Larry Brown Sports

ESPN anchor Neil Everett was caught swearing on-air during a Friday night edition of SportsCenter at a time when he thought his microphone was off.

Everett could be heard saying “son of a bitch,” and “god dang it.”

After the show returned from commercial, he apologized for his language.

“My mic was open. I know better than that. I’ve been doing this long enough, and I apologize to all those who had to hear that,” he said, clearly disappointed with himself.

Nobody will hold it against Everett. He is an excellent broadcaster and, along with Stan Verrett, he forms the best SportsCenter anchor team. Let this be another lesson to current and aspiring broadcasters to never say something you shouldn’t as long as a microphone is around, because you never know when it might be on.

Last week, the hosts of ESPN’s “NFL Kickoff” show decided to try to work in as many references to “The Princess Bride” into one episode as they possibly could. Buzzfeed put together a video featuring several of the references, though host Trey Wingo says they missed a few.

Yes, that’s Wingo, Mark Schlereth, and Tedy Bruschi running as many references to the classic movie as they could imagine. The Cliffs of Insanity, storming the castle, corners of an unusual size, inconceivable, only mostly dead … it was brilliant. We asked Wingo about the inspiration for the references:

@lbsports all three of us love that movie. that was it, seriously

— trey wingo (@wingoz) November 14, 2012

Whatever the reason, the result was our pleasure. Well done fellas, well done.

I’d offer more commentary, but I was not hired for my brains.

For a while it appeared as though Stan Van Gundy was going to join ESPN this upcoming season and help an NBA Countdown crew that was the target of a ton of criticism last year. According to The Big Lead, that is no longer the plan as David Stern has allegedly stepped in and blocked Van Gundy from joining the World Wide Leader.

On Wednesday, TBL called ESPN and a spokesman told the website that the network is going in a different direction after not being able to agree on what Van Gundy’s role would be. In an interview with Dan LeBatard on The Ticket in Miami Wednesday afternoon, Van Gundy said that is a total lie.

“No one at ESPN will tell us what happened,” Van Gundy explained. “Certainly the NBA office isn’t going to tell us what happened. One of the quotes from ESPN in there – we had discussions, but couldn’t agree on a role … as usual, that’s a bunch of BS from ESPN. We actually did agree on a role, but then they came back and pulled that. That’s when we knew something was up.

“What I find fascinating … you have to give David Stern and the NBA a lot of credit … ESPN pays the league, and then the league tells them what to do. It’s more ESPN’s problem. You gotta have no balls whatsoever to pay someone hundreds of millions of dollars and let them run your business.”

Van Gundy said ESPN claiming they disagreed on his role is a “flat out lie” and that it was simply a case of them making an offer and then pulling it back. As we have seen when he goes on rants like this one and this one, Stan is one of the most outspoken figures in basketball. Stern has ESPN in his back pocket, and it’s probably that outspokenness that he is afraid of.

ESPN was so prepared for the Red Sox to make an announcement on Thursday about the future of Bobby Valentine that they had Tim Kurkjian create two television reports: one in case Valentine were fired, and the other in case the Red Sox brought him back. Even though it was like 99.99999% certain Valentine would not be back, the network wanted to make sure they were prepared for either scenario.

Unfortunately, after the Red Sox announced Valentine would not be back, SportsCenter aired the report saying he would be returning. The result was a humorous conflicting message from ESPN; the scroll on the left side of the screen read “Bobby Valentine fired,” while Kurkjian was telling us in a prerecorded report that he’d be receiving a second chance.

“Valentine is getting a second chance because he never had his A-team on the field for even one minute this season,” the report said. “Major injuries to (Carl) Crawford, Jacoby Ellsbury, Andrew Bailey and others, had Valentine juggling new lineups everyday. He’s getting a second chance because the vaunted rotation once led by Josh Beckett and Jon Lester was terrible.”

ESPN quickly realized the error and pulled the report before it was done running. This sort of mistake is nothing new in broadcasting and print, but it sure produced a funny moment.

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ESPN was apparently planning to air what they called a “character study TV feature” on Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma this weekend, only it seems they didn’t want Vilma to know about it. Whoever was in charge of the project did a lousy job of keeping it under wraps. As part of the study, an ESPN feature producer named Barry Abrams reached out to one of Vilma’s former teammates with the Jets, retired linebacker Eric Barton. As you can see from the photo below that Vilma posted on his Twitter account Wednesday night, Barton decided to share the letter with his buddy.

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ABC/ESPN play-by-play announcer Brent Musburger was censored for a few seconds during the third quarter of the Alabama-Michigan telecast on Saturday. There was plenty of speculation about what Musburger said to get muted by the production team, and now we have our answer.

Via Deadspin, we’ve learned that Musburger said to analyst Kirk Herbstreit, “Did I miss something, or did you not piss an SEC team to play for a national championship?”

Both announcers laughed when Musburger misspoke and said “piss” instead of “pick,” which he termed “a Freudian slip, by the way.”

ABC may have given more attention to the issue by muting the line when all it amounted to was a minor misspeak. That’s probably why they released the original video to ensure Musburger wasn’t being dirty.

Below is the censored version of the video:

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We make plenty of mistakes here at LBS, so I don’t mean to pick on ESPN too heavily with this. But … you have to admit the timing and severity of this mistake was pretty amusing. LeBron James had just gone off for 45 points in Game 6 for the Heat against the Celtics, and a graphic at the bottom of the ESPN screen said James still played for Cleveland. As if Cavs fans don’t already have enough, you have to tease them like that? And you really think Heat fans want their top player confused for being on a different team? No way.

Chest bump to Jimmy Traina