SportsCenter: Da-Da-Da, Da-da-huh?

Where have you gone Lee Leonard, Bill Patrick and Tim Brando? Stuart Scott and his station should turn his lonely eye to you.

America's gathering place for sports seems to fit better on MTV than ESPN.

The cornerstone show from the network that revolutionized the way we follow sports has turned into an hour-long (if we're lucky), mistake-infested, frat-fest anchored by two clowns tripping over each other trying to become the next Craig Kilborn.

Yeah. Remember him?

Even Dan Patrick has removed himself from further lampooning on the network that was once led by respectable names such as Bob Ley and Greg Gumbel. SportsCenter eventually morphed ("evolved" would be complimentary) into the "jockocracy" Howard Cosell warned us Monday Night Football could someday become.

It's ironic how ABC/ESPN even ruined that, too.

Just watch an hour and listen to Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt trade hip-hop rhymes for recycled one-liners from movies they assume everyone has seen (assuming everyone is under 30).

Scott once referred to Jay-Z as "Jigga" while introducing the world premiere of the rapper's music video during a MNF halftime show and feels the need to "pound" the athletes he interviews and call them his "dogg." (Meanwhile, Don Imus remains unemployed for uttering "Nappy Headed Hos".) Van Pelt super-saturates his scripts with lines from Borat, Flight of the Conchords, and South Park like a giddy frosh trying to impress a sorority gal while struggling to keep his bifocals out of his beer.

Sports are a great thing. But they aren't all things to all people. Somehow, ESPN has taken the opposite approach thus, feeling the need to infotain everybody, shooing away viewers to ESPNEWS if they only want news and highlights.

Wasn't that SportsCenter's original purpose?

Keith Olberman may have been a pompous jackass to work with, but when the cameras were on, the guy's lines were crisp, sly and clever. Dan Patrick didn't need to create nicknames for each athlete so people would like him. The days of Mike Tirico and John Saunders are only relived on Outside the Lines with Bob Ley, or the 6 pm SportsCenter through Jay Harris and Brian Kinney.

We rarely see Trey Wingo, Linda Cohn, or Karl Ravech on SportsCenter anymore because they have too much credibility. Imagine that.

Even Mike Greenberg has been transformed from a serious anchor and radio show personality to a metrosexual caricature for Mike Golic to feed off in-between Nutri-System snacks. ESPN does recognize radio is strictly entertainment and has enough (dare say) savvy to keep Greenberg off SportsCenter while focusing his efforts toward the Mike and Mike simulcast on ESPN2, thus avoiding burnout.

They should take the same approach with Scott, Van Pelt, Neil Everett and John Anderson so they don't burn-out the audience. But when you rotate several anchors who all weave similar lines into a sportscast, nobody realizes there's supposed to be a difference because there really isn't one.

The network occasionally breaks the cycle when Kenny Mayne makes a cameo in the air-chair. That's only because his humor comes in small doses. However, when he fills-in on Sunday nights, he can't utter two sentences without sandwiching-in sarcasm.

Then there's this new "Who's Now?" segment, the ridiculous ESPY Awards and those overdone SportsCenter commercials. These are ESPN's way of rubbing elbows with the athletes and keeping them happy enough to do appearances with the network, while making shows like NFL Live and Baseball Tonight play the heavy, investigating Michael Vick's kennel club and Barry Bonds' (alleged) steroid use.

"Who's Now?" is a segment hosted by Scott and discusses two athletes each day pit against each other by fans voting in a mock-tournament to see who the most popular athlete is in America. His panel: Jessica Biel, Kevin James and Mike Greenberg. Why? The actors have a movie heavily promoted by the network, while ESPN2 tanked with Cold Pizza and really needs the Mike and Mike simulcast to create numbers, while competing with repeats produced by their chest-bumping colleagues on the mothership. None of them have anything real to add to the competition, which itself isn't real anyway.

Before we realize it, ESPN will abandon scores, highlights and games like MTV has exchanged videos for reality TV. We'll get 24 hours of World Series of Poker, Celebrity Softball and Stuart Scott hosting the ESPN incarnation of Cribs.

Better hope your cable company adds NFL Network real soon.