Sports Media

The tattoo, still so new the ink barely is dry, spreads from David Wells' biceps toward his shoulder -- his left shoulder, naturally -- and leaves no doubt where his emotional ties to baseball remain.

It begins with a detailed image of old Yankee Stadium, runs past a skull with a baseball in one of its eye sockets and ends with a Mount Rushmore of Yankees lefties: Whitey Ford, Babe Ruth, Ron Guidry.

Bill Simmons, ESPN.com's "Sports Guy," has an image as the wise guy in the back of the room aiming spitballs at the teacher -- or in his case assorted sports figures, including executives at his own company.

So it is startling to see him listed as executive producer for the ambitious "30 for 30," a 15-month-long series of documentaries by A-list filmmakers to celebrate ESPN's 30th anniversary.

DALLAS -- Notes on a TV scorecard:

NBC left little question how it feels about Cowboys Stadium. In the opening segment to its telecast Sunday, the network compared the $1.15 billion building in Arlington to the Pyramids, Parthenon, Great Wall of China, Taj Mahal and Roman Colosseum.

 WASHINGTON -- It might be the high-waisted salsa outfit. Or the plaid suit he'll wear while doing the foxtrot. Or maybe it's just the fact that he'll be (ital) doing (end ital) the foxtrot.Whatever. Louie Vito knows, entering Monday night's premiere of "Dancing with the Stars," that he will be mocked by his friends and colleagues on the U.S. snowboarding team -- and possibly by millions of others watching the ABC reality show. He just doesn't care.

PHILADELPHIA -- Scott Graham spent nearly a decade calling Phillies games on radio and television. Before that he spent several season hosting a pre- and postgame show. So a couple of developments were totally predictable.

The first was that he would become close to Hall of Fame announcer Harry Kalas. The second was that he would occasionally be asked about the possibility that he'd succeed Harry the K behind the Phillies microphone someday.

Cable television's Versus network has launched an aggressive public relations campaign against DirecTV, which unceremoniously dropped Versus at the start of the month.What makes it a really big deal here is that the University of Texas' football game vs. Wyoming will blacked out to DirecTV subscribers because it's on Versus. So too are four upcoming TCU games.The squabble between the two corporate giants comes down to money. Both sides claim they are fighting for the best interests of you, the consumer.

Dave Brown's college football season opens every spring.
Brown is ESPN's vice president of college football programming. His most important job is to sit in his Bristol, Conn., office and play matchmaker for schools in search of big-time games.
"Really what I am trying to do is improve our schedule," he said Friday from Stillwater, Okla., where one of his matchups -- Georgia-Oklahoma State -- played on Saturday on ABC, part of the ESPN empire.