Because of its tie-in with the Super Bowl, NBC affiliate KVOA Channel 4 sent news anchor Tom McNamara and sports director Ryan Recker to Tampa Bay to provide a week's worth of coverage as the Arizona Cardinals made their first appearance in the extravaganza. KOLD Channel 13 shipped sports editor Damien Alameda to Tampa as well, but his stories took on the look of Chamber of Commerce features as opposed to anything directly related to the game. KGUN Channel 9 did not send a representative to Tampa Bay.

Compare that with the way KVOA (and, to a lesser degree, news-sharing partner KMSB Channel 11) covered ABC's Extreme Makeover taping. KVOA's coverage was close to that of KGUN, which has the natural tie-in due to its ABC affiliation. KOLD chose not to mention the event.

There are hardliners who view any mention of something tied to the competition as off-limits, the thought process being: Why give the competition free advertising? The other school of thought: Let's not neglect an event of some significance just because it's tied to someone else.

I tend to land in the latter camp. This issue pops up from time to time when I talk sports on KCUB AM 1290. KCUB is a Fox Sports affiliate, yet the better-known sports network is ESPN, which has a local affiliation with KFFN AM 1490. It's not out of the realm of possibility that a sports story could break while we're live, and it's a pretty strong possibility the best source for that information will come from ESPN. So what would we do? Ignore the story? Ignore that we're watching it develop on the only network probably providing information? Do we ignore all that stuff about the better-known college-basketball expert who says Arizona is on the bubble?

A former local sports-talk-show host at KCUB would refer to ESPN as "that other four-letter network." I have to admit that occasionally, I've bypassed a mention of the competition, for some reason, at the spur of the moment, giving in to some old-school mentality that creeps up from the depths of my broadcast-school training. And almost always, upon further review, I think something like, "Boy, that sounded stupid."

I'm all about the cheap plug for the station cutting the check, but if I'm making some vague reference about, say, the worldwide leader in sports, it's probably safe to assume the listener--likely a sports fan who has a working knowledge of this ESPN thing--can figure out what's going on. To me, that's worse than pretending it doesn't exist.