Metro Detroit's appetite for sports might have eyes bigger than its' stomach.

WDFN's abrupt, noon-time decapitation of all local programming on Tuesday, save for 90-second updates every 30 minutes and Pistons' play-by-play, reveals a lot about the local economy, the teams we zealously root for and a time-tested adage WDFN largely ignored in the station's 15 years of local programming.

Obviously the amount of advertising revenue and ratings' share, both procured and projected, didn't justify 1130AM's parent company, Clear Channel, keeping the majority of local sales and on-air talent on the company's payroll. The nationwide media malaise and local depression was too much to bear.

Another key component in the demise of WDFN was signal strength, already weak when 97.1 The Ticket went to a resounding dual AM/FM signal a year ago that combined 1270AM's WXYT with 97.1FM. Before that, it had been WXYT that looked like the fly-by-night competition for much of the time the two stations battled each other for sports supremacy. The station had gone through a handful of platform changes and renamed the station's handle two different times before finally settling on 'The Ticket'.

But the FM stereo upgrade at WXYT changed the tenor of the two-station sports fight. The Ticket gained an all-encompassing signal found nearly everywhere in the three-county metro area and beyond -- at all hours of the day -- while 'Da Fan was tough to find in Southfield after dark when the station powered down the signal. Once WXYT went to FM, the Tigers and Red Wings became crystal clear on FM in the car and WDFN lost a key arrow from the quiver when fighting WXYT for advertising dollars.

Finally, while it made for great radio at times, Detroit's downtown professional teams repeatedly snubbed WDFN when play-by-play contract rights were available for bid. Already leery of WDFN's truculent approach to on-air criticism of both in-game performance and administrative decision-making, the city's sports-minded Big Three tired of the station's oft-juvenile approach to culling fan reaction in promotion and programming and WDFN subsequently never made the breakthrough needed to secure radio rights. That allowed WXYT to remain a potential competitor for advertising dollars when the station was turning over multiple contracts for on-air talent and drawing abysmal ratings.

The Fan was brought to Detroit in 1994 as a mirror image of popular New York City sports radio station WFAN, and Detroit's Fan had the jump on any future competition had it been able to lock up any one of Detroit's three downtown teams. But instead of getting along before going along, WDFN implemented an adversarial approach to sports talk, pitting fans versus the teams without a major play-by-play contract to sustain it. That ultimately cost The Fan's staff of talent when Detroit's economy could no longer sustain two sports talkers.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries from Arcadia Publishing. Cameron's 2nd title, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, is due August 2009.

It wasn't that long ago, in a land far, far away, before the Internet was available to the masses, that prep football news came from just a few sources. It was a place called metro Detroit in the year 1994 AD. Way back then, in the days of land lines and shopping malls, the only prep football fodder came from the Detroit dailies, the local paper, or the barber shops and diners where the coaches, boosters or parents mingled.

We've come a long way. Today there's sources beyond the wildest imagination to get your motor running for the upcoming prep football season. Fans sites, blogs, team sites and independent rankings.

One of the best prep football sites on the Internet among many is Searn's Football Site, home of Searn's Super 32 Rankings. The metro area is well-represented in the preseason-season poll, with 16 of the 32 slots occupied by schools from the metro area. Additionally, of the 26 schools listed in the site's Honorable Mention, eight hail from the metro. That's 24 of the 48 schools worthy of note in the preseason are from the Tri-county Detroit area. If you're a football fan, how could you not be ready for football season to start?

Counting the honorable mentions, the breakdown by conference is impressive. The Oakland Activities Association (OAA) leads the way with six schools ranked within Searn's site. The Kensington Lakes Activities Association (KLAA), Catholic High School League (CHSL) and MEGA each earned four rankings, followed by the Macomb Area Conference (MAC) with three and the Detroit Public School League with two. Detroit Country Day, an independent, earned an honorable mention nod to round out the 24 ranked schools. The county breakdown is as follows: Oakland County schools received 12 nominations, Wayne County took eight slots and Macomb county schools earned four rankings.

Of course, there's the occasional dissenter who will bend your ear to tell you that you can't trust everything you read (thanks, Dad), that it's just prep football (OK, Mom) and there are other pressing, important things to follow. True, true and true, but who cares? Following prep football is fun, and this season football comes at a most convenient time. The Detroit Tigers have been toothless since April, easily the worst team $138 million has ever purchased in the history of professional sports. The Detroit Lions? If you have faith, you're not familiar with the last 53 seasons. For the first time in 22 seasons, the University of Michigan Wolverines weren't found in the Associated Press preseason Top 25 college football poll.

Above all else, in this downtrodden Michigan economy, is there a better sporting value that $5 to watch a high school football game?

There's always room for prep football in metro Detroit, long regarded one of America's smallest big towns. On both the Michigan and Michigan State radio pregame broadcasts, prep football gets a more than a passing mention, with scores and stories from the Friday night that preceded Saturday's major college football games.

It's important to keep things in perspective, and yes, there's other important things to keep a focused eye on, but there's no shame is getting geared up for another prep football season, either.

Back from a weekend on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, the highlight of the National Association of Sports Officals (NASO) conference, for me anyway, was a research project that started in Cleveland's Renaissance Hotel, took Chad Clark and I out to beautiful Avon Lake along the banks of Lake Erie and finally, back to Detroit with successful procurement of some essential archives.

Don't get me wrong, we met some amazing people from within the officiating industry in Cleveland, including Bill Carollo, Violet Palmer, Ron Foxcroft and Monty McCutchen, to name a select few. The annual NASO convention convenes some outstanding people, but rare is the opportunity to delve headfirst into the 10-Year War between Bo Schembechler's Michigan Wolverines -- that school 'Up North' -- and the Ohio State Buckeyes under Woody Hayes. Even more amazing is to listen to recants of train trips between American League cities, tenuous contract negotiations that bumped salary from $8,000 to $10,000 and busting Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak before becoming a teammate of the Yankee Clipper.

