• As we suspected might happen, Pres. Obama and Mitt Romney will give interviews tonight during the Eagles/Saints Monday Night Football game. The New York Times reports ESPN’s Chris Berman will interview Obama and Romney at halftime.

• In USA Today today, Michael Wolff asks ‘Who Will Buy Al Gore’s Current TV?’ and sums up: “Current TV is quite a disaster area, never able to clarify its mission, style or business reason for being.”

• Neil Cavuto on election anchoring and his battle with MS: “The biggest thing I try to do is get engaged in my work and not let what I clearly feel in my body slow me down. I’m well aware of the fatigue issue.”

You thought it was over, didn’t you?

You thought after the final debate, you would be able to turn off the political pandering from Mitt Romney and President Obama. Never again would politicians force you to miss “The Voice” or “How I Met Your Mother.” Well, it isn’t over yet.

According to Sports Business Daily‘s John Ourand, the Romney and Obama camps want to make one final push for voters during ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” game on November 5. You may recall that in 2008, Obama and challenger John McCain appeared in interviews during halftime of the “MNF” game before election day (pictured above).

ESPN has not made a final decision yet, but appears likely to have its longtime NFL studio host Chris Berman interview President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney during halftime of the Eagles-Saints game Nov. 5, according to Vince Doria, ESPN’s senior vice president and director of news. The campaigns also have expressed an interest in appearing on ESPN’s “Mike and Mike” morning radio show.

“We’ve been approached and are strongly considering doing it again,” Doria said. “If we do those, we will try to treat the candidates in a fair manner and try to find some questions that have a sports connection but have a substance to them.”

The first two Presidential debates were ratings juggernauts, utterly dominating the TV landscape the nights they aired (it helps that it was on nearly a dozen channels). Tonight is the third and final Presidential debate, but while the anticipation may be high, the competition for eyeballs will be fierce.

Two big sporting events are on tap for tonight, “Monday Night Football” on ESPN, and game seven of the MLB National League Championship Game on Fox. The baseball game will result in one fewer broadcast network covering the debate, and fans of the Cardinals, Giants, Lions or Bears will have to choose between watching Obama and Romney spar yet again, or watching their favorite team take home an important win.

Brian Stelter writes in the NY Times that ESPN is trying to convince viewers that they don’t have to choose, they can watch both!

A pair of ads that started appearing on ESPN on Saturday promote the WatchESPN app, which allows subscribers of certain cable companies to watch ESPN on phones and computers at no additional charge.

“This debate will be settled on the gridiron,” one of the ads says, after referencing the verbal battle that will be taking place on a stage in Boca Raton, Fla. The ad concludes, “Don’t miss a minute of Monday Night Football on ESPN, the WatchESPN app and WatchESPN.com.”

Barstool Sports editor David Portnoy pulled photos of Tom Brady‘s naked 20-month-old son off his website after a visit from Massachusetts state police, who told him the pictures were causing unnecessary headaches for a lot of people. A lot of people had called to complain, and the state attorney general’s office opened a preliminary investigation as to whether posting the pictures constituted child exploitation.

“I’ve never had cops knock on my door for anything in my life,” Portnoy said in an interview with the Boston Globe yesterday. “That is not a coincidence that this is one of the first times I’ve taken something down.”

The pictures showed the baby frolicking on the beach with his mother, Gisele Bundchen. Portnoy did not take the photos, but drew fire for his decision to post them alongside commentary about the size of the boy’s genitalia. That didn’t sit well with many readers, nor with the producer at WEEI radio station in Boston. Portnoy had been a regular on-air guest, but was dropped after posting the pictures.

“What he did was completely irresponsible,” Jason Wolfe, the station’s vice president of programming, wrote on Twitter. “It’s not about whether he was allowed to do it or not. It’s about common decency. And he showed none.”

Lawyers said Portnoy would probably not face child pornography charges because he did not appear to have “lascivious intent” in posting the picture. Some said that posting the images may have violated the child’s privacy rights, depending on where the photographs were taken.

ESPN and the West Coast Conference agreed to a eight-year rights agreement extension for men’s and women’s basktball coverage and Olympic sports content across multiple platforms.

As part of the deal, which runs through the 2018-19 academic year, the WCC will receive a minimum of 48 men’s basketball appearances, including conference games and home non-conference games on ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNU. Over the past three seasons, ESPN has televised an average of 38 WCC men’s basketball appearances. Read more

Kevin Baumer at the Sports Page echoes an argument we’ve been making for months: 2011 is the NHL’s big chance.

The league couldn’t have picked a better time to find success. With labor situations uncertain for the NBA and NFL in 2011, the NHL may have the rare opportunity to corner the professional sports market from the end of baseball season in late fall until spring training next year.

Things will only continue to improve. The Winter Classic was a huge success. A new TV rights deal is in the works, and there’s a new content head. Labor strife is a thing of the past.

If the NHL can’t take advantage of the momentum – and the possible loss of part or all of the NBA and/or NFL seasons – there’s no hope for the sport in America anyway.

The Onion is known for its outlandish stories and cheeky headlines. So when you see a title such as “Why does most modern sports broadcasting suck so hard?,” you expect to read, laugh, throwaway.

Except then you realize the column is in the AV Club section. You read closer. You nod. You smile. Noel Murray understands:

Watching a Saturday baseball game on Fox is like tuning into an especially lame daytime talk show, interrupted by the occasional play in the field. This most recent Thanksgiving weekend, while gorging on football, I grew exhausted by the frequent breaks to show the broadcast crews of the respective games enjoying their holiday dinners. A little bit of that is fine, but on one game, an announcer went to commercial teasing more footage of the staff’s touch-football outing. (Because surely that’s why we we were all watching.)

The writer spends almost 2,000 words ripping apart the current state of sports broadcasting, landing blow after blow. It’s probably not anything you haven’t heard before, but it’s an excellent collection of points that combine to demonstrate the dumbing down, broadcasters-as-stars phenomenon.

We have but one quibble. Read more

In case you wondered what story on The NFL Today had host James Brown all choked up, you can watch it for yourself.

The story is about Carolyn Henry Glasby, the mother of former NFL wide receiver Chris Henry. She made the decision to donate his organs following his death, helping a slew of individuals in the process.

Hockey fans, rejoice!

Tonight marks the debut of NHL Overtime on Versus, an hour-long live hockey show. Airing Monday-Thursday, NHL Overtime will feature game highlights, recaps and expert analysis ranging from the NHL to the minor leagues.

“This season we have more NHL coverage than ever before and adding a nightly show provides an additional platform for the network to super-serve hockey fans the way only Versus can,” said Marc Fein, Executive Vice President of Programming, Production and Business Operations for Versus. “This is also a natural evolution in our relationship with the NHL, which has continued to reach new milestones each season.” Read more

Have you ever wondered what it’s like sitting in The Black Hole at an Oakland Raiders game?

David White of the San Francisco Chronicle sat in Section 103 at the Oakland-Alameda Country Coliseum on Sunday for the Raiders 23-20 overtime victory over the Kansas City Chiefs – and managed to survive:

The fans were so wild, they had to be waved quiet when the Raiders were on offense. They screamed the Chiefs into two false starts inside their 20. They forced Kansas City into using hand signals at the line of scrimmage. A Chiefs third down wasn’t a third down if eardrums weren’t ruptured. Read more