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🐝 ESPN NFL analyst Mina Kimes will host the National Spelling Bee this year, with ION hoping to revitalize coverage with producer extraordinaire and Men in Blazers podcaster Michael Davies now leading the effort behind the scenes.

🏈 Power brokers seem to be coalescing around a 24-team expanded College Football Playoff and the elimination of conference championship games.

📺 Sports broadcasts could be getting even bigger ratings bumps with Nielsen experimenting with “co-viewing” measurements.

🏈 Marcellus Wiley responded to sexual assault allegations made against him by a former ESPN colleague, denying any inappropriate actions.

🏈 A sticking point of Comcast’s negotiations with NFL Network is the future of exclusive regular-season games on the platform.

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

Imagine, if you will, a scenario where Georgia plays Ohio State in a non-conference game in Las Vegas on Netflix to start the college football season, and both teams can keep all the cash for themselves, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars?

If there is a future where that indeed becomes possible, schools will have the Duke Blue Devils to thank.

Everyone is still trying to navigate through the ripple effects of Duke striking a deal with Amazon to play three neutral-site, non-conference games exclusively on the streaming platform. There have been plenty of hoops to jump through, and perhaps more to come. The Big Ten has laid a claim to Duke’s game against Michigan. And according to Ben Portnoy of Sports Business Journal, Duke also had to get approval from the ACC and ESPN.

But as Portnoy posits, it could also open the floodgates to other schools looking to cash in on similar propositions.

In fact, we already have one such example: another streamer trying to take a run at televising one of college football’s famous non-conference rivalries, with Netflix’s effort to get rights to the Notre Dame-USC game and play it at a neutral site.

The Big Ten eventually shut that down, but Netflix isn’t going to give up. And now that schools and streamers see “the Duke precedent,” the gold rush is coming.

The guardrails holding together college athletics are hanging by a thread. Nobody wants to take responsibility for fixing the sport as the power brokers and government officials dance around real action with made-for-TV committees and meaningless executive orders.

Meanwhile, conferences have died, split, and fractured in nonsensical ways, traditions have fallen by the wayside, coaches and players coming and going anywhere and anytime they wish, eligibility rules have been turned into a joke, and if a team wanted to play a game by Savannah Bananas rules, they probably could.

To put it simply, who’s going to actually stop the next school from looking to do not just exactly what Duke did, but take it one step further?

The one thing holding college sports together at the moment is the conferences, not the NCAA. But as we’ve seen many times over, any “grant of rights” agreement is as binding as the schools decide it is, or at least as hard as they decide to fight it in court.

Sure, maybe for now, schools are restricted to finding loopholes in the current setup to neutral-site, non-conference games. But that can still represent a huge opportunity, especially for schools that may feel underserved by their current setup. And the impact across college sports could bring the house of cards tumbling down.

Let’s play this out to its logical conclusion. Suppose that in basketball, we see the likes of UConn, Arizona, North Carolina, and Houston go this route. Suddenly, the schools find themselves with the leverage as the early-season conference tournament universe becomes a quagmire. More late-season non-conference games (like we saw with Duke-Michigan last year) have now become the norm, and conferences are left grasping for answers as their teams prioritize big-money games against the highest-profile opposition. Why exactly can’t UConn play Arizona in MSG in mid-February?

What about powerhouse programs in other sports like South Carolina women’s basketball, Oklahoma softball, and Nebraska volleyball? The company behind Major League Pickleball is promoting a four-team volleyball tournament with a million-dollar prize pool at AT&T Stadium. It’s easy to see how this can become the norm rather than the exception for teams and programs with enough pull.

Of course, football is where the true money and power lie in college sports. And the snowball effect could forever reshape the sport.

And for years, the fear has been a breakaway between the Big Ten and the SEC, given the gap that exists between the haves and the have-nots. But ask yourself this: why are Ohio State, Michigan, and Indiana happy to prop up Purdue and Rutgers so that they can earn $77 million each in annual TV revenue? Why should Alabama and Texas do all the hard work so Mississippi State can coast off their success and continue to turn a huge profit?

