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⚾ Instant World Baseball Classic. The WBC final between the United States and Venezuela averaged a whopping 10.78 million viewers on Fox this past Tuesday. The game more than doubled the 2023 WBC final between the U.S. and Japan, which averaged just under five million viewers.

⚾ The name’s Bonds. Netflix has officially announced Barry Bonds as a studio analyst for its Opening Night game next Wednesday between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants. Bonds’ inclusion was a pretty safe bet after it was reported that Netflix would fill McCovey Cove with 73 kayaks, matching his single-season home run record.

⚾ Farewell, Howie. Legendary New York Mets radio voice Howie Rose will call it a career following this season. Rose, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2021, reduced his schedule in recent years, cutting back to 100 games before announcing plans to eliminate travel this season.

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

Any doubts about Cinderella’s place in the NCAA Tournament were quickly erased on Thursday afternoon.

Within the first five games of this year’s tournament, we saw High Point, a team that hadn’t beaten a power-conference school all season, upset Wisconsin in a back-and-forth thriller. All the while, No. 16 seed Siena opened up a double-digit lead on No. 1 seed Duke, with the Blue Devils needing to eek out a win down the stretch to keep its championship aspirations alive.

And that was all before most people got home from work.

There’s certainly something to be said for the concerns of Cinderella after last year’s tournament, which saw all four No. 1 seeds advance to the Final Four. But Thursday showed there’s still life in the princess.

The reality is, the level of play has improved up and down college basketball with the evolution of NIL, particularly this season. At the top level, players that may have at one time left school early for the NBA, G-League, or a professional league abroad, are increasingly choosing to stay put. College basketball has become just as, if not more lucrative for many players than the G-League or Europe.

This dynamic works in the opposite direction as well. Many players that previously played professionally in other countries are now turning to college basketball as a preferred pathway to the NBA. These players are getting paid comparably to play in college and are now front-and-center for NBA scouts.

And it’s not just the top schools benefiting from the new rules. Mid-majors are able to secure better players now as well, with more talent trickling down to the lower levels of the sport as the best non-NBA players in the world flock to college.

The end result could be more competitive NCAA Tournament games. Siena took Duke to the wire, and the Blue Devils have the future No. 1 pick in this year’s NBA Draft on their roster. High Point looked like the better team against Wisconsin.

Two games, of course, don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. It’ll take years, and a much larger sample size, to know for sure if Cinderella is still with us. But, at least for the early rounds, it’d be in the NCAA’s best interest to make sure mid-major and low-major teams remain viable.

The worst-case scenario for the NCAA would be to see the Thursday and Friday of the NCAA Tournament begin to feel more like the first round of the College Football Playoff, where blowouts are the norm. The magic of the first round is that we’re bound to get a handful of really competitive games from teams that we’d never expect to win.

Last year, the first round averaged 8.8 million viewers per window across CBS, TNT, TBS, and truTV. It’s really the only round where upsets and Cinderellas are the draw. Once we get past the first weekend, it’s blue bloods who drive viewership.

But the first weekend still matters. 8.8 million viewers over a 12-hour window is nothing to scoff at. And the first round helps build momentum for the later rounds. And also, who doesn’t love an upset? It’s part of the charm of March Madness.

At the risk of being a bit too reactionary towards a couple of results, it seems like the evolution of NIL and the transfer portal — from something that helped the rich get richer to something that has raised the level of college basketball for everybody — has breathed new life into Cinderella. Perhaps rumors of her demise were greatly exaggerated.

Awful Announcing’s Michael Grant sat down with Carlton Gerard Sabbs and Corey Colvin, the directors of Prime Video’s newest documentary Meal Ticket, for a chat about the film, their directorial debuts, and the rich history of the McDonald’s All-American Game. Check out the full story here.

For two Chicago guys, this was a significant directorial debut.

Carlton Gerard Sabbs and Corey Colvin are the co-directors of Amazon’s Meal Ticket, a documentary about the 49-year history of the McDonald’s All American Games. Opportunities to create a feature-length film about a sports institution are rare. It’s even more uncommon when you’re essentially rookies in filmmaking. The McDonald’s All American Games serve as the springtime basketball showcase for top high schoolers from across the country. Players, coaches, and fans tune in every year to see the best of the best—future college and pro stars. 

They’ll be watching when ESPN airs the games on March 31. Some of those same people will also be checking out Meal Ticket, which premieres March 19 on Prime Video.

“Carlson and I are both from Chicago,” said Colvin in an interview with Awful Announcing. We named our production company Stony and Yates as an homage to Chicago. Growing up, many of those games were played in Chicago. I know Carlson had a chance to check one out while growing up. I had one, maybe on a school field trip. Being a big fan of the game, you always knew about it. You knew its history.

“When it came across our desk, to be able to tell the story, go down the rabbit hole, and really start to find out about the crop of players that came through the game, it was a really fun thing to research and learn about as we were telling the story. We had that opportunity to really hone in on our documentary filmmaking.”

I’m sure most of you sickos are aware by now, but Season 22 of The Bachelorette was abruptly canceled by Disney yesterday, just three days before the premiere was scheduled for Sunday night. The season was scrapped after an ugly video surfaced of the Bachelorette, Taylor Frankie Paul, being the aggressor in a domestic violence incident.

Paul’s past domestic violence issues were already well-documented. She had already plead guilty to one count of aggravated assault back in 2023, which served as a key plot point in Season 1 of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a show that helped propel her to fame.

So what does this have to do with sports? Well, axing the show on such short notice created quite the programming gap for ABC’s primetime lineup this weekend. Sunday between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. no longer had its blockbuster franchise to fall back on.

But there is a seemingly perfect solution for ABC’s self-inflicted wound: the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament airing on sister channel ESPN. ABC is already scheduled to air a doubleheader of women’s hoops beginning at 1 p.m. ET on Sunday. Why not simulcast the 8 p.m. ET window which is scheduled to air on ESPN?

The move would accomplish two things. One, there’s a good chance the women’s basketball would perform well from a viewership standpoint, or at least better than some sort of reality show rerun. And two, it’d serve as a bit of a palette-cleanser. Instead of platforming someone like Paul, ABC would be celebrating women who deserve recognition.

Unfortunately, that’s not what Disney opted to do. ABC will re-air an episode of American Idol in primetime on Sunday. Yawn.

On the bright side, there are nine more weeks on ABC’s calendar that would’ve been filled with The Bachelorette. Perhaps at least a few of those will be awarded to live sports.