Sports & Other Stuff

There is a house style here, and it belongs to old local television rather than sports radio. Sports and Other Stuff opens with four voices introducing themselves in sequence from Sport Weasel Central. Luggs, J-Boy, T-Dog and Smalls. Sometimes one of them is missing, described as being on assignment, and the remaining three carry it. The joke of the day comes first. Riddles about pennies, lettuce, a clown at the x-ray machine. The panel is instructed to sharpen pencils and put on thinking caps, then produces answers that are close but wrong, which appears to be the intended outcome. Only after that does the football arrive. Recent episodes sit deep in draft season, and the arguments are specific: whether Jeremiah Love ends up on a rebuilding team that wastes his best years, whether Arvel Reese projects as a Micah Parsons type at the next level, which pick the Giants use and on whom. Smalls would rather see a player go to New York than Tennessee and says so. Free agency gets the same treatment, with Carolina's additions of Jalen Phillips and Devin Lloyd weighed against Tampa in the division. League business is not ignored either. The panel walks through the NFL and Referees Association agreement expiring at the end of May and reports that replacement officials are already being sought, with someone noting they have all seen this before. History surfaces constantly. The XFL comes up mainly as the origin of the spider camera, which they agree was the league's real legacy. Sports of Yesteryear is a standing segment where Luggs reads out old results with the numbers attached: San Francisco over Iowa in 1956 behind Bill Russell, Magic Johnson's triple-double against Penn State in 1979, Martina Navratilova's third straight WTA Tour Championship in 1985, Rob Gronkowski's retirement in 2019. Between all of that the show wanders freely. Smalls reports from a bridge painted in West Virginia colors. He explains he was in Savannah investigating where Jimmy Hoffa is supposedly buried. Someone offers that Savannah held the country's first St. Patrick's Day parade. The closing beat is the most committed bit of all: a mock advertisement for a Saturday matinee at 1 p.m., admission twenty bucks, promising a Vin Diesel marathon or a wrestling event or an Office rerun day with paper giveaways. Then a sign-off borrowed from an older era of broadcasting, and the line about Channels 8 and 16 that ends every episode. Thirty-odd minutes, one per week, no urgency about any of it.