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🐭 Disney will keep ESPN in the family business and not spin off the network with new CEO Josh D’Amaro soon taking the reins.

🐭 Speaking of Disney, the FCC is once again applying political pressure on the company after an opportunistic conservative uprising against Jimmy Kimmel.

📺 YouTube TV is now offering fully customizable multiview options for subscribers that will include NFL Sunday Ticket.

🏀 Longtime ESPN Radio NBA voice Marc Kestecher will call his first playoff game on television for the network in Raptors-Cavs Game 5.

🎙️ Thankfully, Mike Francesa is alive and well after a sudden two-week break from his podcast due to knee surgery.

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

Mark Twain popularized the phrase that there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. But now we may have to add a fourth category -- sports ratings.

Ratings are an obsession of the sports media industry, as they very well should be. Viewership numbers can give us a hierarchy of the true popularity of sports. They can tell us which sports and events are growing and which are in decline. They can even tell us how well sports are connecting with certain ages and demographic groups and who is well-equipped to maintain or build an audience through unprecedented churn and competition.

But it is becoming increasingly frustrating to try to decipher fact from fiction when it comes to sports ratings numbers that are being produced.

Nowhere was that more evident than this past weekend’s NFL Draft.

ESPN and the NFL touted the third most-watched opening night of the NFL Draft with 13.2 million viewers. But that wasn’t just on the THREE linear presentations available across ESPN, ABC, and NFL Network. No, it also included ESPN Deportes, Hulu, Disney+, the ESPN App, NFL+, TikTok, YouTube, and X.

In case you’re not counting along at home, that’s ELEVEN total platforms that the companies are combining numbers from to make their viewership figures look more impressive. They also switched gears mid-stream in a press release to count the number of minutes and views that Pat McAfee’s draft coverage generated on social platforms. What's next? Will we start talking about the Stanley Cup Playoff performance while Mercury is in retrograde?

How is anyone supposed to make sense of this melting pot of data that combines linear, streaming, and digital, and presents one convoluted stew of statistics?

Not to be outdone, the NBA has begun hyping the total reach of 170 million individuals throughout the regular season, rather than publicizing average game viewership that could conceivably offer year-to-year comparisons. More NBA games are on network primetime television than ever before, so it makes sense that reach would expand drastically. But does it actually mean that more people are watching games and becoming fans? That's a more difficult question to answer.

The truth is that we have more data at our disposal than ever before. And the advent of the streaming era means that media companies can sometimes sidestep presenting the most accurate and complete picture of their true audience trends to play a convenient game of “choose your narrative.” We live in a world now where Apple can claim to have a bigger Formula 1 audience than ESPN, but then provide no actual numbers to back it up.

Nowhere has that been seen quite like the recent debate over which of the NBA and MLB is the second most-popular professional sport in the country. Supporters on both sides have been twisting themselves in knots trying to find an argument that will suit their point. MLB fans can cling to World Series ratings and local viewership numbers. NBA fans can point to consistently larger national audiences in the playoffs and regular season. Who's right and who's wrong? Who knows.

But that's not going to stop sports leagues and networks from trying to win the ratings wars and, maybe more importantly, the stories that will come from them. And all of this is happening on top of Nielsen methodology changes that have helped to inflate sports viewing numbers thanks to out-of-home viewership expansion and Big Data measurements. Unless you're a pro wrestling promotion, that is.

Any time a challenging conversation about these numbers comes up on social media, the question is always asked why we should care about sports ratings. It's important because it proves to sports leagues, networks, and advertisers what is worth investing in. And now more so than ever before, television and the billion-dollar rights deals that come with it are what drive the entire economy of the sports world. That's why networks and leagues fight tooth and nail, trying to craft the best-looking stories for their properties. The ratings and viewership numbers justify the entire operation.

But if sports media is going to start mixing together social, digital, streaming, and linear, then the numbers will become increasingly meaningless. We're not going to be comparing apples to apples anymore; we're going to be comparing apples to aardvarks.

The more sports leagues and numbers twist ratings data to suit their own causes, the less important the numbers will become to fans and to decision makers. A TikTok view is not equal to someone who sits down to engage with a sporting event through a more meaningful and purposeful platform. But if we are going to be asked to suspend our own disbelief in evaluating this data, then it defeats the whole purpose of the enterprise.

Dan Orlovsky has some life advice for football people who might be new to ESPN - don’t vague tweet around Adam Schefter.

Apple released the first trailer for Season 4 of Ted Lasso where the coach takes on AFC Richmond’s second-division women’s team.

Kendrick Perkins does not see Kevin Durant as a desirable NBA player at this point in his career after another troubled stint with a franchise.

"I am ready to fight anybody who says this wasn't one of the greatest decisions we've seen in recent memory.” - Mike Tannenbaum needs to take a deep breath when it comes to the Rams drafting Ty Simpson.

“That may be the most impressive streak in all of sports! Forget Cal Ripken! I just want to make it clear. 43 years! 43 drafts, not one tinkle ever, Mel?” - Adam Schefter on Mel Kiper Jr. continuing his streak of never taking a bathroom break during the NFL Draft. He deserves induction into Canton solely on the basis of his superhuman bladder control.

"I'm struggling to articulate this because an addiction, a gambling addiction, I do think it's worthy of consideration as a disease.” - Pablo Torre on Texas Tech QB Brendan Sorsby stepping up regarding his sports betting habits.

“Check the news. Google me. I don’t have that concern. I’ve been blessed by God enough not to have that concern… Do I look like somebody that needs to be relevant? I am relevant.” - Stephen A. Smith channeled his inner Curt Cignetti to clap back at Joey Logano.

After being the biggest story in the sports media universe, the standoff between the NFL, the DOJ, and networks waiting to discover the NFL’s asking price for new television deals has suddenly reached a standstill.

And because of the lack of movement, time is running out if the league wants to move forward in cashing in as soon as possible. As AA’s Drew Lerner explains, the upcoming schedule release that is typically done in May makes the timeline almost impossible for the league’s new television deals (where they potentially hope to double their revenue) to go into effect this upcoming season.

Why does May matter? Well, as the NFL announced during last week's NFL Draft, the schedule for next season will be released in May. That schedule, of course, is directly tied to the broadcast agreements the NFL has with the networks. And if the league wants these new deals to "take effect immediately," then one of three things must be true: either these new deals will be done before the schedule is released in May (very unlikely), these new deals will be done by September, but won't be different enough from the current agreements to impact the schedule in any material way (feasible), or the NFL is simply going to punt the new deals until the 2027 season, giving itself another 12 months to negotiate agreements that will be ready for next year's schedule release (also feasible).

Considering there has been no recent movement on the CBS deal and the NFL seemingly hasn't even engaged any of the other four partners — NBC Sports president Jon Miller said the league has not yet approached the network about new media rights deals during an interview last week — time is running out for the league to reach new deals prior to the schedule release.