TVSquad

For nearly 20 years, NFL football fans could feast on Sunday games and then flip on ESPN for a complete wrap up on NFL Prime Time hosted primarily by Chris "Boomer" Berman and Tom Jackson. It was a staple. Then in 2005, ESPN dropped the show.

Now, it's coming back (sort of) and in addition to Boomer and Jackson, John Saunders will be rejoining them, re-creating the original troika from 1987. The essence of NFL Prime Time will be found in the 7 p.m. ET edition of SportsCenter each Sunday during football season. Essentially, they'll be doing what they did on NFL Prime Time, and in doing so, they'll be taking aim at NBC's Football Night in America, that network's lead in show for the Sunday Night Football game.

This should be really interesting because the NBC pre-game show is like Thanksgiving dinner -- loaded with stuffing. They have stars galore, including the recently added, former ESPN stalwart, Dan Patrick.

Nielsen has begun adding college students that live in dorms to its ratings. In practical terms, this means 130 drunk kids will represent about 2 million actual college students, and have an inordinately large influence on the television landscape.

The Wall Street Journal reports that some shows have seen a huge boost due to the inclusion of college student data. Comedy Central's Drawn Together saw a 60% ratings bump, which shouldn't be surprising, as I'm not sure anyone who doesn't live in a dorm watches the show. Of course, Nielsen estimated 163,000 additional people were watching the show based on the fact that 12 of those college kids were tuning in. Yay statistical sampling.

Nielsen gathers data from about 10,000 households and uses that data to extrapolate what the rest of the country is watching. While that system probably worked pretty well thirty years ago when there were only a handful of networks, viewers today can choose from hundreds of different channels.

Congress has $20 million for an Iraq victory party. I thought this was a joke. It's not. However, the ice sculpture of Saddam pissing freedom was a joke. Unfortunate.

"Operation: Just Clause": Holy crap. Bush quote on the Iraq War... "When this chapter of history will be written... it's going to be a comma -- the Iraqis voted, comma, and the United States of America understood that Iraq was a central front in the war on terror and helped this young democracy flourish." A comma? Jon was spot-on... The Spanish Inquisition can be summed up as just a tilde (~). The extended montage of Bush trying to explain what is job is... that was brilliant. Jon seemed genuinely pissed about it. Oh, and the part when he plugged the cord into an avocado was great.