•Between the NBA All-Star game and the Super Bowl, Dallas police are expecting six figures worth of prostitutes to flood the Metroplex. Thankfully, (tonyromo) the star athletes of the city (joshhamilton) would never (dirknowitzki) get involved with women of ill repute.

•Know the name Anze Kopitar yet? You probably should. The breakout Slovenian superstar led the Kings to a dominant victory over the Stanley Cup champions, announcing their legitimacy and teaching me that Slovenia is apparently a wholly separate country from Slovakia.

•Are the Cavs even a top three team in the east? They didn't look like it last night, falling to the Bulls. Tonight will be interesting, as they travel to New York where LeBron will see his future. (Whether that future is his team dominating opponents, or losing with the Knicks depends on your point of view.

•Baseball's hot stove league kicked off in earnest, with Jeremy Hermida going to Boston, Bobby Abreu staying in Anaheim, and Jason Bay and Matt Holliday making their intentions to blow town clear. For all those teams looking for a power bat in the outfield, let me remind you that Barry Bonds is still available.

•Here's a list of the top 10 sideline reporter bloopers. Your clear number one involves double penetration, and it's not even a Vikings sideline reporter!

•Pittsburgh safety Ryan Clark is unlikely to play Monday night in Denver, because of a rare sickle-cell trait that makes exertion in high altitudes dangerous. Should the Broncos win, expect dome teams to pump a little oxygen out of their stadiums when the Steelers come to town.

•Finally, I would be remiss in shirking my duty as a conduit for your Yankee hatred. Here's a collection of celebration videos, capped off by the most touching: a man and his crazy West Indian mother.

Lampley was the first sideline reporter, along with Don Tollefson. Both were discovered in a national talent hunt through which ABC Sports hoped to find a new broadcaster to "represent the face and voice of the American college student," in Lampley's words, which is to say that, from the very beginning, the sideline reporter was foremost a matter of cosmetics. It was about market share. It was someone with nice hair and a bright smile, delivering 24 seconds of cheerful inanities into a microphone. A full three decades before Erin Andrews first walked a sideline, the job was very explicitly about, to borrow Christine Brennan's phrase, playing to the frat house.

And now, 35 years later, the first sideline reporter is wondering why the job he pioneered still exists.

"I'd get rid of it entirely," says Lampley, ABC's former "golden boy," in the words of Sports Illustrated, who was once regarded as the presumptive heir to Jim McKay. Lampley is now known mainly for his work on the Olympics and HBO's boxing broadcasts. "All the injury-related information, all the other sideline stuff, you can do that just by having somebody on the sideline who's not on the air, reporting directly to the truck. I just don't see what it adds. Unless I felt my viewership was going to go up because somebody was really good-looking, so dramatically, amazingly, dynamically good-looking. But that doesn't make any sense at all to me."

This may slowly be dawning on the lords of television sports. CBS and the NFL Network recently did away with sideline reporters, with no discernible cost to their coverage. That's a major development. If there's a symbol of sports television's unruly growth in the latter half of the 20th century, it's the sideline reporter, whose birth predates that of ESPN by just a few years. In Lampley's telling, the job grew out of the wreckage of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where new wireless technology was put to such vital use in ABC's quicksilver coverage of the Israeli hostage crisis and the subsequent massacre. Says Lampley: "Months later, they asked, 'What else could we do? Would it work in a football stadium? Could we put someone on the sidelines?'"

In 1974, Lampley was in graduate school at North Carolina, and Tollefson was an undergrad at Stanford. Both found themselves among 432 contestants for some vague ABC Sports job that lay enticingly at the other end of a gimmicky talent search, led by Dick Ebersol himself. "The idea," Lampley says, "was to have a new person on a college football telecast, someone who'd provide program material that would help differentiate college football from pro football, illuminate the unique lore and social interaction of college football."

At the time, Lampley was studying mass communications in Chapel Hill and had worked radio broadcasts of UNC football and basketball games. "I was screened out at first," he says. "They were looking for someone with zero on-air experience, someone who was definitely not a broadcast type."

Lampley nevertheless got the job, and that fall he and Tollefson were thrown immediately into the mix. "Sept. 7, 1974," Lampley says. "Tennessee-UCLA in Knoxville. "Don was all over the telecast. I was on 11 times. I think he was on even more."

He goes on: "I can tell you exactly the first time they threw to me during action. It was early in the game." The day before, he'd had a lengthy interview with Tennessee quarterback Condredge Holloway. Afterward, Holloway pulled Lampley aside and guaranteed that, the following day, he would throw for a touchdown on the Volunteers' first play from scrimmage. Says Lampley: "I'm like, 'Pardon me?' He said, 'Trust me. We spent all summer studying film. We know exactly how they bit. This is play-action to Stanley Morgan, and we'll score on the first play from scrimmage.'" On Saturday, Tennessee won the coin toss. Got the ball on the 20. Play-action to Stanley Morgan. Eighty yards. Touchdown.

"I had told the producer about it," Lampley says, "and he remembered, and amid all the hoopla, Keith [Jackson] threw to me on the sideline. I said, 'Keith, at our sitdown interview, Condredge told me he'd throw a touchdown pass on the first play of the game, etc., etc.' That was the first thing I did on camera. You don't get lucky that often.

