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😬 No, Shilo. Longtime Cleveland Browns beat reporter Mary Kay Cabot responded to an overtly misogynistic comment made by Shilo Sanders earlier this week. Sanders, reacting to Cabot’s comments suggesting Deshaun Watson, not Shedeur Sanders, should start for Cleveland this season, said, “Go make a sandwich Mary.” Cabot took the high road in her response. “I really do believe that I have been an inspiration for lots of women and young girls to know that you can go out there and do a good job in a man’s world and take on all of that that comes with that,” she said.

🤫 A breaking of silence. Barstool Sports personality Kirk Minihane became the first person at the company to address the situation regarding Evan “Big Ev” McDowell after Awful Announcing reported earlier this month that his status was in doubt following multiple allegations he stiffed illegal bookies. “Not good. He’s got to get his sh*t together, I think, anyway. He clearly has some issues beyond that,” Minihane said.

🏌️ Blame game. Stephen A. Smith appeared on First Take yesterday and flipped the script on the situation regarding the possible return of LIV golfers to the PGA Tour. “[The PGA Tour] should not be punishing anybody [for returning]. It was their negligence, it was their abuse, it was their taking golfers for granted that forced the existence of LIV to begin with. The players didn’t want to leave the PGA, they were forced to because they were looking for better opportunities because of the manner in which they were treated.”

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

Perhaps the biggest news in sports media yesterday, one day before the calendar flips to May, was a college basketball story. And somehow, it didn’t have anything to do with NCAA Tournament expansion.

On Thursday, Amazon and Duke University announced a landmark deal that will see the Blue Devils men’s basketball program stream three games exclusively on Prime Video next season. It’s a first-of-its kind agreement between a university and a streamer, but not one that came entirely out of left field.

Last football season, many will recall that Notre Dame and USC were in talks with Netflix to bring their historic rivalry to the streaming screen. Alas, that never came to fruition and now the two teams aren’t scheduled to play at all.

Of course, there are plenty of college sporting events on streaming services. Football and basketball games are cleaved off as Peacock exclusives, wrestling meets are thrown on the ESPN app, field hockey requires a BTN+ subscription. Every college sports fan has, at one point or another, needed to find a game on a streamer.

But this is different. This is one of the preeminent men’s basketball programs in the country taking marquee games that, in theory, are already accounted for as part of existing media rights agreements, and selling them to a streamer.

How is that possible? Well, we now know that Duke needed, at least on some level, to work with ESPN to get this deal across the finish line. College basketball TV rights are awarded on the basis of who the home team is. So when ESPN purchases ACC broadcast rights, the network is assured every game played in the home gym of an ACC team is theirs to air.

The rules get muddled for neutral-site games. CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander reports that neutral-site games are typically awarded based on where they are played. If Duke wanted to play East Carolina at the Spectrum Center, where the Hornets play, that game would be awarded to ESPN because it is being played within the ACC’s territory. But when neutral-site games are played outside of a conference’s territory, like when Duke plays UConn in Las Vegas or Gonzaga in Detroit next season, the teams are free to sell the game outside the bounds of existing media rights agreements.

So the UConn and Gonzaga games were in the clear, but what about Duke’s game against Michigan at Madison Square Garden? MSG is technically within ACC territory thanks to Syracuse. Well, per Norlander, Duke agreed to some future non-conference games on ESPN later this decade in exchange for including the MSG game in the Amazon package.

The question now is how replicable is this model for schools that aren’t Duke? It’s hard to imagine Boston College will be following in the Blue Devils’ footsteps, even if Bill Murray’s son is coaching.

But is there a tier of schools that can earn some incremental revenue through similar deals? Surely. North Carolina, Kentucky, UCLA, Indiana, and others could all likely garner some interest. However, it’s a lot of hoops to jump through; scheduling games far away from your core fans, finding an opponent, wooing a streamer, and perhaps upsetting your primary media rights partner in the process. While we’ll probably see more of these deals in the future, it’s unlikely they’ll become commonplace. After all, how many teams other than Duke could really move the needle for a streamer?

The more likely place we’ll see these deals spring up is on the gridiron. How much would Amazon pay for Alabama and Ohio State to square off at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas? What about Michigan and Notre Dame from Jerry’s World?

If there’s extra money to be made, college athletic departments will find a way to make it. But don’t expect these one-off streaming packages to become all that common. There are very few schools that make the economics work for streamers. Duke men’s basketball is one of them.

These deals will, however, go a long way in determining just how interested streamers are in buying up college sports rights long-term. Marquee Duke games can give Amazon an approximation of what college basketball’s regular-season audiences look like at the high end, and will help the company determine whether or not it’d make sense to buy ACC rights, or Big Ten rights, or SEC rights down the line.

It’s a toe dipping in the water. And perhaps college sports is the next frontier being eyed by the streamers.

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After years of speculation, it appears as if Tennis Channel will stay put under the Sinclair umbrella for the time being.

In an interview with Dade Hayes of Deadline, Tennis Channel CEO Jeff Blackburn refuted any suggestion that the network’s corporate parent would sell the single-sport network.

“That’s gone, that was several years ago,” Blackburn told Deadline when asked about Sinclair’s “strategic review” of Tennis Channel. Former Tennis Channel CEO Ken Solomon revealed in a lawsuit filed last year that Sinclair had directed him to explore a sale process for the network, and Solomon returned with multiple purchase offers that valued Tennis Channel at over $1 billion. Sinclair purchased the network for $350 million back in 2016.

Last August, CNBC reported that Sinclair was exploring potential mergers and its “ventures” division, which includes Tennis Channel, was being reviewed for separate M&A opportunities tied to a spinoff. In the months since, Sinclair has moved to takeover another local station group, Scripps, but those efforts have so far been unsuccessful.

In any case, Blackburn expressed confidence that Sinclair sees Tennis Channel as an asset worth keeping.

“Sinclair, to their credit, made a great acquisition,” Blackburn said. “They did a lot of good things for it on distribution. And they are great partner for us. And they made a good decision, I think, to say, ‘Let’s reinvest in Tennis Channel.’ It’s working. Let’s hire someone like me. Let’s get the digital part right. So that’s what they did. So, it’s not on the market. We don’t need investments. We don’t need anything. We just need to kind of work on our own business and improve it, cross the bridge into streaming.”

Tennis Channel, while not having any exclusive broadcast rights to the sport’s four grand slam events, owns full rights for both the ATP Tour and WTA Tour, making it a must-have network for any tennis fan looking to follow the sport year-round. That alone makes it a valuable enterprise, before even considering the affluent audience tennis attracts.

If Tennis Channel were for sale, there would surely be a handful of interested buyers. But it seems, at least for now, Sinclair is content holding onto the asset.