Sports Intoxication

Sports Intoxication is a Cincinnati sports show built on a panel conversation that sounds recorded more than produced. Sentences start with hedges, stall, restart and stretch into a take before someone else cuts in with a stat, a correction or a joke. That looseness is the point. Cincinnati teams give the talk its center. On Xavier basketball the analysis is a fan's, but a serious one: a preseason projection of second in the Big East is judged too high, and the one goal named for the season is getting back to the NCAA tournament after four years without a bid. The standard is 30 years of the panel's own fandom, dating back to when they were kids. The Reds come up as a rebuild in progress, with talk of young pitching needing starts, Winker's patience at the plate, and the hope of taking a step forward while Joey Votto can still play. The Bengals get a mention too, if only as a joke about the panel taking its own bye week. Then there are the event shows. Episode titles such as 'Bowl Preview', 'NCAA tourney preview' and 'Masters Preview' track the big fixtures of the sports year. In the bowl excerpt, Matt Bessler reads the introduction, Kevin Isaacson introduces himself as host of the normal edition, and the group promises gambling picks on 40 bowl games at speed; a Texas Bowl line with Texas A&M favored by five and a half over Oklahoma State splits the room. The bracket excerpt has picks made live while the panel writes off a St. John's game it has on as garbage. Doubt gets said out loud. One bracket starts with an admission that none of the picks feel good, and a Duke-over-UVA title pick is called a terrible idea but left standing because it is already on tape. Corrections happen live as well, as when a Michigan State aside becomes a back-and-forth over whether the Spartans actually made the playoff. The same game prompts a detour: it was a bad one, the panel agrees, but the wedding that night was great. Golf gets its own fandom, with a winner picked and Tiger's round admired by a self-described fan boy. The humor is dry and mostly aimed inward: ad spots are offered with one download guaranteed, the show pitches itself as cheap social media marketing, and the 'Masters Preview' introduction jokes that Sox's Cabin would never be allowed near Butler Cabin. By the panel's own account, it has become close to a bourbon podcast. What a listener gets is Cincinnati fandom and betting-line picks in the same conversation, with the second-guessing left in.