Can the outgoing trifecta of women’s college basketball’s most visible stars attract a bigger spotlight for the WNBA?

That’s what both the league and ESPN are banking on as they held a tightly-staged press conference Thursday to announce an extension of their long-standing television partnership.

The six-year deal, which Sports Business Journal reported ahead of time is worth an estimated $12 million a season, was unveiled along with the WNBA’s new branding campaign and logo.

At times during Thursday’s media event, it was hard to tell whether it was about ESPN’s self-proclaimed commitment to women’s sports more than the WNBA. But it is quite clear that Brittney Griner of Baylor, Skylar Diggins of Notre Dame and Elena Delle Donne of Delaware, who figure to be top three players taken in the April 15 draft, have generated the kind of national press that the WNBA has dreamed about.

For as loaded as the pro league has been since its inception with former college All-Americans and Olympians, their visibility drops during a time of year when most fans (this one included) don’t have much basketball in mind.

The question at the top is one that has been posed many times before. Here’s another one: Remember Diana Taurasi? UConn’s iconic guard and three-time national champion has had a stellar WNBA career leading Phoenix to two titles, as well as three Olympic gold medals and European crowns in Russia.

But as she completes her first decade after college, Taurasi’s feats have largely flown under the larger national sports radar. When Griner joins Taurasi in Phoenix — the Mercury won the draft lottery — will that truly generate a closer look at a WNBA that has been around for 16 years? Griner’s potential dominance in the pros could be as unprecedented as her spectacular impact on the college game.

Diggins has become something of a national sports celebrity thanks to her social media acumen, counting the rapper Lil Wayne (reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated) among her many admirers. Whether she goes to Chicago with the No. 2 pick or Tulsa at No. 3, she’s easily the personality player of this trio. But will that interest wane as she takes her game to the dead of summer, and then overseas, where the real money is earned by female pros?

Delle Donne, the one-time UConn signee, is as pure a shooter and scorer as the women’s game has had in years, and there’s no doubt she can gun it in the pros. She’ll have to learn to play some stellar defense in the W and get used to its rather rugged physicality.

The hope is that they’ll do for the WNBA what Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s arrival did for the NBA — broaden its appeal far beyond the purists.

The WNBA is coming off its lowest average attendance for a season since it began in 1997, and Griner is a once-in-a-lifetime-player whose presence has been compared to that of Wilt Chamberlain.

While reading through some Tweets of WNBA players during the press conference, it’s easy to understand why seasoned pros, most of whom are now playing in Europe, Asia and Australia for their real living, might chafe at the hype.

Most revealing were the comments of Erlana Larkins, a former college standout at North Carolina who plays for the WNBA champion Indiana Fever and is currently winding down her Turkish domestic league season. In response to another Tweet she said:

league has superstars that have proven themselves how can u be a superstar & have yet 2 play in a pro game yet

And this:

Griner is huge & everything but unless she gets get weight up she won’t be as prosperous as everyone thinks

While I groused (only once!) on Twitter about ESPN’s relentless promotions of “3 to See” during the NCAA Tournament, from a business and promotional point of view it makes sense.

At the same time, the Phoenix marketing staff isgiving away tickets to men in an attempt to appeal to a segment of the sports-watching public that supposedly doesn’t think much of female athletes.

Not only that, but the Mercury has set up Twitter hashtags #ManUp and #CureTheCooties as part of this campaign.

Yes: “Cure the Cooties.”

Welcome to the fourth grade, fellas.

A franchise with Brittney Griner coming on board is resorting to a gimmick like this?

While they indulge in the hard sell of “enlightening” men about the women’s game, the Mercury and the WNBA still aren’t addressing why more women don’t watch and become fans. They are dealing in a bottom-line reality that NBA commissioner David Stern has laid out for the women’s league to achieve beyond his departure: To become more financially self-sustaining.

Star power is what got the NBA where it is, so expect a further deluge of ESPN’s “3 to See” branding at the next level. Name recognition beyond what appeals to hard-core fans explains the prominence of Bill Laimbeer during Thursday’s presser. He’s back in the league after guiding the former Detroit Shock to multiple WNBA crowns, and now is GM and head coach of a New York Liberty franchise that has been floundering for too many years.