I'm talking about the Mack family from Cleveland's suburban University Heights, Ohio. I'm talking about Cleveland Indian Ray Mack (pictured above) and sons Tom and Dick, but there was nothing harry about the family's Cleveland heritage and lineage.

In spending the weekend immersed in one family's significant sporting history, I was immediately awakened to an undeniable fact: We've lost something in American sports. We've lost our history, our pride and dignity as it relates to professional sports in this country. Today's professional athletics are littered with the 'me' and the 'now' before the 'we' and 'how' gets addressed in the team sports scene. In today's game, I comes before team and respect is paid with a comma on a paycheck instead of the natural respect and admiration of a teammate or a town.

Don't misunderstand -- I'm not a hopeless romantic for the days of top hats and pinstripe suits, of coal-burning locomotives, Nash Ramblers and such. Pro athletes have made some amazing and necessary strides, but with the opportunity to see the actual contracts Ray Mack signed with the Indians and Chicago Cubs (Mack's year with the Yankees was an original Cleveland contract purchased by the Bronx Bombers), it reminded both of us of the merit and hard work one was required to put into their craft as a pro athlete within the team structure in the 1940s and 50s.

It stood out even more when we were invited to join NASO at Progressive Field as the present day Indians hosted their longtime rival, the Detroit Tigers. The Bengals didn't do their long history proud in dropping a 5-0 decision to the Tribe with equal parts of listless precision and lifeless execution. In giving away at-bats and hacking at pitches for no rhyme or reason, the Tigers were held scoreless for the 11th time this season, a season that is the most expensive in team history at nearly $140 million in player payroll.

Not exactly the rivalry the two junior circuit stalwarts had in the 1940s when Mack joined Bob Feller, Lou Boudreau and Bob Lemon while facing Detroit Tigers like Hal Newhouser, Hank Greenberg and Charlie Gehringer almost 70 years ago.

Times changes, that's life. But there's something timeless about the 'old days' that today's athletes don't seem to identify with.

(Ray Mack photo courtesy Mack family archives)

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th from Arcadia Publishing

Between the rusted fences, crooked baselines and lumpy outfields lies a game, unfettered by negotiations, eight-figure egos and contracts to define every person's shuffle and step. It won't be seen by millions but rather, a handful or friends and neighbors. There's no fireworks or heart-throbbing music before an at-bat. No gimmicks, trivia questions or foul balls to keep. There's no advance ticket booth and the only season-ticket holders are usually the local volunteer, a man who gets senior discounts and watches every game from his folding chair.

That's the difference between prep baseball and professional baseball. Prep baseball is still baseball. Major League Baseball is The Show.

Pictured to the left is longtime Birmingham Seaholm baseball coach Don Sackett, coaching his last game against his school's longtime rival, Frank Clouser and the Royal Oak Kimball Knights, on May 11, 1990 at what is now Royal Oak High. Sackett's 'Miracle Maples' won the 1988 Class A state title when his Seaholm team won the regional final, quarterfinal semifinal and championship game in their last at-bat. Clouser's Kimball teams went to the title game in '71, '72, '73 and '80 and captured the 1972 title. There's no media relations or sports information department in high school sports. It's hand-written notes and facts committed to memory.

Major League Baseball is a heavy metal band's six-month gold album tour compared to prep baseball, and Opening Day commands our attention in Detroit like a Black Monday automotive press conference. Everyone knows about it, many will be there to witness it first hand and nearly everyone has an opinion about it, too. That's metro Detroit. We love our sports and the Tigers will always own this town in that regard. It's the one game we've all played at some point in our lives. Prep baseball, by comparison, is hundreds of scores and names jammed into agate type in your local paper.

It was amusing to watch and listen to the fans, many sporting a double-fisted 16-oz opinion, talk baseball yesterday in Comerica Park. The game is the same at either venue but the presentation at the major league level distorts the reality of what wins and loses a game. Most fans walked out of Comerica Park yesterday describing a gas can with arms and legs, that being the Tiger bullpen. The Tigers dropped yesterday's opener because they stranded about a dozen runners on the bases yesterday in what should have been an 8-3 Tiger win instead of a 5-4 extra innings loss. Today we're talking about the failure of the Tiger bullpen. The high school coach will talk about all the runners his boys stranded on the island.

That's the difference of prep baseball. It's a game worthy of following or attending. Why do prep players hustle every single ball out when it looks like major leaguers are on cruise control? Because anything can happen in a prep game; a good major leaguer errs about once a month. A prep player gets 20-30 games to prove himself; a major leaguer will play another sold-out concert tomorrow, and the night after that, and the night after that. A prep player doesn't make millions and still has algebra homework to finish after the game.

We don't apply the scrutiny to our kids that we do to million-dollar adults. Prep baseball is what we can improve on; pro baseball is about what didn't get done more than what did. There's going to be 161 more chances at glory for the Tigers. Losing the one game you'll play for first place all season makes high school special in it's own way, too.

If you love baseball as much as you love the Tigers, you'll get to high school game this spring. It's still baseball the way Abner Doubleday saw it. It's gritty, emotional, raw and pure. It's a history teacher who has prepped for 25 dates for the 10 months since last season ended. It's a neighbor or nephew who gets dirty at the first chance he gets. It's a fight to the finish, a handshake at the end and a hug from a girlfriend after it's all over.

That's a real baseball game, and it doesn't need a 40,000-seat stadium to be important.

(Photo courtesy The Daily Tribune, Royal Oak, Michigan/Craig Gaffield)