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Late yesterday ESPN ran a story about a rap recording that had surfaced “on the Web” during the day. The recording, which spends a very long time promising a shitload of sexual prowess “on the 7th floor,” is one of those things that should offend just about everbody, but especially … well … everybody. Why is it on ESPN? Well, it was reportedly made by a group of University of Miami football players, two years ago, and some of the musicians are apparently still on the team.

To ESPN, which threw it in the “breaking news” box on its home page, this smells of controversy and the decline of moral values in America. Pat Forde wrote the accompanying opinion piece, in one of the week’s more unfortunate sportswriting gigs, saying that “Miami football, which has made significant strides over the years to eradicate the old image of Thug U., needed this like Doc Gooden needs another trip to central booking.”

Hard to predict where the story will go. More than twelve hours since ESPN reported it, the controversy-to-be is still not getting traction on other national sports pages. So instead of making some crass analysis about sportswriting and moralism in America …

More interesting for our present purposes is the question: how did the story get to Bristol? The recording was first “released” on Kyle Munzenreider’s Miamity Blog on Tuesday afternoon. Kyle’s a student at U-M and lives on the sixth floor of the building whose seventh floor is obviously such a den of ill repute (at least in its own imagination).

Deadspin, which reads all blogs – seriously, how? – went with the story shortly thereafter. On Wednesday, some intrepid ESPN Nation chatroom participant – Mike from Boston – asked U-M Wide Receiver Sinorice Moss about the song (without saying anything about its subject matter), and Deadspin ran with that as well.

In light of the Deadspin piece, and especially in light of the eventual ESPN story, Munzenreider’s blog has been overwhelmed, as have various sources for internet downloads (operable as of the publication of this piece, but get ‘em while it’s hot). The main posting is on Putfile, though various posters to the Miamity blog have listed alternate web hosts, and the Digest has no doubt that somewhere in P2P-land the 7th floor is already gettin’ busy.

So, before we move on, let’s just say one big hoorah for online sports journalism. As Deadspin was with the Matt Lawton steroids piece – it’s great to trace your own involvement in bringing stories to national attention. Everyone’s hit counters go way up, and it makes ESPN look just a little bit more ridiculous than it already did. Which, we have to admit, takes some doing.

Can we also ban talking about steroids?

The morning after the morning after, there’s still some hovering talk in the air about the MLBPA bowing to the Selig/Congress doubleteam. Now, the Digest covered this yesterday in some detail, but it’s worth pointing out that an additional twenty-four hours of reflecting has made a few sportswriters more concerned about the long-term impact of the policy.

In her morning column, Sally Jenkins says that the steroids policy will only work on anybody dumb enough to get caught in the first place: “[the policy is] merely a deterrent -- and a crude one, at that. The problem is, there's little evidence that deterrents consistently work on elite athletes, who tend to be risk-takers by definition, and whose outlook and habits are formed long before they sign contracts.”

In a similarly scatching column, Ray Ratto points out that Selig’s tough stance on the current list of banned substances is mostly smoke and mirrors; real enforcement means bringing the current list up to par with more realistic standards (the Olympic one being a starting point): “The smart juicers are using the vast amount of undetectables that the backstairs chemists are whipping up, and the testing for that is either (a) expensive or (b) unavailable. It's an endless cat-and-mouse game that will end only when some great/famous player drops dead during a game when there's no way to hide the evidence.”

Ratto makes the point that McCain and Bunning just simply realized they had won as much of a political victory as they were likely to get with baseball. So perhaps it’s no surprise that now they are moving on, turning their attention to other sports. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see to what extent the media resonates with today’s report in The Washington Post that the new NFL CBA negotiations are stalling, and that next season very well may be played without a salary cap. The NFL has so long been the media’s example of how sports leagues should be run – especially with documented league management troubles in the NBA, MLB, and, well, that thing called the NHL, it will be curious to see whether or not media outlets jump on the NFL-is-doomed bandwagon. Because that whole salary cap thing, yeah, that’s big news. Big, big, big, big news.

In Actual Sports

The Knicks and Lakers played last night. No small amount of interest, the whole Larry Brown v. Phil Jackson thing. In fact, it was so interesting, Tony & Mike brought it up yesterday just to talk about how uninteresting it was. Thanks guys.

This morning, after the Lakers’ victory, Phil Taylor at SI says that there’s no coaching genius here, just talent. That Kobe guy.

Tomorrow: We gave the Los Angeles GM story the day off, but it’ll be back. Also: ESPN has themselves a whole ‘nother bad boy wide receiver interview, but let’s give them a day to overreport it before we get involved. It’s just not fun otherwise.