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🏀 Post-Bron world. Maverick Carter confirmed at a Semafor conference last week that LeBron James plans to build his own content operation through Fulwell after retirement rather than pursue a traditional broadcasting career, saying the plan is to develop a suite of shows around whatever LeBron's creative vision is.

🎬 Cut before the finish line. ESPN pulled Frank Marshall's documentary Rachel, Breathe from ESPN2 one hour before its scheduled Sunday premiere after failing to finalize a licensing agreement, with Marshall — the producer behind Back to the Future — going public immediately and saying ESPN's lawyers told him "sign it now or we are pulling the show." The film is about a woman who completed the Boston Marathon five months after emerging from a coma, and it was scheduled to air the night before the Boston Marathon.

🏈 Kraft service. Robert Kraft used the extended response window the New York Post gave Mike Vrabel to send a crisis strategist to pressure the paper not to run the Mike Vrabel-Dianna Russini photos, with a source telling In Touch Weekly that the Post gave Vrabel longer than industry norms to respond, and Kraft took advantage of that window.

⛳ Rough treatment. The Athletic's Brody Miller traveled to Mexico City to cover LIV Golf this weekend and was stopped on the course by a security guard who pulled out his phone and showed Miller his own headshot in a company security chat, telling him a security alert had been issued for him the day before — days after Miller and his colleagues broke the story of the Saudi PIF pulling LIV's funding.

🏟️ Tennessee’d. Dan Patrick said on his eponymous show on Monday that he was told the 2030 Super Bowl is "signed and ready to go" in Nashville, citing a source, while acknowledging there were no published reports to support the claim and no official confirmation from the NFL. Nashville's Nissan Stadium is currently undergoing a major renovation, and the league has not announced any Super Bowl beyond 2028.

🏒 Luukkonen't. The Buffalo Sabres broke the NHL's longest active playoff drought — 15 years — with a 4-3 win over Boston on Sunday, but ESPN's coverage of the moment left a lot to be desired, with studio analysts Mark Messier and P.K. Subban both stumbling over goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen's name before Steve Levy stepped in, and reporter Leah Hextall telling Tage Thompson on the ice that Buffalo was the only franchise he'd ever known — Thompson was drafted by St. Louis and came to Buffalo in the Ryan O'Reilly trade.

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

Here is the most honest thing anyone has said about the College Football Playoff's weekly rankings show, courtesy of an anonymous person involved in the process, via The Athletic’s Ralph D. Russo and Chris Vannini

"The rankings show is a blessing and a curse. It provides great fodder for college football fans, but every word gets parsed to the point where no one seems happy."

The CFP management committee — the 10 FBS conference commissioners plus Notre Dame's athletic director — is gathering this week in the Dallas area for its spring meeting, with ESPN executives in attendance. On the agenda, along with the unresolved expansion fight between the SEC and Big Ten, is the question of what to do about the Tuesday night rankings show that has become the most reliably controversial hour of college football television.

The Athletic, the options being considered include starting to release rankings later in the season, eliminating the rankings release the week before championship weekend, and taking the spotlight off the committee chair.

These are, to varying degrees, fine ideas. They are also, to varying degrees, beside the point.

The ranking show's problem isn't that it starts too early. It isn't that the penultimate release box-scores the committee before conference championships. It isn't that Hunter Yurachek, a full-time athletic director at Arkansas, has to sit down with Rece Davis on national television and explain, with five minutes of airtime and a week's worth of incomplete data, why Notre Dame is ranked ahead of a Miami team that beat them on the field. Although, for what it's worth, all of those things are also true.

The real problem is that the weekly rankings were designed for a four-team playoff. It debuted in 2014, a product of a specific anxiety: the old BCS had released its computer standings on Sunday nights with zero explanation, just a number next to a team name, and the backlash was immediate and perpetual. The CFP wanted to show its work. It wanted to prove that humans, not algorithms, were making these decisions, and that those humans could stand behind their reasoning.

That logic made sense when the cutline was four teams, and the gap between in and out was usually obvious by November. It makes considerably less sense when there are 12 teams, when the committee is parsing 25 résumés across conferences that don't all play the same schedules, when a team can sit at No. 14 in the first rankings and legitimately make the field four weeks later. The show was built for a binary world. It is now operating in a multi-variable equation that can't be cleanly narrated on television in five minutes a week.

