💰 Murdoch Mystery. Last month, Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner pondered if the Murdochs and Ellisons, owners of Fox and CBS, respectively, were behind the Trump Administration’s recent interest in sports fragmentation. Turns out, they were! Or at least, Rupert Murdoch was. The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday that Murdoch personally lobbied Trump at a dinner about the potential doom of streamers getting more NFL games.

🏈 Netflix adds NFL. Speaking of concerns about streamers getting more NFL games, The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand reported Thursday that Netflix is adding the Week 1 Australia game between the Rams and 49ers to its portfolio, and Puck’s John Ourand added that the NFL and Netflix are “close to a deal for at least five NFL games next season, including the two Christmas games already under contract.”

🏀 More Madness. March Madness just keeps getting bigger. As to whether or not that makes it better remains to be seen. As first reported by Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, both the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball selection committees approved the move to include 76 teams on Thursday. The long-expected move adds eight additional at-large teams to each tournament. Eight opening-round games will be paired with the current First Four, with participating teams split between the lowest-seeded automatic-qualifier bids and at-large bids.

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

As we do every year, we asked Awful Announcing readers to submit grades for all 30 local NBA announcing teams. Around 11,000 grades later, we have our answers on which booths and broadcasting crews met the moment and which left NBA fans wanting more.

We give you… the 2025-26 Awful Announcing local NBA announcer rankings.

You can visit the rankings on the site for the full rundown, complete with graders' comments explaining why they voted as they did. In the meantime, here are some highlights.

The kings stay kings. For the third consecutive year, the New York Knicks broadcast booth was named No. 1 while the Brooklyn Nets crew came in second. Scores were up across the board from last year, but the Knicks and Nets broadcasters blew the rest of the field away. 67.5% of the Nets’ grades were A’s, while 75.8% of the Knicks’ grades were A’s.

On the flipside, the Golden State Warriors' broadcasting team came in dead last for the third consecutive season. Our readers really do not like this booth. It’s the only booth that received more F’s than any other grade. In fact, they’re the only broadcasters whose most common grade wasn’t at least a C. Brutal.

The biggest climbers from last year? The Boston Celtics announcers, fronted by Drew Carte and Brian Scalabrine, jumped from 22nd to 16th. The Houston Rockets broadcast, headlined by Craig Ackerman and Ryan Hollins, moved from 17th to 11th. The Memphis Grizzlies crew jumped from 19th to 7th behind some kudos for Pete Pranica and Brevin Knight. The Toronto Raptors, powered by an appreciation for Matt Devlin and Jack Armstrong, jumped from 16th all the way to 4th.

Conversely, the Sacramento Kings’ booth dropped from 10th to 18th, the Indiana Pacers' broadcast slipped from 15th to 22nd, the Cleveland Cavaliers' announcers sank from 13th to 23rd, and the Oklahoma City Thunder crew fell all the way from 7th to 26th.

The biggest complaint? Part-time superstar announcers are missing too much time. Minnesota’s Michael Grady, Brooklyn’s Ian Eagle, and New York’s Mike Breen all frustrated local fans with their many national commitments.

Hard-to-miss trend: Booths with female announcers ranked poorly. Both the 76ers (Kate Scott) and Bucks (Lisa Byington) were at the bottom of the rankings, while the Denver Nuggets (with Katy Winge) weren’t far behind. We can’t say that’s a big part of the reason they scored so low, but we also spend a lot of time on social media, so…

Check out the rankings for the full story and to find out why your favorite (or least favorite) local announcers ended up where they did.

“If you are chauvinistic enough to associate the actions of one and apply them to all women, then you were never going to take a woman seriously anyway in her job. You were always going to minimize why she got that role.” - Elle Duncan on the notion that Dianna Russini made it harder for women working in sports.

“Angel was set up as a villain before she was even in the WNBA, and now she’s making it clear that she’s gonna protect her peace.” - Megan Rapinoe, defending Angel Reese’s decision to take fines instead of speaking with the media.

“He needs to be quiet… Unless you’re trying to get traded.” - Stephen A. Smith on Celtics star Jaylen Brown.

“I’ll ‘be quiet’ [or] stop streaming if you ‘be quiet’ and retire. Let’s give the people what they want.” - Jaylen Brown, responding to Stephen A. Smith.

“It’s one thing for college basketball to go to 76, it’s not really changing anything. … But this doesn’t make very much sense (in college football). … It’s not even a money grab; it’s an access grab that should not happen in the sport of football, where we used to have two (finalists), and a couple of years ago, we had four, and now we have 12. And to double that and let 8-4 teams in a Playoff when they don’t belong there is completely absurd.” - Paul Finebaum on a potential 24-team CFP.

“We’re just trying to make sure that we’re educated on these issues. It’s not clear whether there will be a regulatory outcome or not.” - FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on their probe into fragmentation of sports broadcasting.

On this week’s episode of the Awful Announcing Podcast, host Brandon Contes interviews legendary NHL broadcaster Mike “Doc” Emrick.

Emrick discussed a wide range of topics, including his decision to retire, the Olympics, his one regret as a broadcaster, the infamous glowing-puck era at Fox, John Sterling, Charles Barkley, Barry Melrose, and more.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

Given Dianna Russini’s role as an NFL insider with The Athletic, her prior role with ESPN, and the fallout from a journalist like her being a little too close to a subject of her reporting, we covered the heck out of the scandal surrounding her and Mike Vrabel from the jump.

That is, until last week when we started to pump the brakes on some aspects of the story. The rumors and salacious details emerging started to veer outside our purview, so we got a bit choosier with which ones we covered.

However, try as we might to move on from the story, the story keeps finding its way back to us. And, to a larger extent, everyone else.

Every week, there seems to be a new photo or video uncovered from a previously unknown rendezvous between the two from some point in the past six years. It’s starting to seem like everyone has a video of the twosome lurking in a folder somewhere.

Every old social media post or interview clip is a fresh accusation that can be added to the evidence pile. The less context, the better.

Rumors and speculation around Russini’s personal life ran so rampant that TMZ had to try to be the voice of reason, reporting that her son Michael is named for her brother, not the New England head coach.

The never-ending firehose of evidence shows no signs of stopping, which means this story isn’t going anywhere, much as you might want it to. Perhaps more importantly, much as Mike Vrabel and the Patriots might want it to.

“The problem for [Patriots owner Robert] Kraft is that it's not going away, and there's nothing he can do to make it go away,” said radio host Jim Rome on Thursday. “…Not only did the public disagree that the photos didn't deserve any further response, they are refusing to move on from this entire topic. Forget not deserving any further response. The public's like, 'This deserves our full attention, indefinitely.’ It's like a 2026 gold rush, and everybody's out here mining for their nugget, trying to strike it rich.”

Rome hit the nail on the head. We’ve learned just enough about what went on between Russini and Vrabel that the demand to know everything is beyond control. Page Six, TMZ, and every other tabloid are pulling out the stops for the next morsel they can get their hands on. And we haven’t even gotten the results of The Athletic’s internal investigation or Russini’s eventual tell-all yet.

Whatever hopes Vrabel and the Pats had of making this story go away, they’re already gone. And so, don’t be surprised to keep seeing headlines with their names in them, on Awful Announcing and elsewhere, for the foreseeable future.