As Shelley DuBois noted at Fortune.com, three of the WNBA’s 12 teams have turned a modest profit, as well as the league overall. The money per team as part of the new ESPN contract is $1 million a season and that’s nothing to dismiss: “In a way, the cold business of it is heartening: This deal wouldn’t have taken place if it wouldn’t work financially.”

Bingo. The business of women’s sports, especially professional team sports, will always be a sliver of what their male counterparts enjoy, but this is a notable development. Increased ticket sales — not patronizing giveaways — and corporate sponsorships remain just as important as branding campaigns and buzzwords.

As for the new logo, I’ll admit it doesn’t do much for me. Instead of a female dribbling, she is now shooting a layup, which is supposed to signify another phase in the development of women’s pro basketball.

But the less gimmicky the WNBA becomes, the better. If we’re going to have cheesy promos, I’m totally old-school, a hopeless nostalgiac for the funky funky 70s that ESPN reprised in the early years of the league. What’s easy to forget now is how effective these ads were, and how much of a sense of fun they evoked. There’s nothing wrong with keeping that going.

Will Leitch continues his refreshing break from the predictable sports media rip-snorting with his Sports on Earth columns; in his latest, he assesses the relatively new NBC Sports Network with this gem:

I’ve generally progressed to the point in my sports viewing life that I almost exclusively watch sports channels for actual sports, rather than people talking about sports. Years of ESPN have beaten me down. I can sort of only handle the games themselves anymore.

But it’s obvious that NBC Sports Network is trying something different. Every time I’ve turned on the channel — and it has become my “all right, so there are no live sports on right now but I need something in the background” default channel — the one thing I never see are two people screaming at each other. I don’t see little widgets keeping score between sportswriters, or #embracedebate, or Happy Birthday, Backup Quarterback. I see at least an honest attempt to be an alternative to ESPN, a place where all the junk that has surrounded ESPN, the corporate junk that has completely taken over the network we all fell in love with a decade ago, a place where all that takes a backseat to, you know, the actual sports.

…….
The reason ESPN has become so infuriating to sports fans over the last decade isn’t because they’re evil, or because nobody smart works there. It’s because they have had no challengers: They’ve become more about ESPN than about sports because consumers haven’t given them any reason not to. That’s what corporations do when they dominate a market: They maximize profit, at the expense of the consumer. It is our job, as consumers, to be market-corrective: To demand higher quality, and choose it when it’s available.

Read on. This is a good one.

So is this from the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn, which further explains the NBC and CBS cable sports challenges, and a nominal response from ESPN.

Don’t forget that it wasn’t all that long ago that The Onion foretold of a very grisly live scenario on the set of “SportsCenter,” according to a foremost academic expert on the subject:

The strained faces of the presenters as they read yet another Tim Tebow story late last year, their tortured voices as they tried to pass off the statistical anomaly of ‘Linsanity’ as some sort of magical phenomenon—classic evidence of stress and trauma. Given what I’ve seen on the show this week, I’d be surprised if we get through the Peyton Manning free-agency tour without a tragic incident, let alone March Madness.

You never know when that breaking point may be reached.

I had no sooner pushed the button on yesterday’s post on the issue of gender and coaching women’s basketball than ESPN The Magazine, as part of the Worldwide Leader’s flood the zone Title IX coverage, published “The Glass Wall” on the same topic, but that reached an entirely different conclusion.

Written by Luke Cyphers and Kate Fagan, a former basketball player at Colorado, this very long piece examines the dearth of women in the college coaching ranks, why so many more men are itching to coach women’s teams and what happens to women coaches who fight for gender equity.

As I Tweeted upon first reading this, I thought this was a crock, and at so many levels. After several more closer readings, it is sadly nothing more than the dogma of recycled, decades-old cultural grievances from a handful of women’s advocates. Cyphers and Fagan have provided an updated shine, designed to give the impression that the professional prospects for women coaches are grimmer now than ever.

This claptrap has been peddled by women’s advocates since the demise of the AIAW in the early 1980s. It is less about the development of women’s sports than the careerism of adult women, whose interests and desire for power have always been more paramount than the athletes under their charge.

There is quote after mournful quote of women coaches, administrators, academics and even NCAA officials about how it’s unthinkable that women will ever have a chance to coach men as they watch men easily cross the line in the opposite direction.

