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🦚 FNIA shakeup. Amid reports that Tony Dungy is “out” at NBC’s NFL pregame show Football Night in America, changes will likely extend beyond the Hall of Fame head coach. Awful Announcing has learned that it is unlikely analyst Rodney Harrison will return next season and that Jac Collinsworth’s role on the show is also in question. Along with Dungy, the trio made up the show’s satellite studio that traveled on-site to each Sunday Night Football game throughout the season.

📰 WaPo roundup. The Athletic is taking advantage of the Washington Post’s decision to shutter its sports section by hiring six former staffers to bolster its coverage of D.C.-area sports teams, along with adding to its coverage in other areas. Barry Svrluga, Spencer Nusbaum, Candace Buckner, Ava Wallace, Adam Kilgore, and Jason Murray are the six hired by The Athletic, announced on Thursday.

📺 Finally Un-limited. At long last, Comcast Xfinity subscribers have access to ESPN Unlimited. Access to ESPN Unlimited has been promised to pay TV subscribers who receive ESPN ever since the app's launch last August. But it’s taken nearly six months for that promise to be fulfilled for Xfinity subscribers. Now, YouTube TV remains the last major distributor without Unlimited access.

In the past year, momentum in college sports to lobby Congress for an antitrust exemption similar to what professional sports leagues get via the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 has grown substantially, spearheaded by Texas Tech billionaire booster Cody Campbell, who founded the organization Saving College Sports.

Campbell’s premise is simple. By pooling media rights across college conferences, rather than each conference selling its own media rights packages, college sports could generate more revenue from its media rights deals. In Campbell’s estimation, centralizing these rights would enable more efficient scheduling, thereby maximizing viewership (and the value) of broadcast inventory in college sports, particularly in football.

It’s a model that has worked swimmingly for the NFL. The league sells media rights on behalf of its 32 teams and can efficiently distribute games to the tune of $10 billion per year, a figure that will soon be much higher after reworking its deals over the next year or two.

The four major conferences in college football, on average, command $2.55 billion in media rights revenue by selling their media rights separately. Campbell believes that figure would go way up if there were a single entity in charge of selling media rights for college sports.

But the Big Ten and SEC are staunchly opposed to such a model, likely for fear that centralizing the sale of media rights would upend the structural advantages currently keeping both conferences atop the food chain. According to a recent report by Ben Portnoy in Sports Business Journal, the two conferences commissioned a white paper to serve as a reference for Congress, which is examining whether to reopen the Sports Broadcasting Act to consider granting college sports an antitrust exemption.

The Big Ten and SEC claim that the current structure, in which conferences compete with one another in the marketplace for media rights, is superior to a centralized model because it fosters innovation.

“By keeping control at the conference level, the system retains optionality to pilot new formats, adopt mid-week showcases, experiment with streaming exclusives, and iterate sponsorship models — all of which could help generate substantial additional revenues that could be used to support other sports,” the paper reads. “But this result can only be accomplished by market forces. A federally created single-seller sports media regime would reduce optionality, slow decision cycles, eliminate college and university autonomy over their own athletic programs without generating more revenue.”

There is some truth to what the paper is claiming. Universities would have less flexibility over their schedules under a single-seller model, which could rankle some schools that like to exercise strict control over who they play and when, such as the handful of Big Ten schools that refuse to play night games late in the season.

But the idea that a single-seller model wouldn’t experiment with new formats, mid-week showcases, and streaming exclusives is nonsense. The NFL, and every other pro sports league that afforded an antitrust exemption, disproves that premise immediately. These leagues are incentivized to maximize media rights revenue in any way possible, and they’ve all iterated their broadcast schedules in more or less the same ways the Big Ten and SEC claim wouldn’t happen under a single-seller model. If anything, centralizing media rights would make such innovation more likely, not less, given what we’ve seen from other leagues.

And the idea that a single-seller model would “slow decision cycles” is equally ludicrous. College sports now are an unwieldy beast of competing interests. Conferences, schools, the NCAA, TV networks, etc., are all often pulling in different directions to protect their own bottom lines. Think about how long it took for the College Football Playoff to expand from four teams to 12. And now there’s yet more bickering over playoff expansion that has kicked the can down the road for another season. The “decision cycles” of college sports right now are far from efficient.

This letter reeks of two conferences, the Big Ten and SEC, scrambling to protect their own statuses as the ultimate power brokers in college sports under the auspices of protecting innovation and autonomy.