"That game, we were all over the place. If you wanted to liberally use a sideline reporter, let them really play a role, that telecast might show how it could work. That was the height of ambition for the broadcast. Two nights later, we did Georgia Tech vs. Notre Dame in Atlanta. I think I was on three times."

From the start, the notion of sideline reporters met with resistance from all points on the compass. Coaches hated them, for obvious reasons. Sports information directors, too. "And sportswriters went berserk," Lampley recalls. "What we were doing, in effect, was threatening their sidebar stories." The issue came before the American Football Coaches Association, says Lampley, who was friendly in those days with one former AFCA president (Paul Bryant) and one future president (Darrell Royal). "The subject came up and Bryant said, 'Fuck it. I like him.' And that was the end of that."

Lampley never had any illusions about the job. "I never thought for a second that what we did was vital," he says. "What had been envisioned was that, several times during the telecast, they'd throw to the sideline, where a college-aged reporter would do something, within 24 seconds, on Herbie the mascot buffalo or the cheerleader who won homecoming queen or whatever. And Keith is a no-nonsense guy of the highest order. You can put that in bold print. Pretty early on, I realized that despite everything that had been billed about this job, if I did it as they'd originally conceived it, I was gonna be a pariah, persona non grata — to Keith, to the truck, to the viewers. Because all of this was just nonsense."

We pause here to note that Lisa Guerrero was still a quarter-century away. If, for some, she represents the nadir of sideline reporting, she was also a natural step in the evolution of a position that was defiantly stupid from its very conception. (Remember that, initially, ABC didn't want someone with actual experience.) More than anyone, more than seasoned reporters like Andrea Kremer and Armen Keteyian, Guerrero was exactly what the job had called for, from the first: a smiling, pleasantly daft cheerleader.

ABC asked Lampley to work the 1977 season, but he "screamed bloody murder" and begged off. "The next person who worked the sidelines for ABC — how shocking is this — was a young, beautiful woman," he says. It was Anne Simon, last seen around these parts getting slowly consumed by Bear Bryant's hat. "From that point forward, the bulk of what you see are young, attractive woman. Obviously, 90 percent of them are very bright, eager to become legitimate sports reporters, but it puts them immediately into an awkward position.

"When something is not utterly vital, when something is totally insignificant, it's very easy to go to the next consideration, which is the cosmetics," Lampley continues. "There's no question [producers] think the cosmetic value means something. Obviously, they think it filters into the mix that prompts more people to stay and watch a telecast. I just doubt that's the case. If my goal today was to look at a beautiful woman, I don't have to turn on the Notre Dame-USC telecast. I've got 147 channels to choose from, and I can get a better look than through a peephole darkly, in a hotel room."

It was only earlier this year when we were being inundated with Sideline Princess pics from young men showing off how closely their wrap around Ms. Andrews' waist was at the time. Dan Patrick sees your tentative four-finger grip and comes back with, not only an additional Andrews sister, but a pose that in some social settings would be characterized as a full-on cuddle party.

When it comes to Dan Patrick, we're all inadequate amateurs, it seems. He did have them on his show today, but it appears they didn't even take the time to upload the Andrews segment online. You know, what's the point? The Danwich. Yer all amateurs!

*****************

Oh, and FYI about last night's DUAN that I yanked. So I received an email that said that Bob Ryan might have some cancer issues going on, hence the weird facial transmogrification. I felt pretty horrible. But he went on Around The Horn today and said that the shit going on with his face was a dermatological procedure done for preventative skin cancer reasons and that he's all good. Great news. So it's back up.

Anyway, thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Please go buy your kids some Craque. Not in Alabama, though, because they have some serious crack problems that are not as sweet and savory.

Well ... except maybe for this. It's The Big Picture's Who Would You Do Tournament?, which, in the spirit of the new book "The Enlightened Bracketologist" — which tries to rank all human phenomena by using tournament brackets — puts the top 16 sideline reporters and gently caresses them into a full bracket.

To no one's surprise, Erin Andrews is the No. 1 seed, with Suzy Kolber at No. 2, Pam Oliver at No. 3 and Melissa Stark — our dark horse contender — at No. 4. The tournament will be going on for the next month, so if you're the type of person who has his/her head in the repulsive, loathsome gutter ... go on over and vote!

Who Would You Do Tournament? [The Big Picture]

The more I watch this, the more I laugh. That's legendary Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, just barely stopping short of saying something like, "Look, you stupid bitch." Today's coaches (for the most part) are too publicly polite to embarrass a sideline reporter by pointing out the absurdity of their questions ... The Bear had no such qualms, making for a rough day on the job for Anne Simon.

The last line is my favorite. "We're gonna try to receive the football and take it for a touchdown." That simple enough for you, sweetheart? You understand what a touchdown is? Does your little feminine brain understand that when we have the football and we make it cross the goal line, we get six points for it? Good. That's what we're going to try to do.

Now get your little chicken ass back in the kitchen, Anne Simon.

Great Moments in Sideline Reporter History [The Wizard of Odds]