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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺 GameDay’s Plan B. As the carriage dispute between YouTube TV and ESPN continues, the network moved Saturday morning’s episode of College GameDay to its streaming app and the X account of star host Pat McAfee — for free. Meanwhile, subscribers did not respond well to videos posted by top ESPN talent asking viewers to lobby YouTube to end the dispute.

⚾ Calls from an epic Game 7. The Los Angeles Dodgers are your back-to-back World Series champions. We have all the television and radio calls from the final out of the Dodgers’ clinching win, from Fox to SportsNet to KTNQ.

🟣 Ravens fined over Lamar status. The NFL fined the Baltimore Ravens $100,000 over a discrepancy in QB Lamar Jackson’s status last weekend, after NBC’s Mike Florio and others called on the league to act aggressively and set a precedent about potential information trading with injury reports across football.

✍️ Ley bullish on sports media? In an interview with the student newspaper at his alma mater Seton Hall, ESPN legend Bob Ley poured cold water on the idea that sports journalism is being “choked off.” While Ley’s headline quote that it is a “lazy” narrative to say sports journalism is dying looked bad, his explanation is founded in optimism that reporting is still thriving on new platforms and from new voices.

🏈 Deion falls on the sword. Amid an awful Big 12 campaign for Colorado football, head coach Deion Sanders nixed postgame media availability for his players after a 52-17 drubbing at home against Arizona. “This is me,” Coach Prime said. “This has nothing to do with them, it has everything to do with me.”

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

‘NFL on CBS’ is the soundtrack to an all-time rivalry

The sixth straight regular-season installment of Chiefs-Bills on CBS more than delivered.

The motions of these clashes are merely the checkpoints between kickoff on one of these teams’ frosty open-air coliseums and the inevitable last-second touchdown drive. Both Buffalo and Kansas City have stretched the limits of what it means to say “whoever has the ball last.” Each game lives up to the high bar that comes when the two best living quarterbacks go head to head, the game invariably serving as a preview of a postseason rematch to come.

The NFL has painstakingly committed to scheduling this rivalry each season, and, like the Draft or the Super Bowl, fans know to circle it on the calendar.

Likewise, it has become the event around which the NFL on CBS coverage orbits. Anyone who has enjoyed Mahomes vs. Allen all these years (including all four postseason duels) owes a great deal to Jim Nantz, Tony Romo, Tracy Wolfson and The NFL Today.

“We get attached to these players and these teams,” Wolfson told AA’s Sam Neumann this week. “You form relationships with these players and coaches.”

She added that this year, the difference for both teams was an added sense of urgency. Neither team was at the top of their division, with Buffalo dropping an early game to New England while Kansas City continues to watch the Broncos pull rabbit after rabbit out of their Rocky Mountain knit caps.

Wolfson is a great example, though, of how one network covering a particular team or matchup delivers a better experience for the audience. When she comes up to interview Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes after a game (or, though less visibly, when she is in town for prep throughout the week), that history comes through. The stars respect Wolfson, and she knows what to ask to set them up.

The same can be said of Romo, who gets the opportunity of a generation as a former quarterback analyzing the best quarterbacks in their biggest moments each season. While his unique sense of humor can make for an awkward watch at times and he is no longer the NFL Nostradamus he was when he first joined CBS, Romo is strong on these games because he keeps it simple. These are two all-timers trading blows. Romo lets the game play out and analyzes what comes, good or bad.

With The NFL Today going on-site the past two years, Chiefs-Bills has the aura of a major sports moment. As it should.

In this way, the NFL on CBS team has begun to feel to the AFC in the 2020s like the NBA on NBC did with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. CBS is giving us the backing track for our core sports memories, bringing its A-game to the defining rivalry of this generation.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

We’re not sure who asked for an MLB rules analyst, but this couldn’t have been what they wanted when they did…

Tony Romo is coming for Cris Collinsworth’s corner!

Not every day you see a pro athlete take a swipe at his teammates like this:

Kirk Herbstreit getting to the bottom of the important issues facing college football":

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• For a Halloween edition of his ESPN show, Pat McAfee dressed up as Peter Neverville, an “old sports media man.” Performing a fake conversation in character on-air, McAfee told a hypothetical version of himself on the other end of the conversation to “shut the f*ck up.”

• The circus around the LSU head football coach position continues, with significant influence by Gov. Jeff Landry. Ahead of basketball season, Kim Mulkey symbolically skipped her postgame press conference after an exhibition game in support of departing AD Scott Woodward.

• A scholarship dedicated to the late Yahoo NFL reporter Terez Paylor was recently stripped of its focus on developing a pipeline of young Black journalists by the University of Missouri, leading his widow and friend to lament the “gut punch” of Mizzou undermining Paylor’s legacy.

• Urban Meyer reportedly went down the road to replace James Franklin at Penn State, only for the university’s leadership to disengage over concerns about Meyer’s outlook on NIL in public comments while at Fox.

• ESPN hired a regular women’s college basketball analyst, making veteran referee Dee Kantner part of the top broadcast crew. Kantner will be on-site for big games all season, and could contribute during WNBA season as well.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

Last Friday on The Play-By-Play, our LIVE sports media talk show, Ben Axelrod and Brendon Kleen broke down the 2025 Awful Announcing Sports Podcast Power List.

The pair discussed the ongoing reign of Bill Simmons atop the industry along with newcomers like Pablo Torre, Kylie Kelce and Cam Newton.

Then, a fun debate on who should be on the Sports Podcast Mt. Rushmore (which you can vote on!)

You can watch The Play-By-Play here, or listen on Apple and Spotify.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Why head coach rants against local media never work…

Heading into another NFL Sunday (and another Houston Texans loss), our Michael Grant had a sharp column responding to head coach DeMeco Ryans.

Ryan made news this week for becoming the latest coach to accuse the local media of overly negative coverage, saying, “You guys must be the negative ones with the negative stuff.”

As Michael wrote in response, coaches create unnecessary friction and look quite defensive when they fail to realize that media coverage simply rises and falls with the team’s performance:

He’s the coach. His paycheck includes accepting responsibility and projecting an optimistic vision for the franchise. If he wants more press that he deems as positive, Ryans can either win more games or rely more on the Texans’ Instagram account. The media is not here to be your cheerleader.

Read Michael’s full column here.