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If you haven’t seen the interview, it’s on ESPN Motion this morning. Essentially Stuart Scott gets a chance to walk him through the world’s most scripted questions. Seriously, folks, it makes Desperate Housewives look like improv. This after Mike’s original statement didn’t exactly make any sense, prompting the good folks at Deadspin to bust out the junior detective kit.

Irvin had already clarified the original statement with AP earlier in the day, one of the several AP releases pertinent to the Irvin affair that ESPN had neglected to publish. Among the issues is whether or not by referring to his brother’s pipe (a story that bounced from The Smoking Gun to the Dallas Morning News to AP without attribution, as noticed by Deadspin) he meant one of his actual siblings or, as he claims, his “brother” in the man-love sense. And really, Stuart Scott’s questions about Irvin’s earlier drug issues didn’t really scratch the surface, as AP also investigated, and as ESPN also failed to run.

By virtue of being a hugely iconoclastic and infamous analyst – and not to mention an ex-Cowboy - Irvin has just set himself up to be publicly mocked. Which, we have to admit, is not without entertainment value; in this very space we have called Irvin “every maniacal NFL ego’s favorite spokesperson.”

But let’s not ignore the real issue here: when did ESPN find out about the arrest, and how did the network respond? After all, the arrest happened on Friday, and Irvin was on Sunday NFL Countdown just like normal. If Irvin or the police reported to Bristol on Friday or Saturday, then ESPN presumably had no intention of ever breaking the story. Given the low standard for sports celebrity controversy, and given Irvin’s recent short-listing for the Hall of Fame, Irvin’s arrest is real news regardless of his ESPN employment status, which means that ESPN was likely sitting on real news instead of risking a blemish on its image.

The alternative is that ESPN found out when we did: in-between the Sunday NFL Countdown airing and Sunday night’s SportsCenter, when Irvin’s statement was originally presented. In this case, we have to wonder about the network’s internal response; even though ESPN has obviously given him a free pass on PR blowback, at least on its flagship programs, will there be internal sanctions or discipline for his failure to disclose a potentially scandalous and nonetheless newsworthy story?

Regardless of which of these two alternatives is correct, ESPN has clearly attempted to orchestrate coverage of the story in oversimplified and unsatisfactory directions. While sportswriters seem mostly concerned with gauging Irvin’s character and evaluating his honesty and sobriety, the more important issue is about ESPN’s relationship to the jockocrats that increasingly populate its airwaves.

This Just In: Sportswriters Like Football

Lots of Colts, lots of Lions, lots of Bears, and a few Seahawks in for fun. After the Colts knocked of Pittsburgh in last night’s highly-anticipated contest, we are increasingly converting writers to the undefeated bandwagon. SMW would like to congratulate Lincoln Kennedy for being, as far as we know, its first member, way back before the Patriots game. Jaworski officially boarded the bandwagon yesterday on PTI, and Salisbury isn’t too far behind. On SportsCenter, he’s holding out for the Seattle game as a loss, but with increasing uncertainty.

And now that Mariucci has been canned, the chorus has turned its ire towards Lions President Matt Millen. In the Free-Press, Drew Sharp rekindled this one yesterday before the firing, and after the announcement, Wojciechowski wrote on ESPN.com that they had fired the wrong person. He’s far from alone; Attner at The Sporting News had made the same point, and Jim Rome “burned” on Millen yesterday aternoon. In Detroit this morning, Millen is not the most popular figure, perhaps no longer one of the five people Mitch Albom meets in Heaven.

We’re all getting on the Bears bandwagon as well. It’s all well and good for Wilbon to claim to have been on for forty-odd years, but the truth is that it wasn’t so long ago that the Chicago papers were eating their own. This Morrissey column sound familiar? How about this one from Mike Downey? Anyway, all that’s just quaint history, ‘cause now we have just spent most of Sunday comparing them with their ’85 progenitors. This time, Morrissey is okay with it, and points out that the comparisons spell “R-E-V-E-N-U-E” for ’85 vets looking to cash in on licensing. And, of course, whether or not they line up with the ’85 team, this year’s Bears are big on defense, and, yesterday morning, they were all over front pages and home pages.

This Isn’t The Sex Van You’re Looking For

So yesterday we teased out talking a bit about ESPN Mobile. That story is going back on the shelf a bit as we wait for more feedback on the product launch keep tracking down the juicy inside numbers we know you love to crunch.

So instead, we present a totally different kind of “mobile”: the Mobile Sex Van. The Tribune reports this morning that Tampa police made a number of arrests outside Sunday’s Bears-Bucs game in relation to a “mobile strip club” being run inside a motor home parked in the Raymond James Stadium parking lot.

WSTP Channel 10 in Tampa Bay interviewed Bill Todd of the TB Police Department, who reported that undercover officers paid a $20 entrance fee that allowed entrance to the van, where other customers were purchasing drinks and lap dances ($20 for topless, $40 for full nudity).

According to Todd, "the other thing the undercover officers observed, that at least two of the young ladies while engaged in lap dancing began performing oral sex for the patrons, on each other, not on the customers."

As the Tribune justly points out, this year’s Vikings/Bucs game was played in Minneapolis. I guess if you can’t find a mobile sex van, sometimes you just have to, well, have a big sex party cruise.

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