Cyphers and Fagan “report” these disparities with skimpy “research” conducted by advocates who have an axe to grind. It is astonishing in its willingness to swallow whole a fallacious ideology, and even more astonishing for the serious journalistic questions it does not pose.

It wasn’t until the 43rd paragraph — the 43rd! — that I finally came across the lead, as we say in the journalism business. Here it is in full:

“Athletic directors who spoke with espnW for this story say they consistently receive significantly more applications from men for all coaching vacancies. ‘There isn’t a job that’s not dominated by male applicants,” says [former Notre Dame and Northwestern women's basketball coach Mary] DiStanislao.’ “

The writers try to explain this away, blaming long-standing sexism and homophobia in an intolerant male sports culture as the real culprit for the lower-than-desired numbers. To prove their point, they simply quote the aggrieved, with no other point of view evident or even possible. Here’s Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights:

“When you look at the decline in the percentage of women coaches, sexual orientation has a lot to do with it.”

What else is she going to say?

The poster child of the persecuted woman coach in “The Glass Wall” is former Oregon women’s basketball coach Jody Runge. The story severely downplays the fact that Runge was a polarizing figure within the Oregon athletic program, and within her own team, for many more reasons than pushing for better support for women’s sports. There’s an excellent book on the subject that illustrates the complexities of her time there. To hoist her as a victim of a female-unfriendly environment is misleading, at the very least.

This story’s treatment of gender equity issues at Fresno State also does not tell the full story, some of which I wrote about last summer. While there certainly was a high degree of gender-based hostility within that athletic department, this is not a one-way street. There was too much mistrust and animosity going back and forth to blame one side as the source of the problem.

Curiously, none of the women coaches quoted by Cyphers and Fagan talk about whether they’ve expressed an interest in coaching a men’s team, or even applied. Surely the writers should have known that Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer’s name was bandied about in the early 1990s for men’s openings. Did they bother to ask her about it?

Here’s another glaring omission from this story: In women’s basketball, men are quite often more willing to take a job at a mid-major or small-conference program and work their way up. While an increasing number of women are doing the same thing, those women touted as the “hot young coaches” are primarily top assistants at BCS-level programs, usually in charge of recruiting and waiting for their first head coaching job, ideally at another major school.

Cyphers and Fagan can’t be bothered to question this further, nor to mention that the percentage of male coaches abounds most notably at the lower college, high school and AAU levels. Are more women not willing, or just not interested, in starting out at the very bottom? Have they been encouraged by women’s sports leaders to aim higher before they may be ready? Are they being properly prepared for the rigors of contemporary coaching by their mostly female mentors? These questions also do not seem to have been asked.

During the 1990s there was a concerted effort to hire women as much as possible. Starting in the last decade, athletics directors have been hiring coaches, regardless of gender, who they believe will win. It’s a cold bottom line, but it’s a trend that figures to escalate.

To continue to blame the same old bogeymen for the changing nature and demands of the coaching profession is to continue to fight the past. “The Glass Wall” perpetuates a narrative of unwarranted victimology that ESPN, with its earnest diligence to chronicle “The Power of IX,” has gotten badly wrong.

Those lamenting the supposed invisibility of women’s sports on television should read every word of this story in Sunday’s Indianapolis Star by Jeff Rabjohns about the wealth of women’s basketball games available on the Big Ten Network. The cable outlet has shown nearly 60 games this season, including the just-completed conference tournament, and this has spawned a number of followers, including the SEC:

“Over the past five years, television exposure for women’s basketball has surged. The number of games on national television is up 70 percent and the number of times Big Ten teams play on national TV has increased fivefold.

“The Big Ten Network has been the driving force in that. Five years ago, Big Ten teams played on national television 18 times; this year that number is a nation-leading 116.”

Coaches love it for the national, and not just regional, attention that helps with recruiting. I know women’s hoops coaches in other BCS conferences who have given up good home weekend attendance draws for weeknight television games for exposure reasons.

On the macro level, the Big Ten Network is also setting a new standard by devoting around half its programming to women’s sports. The BTN also has a half-hour weekly “Women’s Show” with highlights, interviews and features.

ESPN’s multi-sport contract with the SEC includes an ample amount of live women’s events, and not just basketball. College softball is a growing staple of the springtime programming on ESPNU. Next year ESPN begins a new contract with the ACC and is helping launch the Longhorn Network, which is devoted entirely to University of Texas athletics.