Are some of their points valid? Yes. It’s understandable for conferences to want to protect rivalry games and other elements that make college sports unique. But let’s not kid ourselves. The point of this letter isn’t to make a good-faith argument about maximizing media revenue. It’s to ensure the Big Ten and SEC continue to call the shots for the rest of the college sports ecosystem.

Awful Announcing contributor Ellyn Briggs authored a brilliant story about the increasing prevalence of fabricated quotes attributed to sports media personalities from accounts looking to gin up engagement for profit.

Briggs spoke with Jemele Hill and Ryan Clark — two of the sports personalities targeted the most by these posts — about when they first started getting targeted by these accounts, how they handle people online believing they said things that never came out of their mouths, and the broader implications of incentivizing this type of engagement on social media.

As someone who has been employed by mainstream media outlets for more than two decades—and who often opines on the intersections of sports, gender, politics, and race—Jemele Hill is more than used to receiving hate mail in response to her commentary.

She is, however, a novice at dealing with a new contour of being a public figure in the mid-2020s: receiving hate mail for something she didn’t write or say.

“I first noticed something was up last year when I started getting an influx of messages that were more vile than usual,” Hill told Awful Announcing in an interview this month. “I quickly found out there was a post circulating online that claimed I had said Angel Reese was the next Michael Jordan.” 

Despite not recalling making such a statement—which Hill described as “absurd and extreme, even for [her] own history of provocative opinions”—she Googled herself, worried a recent comment could have been taken out of context. It hadn’t been. 

Instead, Hill found that the quote was a total fabrication, first shared by a random sports page on Facebook, with no indication that it was untrue. The post’s comment section was already full of racial and misogynistic slurs when she jumped in from her personal account to set the record straight.

“You would expect in that situation, people would be contrite, apologetic, and say, ‘Hey, I got a little too emotional. I’m sorry,’” Hill recalled. “No. Instead, the response was, ‘Okay, maybe you didn’t say it, but it sounds like something you would say.’ That seems to be a common theme whenever I’ve checked people about falling for this clickbait; they have a hard time apologizing.”

Check out the full story here.

At long last, the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery has reached its final chapter.

On Thursday, the WBD board announced that it has deemed Paramount’s latest bid of $31 per share as “superior” to the deal it agreed to with Netflix late last year. Just hours later, Netflix officially pulled its offer to purchase WBD.

We’ll spare you the details of Paramount's new offer, but the short of it is that the company increased its proposal by $1.00 per share and included a number of provisions that protect WBD in the event its deal is held up or blocked by federal regulators.

What's important for our purposes is what this means for TNT Sports. Under the Netflix agreement, TNT Sports was destined to be spun out with Discovery Global, likely to get caught up in further M&A down the line. Now, under Paramount ownership, TNT Sports' destiny is a combination with CBS Sports.

Such a tie-up will create a formidable portfolio of live sports rights, including the NFL, College Football Playoff games, the entirety of March Madness, MLB and NHL playoffs, multiple golf majors, including the Masters, UFC, NASCAR, the French Open, and more.

It's fair to say that this live sports portfolio would be rivaled only by ESPN.

And realistically, the TNT Sports properties might fair better under CBS Sports than cast away in a stub company filled with other declining assets. CBS has the deep pockets of the Ellison family, who have already proven willing to spend big on sports, having shelled out over $1 billion per year for UFC. Not to mention, CBS can better capitalize on the College Football Playoff, postseason MLB and NHL games, and NASCAR races by putting them on broadcast television rather than cable.

To be sure, not all of these properties will move from TNT Sports straight onto CBS. The company will want to protect the still-lucrative TNT/TBS/truTV carriage fees. Not to mention, WBD's current distribution deals likely stipulate certain programming air on certain channels. But there are some moves that would make sense for CBS to better maximize viewership.

There's also a likelihood that TNT Sports properties become available on Paramount+, boosting the value of that streaming service.

The bottom line for sports fans is that the TNT Sports brand will, in all likelihood, be rolled into CBS Sports. That calls into question the future of TNT's studio shows, particularly Inside the NBA, which is licensed to ESPN but remains a TNT production. It also calls into question whether or not TNT's production style will be ported over to CBS, or if properties like MLB and NHL will be produced by teams currently under the CBS Sports umbrella if/when a deal is approved.

Next up is the regulatory process. Given the confidence the Ellison family has shown in its relationship with the Trump administration, and the billions of dollars in fees it would owe WBD if the deal doesn’t close, it seems like approval is a foregone conclusion. But for now, we’ll have to wait and see.