Espn Television Network

Amid expectations of more coverage for West Coast games and events, ESPN is officially opening its 12,300-square-foot studio today in the middle of LA Live, the entertainment complex across the street from Staples Center. The national sports cable network, which reaches 98 million viewers, will broadcast its first 10 p.m. "SportsCenter" from the new studio tonight.

The Lakers just won the NBA championship, and Southern California celebrated with them, with hundreds of thousands of fans attracted to a parade down Figueroa Street and a rally at the Coliseum. There are 122 teams in the NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball. And Southern California is home to the team that best repays its fans "for all the emotion, money and time fans invest," according to an ESPN study to be unveiled today. That team is not the Lakers. That team is the Angels.

Another member of the media is in trouble for making inappropriate comments. Only this time, the subject was religion. ESPN personality Dana Jacobson has been disciplined for remarks she made Jan. 11 at a roast in Atlantic City, N.J., for colleagues Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic. According to various reports, Jacobson appeared inebriated when she used an expletive in connection with Notre Dame, Touchdown Jesus and Jesus.

ESPN, looking beyond the middle-aged male sports fan, will unveil a new digital strategy Wednesday aimed at the Dogtown crowd. The move seeks to establish online what the Walt Disney Co.-owned cable channel did more than a decade ago in television when it created the X Games, a twice-yearly competition of assorted nonteam, untraditional sports events catering to extreme sports enthusiasts.

It was an announcement that would have left even Howard Cosell speechless, had he still been around. "Monday Night Football," a national phenomenon that became the longest-running sports program to ever hit prime time, the show that enabled ABC to finally break the CBS-NBC stranglehold on the NFL, was going to basic cable. Of course Cosell lived in an era when the three networks ruled the airwaves and cable was a novelty for those with too much free time.

The 30-second spot is called "Dunk." Its script has six lines of dialogue, the cast numbers seven. It stars Sparks forward Candace Parker -- she of NCAA title, Olympic gold medal, WNBA rookie of the year and MVP all-in-one-year fame. Thirty seconds, and with that, she joined what is mostly an athletic boys club whose members include ESPN "SportsCenter" anchors, athletes and a roly poly, furry, fruity collection of college mascots tapped to do wickedly funny "SportsCenter" promo spots.

There have been about 325 ESPN "SportsCenter" commercials made. They have featured hundreds of star athletes -- from Gordie Howe to Andy Roddick, from Kobe Bryant to Drew Brees. Some have been kind of funny, some laugh-out-loud funny. And after going through all 325, there wasn't one that wasn't at least a little funny. Here are my top five (actually, six) favorites: 1. Made in 2006, it features the Manning family.

Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN cable-television network must face allegations by Quiksilver Inc. that a logo for its international X Games sports competition violates a clothing trademark, a federal judge ruled. The emblem for ESPN's extreme-sports franchise is "strikingly similar" to the stylized X used by Quiksilver in the Gen X line of clothing, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said in a Friday ruling in New York.

Games in the 76 Classic college basketball tournament will be played in front of thousands of empty seats at the Anaheim Convention Center today through Sunday, and the event organizers couldn't care less. They didn't mind last week, either, when only a few thousand spectators dotted a 19,000-seat arena in Puerto Rico for another of their tournaments.

The jockeying to bring the most popular names from TV and the Web to cellphones produced another exclusive deal Thursday with Verizon Wireless nabbing a multiyear agreement to offer ESPN's flashy feed of sports scores, newscasts and video highlights on the tiny screen. The plan to revive Mobile ESPN -- initially born as a full-blown cellphone company that would compete with big players such as Verizon before Burbank-based Walt Disney Co.