Do you remember when star athletes Kobe Bryant and Ben Roethlisberger were accused of rape? Or how about when Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, while still married, was reportedly making late-night visits to Madonna’s New York City apartment to get a little sumpin-sumpin? And of course, the Tiger Woods fiasco — who can’t escape that? It’s still getting worse.

Well even if you don’t recall some of these epic moments in time, I’ll tell you who does:  TMZ.

Why? Because salacious stories on scandals like these represent opportunities. And in TMZ’s case, they are potentially lost opportunities, and revenues, at a time when media needs to capitalize on every possible chance to enhance their relevance and increase revenue streams.

That’s why TMZ head honcho Harvey Levin must think he is about to cash in, and leverage the online network’s unique capability of breaking, reporting on, and making us utterly sick of celebrity gossip. But in this instance we’re not talking about the traditional TMZ fare of Brad Pitt smoking pot with Quentin Tarantino or Gary Coleman working as a security guard. Now TMZ is setting its eye on the potentially profitable pie that is the sportsworld as reports from the last day would have us believe.

And while we’ve seen these stretches into sports from Huffington Post and Mediaite’s soon-to-come SportsGrid, TMZ represents something different. Something that should even concern the powers at ESPN and the fine boys at Deadspin who have essentially cornered the market on the sports reporting world.

So why is this such a huge deal?

• Whether you like it or not, TMZ has earned itself a pretty lofty position in terms of reporting celebrity gossip. You see it cited in places like the CBS Evening News, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, and the New York Times. In short, it matters.
• Reporting on celebrity gossip is what they do, and how difficult do you think that is to translate into sports stars? If you’ve watched the Tiger Woods ridicularity, you’ve no doubt seen that TMZ reporting has driven much of the coverage.
• Athletes are entertainers. That’s why many of them make between $5 – $20 million annually. And the rule of law is that if you are an entertainer or in the public eye, very sadly, you are fair game.
• This will change the way places like ESPN staff for, and report on, issues like these. From a competitive standpoint, network executives might decide that someone like Sal Paolantonio in his grey Brooks Brothers suit might not be the right guy to be reporting on Donovan McNabb’s out-of-wedlock lovechild.

The reality is that for crisis reputation managers who protect athletes and sports teams, TMZ’s entry into this domain should not be understated. While it may take a while to develop, it’s potentially a game-changing moment in sports media, and the way that scandals in the sports world are reported on is about to take a dramatic shift.

Carry on.