Eight months after KCTV-5 greatly reduced its relationship with Metro Sports — the Time Warner Cable-owned channel and production house that allowed KCTV-5 to eliminate its sports staff in 2003 — the CBS affiliate is joining forces with Kansas City's top-rated sports talk radio station.

810 WHB personalities will appear on camera providing reporting and analysis for the two big sports that KCTV-5 covers throughout the year: Chiefs football and Jayhawks basketball. (Sister station KSMO-TV just grabbed the rights to KU games.)

"The amount of people that we've got doing sports work for us this year, the personalities, it's unbelievable," said KCTV-KSMO general manager Kirk Black this morning. "We've got all these 810 guys but also Trent Green on the locker room show, Kevin Harlan, Dave Armstrong ... we've got an unbelievable stable of well known sports personalities working for us on our Chiefs stuff — for someone that doesn't have a daily sports department. This really helps us bridge that gap without having Metro."

Metro Sports will continue to produce Chiefs preseason games for KCTV-5. The nightly sports report won't be returning, probably ever, but Black guarantees you will see a lot of Kevin Kietzman, Soren Petro, "Border Patrol" dudes, etc., on camera.

"Pretty much all of them are going to be on camera for analysis and co-hosting," Black said. "We talked a lot about that," said Black. "We had a lot of conversations about migrating radio personalities to television and making them TV ready. But that's why every show that we do will have a TV host and they'll be assisting that radio host. We're not going to ask any of them to be the main host of any of the shows."

The deal is for just one year. "It's a new venture for both us," said Black. "Let's get through March Madness of next year and see how it went."