What happens when you put that equation on TV anyway? You get what happened last November. Miami beat Notre Dame in the season opener. The Hurricanes started the season ranked 8th in the first CFP poll, eight spots behind Notre Dame, which they had beaten. The committee's explanation — that teams start from scratch every week, that the head-to-head isn't applied until teams are in a "comparable tier" — was both technically defensible and completely incoherent to anyone watching at home. The show didn't just document the committee's work. It created a villain arc. Notre Dame became the team getting preferential treatment. Miami became the team getting robbed.

And in the end, after all of that, they flipped in the final ranking anyway.

Notre Dame's athletic director was reportedly left feeling the school had become "an involuntary character in a made-for-TV drama." That’s an exact description of what the weekly rankings show does to every team near the bubble every single week. The drama is the product. The teams are the raw material.

Here’s the thing that the reforms being discussed this week in Dallas can't fix: ESPN contractually requires five rankings shows before selection day. Last year, those six shows, including selection day, averaged 1.4 million viewers, the best since 2017. You don’t go to ESPN and say, "We'd like to do fewer of these" when the ratings are pointing in the opposite direction. Starting the show a week later, or skipping the penultimate one, doesn't change the fundamental incentive structure. ESPN wants the controversy. The committee hates the scrutiny. These two parties have now agreed contractually to produce that contradiction every Tuesday night in November for the foreseeable future.

“Truly, until all the data is in — conference championships, head-to-head — I think all the data comes in, then you can look at this fairly,” said Kirk Hebstreit.

ESPN's own lead college football voice thinks the show shouldn't exist in its current form. The committee apparently agrees, and yet their solution is to stop putting someone on camera to defend it.

Of all the ideas being floated, removing the chairman from the on-camera interview is the most revealing. Think about what that concedes. The CFP is essentially admitting the interview does more damage than good. That putting Hunter Yurachek in front of a camera for five minutes every Tuesday creates more problems than it solves. But removing the chairman doesn't remove the show. It just removes the person who has to answer for the show, which is a very different thing.

There's a version of this that works. ESPN does this with NFL mock drafts every April. Mel Kiper doesn’t have the general manager of an NFL team on set to justify their first-round pick. The analysis is the show. The actual decision comes later, when it's actually a decision.

The committee's mantra, as noted in The Athletic's reporting, is to start each week with a clean sheet of paper. That's a lovely sentiment. The problem is that it then hands that clean sheet of paper to a television show that photocopies it, broadcasts it to 1.4 million viewers, and spends the next 168 hours generating content about why it's wrong. At some point, the clean sheet gets crumpled beyond recognition.

The CFP is meeting in Dallas this week to figure out how to make a bad show slightly less bad. That's a reasonable short-term goal. But the reason everyone is frustrated — the committee, the schools, the fans, even the ESPN talent who covers it — is that the show was never designed to do what it's now being asked to do.

The blessing and the curse aren't two sides of the same coin. The curse is the blessing. The confusion and outrage are the point. And no amount of trimming the schedule or hiding the chairman changes that, because 1.4 million viewers on a Tuesday night in November tells ESPN everything it needs to know about whether the show is working.

It’s working. Just not for the people it's supposed to be working for.

With the collapse of cable-based regional sports networks, teams across the NHL and NBA have increasingly turned to local over-the-air broadcasters to fill the gap — and two companies, Gray Media and E.W. Scripps — have quietly built the infrastructure to serve them. Scripps now holds the exclusive local rights to five NHL teams including the Utah Mammoth, Vegas Golden Knights, and Florida Panthers. At the same time, Gray has taken a broader approach, picking up rights wherever it can and now reaching 13 MLB teams across its station portfolio.

The model is working in some ways and not others. Scripps Sports President Brian Lawlor points to the Golden Knights doubling their ratings in their first season on over-the-air as proof of concept. But the revenue picture is messier — the Dallas Mavericks reportedly took a $50 million annual hit when they left their cable RSN, and the NBA and MLB are both eyeing a centralized streaming RSN model that could pull the rug out from under the whole thing.

Awful Announcing's Manny Soloway breaks down whether over-the-air can actually replace the RSN model, what the Comcast-Scripps carriage dispute means for fans, and why the league most likely to benefit from all of this chaos might be the NHL.

"You've won five titles as a franchise. It's not the time for gimmicks. Act like you've been there before. I don't put the t-shirt on. I hate the t-shirts. I don't understand the t-shirts." — Bill Simmons, on his Sunday night podcast with Zach Lowe, taking the position that the Spurs' Fiesta color-coordinated arena for Game 1 against Portland was an affront to the franchise's legacy.