It’s hard to break down the financial component of women’s hoops packages since they don’t produce revenues and are enabled by the money generated by the men’s game and football.

But as Rabjohn writes, “television executives see [women's basketball] as one of the key sports on the next tier” of college sports programming.

I found this to be a rather remarkable statement, given the paucity of women’s games on television when I first began covering the sport in the early 1990s. By the end of that decade, I still could not have imagined the wide availability of games that now reach a couple of dozen every week.

But USC professor Michael Messner and other obsessed with media coverage of women’s sports by parsing down numbers and comparing them to more popular and established men’s sports continue to miss the larger, more encouraging picture of women athletes on the tube.

Viewing these matters through the very narrow prism of what’s on SportsCenter and the rapidly dwindling block of local television news is a prescription for misunderstanding.

While there are serious concerns about a lack of serious journalistic treatment of women’s sports — something I’ve encountered in my career — spouting indignance over a few snippets of highlights seems rather short-sighted. Especially when viewers with basic cable can watch whole women’s games in a multitude of sports, perhaps many more than they may ever care to see.

Sports business ace Kristi Dosh talks to espnW vice president Laura Gentile on the Forbes SportsMoney blog in response to some of the rather heated reaction to last week’s site launch, and says we’re missing the point entirely.

It was never meant to cater specifically to women who are already hardcore sports fans, or to those who want to see more women’s sports (I’m in both categories) but to those women who are in the vast, untapped majority:

“Although my conversation with Ms. Gentile certainly helped put things in perspective, it was the surprise phone call I received from an anonymous espnW supporter that really had an effect on my view of the situation. This person pointed out that they’d heard from women who watched their child’s little league game from the car because they were afraid they would clap at the wrong time or who wanted to coach their kid’s team but had no idea how to run a practice. As a woman who grew up after Title IX, and who has spent my entire life playing and coaching sports, I was honestly oblivious to such issues. These women—the ones who aren’t part of ESPN’s existing 26% female audience—deserve to be engaged. They want to be fans, but are a little shy about it. They don’t want to look stupid. They are lost in the world of sports and no one is catering to their needs.”

I touched on some of this after a much ballyhooed espnW retreat in October, but Dosh really drives home the point well, while suggesting that espnW could have more clearly explained its aspirations.

That’s why I also was a bit confused by what I saw on espnW launch day and every day since: A lot more men’s sports than I expected, and I was expecting some. Perhaps it was a fangirlish piece about Bill Simmons that ultimately turned me off. The subject of his visceral loathing of the WNBA somehow never comes up.

But then again, I’ve never been in the target audience for anything in my life, so I’ll admit to having yet another blind spot.

Media writer Eric Deggans falls for the pink ghetto meme, then falls into the tired, dreary cultural rabbit hole of gender and sports to express his disappointment with espnW:

“How does a female sports fan respond to all the sexism embedded in some professional sports’ presentations? Does it matter that even the most accomplished female athletes seem encouraged to sell themselves as sex objects to get ahead?

“What about some female athletes who have been accused of emerging as stars mostly for their beauty and sex appeal of male fans? If a name like Kournikova or Patrick floats up in these conversations, are the criticisms fair?”

Again, that’s not really the issue here.

Dosh’s larger point is that espnW’s marketing must be vastly improved:

“There needs to be a unified message coming out about what espnW wants to accomplish and how they plan to do it. I know they’ve done the research behind this, and I’m now convinced they’re serving both an untapped area and underserved consumers. The issue is the message.”

From a corporation that aggressively and relentlessly promotes itself and makes perfectly clear what it is pushing, this is truly surprising.

For those wishing for more news-oriented women’s sports coverage on this platform, it’s not going to happen, not to the degree we might wish. At first I thought it was a missed opportunity by espnW, but that’s not the case.

It still leaves open the door for others to claim that space. It may be a much smaller niche that a gargantuan enterprise like ESPN may not be able to make profitable enough, but the opportunities are there, on a different scale.

Here’s the first part of Dosh’s two-part take on espnW.

I began hearing not long ago that espnW was coming online in December, and on the first Monday of the month the site indeed did go live.

