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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 Sanchez fired. Fox Sports officially let go of NFL game analyst Mark Sanchez on Friday, as Sanchez is set for a trial next month on charges related to an alleged violent late-night dispute with a delivery driver last month in Indianapolis. It appears that the recently-hired Drew Brees will serve as Sanchez’s replacement in the No. 3 booth alongside Adam Amin.

📺 The latest on YouTube TV. With less than 24 hours to go until YouTube TV subscribers miss out on Monday Night Football once again (with a far juicier matchup this week) amid a carriage dispute with Disney and ESPN, the Google-owned MPVD service announced it will give subscribers a $20 credit for the continued disruptions.

🏈 Trump makes more sports history. The famously sports-loving president made his presence felt in sports fans’ lives once again on Sunday, joining the Fox broadcast booth in the third quarter of Commanders-Lions to talk football, politics, and more. We can safely say he is the only sitting president to appear on the call of a bad NFC East game.

🔴 Mina walks it back. After Mina Kimes got caught up in one of the stranger sports media stories of 2025 last week by agreeing to a marketing deal with an online casino company, she quickly walked back the decision this weekend. “I didn't spend any time looking into the whole thing, and that's 100% on me,” she wrote on X. As of now, Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins remain partnered with the allegedly fraudulent Solitaire Cash.

🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

Donald Trump: The sports president?

The relationship between Donald Trump and the sports world has been far more hospitable and, on the president’s part, synergistic this term than the last.

From the outset of Trump’s campaign last year, it was clear the average political operative or pundit had underestimated the magnitude of his ties to the UFC. Meanwhile, Trump’s facility with athletes and sports commentators put him in a position to excel in the type of long-form interviews that many now believed helped sway younger voters rightward in 2024.

Support for Trump also hardly had the stench it used to, meaning athletes like Nick Bosa and Jon Jones could proudly stand behind the president without taking a hit. And upon being elected, Trump took advantage of these inroads to become the most present president in American sports history.

Trump has attended everything from a women’s volleyball championship to a Super Bowl to, on Sunday, a regular-season Washington Commanders game. As Fox’s Kenny Albert noted while introducing Trump to the audience during a prolonged third-quarter interview with the president, Trump is the first sitting president to attend a regular-season NFL game since 1978. Some type of strange history was made on Sunday.

The actual bones of the conversation were far less historic. The odd segment saw Albert and his partner, Jonathan Vilma, fluff Trump up before giving him space to alternately campaign to be honored by the Commanders and deliver his usual stump talking points.

The typical social media accounts drummed up controversy by calling out Trump’s economic inaccuracies, while others championed his patriotism and passion for America’s game.

We don’t typically call it sportswashing—or propaganda—when American politicians do it. When President Barack Obama connected with Americans through his love of basketball and his annual appearances filling out an NCAA tournament bracket on ESPN, he was practicing the same thing Trump was this weekend. Of course, Trump goes further. The attention-seeking leader of the free world wants his name on Washington’s stadium, wants a UFC card on his birthday, and wants adoration from as many stars as he can get it from.

What came to mind while watching the interview on Fox is how big a platform Trump will have to accelerate these efforts through the rest of his term. The U.S. is hosting the FIFA World Cup next year alongside the America 250 celebration that the UFC fight is part of, followed by the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. Not every sports leader is as Trump-forward as FIFA president Gianni Infantino, but he and his staff will wring every bit of value out of these events and the media attention that follows.

In practice, it is hard to define how the melding of sports and geopolitics affects the average person’s life. Not every example is as clear-cut as Jesse Owens dominating in Berlin.

Rather than make a bold prediction about precisely what Trump will do or how he will act, I will point to a more straightforward, domestic example. For no particular reason other than to inflame tensions and troll a celebrity, the Trump administration involved itself recently in the NFL’s selection of Bad Bunny as its halftime performer in Santa Clara next February. Supposedly, the president will sic immigration enforcement on Bad Bunny and his fans at Levi’s Stadium, based on the Puerto Rican rapper’s criticisms of Trump and ICE in the past.

Trump sees sports as a high-profile spectacle, an opportunity for a lot of people to pay attention and act on their passions. Whether in the broadcast booth at Northwest Stadium or on some podium next year alongside an international soccer star, the seas are parting for Trump to carry out his agenda through and in unison with America’s many major sporting events.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Here’s the whole segment with Trump on Fox:

Another funny moment from the quickly improving and seemingly very solid NBA on Prime postgame show (reminder: Haslem retired a full seven years after the story he tells in this clip!)