"I did a La La Land–Moonlight. I changed my pick. I was like, 'What am I doing? How can I not vote for Joker?' And I feel not awesome about it." — Bill Simmons, revealing on his podcast that after spending several episodes agonizing over his NBA MVP vote and landing on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, he watched his own clip back on social media, got embarrassed by how unconvincing he sounded, and switched his vote to Nikola Jokic before the deadline. He also flipped his Sixth Man pick after Miami lost in the Play-In and dropped Stephon Castle from his All-NBA ballot when Luka Dončić's eligibility appeal was granted.

"They didn't really even tackle the racial component of what was happening in Portland. They skipped right past it. You want the whole truth, not just their truth." — Dan Le Batard, on his show Monday, calling the Netflix Untold: Jail Blazers documentary unsatisfying and accusing it of being shaped entirely by the players who agreed to participate rather than by what actually happened. AA's own review reached the same conclusion.

"I don't know, man. ESPN's a very polished organization. I don't know if I …I'm just kidding, man! I'd have a f***ing blast, dude!" — Travis Kelce, on the New Heights podcast after Troy Aikman casually recruited him to join ESPN.

"The cool thing is, what we found is you don't need to be an expert. Just like you at home, planning a travel itinerary, you can just ask the thing, and it can spit out pretty good things." — 49ers GM John Lynch, on using AI to help evaluate draft prospects. It’s unclear whether he means the 49ers are using a closed enterprise system or whether Kyle Shanahan is prompting ChatGPT.

"I don't think misogyny applies in this particular case. The onus is on her to make sure her objectivity is not skewed in any way. That's about the position, that's not about gender." — Stephen A. Smith, on his SiriusXM show, arguing that the disparate fallout between Dianna Russini and Mike Vrabel comes down to the nature of their jobs rather than their gender.

"They haven't been back to the playoffs since that championship in 2022. That's four years away from the playoffs." — Stephen A. Smith, on First Take, while arguing Steve Kerr should be let go by the Warriors. The Golden State Warriors made the playoffs in both 2023 and 2025, winning a round each time.

Sam Neumann and Brendon Kleen discuss Pat McAfee's surprise return to WWE at WrestleMania 42 — where he served as guest referee, got taken out by Jelly Roll, got RKO'd by his own guy, and was carried out on a stretcher — and what his "exit" from the business actually means for his ESPN future. Then, the Review of the Week looks at Mike Tirico and Reggie Miller calling Victor Wembanyama's playoff debut on NBC, the first NBA postseason telecast on the network since 2002.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

The easiest way to describe what Mike Tirico does in a broadcast booth is to say he runs point. Not in the sense that he controls things selfishly, but in the sense that when he's on, the whole game — the pace, the tone, the moments when color commentary gets invited in and the moments when it doesn't — runs through him. He is so prepared, so present, so comfortable making the arena feel like a place worth being in, that his partners sometimes spend long stretches just waiting.

Sunday night in San Antonio, Reggie Miller waited less than usual. That felt significant.

The Tirico-Miller partnership is a year old, which means it is being measured against things that took much longer to become what they are. Tirico and Cris Collinsworth have multiple seasons of Sunday nights behind them. Kevin Harlan and Miller built something at TNT over the years that people are still mourning. Tirico and Miller have one regular season and now a playoff opener in a building so loud and so genuinely alive that the broadcast almost ran itself. It’s not a fair comparison. It’s also the only one that matters, because that is the water these two are swimming in.

What came through on Sunday was that the bones are good. Tirico does what Awful Announcing’s Brendon Kleen described perfectly as "Olympics Tirico,” that mellow, welcoming, cozy-abode quality, the sense that you are in good hands and he is going to tell you things worth knowing before you know you need them. It works in the regular season. When Victor Wembanywama started doing the impossible things Wemby does, it turned out to work in the playoffs, too, because Tirico was already in position, already in the right register. When the moment arrived, he just called it.

As for Miller, he’s not going to tell you something you've never considered. That's not his game. What he does is take the thing unfolding in front of you and make you understand why it matters, simply and quickly, without wasting words. That's what good color commentary actually is. Not the observation you've never had, but the right observation at the right moment, delivered like it costs something to say it.

The question with this booth has always been whether Tirico trusts Miller enough to let the game breathe, to hand it over, and see what happens. Sunday night had more of those moments than a blowout in a raucous building probably deserved. That's worth something. They're not finished. But they're getting there.