Welcome to The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter where you’ll always find the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis.

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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 Strength & Honor. College football’s power brokers lost their minds when three-loss Alabama missed the playoff last year. Hence, the CFP revised its team selection process, including new metrics that reward teams with more demanding schedules and penalize those with weaker ones. Thank goodness someone is finally looking out for the SEC.

🥊 Welcome to the Show. Netflix announced yet another venture into the world of live sports broadcasting, featuring a familiar face: Jake Paul. After the massive success of his fight against Mike Tyson, he’ll take on WBA lightweight champion Gervonta “Tank” Davis on November 14.

⛳ Tiger on Top. PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp gave his first State of the Tour address and made clear that there would be a complete reexamination of the PGA Tour’s current model. In fact, none other than Tiger Woods will head a new committee “charged with reimagining the very basics of the PGA Tour’s competitive model.”

🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

We’re really putting the E in ESPN now

To be completely upfront with you, the day after ESPN announced its $325 million/year deal with WWE, we led with that in this newsletter. And it bombed. Quite possibly the worst-performing newsletter we’ve ever sent. You guys were NOT interested in reading about the marriage between the biggest sports network and professional wrestling.

We have some wrestling fans on staff, but I’m personally more lukewarm on the industry, so I understand your lack of concern. Here’s the problem, for you and potentially for us: ESPN is going all-in with WWE, and it is about to become a pillar of their offerings.

There was already a momentum about the arrangement when it was announced that the WWE-ESPN Premium Live Event (PLE) partnership would start with next year’s WrestleMania 42 in April. That momentum went to ludicrous speed on Wednesday, however, when we learned that WWE’s newly created September PLE will be broadcast on ESPN and the (now officially here) ESPN app, but all PLEs moving forward will be there as well.

Peacock, which was presumed to have the rights through April, quickly put out word that they were still keeping plenty of WWE content through the year, but for all intents and purposes, the WWE-ESPN relationship is front and center now.

WWE PLEs will now be one of the core offerings of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer streaming service. And you better believe the network is going to put its marketing machine behind it. Get ready for Seth Rollins screaming at Stephen A. Smith on First Take, The Miz anchoring SportsCenter, and all kinds of promotional and editorial support.

And Pat McAfee, perhaps the best-positioned person in all of sports media, is truly about to cement himself as the face of it all. With a daily show in the heart of ESPN’s lineup, a weekly showcase on College GameDay, and his on-again, off-again work as an announcer/performer with WWE, if you thought he was ubiquitous before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Perhaps it’s a bit cliché at this point to say that ESPN is valuing the E more than the S these days. And it’s worth noting that the new NFL-ESPN arrangement will undoubtedly bring plenty of sports content and promotion with it as well. But given the need to make a mega-splash with their new app, and the desire to remain relevant, the WWE relationship is the one that best represents where Disney’s sporting arm is going.

If you decided not to read any of this cause you don’t care about pro wrestling, I understand. But clearly, ESPN is banking on you coming around, even if they have to bodyslam you with coverage to make it happen.

📺 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🎬

• Rich Eisen’s return to the SportsCenter desk drew a massive audience, averaging 708,000 viewers, 67% larger than SportsCenter‘s normal average in the 11 p.m. ET window. It was the most-watched edition of the show in that window since mid-June, and even beat out Eisen’s last SportsCenter appearance in 2003. No wonder they’ve already confirmed he’ll be returning for “periodic special editions” of ESPN’s flagship show.

• Yahoo Sports announced on Wednesday that it has launched a new FAST channel: the Yahoo Sports Network. Faturing more than 60 hours of original programming per week, covering a variety of sports via both live and recorded programming, including The Ariel Helwani Show, Yahoo Sports Daily, Inside Coverage, Yahoo Fantasy Forecast, The Kevin O’Connor Show, Football 301, and Network with Rich Kleiman. The free, ad-supported streaming TV channel will be available on leading FAST services.

• Are you ready for some fencing??? CNBC and USA Fencing are partnering on a new monthly fencing broadcast program. The Fencing Show, which debuts on October 25 at 2:30 p.m. EST, “will shine a spotlight on the sport of fencing like never before, delivering unprecedented exposure for athletes and the fencing community.”

• NBC announced its full lineup of college football announcers on Wednesday, and it includes plenty of familiar faces. The network’s top broadcast team of play-by-play announcer Noah Eagle, analyst Todd Blackledge, and sideline reporter Kathryn Tappen return to call Big Ten Saturday Night for the third consecutive season. For Notre Dame broadcasts, Dan Hicks will handle play-by-play duties, and Jason Garrett returns as a game analyst for the fourth straight year, with Zora Stephenson as the sideline reporter.

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

"College football, it feels like the only partnership that they really care about is the television money.” - The Ringer’s Ryen Russillo reacting to the Big Ten’s 24/28-team CFP idea.

“Their product is terrible. It’s terrible. Let’s just be honest. Because if it wasn’t terrible, you know what people would be doing? They’d be watching it.” - Trey Wingo on LIV Golf

“You sound more like me every day” - Fox News’ Sean Hannity to Stephen A. Smith. Make of that what you will.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

We’re never going to get the real Colin Kaepernick story, are we?

Much like the story behind CBS canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the saga surrounding Spike Lee’s Colin Kaepernick docuseries with ESPN is a tale in which many things can be true.

ESPN announcing over the weekend that the long-gestating project would not be released, just days after the NFL agreed to buy 10% equity in the company, seems fishy. Even if you’re going to say it’s coincidental, perception is reality on this one.

That deal, which is likely to require approval from the Trump Administration’s Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission, and the idea of a docuseries that reportedly includes “incendiary critiques of conservative politicians and Donald Trump” and “tackles the history of Black athletes in professional sports, as well as the larger cultural conversation around social justice and police brutality” probably would not have sat well with the guy who just said the Smithsonian focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.”

Kaepernick was reportedly granted “approval rights” over the project that essentially amounted to control over the final cut. That may have become a problem when Lee attempted to shift the series’ focus to a bigger picture, causing headaches and head-butting between the filmmaker and subject that eventually hit a stalemate.

So yes, ESPN had billions of reasons to shelve the project, but it’s also fair to wonder if this project was never going to see the light of day even if the Worldwide Leader remained on board.

We can get hung up on the reasons why the series won’t see the light of day, but ultimately, the frustration lies with the fact that there is a large audience out there that would love to know the details and behind-the-scenes stories around Kaepernick’s protest, the fallout, and subsequent blacklisting from the NFL. This is one of those stories that needs to be told, and somehow it feels like we’ll probably never get the version we most want.

If anyone was going to pull it off, it was going to be Spike Lee. And if any company had the juice to make it happen, it was ESPN.

Alas, perhaps the best we’ll be able to get is a Netflix Untold (shudders).