Several readers have asked me to opine on the . . . the . . . hell I don’t know what to call it that unfolded last night on HBO’s Costas Now between Buzz Bissinger and Deadspin’s Will Leitch.

My first thought was to say nothing, since it had zilch to do with football, apart from the presence of a talking bump on a log that looked a lot like Browns receiver Braylon Edwards.  Still, when I saw the FanHouse post from our own MDS on Wednesday morning, I was immediately fascinated, and I couldn’t quit thinking about what might have gone down on the clip that inevitably would be posted on YouTube.   

I didn’t see the segment live, because I don’t have HBO.  (Jason Whitlock accuses me in this regard of being cheap, with a rather colorful and multisyllabic noun following it.)  MDS sent me the clip on Wednesday afternoon, and I was prepared to be riveted. 

And to enjoy it for free.

Riveted I wasn’t.  It was ten minutes of relatively boring television, primarily since Mr. Bissinger was as intent on cramming his points down Leitch’s throat as a schoolyard bully who’s too busy twisting arms to realize that the kid with the inhaler and the orthopedic shoes is screaming “Uncle” at the top of his lungs.

The great irony in Bissinger’s remarks is that he proclaimed that blogs are “dedicated to cruelty,” right after telling Leitch that he’s “full of shit,” in a tone that reeked of cruelty.

In all, Bissinger’s rant was harder to follow than the airing of grievances at Festivus dinner.  Indeed, at one point we half expected Bissinger to say to Leitch, “You couldn’t smooth a silk sheet if you had a hot date with a babe.”

Throughout the encounter, Leitch was appropriately respectful and deferential to the highly accomplished (even if temporarily insane) Bissinger, but since Costas was giving Bissinger the same wide berth that Roy (or was it Siegfried?) should have given to Montecore, Leitch had no chance to make any real points in response to the at times nonsensical assault.

When Costas did speak, he revealed his own ignorance about the concept of comments, and about the business realities of the Internet.  More and more web sites — both blogs and “real” media portals — now allow readers to add their own comments to stories, for various reasons.  The process of commenting enhances the connection with the readers, by giving them a voice that is heard as instantaneously as the content they now receive via their computers.  (And Sprint phones.)  Also, it makes the web site more marketable to advertisers by increasing the amount of time that readers spend there as they review and compose comments, and by pumping up page views as the readers return to see the new comments left in direct response to their own.

Perhaps the most inaccurate statement of the entire segment came from Costas himself, when he suggested that the tone of reader comments is a reflection of the mean-spirited posts to which they are attached.  Costas apparently has never perused the comments posted following stories appearing on newspaper web sites.  Even when the article or the column reflects nary a hint of nastiness, the comments often are eye-poppingly harsh.  (Just ask John Tomase.)

We’ve yet to address the role of Braylon Edwards in all of this.  If he was playing the innocent bystander, he played it extremely well.  Our guess is that someone involved in the production didn’t really think Edwards was right for the segment, but since the folks at CAA presumably lured Edwards away from Lamont Smith with promises of increasing his non-football exposure, CAA was likely very persistent in its efforts to squeeze Braylon into the fray.  And so they got Edwards on HBO, even if the “fit” in this specific instance was roughly comparable to sprinkling cinnamon on a corn dog.

The end result was, for the most part, barely watchable, which gave folks without a prior opinion on the matter little or no information on which to form one.  But some viewers surely came away thinking that this is yet another example of a situation in which those who have enjoyed a long-term monopoly suddenly have lost all control over their playground.

It’s like the day they let the caddies swim at the Country Club, only the riff-raff are now doing cannonballs into the deep end on a continuous basis.  And the “professional” writers and talking heads who used to worry exclusively about each other now have to peer over their shoulders for names and faces they might not yet recognize, as all the while the old guard would prefer to drain the entire pool in order to remove the periodic Baby Ruth that one of us “bloggers” drops into the water, intentionally or otherwise.