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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺 Double-dipping dispute. YouTube TV says its Disney fight is about ABC pricing, not ESPN, arguing Disney is double-dipping by charging premium rates for both networks when simulcasting the same sports. The platform wants lower ABC fees once it becomes the largest distributor, while Disney loses $5 million daily during the standoff.

🎖️ Troops as shield. Pat McAfee told critics of his Trump interview, "you hate the troops," and "F*ck you" to anyone not watching his show again. The ESPN host broadcast from Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island for Veterans Day, claiming he had invited Barack Obama, but scheduling didn't work out.

🏈 Moose on the loose. The UFL parted ways with Daryl Johnston, not renewing the former Cowboys fullback's contract as VP of Football Operations. Johnston's name hasn't appeared in press releases since billionaire Mike Repole took over in July, a move that came as the league relocates teams and targets 16-team expansion.

🏃‍♀️ Opening night shift. The 2028 LA Olympics will feature the women's 100-meter final on opening night, rather than the men's, for the first time. All three rounds of the women's race will run on the same day at the LA Memorial Coliseum, requiring athletes to compete three times.

🎮 Spring football pixels. The UFL is in talks with at least two companies about licensing its branding for a video game, though discussions aren't close to completion and any announcement remains "some time away" if it happens at all.

👨‍🍳 From QB to chef. Terry Bradshaw is testing a four-episode cooking show for Fox Nation after the September release of his cookbook. The 77-year-old previously stated he plans to "die on-air" and has no intention of retiring from Fox NFL Sunday.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

The College Football Playoff rankings don't matter until they do

The College Football Playoff selection committee released its second set of rankings Tuesday night, prompting ESPN to dedicate two hours of programming to debating why Ohio State is No. 1 instead of Indiana, whether Texas Tech has the profile of a top-four team, and other questions that won't have answers for another three weeks.

None of it matters.

The rankings won't matter until the final list determines who actually makes the 12-team playoff. Until then, the weekly reveals exist solely to generate content for ESPN's airwaves and social media feeds, creating artificial urgency around hypothetical scenarios that will change the moment Alabama loses to Auburn or Ohio State drops a Big Ten game.

Greg McElroy spent Tuesday night arguing that Texas Tech "is potentially a top-four team" and could work its way into a first-round bye by season's end. McElroy's analysis isn't wrong — the Red Raiders are 9-1 with wins over Kansas State and BYU — but it's also completely irrelevant in mid-November when Texas Tech still has two regular-season games and a potential conference championship to play. Whether they're ranked No. 6 now or No. 4 now means nothing if they lose to UCF on Saturday.

The same debate plays out every week across ESPN's programming. The committee uses subjectivity whenever it suits them, cherry-picking strength of schedule one week and "quality losses" the next. But complaints about rankings in Week 12 only matter if those rankings stay the same in Week 15. If Indiana finishes undefeated, none of Tuesday's outrage will have mattered.

ESPN isn't selling clarity when it airs the weekly rankings reveal. It's selling drama. The network built the CFP Rankings Show around creating narratives that fuel debate across First Take, College GameDay, Get Up, and every other show that needs content between now and championship week. The committee's subjective decision-making isn't a bug; it's pretty much the entire feature. If the rankings were based on transparent criteria that everyone understood, there'd be nothing to debate and no reason to dedicate two hours of Tuesday primetime to arguing about hypothetical playoff matchups.

The result is a weekly cycle in which fans argue over rankings that don't matter yet, while ESPN's analysts debate whether a three-loss SEC team deserves a playoff spot or whether Cincinnati is being disrespected at No. 25. None of these conversations have stakes until the final week. Still, they generate hours of programming and endless social media engagement, which is exactly why ESPN keeps putting them on TV.

The frustrating part isn't that the rankings exist. It's that the weekly reveals have conditioned fans and media to treat November Tuesdays like Selection Sunday. Greg McElroy making Texas Tech's case for a first-round bye is fine analysis, but it's analysis about a scenario that won't be decided for three weeks and could be rendered completely irrelevant by Saturday night.

