That sums up “The Game,” an unfunny, uninspired new sitcom about women who live with professional football players. It's a study in how to get it all wrong.

The sad thing is that The Game” could work. Premiering on the CW this Sunday at 8:30, this spinoff and lead-out of the urban girl-power comedy “Girlfriends,” clearly aspires to appeal to the same audience by addressing issues that are taken seriously in the African American community, introducing hot-button storylines about interracial marriage, infidelity, class-consciousness and gender equality.

It then reduces them to lame punchlines. That's the huge disappointment.

If the show were to simply acknowledge itself as a silly trifle, nominally about football wives but mostly about women trading snide putdowns, it might work. It wouldn't win any Emmys, but it would find a following for the modest thing it is. It would be honest television.

But by raising real issues about athletes and the people in their lives, then slipping into dull sitcom chatter, "The Game" is worse than not funny, it's genuinely disappointing.

The story: Melanie (Tia Mowry, “Sister, Sister”), an aspiring medical student, has moved west to be with her boyfriend, Derwin (Pooch Davis), a rookie for the San Diego Sabres. To do so, she's transferred from Johns Hopkins, among the nation's top medical schools, to a local school.

Melanie soon meets Tasha (Wendy Raquel Robinson), stage mother and real mom of Malik (Hosea Sanchez), the groupie-friendly quarterback. Melanie also gets to know Kelly (Brittany Daniel, “Joe Dirt”) and Jason Pitts (Coby Bell), an interracial couple.

These relationships show promise but they fail to come to life because of the weak performances. The acting isn’t so much awful as mediocre.

Mowry, as Melanie, comes off as sanguine to lifeless, which is not good for the principal character. She's cute but way short on charisma. When Derwin asks how her day was at medical school, she answers matter-of-factly, “It was hard,” as if she had just spent the day stacking shelves at the local convenience store. We've already forgotten that's she's given up Johns Hopkins to be with her man.

As Tasha, the mommy manager, Robinson makes her every line of sound like a threat. She starts out an intimidating figure but by the end of the episode the effect is more numbing. Daniel, as Kelly, does little to liven up her thankless role, and the guys are uniformly unmemorable.

The writing doesn't do anything to breathe life back into "The Game," despite the promising storylines. It's as if the writers are afraid to tackle the issues they raise. Whenever the material threatens to get interesting, it’s defused with a sophomoric one-liner.

There are the clumsy groupie jokes: “She looks like her syphilis got the syphilis.”

There are the embarrassing interracial marriage jokes: “I know he’s light, bright and damn near white, but we still got dibs.”

And there are the tired infidelity jokes: “Are you an out-of-town girlfriend or in-town girlfriend?”

Sunday night at 8:30 is a competitive timeslot, with “Amazing Race 10,” “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and real NFL football over on NBC. It’s hard to imagine how “The Game” can expect to compete.