It's not enough to say that ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd is my favorite sports talk radio personality. His four-year-old early morning program "The Herd", which airs in L.A. from 6 to 10 PST, is the main reason I even bother at all with sports talk. ESPN unveiled Mike Tirico's new show — the replacement for Dan Patrick's departed mainstay — on Thursday and the prospect of it was as exciting as toast with just a smidgen of butter. (It's like, toast is healthy and necessary and whatnot, but I'm not gonna get especially aroused from it.)

Cowherd is a performer that wields various and sundry gimmickry. His first and biggest trick is very nearly losing listeners. The man will push his audience's sensibilities to the brink, potential alienation of audience apparently something he can't fear. This fast-talking rural Washington native— his personality is of the grating local sort you can imagine driving Kurt Kobain to drug abuse — will rip any player, franchise, conference, sport or mode of thought as long as he thinks the object has the attack coming, and will do so with enough vitriol that the tirade can make his target's supporters rethink their choice of radio.

Here is that rare Disney commodity, the edgy personality. (So far, count Cowherd, Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Simmons — America's greatest sportswriter since Jim Murray —  and Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.) When Cowherd questioned folksy, second-rate Pac-10 football commissioner Thomas Hansen late in the summer, it was terror theater, in terms of the interviewer's viciousness. But he was right; Hansen sucks; his shitty TV deals, among other screw-ups, play a major role in keeping the Pac-10 a backwoods conference.

I've been to the brink with Cowherd numerous times. Yesterday, the host held court on racial issues in sport, sprung on by Donovan McNabb's comments in a Real Sports interview. Cowherd insisted that racism in sports is "largely non-existent" and railed against McNabb for whining. His comments were absurb if only because McNabb's career has largely been shaped by his team's owners milking his talent and declining to set him up with a quality supporting cast. McNabb's peers such as Tom Brady and Peyton Manning would never be treated as one-men teams and thereby exposed to injury and overally physical as McNabb has been. (Don't even get me started about how a tuned-in black general manager would have nipped the quarterback's rift with T.O. in the bud and might have allowed the duo to blossom into football's greatest QB-receiver combo ever.)

But the most telling exchange in the morning of heated give-and-take with listeners came with an emailer from Studio City, CA. The guy preceded his cogent argument by saying that he'd listened to Cowherd's wack take on race for two years now. That's remarkable to me. Cowherd is so good, you're inclined to put up with holes in his game, even where his errors cut close to the bone.

The host's second gimmick is no less important: He gets the West Coast. Bristol, Connecticut-based ESPN uses Syracuse and Penn State as feed schools for its workforce, so much so that it treats the University of Michigan as the champion of the West. Its East Coast bias is so pronounced that USC football's 21st century dominance is underrated and amazing stories like this season's amazin' Arizona Diamondbacks are regarded as curiosities. Cowherd's regionally-broadcast first hour  coincides with the final hour of ESPN Radio's phenomenally popular Mike and Mike in the Morning — and revs up his core audience before going national. In terms of establishing the show's momentum, that's major.

Third, he provides a window on his personal life. Cowherd is going through a divorce. But his listeners knew something was up even before he made mention of this on-air. The host was more skittish than usual, took a lot of seemingly unscheduled vacation. I recall references to drinking. And, because Cowherd's schtick hews closer to Howard Stern than Bob Costas, it became clear that something was up. He'd made lots of hay by highlighting his family man aspect. Yet when Cowherd  announced the split, his listeners, apparently, stuck with him. This suggests to me that there's room for a more intimate take in the arm's-length, aesthetically formatted world of sports journalism.

Frankly, the guy has a lot of problems. When it comes to the non-football topics, Cow is often guilty of frontin'. Like, he knows absolutely nothing about the NBA. He repeats himself with unforgivable frequency. His attack on the Colin-hatin' website thebiglead.com indicated the man isn't just playing a dick on the radio, he actually is one. But I am transfixed by this guy. He reminds me of a lesser Rush Limbaugh, a reprehensible person but a fabulous broadcaster. It's disappointing that Cowherd's ESPN Classic television show eluded me , but I'm very much looking forward to catching his college football booth work this fall.