Welcome to The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter, where you’ll always find the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis.

Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up for free to make sure you never miss it.

🏈 Dianna Russini and Mike Vrabel were captured being very friendly in photos published by the New York Post’s Page Six. Russini denies any insinuation about a relationship between the married individuals.

🏈 NBC is selling Big Ten championship game football rights back to Fox Sports for next season.

🏈 Nick Saban praised Donald Trump for his “leadership” in college sports by convening a roundtable that has yet actually to achieve anything.

⚾ NBC continues to bring in the big guns for Sunday Night Baseball with CC Sabathia, Andruw Jones, and Corey Kluber all part of a Guardians-Braves broadcast.

🏈 Steve Levy could be in line for a surprise return to the Monday Night Football booth with an upcoming shakeup in the ESPN #2 broadcast team.

🏀 One Shining Moment was almost used as the Super Bowl XXI anthem, not as the March Madness anthem.

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

How on earth can anyone even begin to attempt to explain how WWE can salvage Pat McAfee’s heavily criticized return without unleashing 3,000 words of fantasy booking that only the most hardcore of internet wrestling fans could stomach?

Thus far, the shock return of Pat McAfee in the corner of Randy Orton for his Night most WWE fans have thoroughly rejected 1 WrestleMania 42 main event against WWE champion Cody Rhodes. From a creative, business, performance, and logical standpoint, it’s an absolute mess. Let’s recap the main issues.

The revolt of WWE fans has been strong, so much so that, in classic WWE fashion, they have pivoted to now making the backlash part of the storyline.

On Monday Night Raw, CM Punk (who is involved in the other WrestleMania main event) ran down McAfee, tying him to Ari Emanuel and suggesting that WWE should lower ticket prices. Punk called Pat McAfee “MAGAfee” and made it clear that he is only there because the corporate overlords want him there. Obviously, wrestling isn’t strong or cool enough to survive without the former punter of the Indianapolis Colts.

In response, McAfee seemed to defend WWE’s high ticket prices on his ESPN show on Tuesday, suggesting that Punk is arguing he isn’t worth the high price of admission, furthering his new bad guy persona.

But the fact that he is now working, playing a wrestling character on his daily ESPN show, is a brand-new issue for ESPN to figure out.

It was a huge surprise when ESPN entered into a deal with WWE, given that the network covers sports, and WWE has communicated to the masses that they should be seen as pure entertainment. It’s one thing for WWE shows to interview wrestlers to promote premium live events (now exclusively airing on ESPN’s app). But it’s another for an ESPN personality himself to blur the line between storyline and reality.

The ESPN and WWE audiences are not concentric circles. And, likely, the daily audience of The Pat McAfee Show is not filled with hardcore wrestling fans who understand when he’s playing a character and when he is not. After all, that’s theoretically part of the reason why he is in this role in the first place, to help sell WrestleMania to casual fans.

But when he’s doing so by saying that the current wrestlers aren’t any good… what’s the motivation for the casual fan to tune in? Why does any non-wrestling fan care about Pat McAfee saving wrestling? If it makes absolutely zero sense from a wrestling fan standpoint, it probably makes even less sense to a non-wrestling fan.

Pro wrestling always walks a knife-edge when they try to blur the lines between fact and fiction. Already, wrestling reporters have been furiously filing reports suggesting that the various stars are going off-script, that wrestlers backstage are furious at Emanuel for forcing McAfee into the WrestleMania spotlight, and that they want TKO to stop gouging fans at the ticket window.

So what’s true and what’s not? It’s an impossible question to ask when it comes to professional wrestling.

However, that could be just what WWE wants. By turning Pat McAfee into the representative of the modern-day corporation, WWE might see it as an opportunity to make Punk and Rhodes bigger fan favorites than ever before. Fans are already naturally turned against TKO because of ticket prices, nonstop ads, and other complaints. If that anger is turned into a storyline in which their heroes conquer the evil corporate overlords and become the voice of the voiceless, it could somehow turn a disaster into a long-term success. If WWE can bring that real-life tension to the ring, then maybe they can pull off a bigger upset than Danhausen winning gold.

But here’s where the danger lies for WWE. They are building a major storyline around the axis of A) the product being bad and B) the product being way too expensive.

No industry in its right mind would actively highlight for its customers how bad, expensive, or inaccessible its product is. Ok, except for maybe Inside the NBA. Furthermore, the back-and-forth between McAfee and Punk screams of the same desperation that plagued WCW in its dying days, when backstage issues were brought to the cameras.

If you tell someone the thing they are watching sucks, you risk fans believing you and checking out. And when it’s filled with as much cronyism and as little believability as Pat McAfee suddenly being a main event heel manager, that risk doubles. Thus far, the story seems like an incredibly narrow play for a 40-year-old McAfee fan who hasn’t watched wrestling since they were a teenager.

Can Pat McAfee, WWE, and ESPN find a way to deliver beyond that? Or will fans reject it because they can see through all of this as Ari Emanuel’s pet project to make the already omnipresent ESPN host into a movie star? They are all facing long odds of successfully finishing this story.

Dan Orlovsky has to wear a Michigan earring for a month on television, but he doesn’t have a great history of paying off his bets.

Who had Dan Hurley actually praising the referees of the National Championship Game after he lost on their Bingo cards?

The Minnesota Twins were probably not trying to achieve maximum irony with this SNF-style intro, but they did.

If Stuart Holden is selling expensive hospitality packages for FIFA on his personal X feed, don’t expect Fox to acknowledge the fan backlash over insanely high ticket prices.

“He completely misunderstood what I said. The whole idea that I was giving the front office a pass or lowering fans' expectations, that was not the point of it.” - Mike Breen responded to Stephen A. Smith’s criticism over comments about the Knicks.

“OSU dodged a bullet with Dusty May. Not sure if Jake Diebler will be great, but May's claim to fame is a lucky postseason run last year.” - OSU beat writer Dave Biddle and his epic cold take will go down in infamy in the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry.

“Shame on all of you. It’s disgraceful. Don’t do that! You know how ridiculous it makes you look? What’s the end game? To look jealous? To look small?” - Michael Kay is not ending his crusade to talk Yankees fans off the cliff when it comes to chanting against Juan Soto.

This year’s NCAA women’s tournament did not feature Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, or Paige Bueckers. And yet, the ratings continue to impress.

ESPN posted its second-most-watched women’s tournament in company history this past month, up five percent over last year. Sunday’s championship game was the third most-watched in history, with just a shade under 10 million viewers for UCLA’s dominant victory. If that game had been closer, the viewership would have likely been much higher. And the national semifinal games (marked by Geno Auriemma’s temper tantrum in UConn’s loss to South Carolina) were also the second most-watched in history.

After Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese went to the WNBA and Paige Bueckers followed, it was fair to wonder whether or not women’s college basketball could sustain momentum with new players cycling through the spotlight. The answer appears to be a resounding yes.

It’s great news for the sport of women’s basketball as a whole. Given that players stick around in college much longer on the women’s side than they do on the men’s side, fans will get to know the stars of women’s college basketball before they make it into the WNBA. And with the long-term future of the pro league secured with a new WNBA, it should ensure that the sport continues to go from strength to strength.

It might not be too long before we stop talking about the Caitlin Clark effect when it comes to high women’s basketball ratings because these numbers may be the floor now, not the ceiling.