More, more, more (how'd you like it)?

It missed the cut for this week's Daily News media column, but it's not worth missing if you got a few minutes:

-- If you happened to watch all of the 3 p.m. “SportsCenter� on ESPN Wednesday, it wasn’t one big commercial for LeBron James and Nike. It just seemed that way. The shoe company bought out the entire ad inventory for that hour-long show to introduce the Nike Air Zoom LeBron IV shoe with spots featuring “The LeBrons� characters that the Cleveland Cavaliers star plays. ESPN even helped accommodate the Nike sponsorship by cutting back commercial time from 15 minutes to 10, eliminating many of its own promos for other shows, and on its “Shootaround� pregame show at 4 p.m., it had Jeremy Schaap “interview� with “The LeBrons,� leading into the Cavaliers-Wizards live contest. As a story in the New York Times points out, it’s not coincidental that the ad agency employed by the ESPN networks, Wieden & Kennedy, also handles the Nike campaign. Ed Erhardt, president at ESPN/ABC Sports customer marketing and sales, also told the New York Times that “SportsCenter� would probably offer itself up to a lone sponsor “probably every five or six weeks.�

-- If that sends more light bulbs popping up over the heads of execs looking for new ways to milk sponsors, Philips Electronics has done something similar to Nike, but went even more overboard. It has bought all the national ad time on TBS' coverage Saturday of the Texas-Oklahoma State game and says it will give some of the time back to the network so that it can do more replays and interviews in the stands and other things that make it look like good corporate partners. What is this, the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation?

-- ESPN officials say they haven’t decided past this weekend whether college football analyst Brian Kinchen will cover any more games this season. He has been taken off the air this weekend after comments made during an ESPNU telecast of the Northern Illinois-Iowa game, where he said talked about how receivers need to catch the ball with their hands “because they are tender and can caress the ball.� He followed with a pause and added: “That’s kind of gay, but then …� Kinchen apologized for the “extremely poor choice of words.�

-- Dan Fouts, Tim Brandt and Jack Arute do the UCLA-Cal contest for ABC (Channel 7, Saturday at 5 p.m.), which goes to 19 percent of the country (the rest are split between Oklahoma-Texas A&M and Virginia Tech-Miami) while USC-Stanford on FSN West (Saturday, 4 p.m.) has Barry Tompkins , Petros Papadakis and Jim Watson.

-- Eric Wynalda, the former U.S. men’s soccer star who was more than critical of the coaching job that Bruce Arena did for the national team during the recent World Cup, now has to work with the guy as a broadcast partner. ESPN2’s coverage of the MLS Eastern Conference championship game between New England and D.C. United (Sunday, 1 p.m.) pairs up Wynalda with Arena, who was eventually fired by U.S. soccer and hired by the MLS’ New York Red Bulls, on the telecast where the below-average Dave O’Brien does play-by-play.

-- An animated series based on the "Mike and Mike" ESPN Radio show starts a new run on ESPN.com starting Wednesday. The show, "Off-Mikes," actually won something called the Sports Emmy Award for Achievement in Content for Non-Traditional Delivery Platform. Uh, OK. The series takes banter between Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic and puts it into cartoon form. You can check it out for yourself at the ESPN site.

-- Andy Furman, a longtime Cincinnati sports radio commentator, was fired by WLW-AM nearly a month after calling Bengals wide receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh a "racist" during the station's weeknight sports talk show, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Furman made the comments on Oct. 6, one day after Houshmandzadeh failed to make a scheduled, paid appearance on the show. During the show, Furman accused Houshmandzadeh of calling him a "punk-ass white boy," according to the newspaper.
Houshmandzadeh denied making that remark. "I told him, 'Andy Furman, you can f--- yourself.' That's the bottom line. And he twisted it into all whatever he wants to," Houshmandzadeh said. "What he did was wrong ... This time he took it too far."

-- NBCSports.com suppliments NBC's coverage of Sunday's New York City Marathon (a one-hour highlight show delayed at 10:30 a.m.) by showing live online coverage beginning at 6:30 a.m. They're charging $4.99 for this first-of-its-kind coverage of the event, which includes cameras that will follow Lance Armstrong from a motorcycle traveling nearby (the first 30 minutes of his run will be free, by golly). A "Runner-Cam" lets viewers enter a bib number of any of the 37,000 race participants and get notification of where they are as they approach and pass three established camera spots along the course -- the half-way point, the 30K point and the finish line.

-- And finally, Aerosmith has been recruited by ESPN and ABC to do a revised version of "Back in the Saddle" to go with their NASCAR coverage for 2007. The aging band is supposed to be recording a live version of that song during its concert Nov. 4 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. ESPN and ABC do the last 17 races of the Nextel Cup Series starting next year. If only ESPN coulda talked them into a live version of "Dude Looks Like A Lady." Not that it'd fit into the NASCAR coverage. We just dig hearing it any time, any where.