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🦚 On the call. As first reported by Awful Announcing, Jason Benetti and Dave Flemming are joining NBC’s college football broadcast lineup this season, with each set to call select Big Ten games as part of the network’s play-by-play rotation in 2026. In addition, Paul Burmeister returns as the network’s other lead play-by-play voice.

📺 The P in ESPN is Pat. Pat McAfee has been omnipresent on ESPN’s airwaves and is about to become an even bigger part of life for football fans this season. According to an announcement by ESPN on Wednesday, Pat McAfee is joining the network’s Monday Night Countdown studio show this upcoming season. He’ll join Scott Van Pelt, Jason Kelce, Marcus Spears, and Jason McCourty on the show’s panel.

🎤 Can’t keep a Kelce down. Despite initial reports that had him on the outside looking in, Jason Kelce is expanding his analyst role and will join play-by-play broadcaster Dave Pasch and game analyst Kurt Warner in one of two NFL Network booths ESPN is set to announce for the upcoming season, according to a report by Josh Carpenter in Sports Business Journal.

✍️ Claymation. Clay Travis has officially launched his new outlet after departing OutKick earlier this summer. On Wednesday, Travis filed his first column on Sport & State, the new sports, culture, and politics venture he will lead after 15 years building, growing, and eventually selling OutKick. Travis estimated the new site would be “70% sports, 15% pop culture, and 15% where politics intersects with sports.”

🏈 NFL Media, Part II. The NFL may have lost its cable channel, but it’s quickly rebuilding the on-camera operation around everything it still owns. The league is bringing back Andrew Siciliano, Colleen Wolfe, and Michael Yam while adding Trevor Sikkema and Brett Kollmann, giving NFL Media a five-person starting point for its post-NFL Network, digital-first era, according to Wednesday’s announcement.

Read more of today’s top stories at Awful Announcing.

As the second half of the 2026 Major League Baseball season barrels towards the playoffs, we’re not that far away from finding out who will be this year’s sacrificial lambs for the Los Angeles Dodgers en route to winning yet another World Series. Before that happens, we asked you to help determine which local MLB announcing crew would take home the title of your favorite for the 2026 season.

We asked Awful Announcing readers to evaluate every local TV broadcast crew for all 30 MLB teams, assign each a grade from A to F, and share comments. The results, based on more than 85,000 individual votes from more than 9,300 respondents, can be found here.

You can click through to get all the details, but here’s the short of it: The San Diego Padres broadcast, headlined by Don Orsillo and Mark “Mud” Grant, took the title for the second consecutive season. While they actually had only the fourth-most A grades, 88.1% of their grades were A, B, or C, which far surpassed any other broadcast and confirmed that there simply isn’t much to dislike about what they bring to the table.

The Padres repeating at the top of the rankings wasn’t too surprising, but there were a few things that did catch our eye.

The most obvious difference this year was the ascent of the New York Yankees’ booth, from No. 23 to No. 4 this year. They also received the most votes of any booth (over 1,000 more than the next-highest one). Much of the Yankees broadcast’s meteoric rise this year can likely be credited to Michael Kay’s social media campaign to drive votes. That’s well within the rules, but we noted that Kay’s motivation for driving votes was that “I think pitting broadcasts against each other is disgusting.” He wanted to prove a point (especially given how the Yankees usually fare versus the Mets). We admire Kay’s defense of the broadcasting brotherhood/sisterhood. Still, if the point was to prove these rankings are some sham, and it resulted in the Yankees getting their highest ranking ever (by a mile), we’re curious whether he understood the point he was making.

Moving in the other direction was the Los Angeles Angels broadcast, which fell from No. 17 to No. 10. It was a little surprising, given the decent amount of praise they received in the comments. We have a feeling that might have had more to do with sentiments about the franchise in general than with the job Wayne Randazzo and Mark Gubicza are doing.

We wanted to shout out the Chicago White Sox broadcast, which moved up six spots from No. 27 to No. 21. That might not sound too exciting, but given how much grief John Schriffen had been getting in his attempt to replace Jason Benetti while keeping fans interested in a dreadful team, we think it’s impressive that he’s been able to win over at least some people. Probably doesn’t hurt that the White Sox are playing well this season, but hey, a win is a win.

One thing that surprised us was the trend in grades. The average grade across all 30 broadcasting teams was 2.25, down from last year (2.39) and the year before it (2.42). So clearly, people are handing out more negative grades with each passing year. Why is that? We don’t claim to know. Perhaps the internet is just getting meaner, if that’s possible. But it was certainly something we’ll keep an eye on with future announcer rankings.

Go check out the rest of the announcer rankings and reasons graders gave for their scores here.

"You can certainly utilize it as a situation to call me a piece of sh*t again, but I don't think I had anything to do with it." - Pat McAfee, explaining the circumstances leading to a Bill Rasmussen tribute cutaway on ESPN

“I’m going to show you later the DMs from this man. Pages and pages of why I’m such an idiot to be a Republican or conservative and support Donald Trump. Out of the blue, he would send me clips, and I’m like, ‘I just want to talk basketball with you’ or ‘How are your kids…?’” - Sage Steele on DMs she’d received from former ESPN co-worker (and HOFer) Doc Rivers.

“I’d argue, have they brought value to LIV? I think the PGA Tour is in a good spot.” - Rory McIlroy on the value LIV players have coming back to the PGA.

“People expect that this game can be played at the level it’s played at if players just show up on Sunday and that’s it. That’s not how it works. That’s not how football is played; that’s not how teams are built. And I think we just need to pump the brakes on all this, ‘We need to stop that, we need to cut out this…’ because if you start doing that too much, the game is gonna suffer eventually.” - ESPN’s Louis Riddick, pushing back on what he sees as the softening of the NFL schedule.

“If you don’t wear a cup, adoption is an option.” - John Kruk, reacting to bat boy’s unfortunate hit to the groin.

On Wednesday, Brett McMurphy of On3 published a profile on Art Briles, the much-maligned former Baylor football coach who has tried in vain to rehabilitate his reputation several times since the scandal that rocked college football and dismantled the brief powerhouse he’d built.

The piece, which followed Briles at Division II Eastern New Mexico, where he is back coaching college football, reads like so many of its kind. The 70-year-old talks of second chances, and there are quotes from many others about what a good person he is and how he deserves a chance to get back what was perhaps taken from him.

“There’s a small number of people that hate him so viscerally that it’s a little bit alarming,” Dr. James Johnston, President at Eastern New Mexico, told McMurphy. “That small vocal group, they’re hoping he fails, hoping we fail.”

What isn’t made too clear in the profile is why that “small number of people” might not like Briles and think he deserves to just carry on as if nothing happened. And quite frankly, that number isn’t as small as Johnson seems to think.

The details of what was alleged at Baylor under Briles’ watch are harrowing, and the efforts to undermine public awareness of it are a major reason he lost his job and became persona non grata. The profile only skims the surface of all that, choosing to keep the focus on the football coach in search of redemption. And that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way when they decided to read it.

What responsibility do journalists have when it comes to covering someone like Briles, who has never really publicly taken any accountability or responsibility for what happened to multiple women when he was in charge of the men who allegedly assaulted them? Is it unfair to say they are undeserving of coverage? Or is the point that the coverage needs to reckon with the full story, not just that person’s side of it? Or is it a journalist’s responsibility to simply go where the story takes them, especially if there’s access involved?

Depending on who you follow on social media, there’s probably an answer out there for however you feel about it.