Yesterday, Mike Missanelli and Jason Myrtetus, whose skins I have crawled beneath and laid eggs, got all bent out of shape over my continuous criticism of sports talk radio W-L day and threw down the gauntlet at my bony feet:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/318800730″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Mike: “And we’ve already been ripped. Sports talk radio as an industry has already been ripped by a blog.”

Jason: “Well, you can mention, Kyle. He thinks it’s stupid.”

Mike: “Yeah, Crossing Broad blog.”

Jason: “Because we’ll do W’s and L’s. I’d like to invite him in to do an hour by himself.”

Mike: “Yeah for sure. If he’s gonna criticize sports talk radio, you would think that he has all the answers.”

Jason: “We can just plop him in the chair and take a break.”

Mike: “Yeah, we’ll take him break. I invite him in. It’s a personal invitation to the guy who runs Crossing Broad.”

Jason: “And until you accept the invitation and the challenge, shut up!”

I wasn’t listening live but saw a bunch of Tweets after the fact. Jason and I tweeted back and forth about it, and I assumed it was a joke:

Surely he can’t be serious.

I spoke to Jason last night and he was very much serious. “Mike’s gonna set you up to fail,” was how it was pitched to me. Tempting. But I agreed to do it under the condition that after Mike introduces the show, and presumably after he takes a shot at me for being a blogger and calls me something that he feels is demeaning, like “skippy,” I would get to program the hour as I saw fit. I said I would play by the rules, not get the station any FCC violations, and even agreed not to call Josh Innes and Tony Bruno as guests. Jason said he’d call me back later to confirm.

An hour later, I had a text saying it was tentatively approved but that they needed to run it by their corporate overlords, a response from which likely wouldn’t come until this morning. At that point, I said I’d do it, but not today. I live over an hour away and have a site to run, and I’m not just gonna drive down there on short notice and do something I’ve never done before without preparing. After all, if I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna beat Mike’s ratings.

So that’s where we stand. The challenge has been issued. The challenge has been accepted. And now we wait for someone in a suit to weigh the risk-reward of giving a blogger an hour of airtime… because what happens if I beat Mike and get a 10 share?