Comedian Caliendo wants to spread comedy across ESPN

• On new show, Caliendo sees target-rich environment with ESPN personalities to impersonate.
• Sports world loses two personalities this week with passing of Beano Cook and Alex Karras.
• As NHL lockout continues, fledgling network scrambles for live sports programming.

Anybody who doesn't think sports studio shows should have comedy segments is forgetting the alternative.

Segments from comedians such as Frank Caliendo, who'll debut on ESPN's NFL studio Sunday, cut a minute or two from the regular yak. What a loss! That precious time could have been spent on more ruminations over some team's new Cover 2 wrinkles. Or spent on Tim Tebow.

At ESPN, Caliendo hopes to do his impersonations on shows for sports beyond football: "Absolutely. It opens you up to a lot more material. We want to start where people know me and go from there."

He sees a target-rich environment. Like impersonating ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd — "he confirms everything he's just said, so he's always in agreement with himself" — or the professional contrarian Skip Bayless — "if I could chisel my cheeks."

Caliendo is associated with the NFL because he was on Fox's show from 2003 through last season. ESPN added its own ex-NFL official as a rules analyst after Fox had done that, and ESPN is again is showing the sincerest form of flattery by adding a comedian to its NFL pregame show.

Caliendo, who was replaced on Fox's pregame by comedian Rob Riggle, says he was not fired. "Fox and I both felt I'd done everything I could there. How many times can you call Terry Bradshaw dumb, which I don't believe anyway because he's a good guy and funny. It's a bad joke, but I felt we had to do it sometimes."

That's because he got "a little lazy the last few years." Like going back to the well too often for his trademark John Madden impersonation: "By the millionth time I've done John Madden, it's not even John Madden anymore. It's an alien."

Caliendo says he pitched ESPN on doing comedy about various sports. ESPN wanted to start with football. After Sunday's live appearance, he'll do taped segments. He won't make game picks or necessarily appear weekly — "I don't want to force anything or do the same old stuff from Fox."

Sunday, Caliendo will debut his Chris Berman and Jon Gruden. He says Gruden has an obvious defining characteristic: "He's so positive about everything. A piano could fall on his head and he'd say, 'My sinuses are clear. I'm so glad that piano fell on my head.' "

And don't worry if comedians like Caliendo keep popping up on sports yak.

There'll still be plenty of time left for the inescapable cliches.

Sad news: ESPN's college football analyst Beano Cook was a distinctive on-air personality. That was no act.

Cook, who died in his sleep Wednesday night in Pittsburgh at age 81, was as idiosyncratic off-air as he was on-air. He didn't take himself too seriously, although his network TV career dated to 1977, when he started at CBS Sports as a publicist before going to ABC — and going on-air — in 1982 and joining ESPN in 1985. Despite less frequent on-air appearances, Cook would have been impossible to forget even if he hadn't still gone by his childhood nickname.

He also understood the big picture, like with this 1992 prediction: "You'll never have a 16-team playoff in college football. The most that could happen would be four teams in the next century. After that, I'm dead. So who cares?"

Gifford on Karras: "I'm running out of former teammates both from TV and football," says Frank Gifford. His latest loss is Alex Karras, the ex-Detroit Lion who worked with Gifford and Howard Cosell on ABC's Monday Night Football from 1974 to 1976. Karras died Wednesday at 77.

"Quite frankly, Alex wasn't terribly interested in the game itself (on MNF), although I hate to put it that way," says Gifford. "Karras and Don Meredith were alot alike. They loved the game when they played, but it was kind of a joke to them afterwards. Alex was a fun and intelligent guy. He saw the humor in football, but it wasn't that important in his life."

So how did Karras, who got his MNF gig after famously punching out a horse in the 1974 film Blazing Saddles, mesh with the famously self-serious Cosell? "He was really good with Howard," Gifford says. "He had a flat humor that Howard just didn't get."

By the way, Gifford, 82, is not one to fret about football possibly causing long-term health problems: "It's never going to be a safe game, for God's sake. ... In society now, it's, 'Let's protect everybody.' But that takes all the fun out of it, and I'm not just talking about football."

Selling nostalgia: With the NHL lockout creating plenty of upcoming vacancies on the NBC Sports Network -- the cable channel had planned to air about 90 regular-season games -- the cable channel will try to sell nostalgia: NBC's London Olympic coverage.

Starting Monday, NBCSN debut Return to London prime-time series to replace NHL games on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays through at least Nov. 6 -- and air a prime-time special on the 2012 Paralympics on Oct. 24.

Comcast owns both NBC and the NHL Philadelphia Flyers. But whatever its management take on the lockout, its TV goal seems obvious -- end the lockout ASAP. NBC Sports president Jon Miller notes that will live events are "the lifeblood of sports channels, but there's not much live programming readily available" -- since most is locked up in long-term contracts like NBCSN's own 10-year NHL deal.

While NBCSN drew big ratings boost during its Olympic coverage, its post-Games ratings fell below what it drew before it was rebranded (from being OLN) in January -- and ratings have stayed low. But it's not like NHL regular-season action was going to be an obvious savior: NBCSN's NHL games averaged 0.2% of cable/satellite TV homes last year.

Miller notes NBCSN made a recent run at MLB cable TV rights -- which stayed with TBS -- and will "take a look" at the up-for-grabs Big East Conference rights. And as NBCSN tries to bolster its event coverage, he says, "not having an Olympic (ratings) bounce was unfortunate, but not necessarily surprising." He preaches patience: "I remind people that ESPN is 33, while NBCSN is nine months old. The change takes time. The slow and steady will win this race."

Albeit not necessarily in our lifetimes.