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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏀 NBC will use AI to bring the NBA back to NBC, featuring the original promo voice, Jim Fagan. Fagan passed away in 2017, but the wonders of technology will bring his voice back this fall.

📺 Comcast’s upcoming spinoff of its cable assets has found a name, Versant. We can only hope it’s an effort to keep the memory of Versus alive and well.

🏀 Incredibly, over 1 million viewers tuned in to watch Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever play an exhibition game in Iowa against the Brazilian national team, which they won blowout.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

A horse with no crown

With a horse named Sovereignty, you can’t question the horse’s authority to make its own decisions… or at least its trainer, Bill Mott.

However, the choice of the Kentucky Derby winner’s team likely sent a shiver through the spines of NBC, Fox, and horse racing fans everywhere around the country this week. It was announced that Sovereignty would skip the second leg of the Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes, later this month. Instead, the horse will run a more conservative schedule and focus on preparing for the Belmont Stakes in June.

It’s the second time in four years that the Derby winner is skipping the Preakness. Rich Strike won the Kentucky Derby as an 80-1 longshot in 2022 and did not compete for the Triple Crown. But before that, the last healthy scratch for a Derby Winner in the Preakness came back in 1985.

Horse racing is far from its peak as the sport of kings and the days of Secretariat or Seabiscuit. However, the Triple Crown races themselves still carry an enormous audience. The Kentucky Derby saw its highest viewership numbers since 1989, drawing 17.7 million viewers. Without the Triple Crown at stake, the Preakness will have less than one-third of that audience. (Last year’s race drew 5.5 million.)

The Belmont will be hit even harder. It has seen viewership slide in recent years to the point it hit a 30-year low in its first running on Fox in 2023. Belmont ratings have traditionally tripled with a Triple Crown on the line.

Incredibly, only 2 of the 19 horses that competed at Churchill Downs will line up at Pimlico, second place finisher Journalism and American Promise. As Pat Forde notes at Sports Illustrated, the Triple Crown schedule may need to change as so few horses even bother competing in all three races these days. The Preakness will see the last 20 Triple Crown races feature 20 different winners. The longtime scribe recommends spacing out the races more to allow for easier schedules for the thoroughbreds and the Belmont racing on July 4th. And it’s obviously in the sport's best interest to do so.

That brings up a larger point - if the horse racing world itself can’t be motivated to care about the Triple Crown, why would the larger sports world? Why would casual fans? The chase for the Triple Crown was a decades-long story that captivated everyone until American Pharoah completed the trifecta in 2015. Justify did it again in 2018. But instead of producing a horse racing renaissance, pursuing greater glory is now an afterthought.

We have seen time and time again that Americans will gather around any sport if it’s a big event - the Olympics, the World Cup, even the 4 Nations Face-Off far exceed what their sports would draw on a regular year-round basis. Horse racing has three of those opportunities in the calendar to rally the country together. But now it looks more and more like those in the sport are content with just one.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Donald Trump appeared confused when he seemed to imply that Alexander Ovechkin was a Canadian during a White House meeting with new Canada PM Mark Carney. Although, in fairness, he also seemed to forget Ovechkin’s name.

David Beckham and friends on CBS Sports had some high praise for the incredible UEFA Champions League semifinal between Inter Milan and Barcelona.

Note to NBA reporters: don’t ask Thunder star Jalen Williams about rebounding.

🔦 IN THE SPOTLIGHT ☀️

MLS Season Pass on Apple TV has long been under a microscope for the innovative partnership and questions about its true success. MLS media exec Seth Bacon sat down with AA to talk about the deal and how the league is looking to grow its fanbase.

🏄 _{CHANNEL SURFING} 🌊 

🏀 Reggie Miller drew criticism from viewers, including SI’s Jimmy Traina, for his work down the stretch in the Knicks’ Game 1 victory over the Celtics. [Sports Illustrated]

🏈 Former Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren got a healthy bonus after departing the conference for the Chicago Bears for the massive Big Ten media deals. [USA Today]

🏈 In what may be the most frivolous lawsuit of all time, a fan is suing the NFL for $100 million because of the distress caused by the Shedeur Sanders draft slide. [On3]

🗣️ NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

“The audience that we’ve built and that we’re so lucky to have is something the networks could only dream of having to the lengths that they (will) go for that creator." - P1’s Matt Gallagher to Awful Announcing about the independent F1 platform’s remarkable connection with fans.

“If you want to do business with him, you're going to have to make sure that you're ready to engage in some level of capitulation, even if it's something as simple as being well-mannered.” - Did Stephen A. Smith go to the Neville Chamberlain school of politics?

"It shouldn't be insanely complicated or insanely expensive to cheer on your hometown team." - Sen. Ted Cruz to reporters, including AA’s Drew Lerner, after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on sports streaming explored the rising complexity and costs facing fans.

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Can the MLB Draft become an event?

We talked about big events up top, and one that has certainly crossed that threshold is the NFL Draft. What once took place in hotel ballrooms and Radio City Music Hall is now a traveling circus attracting millions of television viewers and hundreds of thousands of fans in attendance.

The NFL Draft will travel to Washington DC in 2027 and take place on the National Mall in the footsteps of the Washington Monument and instantly become one of the most surreal and iconic sports scenes that we have ever seen.

So, how do other sports catch up and follow suit to give their own events a more special feel?

The most overlooked draft in the major sports is baseball. Most prospects spend months or years in the minor leagues, and some draftees who are straight out of high school don’t even immediately go to the pros. Cleveland Guardians 2024 #1 overall pick Travis Bazzana is playing AA ball with the Akron Rubber Ducks. And as we learned from Colin Cowherd, we can’t even have the excitement of trading picks for big-league players.

But Ken Rosenthal and A.J. Pierzynski have a unique idea - pair the MLB Draft with the College World Series.

Major League Baseball has experimented with putting the draft at the All-Star Break. However, because of the baseball selection process's unique nature, it still lacks an immediate connection. However, at the College World Series, all three levels of the sport can come together to celebrate what makes baseball unique across high school, college, and the pros.

On its own, it’s probably not an idea that will shift the modern sports landscape. Who knows if MLB or college baseball would even be interested? But it is an example of how sports leagues need to be more creative and innovative in a time when fans need some extra meaning to earn their attention.