If Ohio State, Oregon, or Penn State were to take individual games to market, they would find out just how valuable their inventory truly is to networks and streamers. Could you imagine if these schools got a small taste of what Amazon or Netflix would offer for just one game, what might happen if they could make more available? It could make Notre Dame’s deal with NBC look like a couch cushion change.

Now go all the way to the end of this road. As schools dare their conference and network partners to stop them from scheduling premier games on their own, what happens when the Big Ten grant of rights expires in 2036? What happens when the SEC’s rights deal with ESPN comes up in 2034?

Perhaps the biggest schools decide that the conference is actually holding them back from maximizing their potential revenue. Or they demand a higher fortune to stay, and tell the lesser football members to go have fun with their research institutes. Why would Ohio State or Michigan want to share private equity dollars with Maryland and Minnesota to extend a grant of rights that only serves to restrict their trade? Games against Northwestern just can’t be that valuable to them.

For now, Duke’s deal with Amazon is for three college basketball games. But it could serve as the blueprint to blow up college athletics, maybe for good.

It may seem like ads are finding a way into your head, but this takes it a bit too far.

Who had Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson squashing a beef between Andrew Hawkins and Taylor Lewan about CFL rouges on their 2026 Bingo card.

Fox Sports and Indeed are seeking someone to watch every World Cup game in Times Square and produce content. Here’s hoping they don’t have to pay those inflated parking and transportation prices.

“He’s coming back because I wanted him to come back for a day. Because I haven’t been with my guy in 10 years. Ratings slip? We’re still number one.” - Stephen A. Smith responded to criticism over his reunion with Skip Bayless on First Take.

"But when LeBron loses, people are happy to see him lose. Especially his peers. Guys who played in the league, that have platforms today. For different reasons, it's extra. They are happy to see him lose." - Rich Paul thinks there is a significant anti-LeBron James sentiment in today’s NBA.

"The other 12 percent are on platforms that are incredibly widely distributed, and people are already there. Netflix is not a small distribution. In fact, you can make an argument it’s bigger than some of the networks.” - Roger Goodell defended NFL games on streaming platforms in an interview with Vanity Fair that might as well double as a signal to the DOJ investigating antitrust issues.

“I’ve said many times, the guy more responsible for any of those calls is the Dog. Because John was an incredibly fervent listener to the Mike and the Mad Dog show, he listened to it every day, he loved it. And the first call was a Bernie Williams triple. ‘Bernie goes boom.’” - Mike Francesa found… his own way… to pay tribute to John Sterling and his own Mike & the Mad Dog legacy at the same time.

We have all grown numb to a world in which executives of major publicly traded companies make infinitely more money than the rest of their workforce combined. So when the executive compensation numbers of TKO CEO Ari Emanuel, TKO president Mark Shapiro, and WWE president Nick Khan were revealed, it wasn’t a total shock to see them making tens of millions of dollars.

But against the backdrop of severe budget cuts, rising prices, and beloved wrestlers hitting the bricks, it’s not going to help anyone’s WWE fandom.

WWE fans have begun to grumble about the company’s direction under TKO. After some really bad years under the latter stages of the Vince McMahon era (even before the shocking allegations about his personal behavior came to light), WWE was in a modern golden age. Everything was newer, fresher, and better under new ownership and booking.

But now the shine is starting to come off, at least everywhere except the wallets of these executives.

A round of cuts has hit WWE after WrestleMania, an annual tradition in which new wrestlers are promoted through its system. What’s new, though, is the news going around that star wrestlers who are staying have also been asked to take drastic pay cuts. It was reportedly what led to the departure of mainstays Xavier Woods and Kofi Kingston.

Here’s what is impossible for both fans and potentially wrestlers alike to square - the cuts come at a time when the trio of TKO executives saw their pay increase by a combined $84 million from 2024 to 2025. Of that money, $20 million was handed out to Emanuel, Shapiro, and Khan through purely discretionary bonuses. How would you like to be asked to take a pay cut at your job by someone who just put an extra $10 million in their own bank account?

TKO was already being seen as the Boogeyman (no, not that one) by WWE fans after wrecking much of the WrestleMania build thanks to the insertion of Pat McAfee at the reported behest of Ari Emanuel. If they’re going to thin the roster, keep prices high, and the only winners are going to be the trio at the top, then it’s impossible to see wrestling fans responding well.