For some reason, Fox’s Terry Bradshaw really wanted to get this joke in…

And finally, the second of two announcer jinxes cast by ESPN’s Sean McDonough on Saturday:

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• The memorable 2025 MLB postseason and historic World Series that capped it off delivered Fox’s best viewership in eight years. Viewership was up 28 percent over last year, and that’s before adding in the significant upticks in Canada and Japan thanks to the Blue Jays and Dodgers going deep. Even in this Big Data + Panel era, that’s a considerable increase.

• Longtime ESPN NBA reporter Brian Windhorst agreed to a multiyear contract extension to remain with the Worldwide Leader, where he has worked for 15 years.

• Zora Stephenson is currently the clubhouse favorite to call the WNBA Finals for NBC next season, per Front Office Sports. Stephenson is a fast-rising reporter on the network’s college football and NBA properties, but has little play-by-play experience.

• Still a year away from their move to Las Vegas, the Athletics have mercifully chosen to once again allow fan engagement on their social media feeds. After a reported 655 days, the villainous MLB franchise has turned on comments on X and Instagram.

💻 TOO ONLINE 🤖

The announcement by popular sports TikToker Frank Michael Smith that he would be contributing videos to The Athletic caught my eye for several reasons.

Quietly, The Athletic has begun transforming its content mix, outpacing most sports outfits we think of as “modern.” From a new streaming show on Prime Video to rights deals for game footage to real investment in podcasts, the outlet is no longer the New York Times for sports.

While Smith’s role appears to be fairly narrow (he is not getting hired by The Athletic), this is precisely the type of move all legacy media companies should be looking for.

Like many TikTokers, Smith’s true strength lies in his visual sensibilities and editing talent. But Smith also possesses a knack for editorial judgment (i.e., picking topics for his videos that jump out to audiences) and synthesizing information.

One recent TikTok made by Smith on The Athletic’s feed argued the Philadelphia Eagles were the big winners of the NFL trade deadline. Smith’s exhaustive research quickly explained how thin Philly’s resume was in its Super Bowl defense before breaking down each Eagles move and why it would improve the team.

Smith tops off the video with interview footage of defensive acquisition Jaelen Phillips as well as B-roll of Eagles players and coaches this season. It is a rhythmic and compelling watch while also being informative and concise.

When I interviewed The Athletic’s chief commercial officer, Sebastian Tomich, earlier this fall, he imagined ways in which The Athletic could leverage its business partnerships and world-class reporting to basically make modern content better than the creators currently thriving on those platforms.

Perhaps the collaboration with Smith is an “if you can’t beat them, join them” kind of example. Or maybe The Athletic believes it can develop or hire a talent like Smith in the future, once it learns how to make this kind of content pop on its platforms.

Either way, The Athletic is thinking big and thinking long-term, and this fascinating partnership with an existing talent like Smith is a great example.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

A ‘colossal f*ck-up’

Everything about the story of Mina Kimes joining other ESPN talent in promoting a controversial online casino app reeks of 2025.

First, the shamelessness of Stephen A. Smith cashing in on a glaring example of fans catching him not doing his job. Smith clearly was glued to a phone game last year at the NBA Finals rather than watching the game he is paid more than anyone else at the network to cover. In response, he played up the incident for content and is now turning it into sponsorship dollars.

Then there was the effort put in by fans online to explore the app. Until the past few years, a sponsorship deal, even one for something as strange as online solitaire, would not have mattered to most fans. Now, the parasocial nature of lucrative connections between content creators and fans leaves even the smallest scraps of a media personality’s life susceptible to dissection.

Fans discovered that the app, Solitaire Cash, is owned by Papaya Gaming. The parent company has reportedly admitted that it fraudulently set users up against computer-controlled opponents in games in which real money was wagered. Quickly, Papaya’s involvement with cryptocurrency, as well as its ties to China and Israel, drew even more ridicule from the ESPN hosts backing the app. This proved to be one too many viral buzzwords for the sponsorship to survive.

So Kimes backed out of the deal and apologized effusively. She said she will donate any of the payout she ultimately receives and called it “a colossal f*ck-up” on her part to not do enough research and vetting on a product she agreed to sponsor.

As the lines blur between sports media personality and content creator, mainstream commentator and parasocial community builder, what Kimes is dealing with is only going to become more arduous. If you think cancel culture is bad in mainstream media and entertainment, ask YouTubers and streamers what it is like to deal with alleged controversy. The more you show, the more is fair game.

Kimes doesn’t have to stoop to that level with her content; analyzing football pays the bills. But that doesn’t change the way in which audiences and fans view her or anyone else in sports media.