Friday, August 12, 2005

The Edwards Thing Again

Now that we've finally figured out if the Cleveland Browns' top draft pick, Braylon Edwards, is signed or not (he is), we have some Brownie Points to make. For one, we spotted WEWS/5's "Chevy Network Dealers Sports Wrap Brought To You By Pepsi And In Part By Cintas" (OK, so we're kidding about everything after "Wrap", though we're pretty sure Cintas sponsors the Browns training camp this year.). And before WEWS sports director Chris Miller told us that Braylon Edwards had officially signed, a graphic told us that Channel 5 was, in big letters, "THE INDEPENDENT HOME OF BROWNS FANS". Shades of, say, WKNR/850, "The Voice of the Fan"!

The "OFFICIAL HOME OF THE BROWNS", WOIO/19, did manage to get the Edwards news conference on the air, live. For whatever reason, the OTHER "official" Browns broadcast partner, WTAM/1100 ("The AM Home of the Browns"), did NOT have the news conference on the air, though it's traditionally an event they would carry. On afternoon motormouth Mike Trivisonno's show, sports director Mike Snyder noted that they were "technically unable" to carry the news conference.

OMW observes that perhaps WTAM was down some equipment, given their assistance to their sister cluster in North Canton, which was hit by a lightning strike a few days ago. And they were doing one of those "Triv in Your Backyard" remotes...though OMW wonders why they don't have a dedicated line to Browns HQ in Berea. Or, perhaps, they could have an agreement with WOIO/19 to simply air 19's audio? Or, perhaps, Browns beat reporter Andre Knott could have held a cell phone up to Braylon? It worked for a Philadelphia sports radio reporter, who used the same technique to feed live audio of Terrell Owens' bizarre outside-his-house press conference the other day...

We didn't hear WKNR running the press conference, either. But we don't expect much from a station that used to air phone-line-fed sound bites from Berea two days after a Butch Davis press conference.

And oh, if you were a Browns fan trying to find out the latest on their high-profile holdout, being near a radio wasn't the place to be in general. With WTAM's Trivisonno wrapped up in his remote, and a long discussion on police chases (something we'd normally encourage from the station!), it was tough to find out the latest until the signing was actually imminent. WKNR was no better, with afternoon driver Kenny Roda spending a long amount of time talking about some odd basketball tournament at Gund Arena this weekend. It took a snippet in one of Ryan McNaughton's sports updates - delayed by an interminable amount of commercials until about 4 minutes after the hour - to learn that Edwards' agent was stuck in bad weather in Chicago, which caused the delay in the actual signing.

By the way, for all the complaining about WTAM's huge commercial load in PM drive, WKNR is not any better. It sounded like they were trying to match their larger competitor spot for spot!

Oh, and when Triv did get around to talking about it, he verbally sparred (playfully) with his foil, Mike Snyder, about whether there was an agreement or not, repeatedly, on and on... then complained that we wouldn't BE in the dark if Carmen Policy was still around. Oh, brother.

We would have much appreciated Triv, Roda, Snyder or someone mentioning the status of the situation once every so often, like, maybe, coming out of a break? We know we ask a lot here at OMW...but our standards are high.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Triv says we wouldn't be in the dark if Policy was still around? Of course we would, but that's because we would still be trying to figure out what he was saying. Carmen Policy, the only man who takes 15 minutes to answer a simple question like "what's your first name," and still not answer it.