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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏆 TNT back for more CFP. As part of an agreement struck with ESPN last year, TNT will exercise its option to sub-license College Football Playoff semifinal games in two of the next three postseasons. The network aired SMU-Penn State and Texas-Clemson first round games in 2025, and was set to add a quarterfinal game this year. Now, TNT will add one of the two semifinals in 2026 and 2028. It helps bolster the network’s live sports portfolio after losing the NBA without harming the overall feel of the CFP, since ESPN produces all of the broadcasts.

😨 The end of college sports? After a landmark ruling by the U.S. District Court in Northern California last week approving $20.5 million in salary allotments for university athletic departments, SEC Network host Paul Finebaum predicted “fans are going to start tuning out” due to the “existential threat” of the professionalization of college sports. The new system will see an external commission oversee the payment system and NIL, effectively leaving the NCAA in the dust and moving big-time college sports closer to a pro structure.

🏇 Belmont Bradshaw. While his buddy Jimmy Johnson heads into retirement, Terry Bradshaw is still a major face of Fox Sports. Even at the Belmont Stakes, where Bradshaw made the “Riders Up” call and was 20 years off on how many runnings of the race there have been. Fox is clearly still getting its racing legs in its third broadcast of the final leg of the Triple Crown.

️‍🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

The Doris Burke conundrum

The Harvard Business Review tells us to deliver bad news privately and directly.

That’s the opposite of how ESPN’s Doris Burke analyst heard last week that the Worldwide Leader was mulling yet another change to its top NBA booth. Such a move, of course, would result in a demotion for Burke. And the news came not in a quiet meeting with her bosses, but in a buzzy article at The Athletic for all to see.

Sure, her ESPN partner Richard Jefferson and NBA colleague Rick Carlisle came to her defense (in very public fashion) through the course of the week. That probably felt good, but it couldn’t have done much to change the reality of Burke’s situation. It also put the possibility of her demotion fully on blast for anyone who may have missed it.

Burke has been on a rollercoaster since she got her job as the network’s top NBA analyst. From Doc Rivers to JJ Redick to Richard Jefferson, she hasn’t had more than a half-season to mesh with anyone. Chemistry is the most important thing in broadcasting, and the chance to develop it has been stolen from her as her counterparts chase coaching jobs.

This has muted what makes Burke, currently calling her second NBA Finals for ABC, a great analyst. Burke’s preparation and awareness are her super powers. At her best, Burke identifies important patterns or habits among the NBA’s best players. Over the course of a game, she drills them in for the viewing audience. Those sharp observations, not coincidentally, often come back to matter in the biggest moments of the biggest games.

If there’s any downside to that approach, it’s that it requires time in a sport that doesn’t offer a lot of it. Burke has to find a pocket early in a game to highlight what she’s watching, and then massage that explanation throughout the night so viewers don’t forget it. When it’s time for the big reveal late in a game, she’s effectively trained our eyes into noticing it.

Perhaps that means Burke is worse in a three-person booth. ESPN, after all, has an odd strategy of assembling two-person booths for its lower NBA broadcasts before forcing analysts to adjust to a three-man weave as they ascend. Or it could mean that Burke simply needs time to learn her partners and pick her spots.

If that Athletic report is to be believed, Burke may not get that time. Of course, it’s not just about Burke’s performance. ESPN is facing down the discomfort of potentially demoting the first woman ever to call a major sports championship event just two years after helping her break that glass ceiling.

Burke has not been able to rise above the churn around her to put out top-notch NBA commentary in two years on the job. For whatever reason, she has not been as effective the past two playoffs alongside Mike Breen as she was while becoming a fan favorite last decade. To put together the best possible NBA broadcast, ESPN may need to pivot.

At the same time, by desperately pivoting to Burke after laying off Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson in 2023, then watching Burke spin her wheels for two seasons as her partners jumped ship, it will be easy to blame ESPN for Burke’s underperformance. Demote Burke, and they will lose the goodwill gained from promoting Burke in the first place. And even with Burke’s slip, ESPN is late to the party in hiring NBA analysts for next season. Improving on the Burke-Jefferson tandem is easier said than done.

There is still a three-person booth that could work with Burke. She was great with Rivers. But if ESPN can’t find the right mix and demotes her, it will erase the one positive from this messy era of NBA broadcasting at the Worldwide Leader.

👀AROUND AA📰

Drive to Survive for pickleball?!

Awful Announcing contributing writer Daniel Kaplan got his hands on a court testimony from Professional Pickleball Association Tour owner Tom Dundon revealing that the tour is working on a “Drive To Survive”-style documentary in partnership with Carvana.

