Spanning the globe to give you the constant variety of sports media…

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Regis: Richard Sandomir of the New York Times has an amusing piece on one of new/old faces of Fox Sports 1.

“Some people are wondering why I took this job,” Mr. Philbin said. “But I’m a fan.”

Mr. Philbin is not working solo on “Crowd.” Nor is he part of a duo, as he was on “Live!” This time he has five partners.

“I can sit back and relax,” he said during the interview at his house. “I killed myself all those years. Let them do it.”

Fox Sports 1: Will Leitch at Sports on Earth on the battleground for the new network.

You need sports, which is why Fox Sports 1 is being taken more seriously. Fox has more sports rights than NBC does, with college football and the NFL and UFC and the World Cup and tons more things that can both be shown and promoted on Fox Sports 1. Right now, NBC only has the NFL, sort of, the Premier League, the Tour de France and some college basketball. (They’re working on it.) ESPN, of course, has a little bit of everything. That’s where these wars will be won: Not in studios, or newsrooms, or branding meetings. They’ll be won in corporate boardrooms where negotiations over exclusive rights are held. That’s all that matters.

Jay Bilas: The ESPN basketball analyst tells Richard Deitsch of SI.com how his Twitter expose led to the NCAA changing its policy on selling athlete’s jersey.

SI.com: Clearly, when they shut the search capability down, this generated into something larger. What was your reaction when that happened?

Bilas: Disbelief. Jeremy Fowler of CBS Sports texted me about the shutdown. At first, I wasn’t certain why it was disabled, but it seemed a reaction to the Twitter activity. I thought it was an overreaction, and I was very surprised. If not for the NCAA disabling its search function, this whole thing would have been of interest primarily on Twitter and some opinion pieces. But the search shutdown was like an admission of wrongdoing by the NCAA, and everything blew up from there. I believe the NCAA itself really raised the temperature of this, and made it such a big deal. With the exception of the interest of the player search capability, this wasn’t that big of a deal until the search capability was disabled. Someone tweeted how to get around the disabling using the URL, and I had a bit of a lark tweeting out a few more searches.

NCAA: Michael Bradley at the National Sports Journalism Center says the media has to keep up the pressure on the NCAA.

It’s incumbent on the media to keep pressure on schools and especially the NCAA, so that fans will understand that this is no longer a case of a player’s not having money to buy a pizza. With hundreds of millions in play, the players deserve more.

Bilas proved that last week.

Clay Travis: How did he go from being a lawyer to launching a site to landing a role on Fox Sports 1’s new college football pregame show. From Darren Heitner of Forbes.

QB Nonsense index: Mike Tanier on Sports on Earth has an amusing piece on the overkill of analysis for NFL quarterbacks. He comes up with his own system.

He writes:

No athletes generate as much mass-media nonsense as NFL quarterbacks (well, maybe with the exception of one or two). When they win, it is news. But when they lose, lose badly, lose comically, get paid, get married, get a new tattoo or do anything else besides study playbooks and lift weights, it’s bigger news. An entire industry is fueled by quarterback nonsense: ESPN would go dark during the day without it, sports radio would not be a three-station-per-market phenomenon, and the blogosphere would go back to being a concentrate-on-your-jobosphere. Also, I would still be teaching algebra.

Veterans in LA: Helene Elliott in the Los Angeles has a piece on the long-time announcers in LA, including Vin Scully, who still are going strong.

APSE: Gerry Ahern writes about his year as APSE president. He writes:

Important progress has been made regarding access and credential issues with the leagues and teams we cover. I am looking forward to serving on a working group along with John Cherwa and Tim Franklin of APSE, the NCAA, conference commissioners and COSIDA to sort through issues and represent our interests proactively. We hope to head off problems and protect our ability to practice sports journalism at its highest level.

APSE 2: New president Tim Stephens says the association is needed more than ever.

It has often been said that journalism is at a crossroads, but I believe that time has past. The road has been chosen, the path is clear even if it is not easy to navigate, and now is the time for action in the new digital landscape. Now, more than ever, is the time for this organization to be the standard bearer for quality sports journalism and the source of leadership, mentorship and inspiration.  Whether that leadership is evident in the pages of a newspaper or within the video of a complex multimedia presentation or even within the 140 characters of a reporter’s tweet, APSE must be that beacon of light in a crowded sea of content.

Podcasts:

Awful Announcing: Rebecca Lowe, who will anchor NBC SN’s coverage of the Premier League.

Sports Media Weekly: Bill Wanger talks about new Fox Sports 1 and David Berson of CBS Sports Network.

Sports-Casters: Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports, and Brett Martin, author, GQ Magazine.