Who needs 10½ minutes of Lino when you've got Notre Dame basketball!

Once again, Lino & Co. get shafted by the University of Notre Dame, as the last 10½ minutes of yesterday's show got pre-empted for the ND basketball pregame show. But never fear, live listeners… we sacrificed a good night's sleep to record and bring you what you missed. Enjoy!

Some highlights:

• Lino & crew mock their pre-emption (gee, what'd you expect?)
• They attempt to find a listener who has the pregame on the radio to hear what it sounds like. They find one, but the pregame is in commercial.
• They repeat their previous announcement of a live late night lock-in show, date TBD.
• They go through e-mails and calls about Lino and online dating.

One more note: looking at the men's basketball schedule for Notre Dame, there are four more games that will cut off the last segment of TCGS: February 11th, 17th & 24th, and March 3rd. Lino Watch is committed to bringing you the recordings of the missed segments of all of these shows so that you can stay in bed when 2:45am ET rolls around.

Conference championship picks recap:Pickin' on off the old man

Let's give credit where credit is due. How many 40-year-olds have you ever seen play quarterback like Brett Favre has played this season? Good grief, he's only two years older than Lino! We can only wish we remain that athletic when we get to that age.

That being said, any quarterback can only take so much during a game, and Favre finally hit his limit when he threw the ball (and the game) right to the Saints at the end of the 4th quarter. Then New Orleans wins the OT coin toss and kicks a 40 yard field goal to send Favre home for the winter. It's not going to be a matter of if Lino talks about this game, but rather how long he'll talk about it. We predict that at least one whole hour will be devoted to this.

Oh yeah... the Colts won against the Jets, too.

So, here's how the picks ended up:

LINO: A gutsy move being the only one who picked the Vikings to win it. It almost made you a winner this week. Almost.

MAUREEN: Don't laugh at her pick... the Jets were in that game faaaaar longer than we thought they'd ever be. Unfortunately for her, the game lasts 60 minutes, not 30.

FATHER ROB KEIGHRON: And unfortunately for Father Rob, Maureen made his picks for him, which mirrored her own. That almost shouldn't count. Almost... shoulda been around to make your own picks instead of leaving it to Lino & Co.

LOU & MARK HART: Both went the safe route with the No. 1 seeds, and it paid off. Barely, but it did.

So Lou and Mark both went 2-for-2, with their tie to be broken at some point in the future, likely next week right before the Super Bowl picks are made. One more round of picks to go, folks. See ya in about 10 days or so.

Phoning it in on MLK day

No live TCGS today due to the MLK holiday, which is completely expected and plenty fine with us. But today's classic best-of orginated way back on... January 14th. Yep, last Thursday. It's so fresh, we can even give you the show rundown:

• Hour 1
• Opening thoughts: Fr. Rob's bowling league, ex-seminarian brother; dressing up for a fancy dinner.
  
• Question: Is dressing up for Mass important?
• Hour 2
• Football picks
• Scathergories (Catholic version of Scattergories)
• Hour 3
• More info about Mardi Gras broadcast in New Orleans
• The World Beyond Lino
• Original Rembrandt found in bathroom at CUA
  
• Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien saga
• Haiti disaster
• Random Thankfulness
• Coaxing Fr. Rob to come to New Orleans
• Father Dave

The TCGS crew: doing their usual bang-up job giving us "best-of's" we really can look forward to.

And to top it all off, there is a LIVE Notre Dame basketball game tonight @ 7:00pm ET, which likely means that the last 15 minutes of the "best-of" will be pre-empted. So don't expect to hear the last couple of bullets from the rundown above. Gotta love it!

Football picks update: Divisional playoffs

UPDATE 1/17 @ 4:05PM ET: Did you see what the old man did to the Cowboys today? Did you lose count of how many times Tony Romo turned over the ball? We certainly did. Congratulations to Lino, who wins this week's picks contest by going 3-for-3 with one game to play. He also wins his side bet with Lou, who must now call him "boss" during one entire show. Full recap of this weekend later tonight or early tomorrow.

UPDATE 1/16 @ 11:15pm ET: With the Ravens loss to the Colts, Maureen joins the losers bracket. This leaves Lino & Lou to fight it out for supremacy this week, and since they both picked the Chargers to win their game, it all comes down to the Cowboys-Vikings matchup: Lino can win as long as Brett Favre & Co. win against the Cowboys tomorrow. Should the Cowboys win, Lino & Lou will end up tied, winner TBD later.

Raise your hand if any of you thought that the Saints didn't have a prayer after the Cardinals' 70-yard touchdown run on the game's first play. Yeah, we thought so. 45 points later the Saints emerge victorious and Kurt Warner's gonna need some serious painkillers after getting hit like that.

What does that mean for the football picks contest? Well, based on everyone's picks:

1. Father Rob and Mark Hart are officially declared losers... there's no way they can win or tie. (And they couldn't win individually anyway since they both had identical picks.)
2. Lou cannot win this week. He can still end up in a tie with Lino when all is said and done, but only if his beloved Cowboys win tomorrow.
3. Lino and Maureen are the only two players left who can win outright. But Maureen can only win if the Ravens win tonight; otherwise she joins the loser's bracket.

