and highlights and the later shows giving more analysis and commentary, plus whatever news has broken during the morning.

As a practical matter, what this means is that ESPN realizes that the reality of today's media environment is that people who want to know what happened in last night's game already know long before SportsCenter has been shown for the seventh time.

ESPN's new weekday program schedule is after the jump.

There's a new SportsCenter commercial that shows kicker Adam Vinatieri, who's won three Super Bowl rings with the Patriots and one with the Colts, trying to get through the metal detector at the ESPN offices and failing because of his rings:

The spot would be OK if it were just Vinatieri trying to get through security, but what makes it brilliant is the man standing behind him in line: Jim Kelly.

Kelly, of course, is the Buffalo Bills quarterback who played in -- and lost -- four Super Bowls. The exasperated look on Kelly's face is basically the same as the look on the face of all travelers when the guy in front of them gets stuck at the metal detector, but Kelly has another reason to be annoyed.

Kudos to Kelly (who's wearing his Pro Football Hall of Fame induction blazer) for being willing to appear in the ad and poke a little fun at himself.

Previously on FanHouse:
The Hilarious David Ortiz SportsCenter Commercial
David Wright Keeps Secrets From the Demon Deacon
Dan Patrick's Best SportsCenter Commercial
Tony Romo/Scott Van Pelt SportsCenter Commercial
Shaq Saves Mike, Remembers His Roots

A light-hearted poke at baseball players' custom of hiding their mouth with their glove while they talk? Or a deep rooted hatred of Wake Forest by Virginia native David Wright stemming from a ruined NCAA bracket in 1995, when Tim Duncan and the one seed Demon Deacons were ousted in the round of 16 by Oklahoma State? You decide in Wright's new Sportscenter commercial featuring Neil Everett, Scott Van Pelt, and the Wake Forest Demon Deacon:

Not sure David is going to clinch any appearances on SNL on the strength of this spot. When the scene is stolen by a mascot reading a newspaper, it's never a good sign.