To anyone who has not seen the Costas NOW special which aired on HBO this past week - you've been cheated. It will not be difficult to pull it up via on-demand, or simply wait until it shows up on HBO7 later this week, but there's no substitute for sitting in front of the television and unexpectedly seeing something you can not believe is happening.

Mind you, the entire hour-and-a-half wasn't interesting. It was just a series of roundtable discussions on the state of sports media today. Sounds thrilling, right?

The first segment was a mildly interesting discussion about sports talk radio highlighted by an entertaining exchange between Michael Strahan and Chris "Mad Dog" Russo. It was a nice set up for the second segment in that you had no idea that you were about to be dragged down the rabbit-hole.

Okay, on to segment two; a discussion of the internet and the role of bloggers in sports journalism. Here's the panel: Will Leitch, editor of the website Deadspin, Buzz Bissinger, the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights, and, of course, Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards, who starts off by making it perfectly clear that he has never posted anything on the internet and, in fact, does not even know anyone who has. Nice call in rounding out the panel Bob. I've seen guys look more relaxed in the waiting room of a proctologist's office than Edwards did on that set.

Costas allows the first comment to Bissinger who slumps over the arm of his chair (it was bizarre, he was either hanging off the side of his chair, or slumped so far down that he looked milliseconds away from sliding onto the floor the entire time, it was like watching Stephen Hawking on quaaludes), turns to Leitch and says in his raspy lisp (in case you were wondering why you've never seen him on TV before) "First of all, I really think you're full of shit." He then goes on to berate Leitch as a "disgusting voice" in sports, and states that all blogging is dedicated to insult.

Aha, you say, this is where the "moderator" steps in and restores order, right? There's the twist - it turns out that Costas isn't there to keep the peace; he's there to pile on. He slides his stubby little fingers inside his jacket and produces a stack of Deadspin printouts. Hey, it's the old "good-guy turns bad" move, straight out of the WWF! I felt as if I was watching an old episode of Piper's Pit, and half expected Costas to reach over and slap Leitch out of his chair (of course, given that Costas doesn't have the reach to get to the give-a-penny, take-a-penny dish on the counter at 7-11, I wasn't that worried). To compound the hilarity, Costas starts reading posts, not columns, posts! Apparently, my Mother-in-Law knows more about the internet than Bob Costas and she just got her first ATM card like eight months ago.

Keep in mind that Leitch hasn't gotten a chance to respond this entire time beyond the occasional "Come on." and "Are you guys serious?" Then we get a clip of Michael Wilbon lamenting the fact that these bloggers have no credentials. That was the theme of the night: Credentials, credentials, where are these guys' credentials? When did it become an absolute necessity to maintain updated credentials to write anything? "I'm sorry Mr. Diaz. It's a wonderful novel, but you simply don't have the credentials for us to publish it." For the love of god, the woman who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay quit being a stripper to write the script. Do those count as credentials? If anything, it seems intuitive that you would need even less credentials to be a sportswriter. During the piece, they refer to bloggers who are Harvard grads and writers for The Office. I think Wilbon and Bissinger's main concern should be that a lot of these people might be better than they are, and have eschewed sports writing as a vocation in favor of a more reputable profession. Oh, and, note to Wilbon (who expresses disgust that younger people no longer read newspapers): You can pull most newspapers up online. Don't believe me Mike? Check it out: http://www.washingtonpost.com/. Pretty easy, right. You can even print it out if you want to.

Bissinger takes the cake, though. He attacks Leitch for saying that he would rather not be in the press box writing for the other writers, he'd prefer to be writing for actual fans. Bissinger's response? "You don't want to be in the press box, because you don't want the facts to get in the way!" Ummmm... are the facts really that different in the press box than they are in the bleachers? I guess so. Costas and Bissinger both, above all else, find fault with the blogs due to their mean-spiritedness. I found myself fantasizing that Bissinger would be flipping through his stack of Deadspin, and come across the following piece written by a vicious blogger about a (hypothetically) recently deceased NFL owner. Let's call it Al Davis and put the blogger in Los Angeles:

To know mismatched Davis was to dislike, pity him...

"It was apparent to most Davis watchers that he had a vast inferiority complex and a drinking problem. He always appeared uncomfortable in a social setting and was entirely out of his element in a football environment."

Could you imagine the reaction? This would be the gold-standard confirmation of everything they had just said. There's only one problem. That wasn't written by a blogger in LA, and it (obviously) wasn't written about Al Davis. That particular headline and quote were featured in a piece written by revered Baltimore Sun columnist John Steadman about Colts owner Bob Irsay and published the day after Irsay died. Now I believe Steadman's "credentials" hold up against Bissinger, Wilbon and Costas combined. The man wrote for the Sun for over fifty years and covered every single Superbowl until his death in 2001.

As for Costas, eff you. Until I die, my most vivid memory of you will be your commentary during an All-Star game in the late 1990s and me having to mute the TV to avoid your rants about the DH and the late start times for games and god knows whatever else you were blathering about. One topic was conspicuously absent from your rote repertoire that night though - steroids. Not a word about them. I guess you must not have known, because it would have been your responsibility as a journalist to report on it if you had. Who knows? Maybe you didn't. The thing is; everyone outside your profession with even a passing interest in the game did. Isn't that strange?