TV NOTES

Tom Fallon has passed along this note that ESPN Radio 1230 and 1320 AM is teaming up with the Red Cross to help raise money for relief efforts in Haiti. The Red Cross will have a dedicated phone line on Thursday, January 21st, for ESPN radio listeners. Anyone can call 1-888-50-HAITI to donate money to Red Cross relief efforts. The phone line is open from 6am-7pm as part of a Nassau Broadcasting company wide radiothon. Contributions can also be made thru paypal. For more information, please visit www.espnlv.com.

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Don't know if anyone saw Sunday morning's "Outside the Lines" on ESPN, but there was a feature on Baylor women's basketball freshman Brittney Griner that caught my interest.

Griner, an agile 6-foot-8 center, is going to be one of most dominant players in women's basketball history.

She's already averaging 18.9 points and 9.1 rebounds, and amazingly has 105 blocks in 17 games. The video and highlights were so compelling that the next time the Baylor women are on ESPN, I want to watch.

She's going to do for the women's game what big men Wilt, Kareem and Bill Walton did for the men's game generations ago.

But I wonder if anyone else found her voice interesting. She sounds very much like a boy. Just hearing her talk, you'd swear it was a teenage boy speaking and not a girl.

I am not suggesting anything peculiar or out of line, just wondering if anyone else agrees that she sounds much more like a boy than the average girl.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx8ktfa0nLA

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HBO's "Real Sports" returned on Tuesday night and Frank Deford delivered a scathing report on the collapse of the Dallas Cowboys' practice facility last May that really was not good for the facility's manufacturer, Allentown-based Summit Structures, nor anyone else.

The report indicated that this was a disaster waiting to happen and Summit Structures had several other buildings that also collapsed.

In fact, the Cowboys don't come out looking too good either. Despite the grandeur of Jerry World, the team's new stadium, the report indicates that the team was much more concerned about saving money than making sure the facility was safe.

Rich Behm, the Cowboys scouting assistant who was badly injured in the collapse and is now paralyzed, certainly seems to have a case against somebody.

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First Philly, and now Pittsburgh is getting an all-sports station on the FM radio dial.

Here's the report from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh is getting a new sports talk station -- the first on the FM dial.
Starting Feb. 15, Sportsradio 93.7 The Fan will launch with some pretty high-profile call letters -- KDKA-FM.

"Pittsburgh is a huge sports town. It's a city that lives for sports. This radio station was created and built for those fans," said Michael Young, senior vice president and market manager for CBS Radio Pittsburgh. "It is local in every sense of the word. The station's sole focus and mantra is going to be all sports, all the time for the fans of Pittsburgh."

The new format displaces contemporary hits station WBZW-FM (93.7), better known as B94. That format and music mix is being blended into sister station WZPT-FM (100.7), which has a hot adult contemporary format. The hybrid format will feature current hits, along with hits from the 1990s and 2000s.

At the new Sportsradio 93.7, the programming lineup will be mostly local, Young said, and will consist of sports talk and news reports.

The new sports format will also be available online, along with blogs, game scores, community groups and message boards, and on mobile devices such as the BlackBerry and iPhone.

It will compete with two other sports/talk formats on the AM dial -- WEAE-AM (1250)/ESPN Radio 1250 and WBGG-AM (970)/Fox Sports 970.