I haven’t looked thoroughly at all of the launch material, but a few thoughts did cross my mind as I perused:

• There’s more men’s sports here than I imagined, and the site was promoted as appealing to women sports fans as well as those interested in women’s sports. Still, at the end of the first day, the Jets-Patriots game is getting top billing? I realize it’s a big game and there’s great interest in that matchup, but that’s a story that can be found anywhere else. It crowds out what I thought was supposed to be the emphasis here.

Which got me thinking about a couple of other possibilities that bear watching as the site develops:

• Can espnW sell a site devoted entirely to women’s sports? Or is it partially using this vehicle to push its men’s pro and college sports content onto a primarily female audience? Do we really need BCS, LeBron James and baseball winter meetings stories here? Women who are diehard sports fans know where to get this.

• The smartest, most relevant piece I’ve seen comes from former WNBA president Val Ackerman, who pens an intelligent, passionate treatise on the future of women’s sports that dearly needs to be amplified. A few snippets:

“In our post-Title IX world, the old stereotypes and barriers which historically distanced women and girls from sports are largely gone, but differences persist in the way American males and females participate in, consume and think about sports, which in turn affects health and fitness trends, media imagery and coverage, and strategies for companies trying to turn sports into profitable business ventures. The future of women’s sports will be shaped by the way these differences are addressed and by the effectiveness with which women’s sports proponents can meld the gains of the past 40 years with the needs, sensibilities and realities of today’s world.”

And:

“But although the battles for acceptance which marked the 1970s and ’80s have been largely won, they’ve been replaced by another challenge: how to convert the feel-good vibe of ‘with you in spirit’ into cold, hard revenue, so that women’s sports leagues can endure as viable businesses. The protections of Title IX, which helped make the pro outlets possible, do not reach beyond federally-funded educational institutions, so the future of the leagues will be wholly left to the realities of the marketplace. In the post-Title IX age, progress at the elite level will ride on the adeptness with which women’s sports leaders can marry what’s appealingly feminine with what’s impressively athletic, what’s edgy and controversial with what’s mainstream and wholesome — and in our culture of celebrity, whether women’s sports ‘products’ can be turned into compelling entertainment, the kind that busy fans (women and girls among them) will make time for and pay real money to see.”

Bravo! No whining about sexism or victimology or spouting the usual reflexive talking points on these subjects. Ackerman understands this isn’t an ideological battle, indeed that’s it not really a battle at all any longer. There are complicated, deeply human considerations that are still evolving about females and athletics — and evolving is the key word here — that defy the absolutist pronouncements of the sports-and-gender crowd.

Please don’t overlook Ackerman’s last point, and it’s one that I’ve been making for some time as well. Please listen to someone who’s been a pioneer in the business of women’s sports about what’s really important at the present time, and in the near future. The challenges are no longer cultural as much as they are cementing durable business models and winning fans for women’s sports.

This goes far beyond Title IX, so perhaps it’s understandable why the women’s leaders who take up most of the oxygen — here and here and here — don’t say anything remotely resembling this. Their inability, or unwillingness, to yammer about much else besides Title IX and trifling cultural obsessions reflects a women’s sports movement that needs new blood, and new ideas, to come to the forefront.

The sooner women’s sports stops being peddled primarily as a cause — and the people behind espnW understand this very well — the sooner they can become more viable in the mainstream of the sports world.

There have been plenty of headlines about this week’s retreat of top women’s sports leaders by ESPN, which has designs on creating a separate espnW brand to appeal to a very different demographic than what tunes into the Family of Networks.

This was an all-invitation shindig near San Diego, so those of us not part of the In Crowd will be eager to hear the details in forthcoming days.

But there’s been plenty of squawking in the women’s sports blogosphere from those who think it’s patronizing to women who like to watch sports. A pink ghetto, if you will.

I can understand this point of view, since I’m in that small, but passionate, minority. This passionate:

“Men and women are not different species, but as a female sports fan, you sometimes can’t help but wonder if marketers think they are. Sports marketing tells men it’s ok to be loud, obnoxious, proud fans of their sport. Marketing tells women… not a whole lot. Marketing can often miss the boat, too – assuming that simply because they design something that is pink or sparkly, that women will want to buy it, or buy into it.”

Except that when it comes to sports, men and women are different viewing species. This is about creating a business model — and an audience — at a scale that a major corporate entity can make work.

