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.