The 24/7 Sports Monster

Pardon the interruption, but I'm the Doc-tor.

Gosh, what intelligent sports fan doesn't love "Pardon the Interruption", or want to do that for a living? How cool must it be to have a professional life like either Mike Wilbon or Tony Kornheiser?

Still, the summer doldrums of the sports world started me thinking - has the cable and internet-driven 24 hour a day, 7 day a week monster that has devoured the news industry spilled over into sports?

The news industry finds itself in a quandary - there is more access to news through cable and the internet, which creates a greater demand for news. But sometimes, there just isn't enough news to justify 24/7 coverage.

The result is wall-to-wall coverage of Scott Peterson, or Michael Jackson, further sensationalizing otherwise grisly tales of murder and pedophilia. But what the heck else are you going to put on the air 24/7?

Even the cable news channels are going toward more entertainment-driven shows in the guise of news (Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Headliners and Legends). Sometimes there isn't enough of that to program 24/7, so you catch the occasional infomercial on MSNBC.

Which leads us back to sports programming. In the dead of summer, when baseball is the only thing going and NFL training camp hasn't started, what do these sports outfits do for coverage? There is a proliferation of sports talkers on TV nowadays: PTI, Around the Horn, Best Damn Sports Show, etc. Not to mention the challenge of keeping SportsCenter fresh.

I watched PTI this week, which felt it had to air a July 4th show with two hosts nobody had ever heard of, and for the 147th time this year, PTI debated the merits of the careers of Danica Patrick and Michelle Wie. Enough already!

But then I thought, this is the 24/7 monster applied to sports. In the dead of July, what else are you going to put on? And heaven forbid watching "Around the Horn" and "PTI" back to back, unless you want to hear the same 5 or 6 topics debated over and over.

We are a sports-obsessed culture, but there is only so much sports to go around. CNN/SI found out the hard way. It's time to cut out some of the worthless sports talkers and go find some more original sports programming to feed the 24/7 monster.

Anybody else miss the CFL, Strong-man competitions, and Aussie rules football that used to be shown?