BY JOHN FAY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Sunday night sports shows in town will be dominated by Bengals talk again this week.
Channel 9's Sports of All Sorts and Channel 12's Sports Authority both have segments during which the Bengals are discussed. At least this week, Paul Justin's first start is a new topic.
"We're playing it by ear," said Channel 12's Brad Johansen. "We already planned to have (golfer) Steve Flesch on this week. They announce the PGA rookie of the year Monday, and he's a lock." Johansen also has had high school football and hockey talk the past couple of weeks.
"We've established that people don't want a half hour of Bengals when they lose," he said.
Channel 9's John Popovich is giving the Bengals until Dec. 1, then he plans to go with college basketball unless something drastic happens.
"(The Bengals are) at home the next three weeks," he said, "and there's a good chance the games won't be on TV, so it will be a chance to show highlights."
Channel 5, which has a 15-minute "Bengals Blitz" show as part of its regular Sunday night news, and Channel 19's Sports Wrap are built around highlights and features so it's easy to show more clips of something else.
BIG ONE:
The Colerain-St. Xavier game will be on WLW-AM (700). It's the first time the Big One has done a high school game in 10 years.
"It's No. 1 vs. No. 2 and we're committed to high school sports," operations director Bill Cunningham said.
ON THE BENGALS:
CBS is sending Bill Macatee and John Dockery to cover the Bengals-Baltimore game Sunday. They normally don't do NFL games, but CBS has seven games to cover Sunday so they were pressed into service.
MORE BENGALS:
Marc Amazon, host of the 4 to 6 p.m. slot on HOMER-AM (1360), has used his show this week to help organize a protest against Mike Brown for Sunday's game.
The first rule of talk radio seems to be "You can never go to far." But in this case, I think Amazon has gone too far. Having someone organizing a protest on the show is fine. Organizing a protest isn't. That's not to say that Amazon and Co. don't have a point, but the media ought to cover the news, not make it.
And I wonder whether a Jacor station would give time to a similar Reds protest.
LARKIN DEBUT:
The new Xavier radio team of Joe Sunderman and Byron Larkin sounded good in its debut on WLW.
Larkin made some good points, although you could tell he's new to the role. He needs to make his points quicker.
Sunderman was terrific. If you just tuned in, you would never know that he is an ex-player and part-time broadcaster. He's smooth, tells you where the ball is, constantly gives you the score and how much time is remaining.
