The Worldwide Leader Should Be Better Than This

by Ian Casselberry on Apr 6, 2007 2:17 PM EDT in Detroit Tigers News

I was going to link to something The Big Lead posted about Curtis Granderson and his blog's migration to ESPN.com, but the juvenile bully tactics of ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd have unfortunately knocked TBL off-line.

If you're not familiar with the story, The Wayne Fontes Experience has more (as do Deadspin, Every Day Should Be Saturday, and The Fanhouse. (Thanks for the links, Big Al.) Basically, what happened is this: For whatever reason, Cowherd thought it would be funny to flex some nationally syndicated radio muscle and use his audience to take down some unsuspecting (yet apparently successful enough to attract such attention) blog. So he asked his listeners to flood TBL with hits, thus crashing the server and taking the site down (where it still remains as I write this).

This is the same guy, mind you, who previously thought blogs were so insignificant that he could just swipe their material without proper credit or attribution.

Why would Cowherd do such a thing? I have no idea, but a conspiracy theory is gnawing at me. The Big Lead has aired out a lot of ESPN's dirty laundry in its year-plus of existence, so maybe someone at the network decided to strike back. So who on the ESPN Radio roster would abide such a request? Mike & Mike and Dan Patrick still have some professional and journalistic integrity to them, and likely wouldn't accommodate such a fool's errand.

Hey! Let's go with our resident corporate stooge, the one who will do anything we ask him to do. Get Cowherd! He already hates blogs for exposing him as an unoriginal fraud and complete tool. Tell him this will get his show on in a couple of large markets that won't put it on the air. And if he hesitates, threaten to take away that three-minute segment of his that we bury at the end of the Sunday morning SportsCenter.

Again, I don't know why Cowherd would do this, other than to try and defend the corporate interests and big markets he frequently sucks up to from something they all don't really comprehend, and therefore feel threatened by. And I don't know what possible recourse could cause his radio show as much damage as he caused The Big Lead. Probably the most productive counter-measure is to follow The M Zone's lead and express your disapproval to those who can actually do something about it. Either leave a comment for ESPN's ombudsman or e-mail presidents of ESPN and ABC Radio.

▪▪ george.bodenheimer (at) espn (dot) com

▪▪ john.hare (at) abc (dot) com

It's bad enough Cowherd gets away with 15 hours of lame radio a week. He shouldn't be able to get away with being a bully and an @$$hole, too.