Saturday, February 7th, 2009

Now that the Super Bowl is over the college basketball season is in full swing, and getting plenty of coverage. ESPN’s college basketball analyst Pat Forde joins the program to talk about the top 25 teams all the way to the mid-majors and every conference in between.

Fans, players, and analysts hang on to every Lakers, Cavaliers, and Celtics game, but the Denver Nuggets have been flying under the radar since their early season trade. In November Allen Iverson was traded to the Detroit Pistons for Chauncy Billups. Ron Schachter reports from Denver on the team that’s applied addition by subtraction.

Baseball isn’t recession proof. This is evidenced in New York as the naming rights for the Mets new ballpark have been called into question. Citi Bank will put its name to the team’s new stadium for the next 20 years for 20 million dollars each year; all this despite scrutiny from the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy and the Treasury Department. Richard Sandomir covers sports business for the New York Times and he joins Bill to discuss the questionable future of stadium naming rights.

On Tuesday, the New York court of appeals will hear a case involving a yacht club that may or may not be a sham, a few billionaires who can’t get along, and a set of rules that were written 160 years ago. Only A Game’s Karen Given reports from New York on the mess that has become the America’s Cup.

Only A Game listeners have written letters and now Bill responds.

Bill and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce discuss athletes drug use, Super Bowl reflections, and an expense account that exceeds most people’s salaries.

Soccer is known as “the beautiful game,” and it’s also a worldwide sport as proven in The Global Game: Writers on Soccer. The book compiles stories, essays, and poems all dealing with soccer. John Turnbull and Alon Raab are two of the editors of The Global Game and they join Bill to talk about the world’s most popular sport.