The playoff selection will matter when the final rankings are released. Until then, the weekly debates are just content dressed up as urgency, serving ESPN's programming needs more than anyone's effort to understand which teams are actually making the playoff.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

British announcers continue making the case that they're better at calling American football than Americans:

Mike Tirico turned around mid-game to interview a screaming 76ers fan sitting behind the broadcast table:

Shaqtin' a Fool found its newest star when Jaylen Brown's hair dye couldn't make it through the game:

Barstool’s Big Cat learned that shilling for sportsbooks while complaining about taxes doesn't play well:

📺 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🎬

• Versant officially branded its sports portfolio as USA Sports on Wednesday, consolidating more than 10,000 hours of live events across USA Network, Golf Channel, and CNBC ahead of the spinoff's completion early next year. The unified identity covers NASCAR, the PGA Tour, the Premier League, WWE, and the WNBA, with new red-and-black branding replacing NBC Peacock imagery.

• Malcolm Michaels, who founded The Sportsnaut and sold it in 2019, launched Hey TC, a new sports media venture focused exclusively on NFL quarterbacks. The website maintains daily rankings of 69 NFL quarterbacks with Patrick Mahomes at the top and Andy Dalton at the bottom, plus a Super Bowl predictor simulator.

• CBS Sports hired two ESPN MMA executives ahead of its UFC debut in 2026, bringing in Matt Kenny (VP of programming and acquisitions) and Glenn Jacobs (VP of production) as the network prepares to launch its seven-year, $7.7 billion UFC package.

• ESPN directed on-air talent to stop promoting Solitaire Cash after the endorsements drew criticism over the company's business practices. Dan Orlovsky, Kendrick Perkins, Laura Rutledge, and Mina Kimes deleted their promotional posts. Stephen A. Smith, who became a global ambassador for the app, has kept his posts up despite ESPN's directive to other talent.

• Drew Brees makes his Fox debut Sunday alongside Adam Amin for Packers-Giants after Mark Sanchez's arrest on felony battery charges. It's Brees' first NFL booth job since his forgettable one-season NBC stint ended in 2022. Brees told Dan Patrick in August he'd "step in the booth right now and be a top-three guy." Fox is about to find out if he's actually improved.

• Tony Reali recreated Around the Horn as a digital series called Around the Room on the streaming platform Playback on Wednesday night, featuring four content creators discussing NBA topics. The former ESPN host, whose signature 5 p.m. show was canceled this spring, drew fewer than 600 viewers for the experiment but offered a glimpse of his post-ESPN future focused on online content and his "Real Ones Universe."

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

"ESPN will be on TV, and they're arguing over these things happening. But let's break away now for FanDuel, let's break away for MGM." - St. John's coach Rick Pitino calling out ESPN's hypocrisy on sports betting while discussing the Terry Rozier gambling scandal. ESPN just terminated its ESPN Bet partnership with Penn Entertainment after two years of a supposed 10-year deal, only to immediately announce a new sponsorship with DraftKings starting Dec. 1.

"No, they don't, I meet them all the time, they love me." - Former ESPN host Will Cain responding to network management after being told focus groups showed "Black people hate you" during his First Take days. The unnamed exec countered that "Black people are polite, they're not going to tell you to your face." Cain's reaction seemed to confirm that the executive was EVP Dave Roberts.

"I bet one kid is." - FanDuel TV's Michelle Beadle making a joke about Josh Giddey after Chandler Parsons said kids aren't going to All-Star Weekend to watch the Bulls guard play basketball, alluding to the 2023 allegations that Giddey had an inappropriate relationship with a minor in California. Giddey was investigated but never faced charges.

"I can't stand it. Why did they do it? Why do I have to go all the way across the page to see what guys shot from the field?" - ESPN's Tim Legler complaining about the network's redesigned NBA box scores on his All NBA podcast, promising to "take this up with my people" at ESPN. The network dramatically altered box score layouts without advance notice, adding individual offensive and defensive rebounds plus separate two-point and three-point shooting stats, creating a messier interface that fans immediately hated.