So right now Lino is in the driver's seat: statistically he has a 75% chance of either winning or tying. Lou is next with a 38% chance, followed by Maureen with a 25% chance. We'll update again tonight after the Ravens-Colts game ends.

Football picks update: Wild-card playoffs

UPDATE 1/16 @ 8:45pm ET: With Arizona's OT win over the Packers, Lou, Maureen and Mark Hart each end up going 2-for-4. Tiebreaker will take place sometime later this week (ostensibly on Thursday). Lino and Father Rob end up going 1-for-4. It could've been much worse for the gambling Father... had Green Bay pulled out an overtime win, the contest's winningest contestant would've gone an embarassing 0-for-4 this week. Still, one correct pick is embarassing enough.

Two of this weekend's four games are in the books, and while we can't tell you who won this week's picks contest, we can tell you who won't win this week. Here's how: there are two games left, which means that there are four possible combinations of winners. So we added up how everyone would do under each scenario, and the results show that there's no possible way that either Lino or Father Rob can win at this point. So they are declared losers for this week.

As for the others… since everybody picked the Patriots to win their game on Sunday, the contest can only end two ways:

• If Green Bay wins: Lou wins this week outright
  
• If Arizona wins: Lou, Maureen & Mark Hart go to a tiebreaker later in the week

The Green Bay/Arizona game is the later of the two, so it'll be 8:00pm ET or so before we learn the final outcome. Until tomorrow…

You can miss a lot in 11 minutes

Well, Notre Dame basketball struck again during a live broadcast of TCGS… only this time Lino prepped us for it. (And so did Elaine over at CatholicGuyShow.com… let's give credit where credit is due.) So yet again, 11 minutes of TCGS got cut out of the live broadcast.

Now something tells us that not a lot of you got up at 2:43am ET to catch those final minutes during the overnight replay. Not to worry… Lino Watch has you covered! We braved the bogeyman to record those last few minutes and bring them to you in the audio slideshow below. (We started about 30 seconds before the actual point where it went to BB.) And boy, did you miss some good stuff! We're going to spoil it below the slideshow, so read on if you don't have time to listen. But if you want to hear it from the big-nosed horse's mouth first, STOP READING NOW!

Don't say we didn't warn you. Here goes:

• True to Catholic radio, basketball cut in about 35-40 seconds earlier than Lino and crew had anticipated, so you missed their countdown (at which point the show went to commercial for 2½ minutes).
• Coming back from the break, Lino made a big announcement geared toward the overnight listeners: sometime in the next couple of months, Lino and crew will do a LIVE broadcast from 12:00am - 3:00am ET. Now THAT's a great idea!
• Bad Connection Bob, longtime friend of TCGS, had a novel plan: he called into the show and asked to be put on hold so that he could listen to the minutes that weren't airing live. The man is smart… we like that.
• To end the show, Lino talked about a study from (Lil') Wayne State University that concluded that people whose names begin with 'A' outlive those whose names begin with 'D'. Of course Lino (née Angelo) compared himself to Bob Dunning. First names, last names… it's all the same thing.
  

So enjoy the last few minutes, and tune in again at 4:00pm ET to hear Lino tease us about it to no end!

Don't say that we never cross-promote

Full credit for the following priceless gem goes to our friend dustin at CatholicGuyShow.com, and we're shamelessly duplicating it here. We wish we had this kind of talent:

Discuss and enjoy the full-size version on the Lino Fans Facebook site!

Our first post for 2010: random thoughts

• Last week's best-of's:
  
  • The good: if they had to go with recent best-of's, these were the ones to go with. Fr. Jim's birthday and Mama Rulli's visit perfectly bookended the crown jewels: the Vegas trip.
  • The bad: while those were good best-of's, we're still hungering for more classic fare. How about some Boring Catholic Radio? Beat The Catholic Guy? The St. Baldrick's head-shaving extravaganza? Even a rebroadcast of the first episode in 2006? We think that new listeners would enjoy hearing things the way they were, and us old-timers would enjoy hearing them again.

• Week 16's football picks: In case you missed it, Mark Hart challenged Fr. Rob for football pick supremacy during Week 16… and lost. His 'punishment'? To evangelize the masses at the local Wal-Mart. Can't wait to hear how this panned out on Thursday.

• Lino Roast revisited: Lino's final show of 2009 saw a welcome replay of the Lino Rulli Roast from the previous day that got interrupted by Notre Dame basketball. What wasn't welcome was the editing of said roast that took place… the 'minor editing' that Lino implied included taking out all of Bob Dunning's material. We guess he just wasn't deemed all that funny. And then after the replay during the second hour was finished, they played it again during the last half of the third hour as an excuse for Lino and Lou to take off early. C'mon… at the very least you could've run a best-of instead of the same stuff from the last hour!

• Pilgrimage to Italy: Boy, that sucker sold out at light speed. You can still get on the stand-by list, though: http://www.thecatholictraveler.com/

• 2009 revisited: Y'all see the year-end stuff we promised? We don't either. We got lazy and decided to take the rest of 2009 off along with Lino. Don't worry… you'll see this stuff in the next couple of weeks.