( above : utterly washed up and his former, increasingly irrelevant co-worker.  And in the middle, Mike Francesa).

Of the recent tiff between fellow Miami alumni Warren Sapp and Jeremy Shockey, the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick writes, “haven’t been more stuck for a rooting interest since the Iran-Iraq War,”.  It’s good line, and one that might well apply to the longstanding friction between Newscorp’s resident sports media conscience and WFAN afternoon drive host Mike Francesa.  In this instance, however, I’ll declare (for this afternoon, anyway) that any enemy of Francesa is my friend, and as such, here’s part of Phil’s (lengthy) Sunday evisceration of New York’s #1 that all but labels the Mike’d Up mouthpiece….as a cut and paste artist.  Not one of Christian Marclay’s caliber, anyway.

There are those within ESPN who monitor Francesa to find strange coincidences: On several occasions, they claim, when his show comes out of an update and commercials, Francesa returns to report — as his own intellectual property, naturally — news and opinions just heard on ESPN TV and radio.

Last week, Francesa, seemingly out of the blue, claimed that he had bet that Joe Namath would rip the Jets for the Tebow deal. “Can you imagine Namath on this one?”

Mikey got one right! Hey, he was due. Namath, that day, went on ESPN 1050, from where he ripped the Jets for the Tebow deal.

Ah, but that happened a half-hour before Mikey said it would. It also was Tweeted before Mikey said that. Amazing, eh?