"I'm not going to win. If that's my scoreboard — trying to please people on that — I'm going to drive myself crazy." - Fox's Joe Davis addressing Dodgers bias criticism on the Awful Announcing Podcast. Davis hosted the Dodgers' championship parade two days after calling Game 7, drawing criticism from Chris Russo, but said he wears it "like a badge of honor."

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

Remember being a channel-flipping ninja? ESPN at 206, then guide mode to scan sports channels. Quick hop to the 240-250 range for USA, TNT, TBS. If nothing's on, safety net time in the 500s, where Top Gun is always halfway through at your favorite part.

YouTube TV and other streaming services killed that. No channel numbers exist on any virtual MVPD. When your mom visits and asks, "What channel is The Weather Channel?" you have to explain that there are no channel numbers anymore.

It's not an accident. These platforms don't want you to bypass content. They want tiles and algorithms pushing suggestions, not you navigating freely through a guide you've memorized. And here's the real trick: when YouTube TV dropped Disney channels during their carriage dispute, there was no empty slot in the guide reminding you something's missing. The channels just disappeared. One Cowboys fan didn't realize he lost ESPN until he went looking for Monday Night Football.

Awful Announcing's Ben Koo breaks down how streaming services are training us to be less efficient viewers, who watch more ads and depend on their algorithms rather than our own muscle memory. The old remotes with "last" buttons let you flip between three games seamlessly. Now it's "a whole thing" just to check scores.

Click to read the full piece on why streaming services deliberately made you worse at watching TV.

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Gus Johnson's polarizing Indiana call is exactly what makes him special

Gus Johnson's voice gave out Saturday during Indiana's comeback win over Penn State, and the internet promptly lost its mind arguing about whether he ruined the moment or created it.

Detroit radio host Mike Valenti went nuclear, calling Johnson's call "fake" and declaring, "I don't dislike him, I hate him. He ruins everything." Barstool's Brandon Walker — usually a Gus Johnson defender — called it "one of the all-time worst calls" and said Johnson "ruined the moment."

The controversy centers on Johnson screaming "GIVE HIM THE HEISMAN TROPHY NOW" after Fernando Mendoza hit Omar Cooper Jr. for the game-winning touchdown, his voice climbing into registers that barely qualified as human speech. Critics argue that Johnson made the call about himself instead of the play. They're not entirely wrong.

But they're missing the entire point of Gus Johnson.

Johnson called the Indiana finish one of his career highlights in an interview with The Athletic’s Grace Raynor, saying nothing in his nearly 40 years of broadcasting has topped it. He acknowledged his voice gave out partially because he was fighting a cold, joking that he got too caught up in the moment and didn't have the vocal stamina to hit the crescendo.

Klatt defended his partner's authenticity, telling The New York Times-owned outlet that Johnson's reactions are genuine rather than calculated, which is what separates him from other broadcasters.

Here's the thing about Gus Johnson: you either get him or you don't, and neither position is wrong.

Johnson calling Mendoza's 80-yard drive against a 3-5 Penn State team like it's the national championship is objectively ridiculous. Crowning someone for the Heisman in early November is absurd. His voice literally breaking mid-call is either the most authentic moment in sports broadcasting or proof he's performing for viral clips, depending on your perspective.

The same people who hate Johnson for being over-the-top criticized him earlier this season for flat calls during Ohio State-Purdue. His enthusiasm spikes for certain moments and disappears for others.

There's no version of this where everyone agrees. That's what makes him polarizing — and why Fox keeps putting him on their biggest games.

Cooper's catch was incredible regardless of who called it. The throw was perfect, the execution was absurd, and Indiana staying undefeated with a comeback win in Happy Valley matters whether Gus Johnson loses his voice or stays completely silent.

But Fox doesn't pay Johnson to stay silent. They pay him to lose his mind when chaos happens, even if that means anointing Heisman winners in November or making himself part of the story. Whether that enhances the moment or diminishes it depends entirely on whether you think broadcasters should amplify games or just describe them.

Gus Johnson refuses to just describe them. That makes him either the best or worst announcer in college football, and arguing about which one is the entire point of Gus Johnson existing in the first place.