And apparently we never will. Stephen A. Smith’s unpopular show is no longer, so he will have to take his shouting elsewhere. Kudos to the kids at Deadspin and, even more so, Synergy of Sports for digging up the tidbit about the cancellation, which we can’t seem to find anywhere else. It’s theirs and theirs alone! No word yet on whether this means an end to typing columns on a BlackBerry. We certainly hope not, and even more than that, we hope sometime 2 C A col. wrt in textspeak.

In fact, the whole Monday Night Football crew is coming back, according to Newsday. That’s right, a whole ‘nother season of awkward banter and news about Tony Kornheiser’s fantasy football team. Sorry, we thought it was a great idea at first, but Kornheiser’s first year was, in a word, disappointing. He has potential. Maybe year two will be different. Maybe Tony will stab Theismann in the leg with a fork to liven things up. We’ll just have to see.

Nice grab by thebiglead.com in finding this interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal about the shortcomings of the NFL Network this year. The network had hoped its package of NFL games would boost demand and help it jump into 70 million homes. Instead, it’s at 40 million, according to the article. Honestly, don’t we get enough NFL on Sunday and Monday? The best part about pro football is the exclusivity. You can’t just see it whenever you want like baseball, basketball or hockey. The Thursday NFL Network games seem to water down the overall product. They’re almost forgotten, with the exception of that hideous Vikings/Packers game. The best part, though: “Oddly, the closest the NFL came to stoking a public demand for its programming was among fans of a college team, Rutgers University, which (played) Kansas State in (Thursday’s) Texas Bowl.”

You’ll notice the Gophers/Texas Tech Insight Bowl matchup, scheduled to air on the NFL Network tonight, did not generate similar castle-storming.

There’s nothing we like better than a good war of words between media members. OK, there are many things we like better. But still, thebiglead.com might be onto something in its tracking of the whole “who had the Allen Iverson story first” battle. ESPN has been known to claim it had a story first when it really didn’t, which is downright shameful. They might have even done it to this newspaper before. We’re not sayin’, we’re just sayin’. But here’s a question: Does anyone out there really care who had it first, or is that just an imaginary scoreboard that journalists keep? And would it bug you to know that ESPN said it had a story first if really it was a paper in Philadelphia that had it first? It bugs the hell out of us, but what about you?