Weird and Wild stuff happening with FOX lately. First raccoons are going to be commenting on the games. And now, they've only scheduled Giants games for Troy and Joe to work. Troy will be calling his 4th straight, but Joe is going to be missing this Sunday. Why you ask?

NEWSDAY.com: Actually, Aikman will be without his usual partner, Joe Buck. Fox will experiment with Buck in the studio; Dick Stockton will work the Giants-Saints game.

"I was surprised by it," Aikman said of the Buck move. "It came out of leftfield. I can assure you I was not consulted on that." He would not comment beyond that.

On Sunday Joe Buck, hosting Fox's pregame show, served us a blind item referring to Johnson as "training dogs to kill." Howie Long, who maintains journalistic integrity, promptly jumped him on this one. "Training to kill what?" he said. "Where'd that come from?" Buck, true to the instincts of all sound bite airheads, went into a stammering backstroke and bailed out.