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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏎️ F1 to Apple. The streamer has finalized a five-year deal to broadcast Formula 1 in the U.S. The deal was previously reported to be worth about $700 million as the streamer steals F1 rights from ESPN, which was paying far less on the previous deal. Races will be available on the basic Apple TV subscription tier.

🏈 Franklin’s audition. Less than a week after being fired at Penn State, head coach James Franklin appeared on College GameDay. Why? Both to revitalize his public image after a disastrous season in Happy Valley and, likely, to audition for a media gig. He already has Nick Saban on his side.

😳 Live from the Sanchez trial. A new judge took over the battery trial for Mark Sanchez in Indianapolis and flipped a ruling, meaning cameras will in fact be allowed in the courtroom. The first hearing is set for Oct. 22, and the trial is scheduled to begin on Dec. 11.

📺 Belichick blowback continues. The latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out featured leaked footage from Bill Belichick’s Underdog show, Coach. It paints both Belichick and girlfriend Jordon Hudson in a pretty ugly light, as they are seen talking down to Underdog production staff. Torre also revealed that EverWonder crews remain embedded with the UNC program, despite the Hulu docuseries being called off. Oh, and the Tar Heels lost again.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

The craziest College Football Playoff ever?

Four more top-10 teams went down this weekend in college football, further throwing the College Football Playoff bracket into chaos before we get our first ranking from the committee on Dec. 7.

With Miami, LSU, Ole Miss and Texas Tech all going down, we could be in for a wild Playoff with a ton of new faces and uncharacteristic programs this winter.

In the latest write-up from ESPN’s Heather Dinich predicting the CFP bracket, all of Indiana, Georgia Tech and BYU are all present. Occasional winners at Texas A&M and Miami are here. And Notre Dame, fresh off a national runner-up season, is all the way down at No. 12. Vanderbilt and Louisville could even be in the mix.

Keeping two ACC teams and just one Big 12 squad in the bracket is surprising by Dinich, but nearly everyone appears to agree that we will see some Cinderellas this year.

What might that mean for ESPN and TNT, who broadcast the CFP? Already, last year saw some lower-than-expected ratings. The first-round games on TNT coupled with the semifinals moving off New Year’s Day led to a downward trend for viewership.

If Notre Dame were to exit early or miss the CFP, it would be a blow. Having Indiana in instead of, say, Michigan could be trouble. The fall of Texas and Arch Manning got the whole season off to a bad start from a popularity standpoint.

Still, the middle seeds with first-round home games should give the TV partners good in-stadium environments to draw from, with Georgia, Miami and Oregon all in position to host games right now.

Of course, the return of Alabama and the continued dominance of Ohio State would go the furthest toward national intrigue among casual fans. And great games with healthy teams all the way through the Playoff is what will matter most.

The sport likely will continue to be driven by parity and unpredictability so long as players can continue to move freely between schools and boosters can assemble talent. It’s not a bad thing for new programs to pop up year to year, but TV partners will be rooting for the recognizable brands to make runs.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

“Big Turd” is back!

File this away under “AI getting another thing wrong”

And file this under “Terry Bradshaw getting another thing wrong”

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• Bob Myers is leaving ESPN, finally diving back into the team side as president of the entire Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment enterprise, which includes the NHL’s 76ers, NHL’s Devils, EPL’s Crystal Palace and Joe Gibbs Racing. Myers departs NBA Countdown, which will be pushed down to second-tier status this season behind Inside the NBA.

• Chris Webber is returning to TNT Sports after four years. Webber was once a rising star and the top NBA game analyst at the network, only to underwhelm in that role after a few years on the job. The Michigan legend will be a studio analyst for the network’s Big 12 and Big East coverage as well as the new Players Era tournament.

• As the local NBA broadcast landscape continues to evolve, Los Angeles Lakers games could be in flux. Charter Communications is reportedly exploring a sale of Spectrum SportsNet, which likely means the new buyer would need to negotiate a lower rights fee to the Lakers. Far fewer people pay for Spectrum these days than when the Lakers signed their deal in 2012.

• All Apple TV subscribers will now have access to the MLS postseason — not just those who pay for MLS Season Pass. The move comes as the streamer continues to struggle mightily to bring in viewers for the American soccer league, whose global broadcast rights it owns exclusively.

💻 TOO ONLINE 🤖

If you haven’t followed The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz since it left ESPN, you may have missed the news that beloved longtime producer Billy Gil is departing the show for a new job at The Ringer and Spotify.

The news made waves in all the places where his impact will be most missed: among the show’s crew and its fans. While the Le Batard Show has taken a beating with talent departures in 2025, it was a trail-blazing radio show and podcast in many ways as it came up through Miami and through Bristol last decade.

For more than a decade, Gil embodied the beautiful incongruity of the show. He took the ridiculous and chaotic parts of it extraordinarily seriously, while reminding the audience just frequently enough of the passion he carried for (or often against) Miami sports teams and the biggest sports stories.

Le Batard likes to fluff up the show with costumes, pranks, goofy sounders and gimmick segments, but the goofy heartbeat of the show came from Gil. There was no one on-air anywhere in sports audio like him.

“Billy never got the credit that Billy f*ckin deserved,” the erstwhile Stugotz said this week on his new podcast.

“Because anyone who has spent any amount of time around our show knows that in that room, Billy is the guy that is making everything go. He is the engine.”

So the show that popularized the high-low broadcasting energy, turned the listeners’ ears into a tapestry, and made it OK to be a sports show that isn’t really about sports lost the man that drove those innovations. It won’t be the same without him.

Gil isn’t expected to be on-air at The Ringer, but they got a good one.

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Dave Roberts rubs it in

Dave Roberts pissed off roughly 90 percent of MLB fans over the weekend when, after his Los Angeles Dodgers completed a sweep of the Milwaukee Bucks, he turned the team’s oligarchic reign over the sport into a punchline:

“Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball!”

Roberts is, of course, referring to the widely held perception that another dominant Dodgers World Series run would likely be the nail in the coffin for a lockout. Before the NLCS, ESPN insider Jeff Passan wrote that the winner of the series could determine whether MLB has a season in 2027.

This season, the Dodgers spent as much as the six teams with the lowest payroll in MLB combined. Their prized signing of 2024, Shohei Ohtani, completed the greatest postseason game in baseball history last week. Much of his contract is deferred so far into the future that many at Dodger Stadium for Game 3 will have forgotten about the epic game by the time he receives his last paycheck.

Not coincidentally, rumors surfaced after Ohtani’s opus that the Dodgers have already recouped his $700 million contract in revenue — just this year alone.

Looming over the postseason is the specter of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, new TV deals, and a potential reconstruction of the entire league and how it works. A salary cap, realignment, the nationalization of local broadcasts, all of it is on the table.

The Dodgers, with their enormous payroll, absurd local TV deal and dominance over the second biggest market in America represent all of the things that make MLB’s current model an unfair one. Of course, they are also incredibly well-run and, by all accounts, a great organization to play for.

Nobody in the league office could have appreciated Roberts’ retort. Fans would be right to curse his name as well.

Despite what Roberts said, nobody is accusing the Dodgers of “ruining” baseball. A more accurate telling would be that the Dodgers broke baseball, and that nobody is sure what comes next or how to get there.

The result might be, for a while, no baseball at all.