I’ve never been part of that target audience, but I think it’s worth another shot at reaching the non-traditional female sports fan. Previous women’s sports magazines had similar aims — to appeal to fitness-oriented women by using prominent female athletes as models of inspiration. The heavy costs of print, among other factors, doomed most of those efforts.

With corporations already actively chasing the disposable incomes of young female athletes, this market is too hard to ignore. And let’s be clear about espnW’s objective: It’s about creating an identifiable corporate brand with enough potential consumers to make it last, and to make it grow.

It’s not unlike Deportes, ESPN’s Spanish-language outlet. Its programming goes heavy on sports that are popular in the Latin world — soccer, baseball and boxing. There’s little attention paid to college sports, which is an American anomaly. And there’s virtually no coverage of women’s sports, except for a tennis Grand Slam event.

I understand the criticisms about some of the activities at the espnW retreat — the pedicures, the sunrise yoga, the girly-girly things, etc. There was a Navy Seal boot camp too, which would have rendered me straight to the sidelines.

Before waxing indignant about “stereotypes,” keep in mind that companies and marketers aim directly at what a large swath of desired demographic groups like to do in order to attract their business. Whether you like it or not, ESPN and every other successful corporate entity knows it has to cater to market-researched general interests and buying habits.

They may not be what I like to do, but I also believe there’s an untapped market for women who are serious spectator fans of sports played by both men and women. It’s a much smaller niche, and it may not be one a major media company will approach in the near future, if at all. It may be up to innovative women media entrepreneurs similar to those behind the WomenTalkSports blog network to which I’ve belonged (and who were in attendance at the retreat) to experiment with a variety of startup ideas.

I’m not a business person, and I’m just rambling off the top of my head here. But I’m thinking that if the initial ideas behind espnW can take off, then perhaps that audience can be expanded to the likes of, well, me.

Who don’t do sunrise anything, much less yoga.

A year into their extremely lucrative relationship, the SEC and ESPN want to kick it up a few more notches.

Good reporting here by John Solomon of the Birmingham News.

• Temperatures are rising along with the collective blood pressure of many in the sports-and-media world over the LeBron James farce on ESPN. The best read I came across is from Jake Simpson of the Atlantic Culture Channel in a post titled “LeBron James and the Rise of Sports Reality TV.” Slam dunk bucket here:

“Skeptics would argue LeBron-mania is an isolated incident, an overreaction by the media and public to a transcendent sports figure making a career-altering decision. But that doesn’t explain why Dallas Braden is more famous for yelling ‘get off my fucking mound’ at Alex Rodriguez than he is for pitching a perfect game. . . . That Braden achieved perfection for a day and carved out a permanent place in baseball history is somehow less marketable than his outburst of bravado and his grandmother’s now-immortal comment: ‘Stick It, A-Rod.’ The sensational has won out over the sublime. And sports franchises are nodding happily.”

• Thanks to the Sports Business Daily for taking its roundup on “The Decision” out from behind its paywall. Lots of good behind-the-scenes details on how James’ publicist, the aptly named Maverick Carter, concocted this prime-time circus.

• John Ourand, the crack media writer for SBJ’s parent publication, the Sports Business Journal, is bothered by today’s column from ESPN ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer, which he calls “stupendously weak” for delving deeply into World Cup vuvuzelas but is stone silent about its James coverage.

• My Twitter follower Mark Zemek is upset, but for other reasons. Huffington Post is featuring a 39-shot photo gallery of Paraguayan model Larissa Riquelme, who has promised to run naked through the streets of Asunción to celebrate her nation’s World Cup team reaching the quarterfinals. If I had a body like that, I’d probably be bold enough to make such a pledge. 700 comments and counting, folks. It’s a bit more G-Rated than this item elsewhere on Queen Arianna’s “sports” page.

• Thank God they won’t have to be on the lookout for Diego Maradona in the rah in Buenos Aires. But I would cry for Argentina if he changes his mind.

• I’ll have plenty more on the World Cup finals tomorrow, but this piece from Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports about the “Oracle Octopus” has me very hungry. The critter correctly predicted Spain’s semifinal victory, and now some German fans want to “throw him in the frying pan.” One suggested recipe:

“Cut him up in thin slices and grill him on all sides with a dash of lemon juice, olive oil and garlic on it. Delicious!”

That does sound tasty, but it’s just too darn hot to stand over a stove tonight.