A PPA Tour spokesperson confirmed:

“It’s obvious if you come to one of our tournaments there are lots of cameras following around lots of our players. … It follows the storylines of the players and some of the executives as well to give a little more insight into the personalities of the sport.”

Read Daniel’s full story on the court filing (plus reporting from inside the media industry) right here!

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

This basically sums up the NBA Finals logo bait-and-switch throughout the series. We’re still waiting for an answer on what exactly is going on here…

Andre Agassi was the talk of the tennis world last week from Roland Garros, where he dazzled with sharp analysis from the TNT Sports studio desk.

Here’s video of Bradshaw blowing the “Riders Up” call at the Belmont Stakes live on Fox:

Harry Potter-style house points to anyone who can make more than one or two sentences from this shouting match during ESPN’s NBA Finals halftime show.

🗣️ NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

The Great One goes off

• “I know analytics say you shoot the puck down the ice, but I’m not a believer in that. I’ve seen too many games cost by guys icing the puck. And then, it’s not their fault on the goal itself. But, just get the puck out and play smart. I don’t understand icing the puck. Rick Tocchet and I argue about this all the time. I’m just not a believer in icing the puck. That icing, I think, was one of the factors in them (Edmonton) getting the game tied.” - TNT’s Wayne Gretzky taking aim at analytics while not quite articulating the analytical side…

• “I don’t have concerns, because I know one guy that you’re never going to change (Charles Barkley). And I know another guy that’s really close to him. So, you know, the other two guys, Ernie [Johnson] is a consummate professional. He can adapt to any situation. Ernie is the guy that really keeps us out of trouble. And Kenny [Smith] is a professional. … We’re just going to go have fun, do what we do, talk about the game that we love, and just try to make people laugh.” - Shaquille O’Neal on concerns that ESPN will screw up Inside the NBA

• “Until now, my condition has only been known to my family. Not even my bosses knew. I didn’t look like Parky, I didn’t act like Parky, so why should I publicly reveal something so personal and embarrassing?” - Bill Plaschke announcing his Parkinson’s diagnosis in the Los Angeles Times

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

TNT Sports reinvigorates the French Open

This week’s French Open coverage from Roland Garros was the biggest win for TNT Sports in years.

In the first year of a reported $65 million annual deal to air the late-spring major, TNT went big. It hired big-name newcomers like Andre Agassi, Sloane Stephens and Venus Williams to go along with tennis TV mainstays John McEnroe, Jim Courier and Chris Evert. And it tried new things, like whiparound-style coverage in the early rounds and mic’d up players and coaches.

The tennis gods rewarded them with a great tournament and two delicious finals. Unless you’re talking about an American underdog on a shock run, most tennis fans want the greats doing battle. Both the men’s and women’s brackets produced 1 vs. 2 finals. American Coco Gauff outclassed a flustered Aryna Sabalenka in the wind on Saturday before an instant classic between young stars Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcara on the men’s side on Sunday.

Above and beyond the professional polish and the awesome competition, what stood out from TNT was that it felt like a network. Outside of a patch in the 1990s when TNT and TBS were airing the NFL and college football in addition to the NBA and MLB, the TNT Sports tree usually isn’t very expansive. Watching the coverage from Roland Garros, you saw the makings of an identity.

Quietly, lead announcer Brian Anderson had a portfolio this season that rivaled Mike Tirico or Ian Eagle. He added tennis to his MLB postseason and NCAA tournament duties without missing a beat. Tennis announcing is about nailing a hundred or so micro-moments after big points. With the crowd begging him to side with Alcaraz, calling tennis for the first time in his life on the biggest possible stage, Anderson delivered. I could see Anderson adjusting to the tame Roland Garros environs and turning down his volume over time, but he met the moment and had an accurate log of the score and situation throughout the marathon men’s final match.

Besides Anderson, NBA on TNT Tuesday host Adam Lefkoe delivered from the studio desk. Not many hosts can set Agassi up to detail Alcaraz backstrokes as well as they cohost a sh*t-talking podcast with Shaquille O’Neal.

We also got a taste for how the heft of the Bleacher Report can insert something into the sports conversation seamlessly. If TNT has a sport, they can make it matter using B/R and House of Highlights. With so many followers, these accounts are bound to make the average sports fan aware, at the very least, that a big event is happening. Even if that event is a tennis tournament in France.

When you zoom out, it’s pretty impressive how much star power TNT has on its sports broadcasting roster. This is a network that employs Charles Barkley, Wayne Gretzky and Andre Agassi in the studio. Grant Hill, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Lisa Leslie call games.

An Inside Sports show with Barkley, O’Neal and Co. may not work, but you can see the idea. Since pivoting from NBA rights, TNT Sports has assembled a collage of sports that feel random until you watch. Then you realize they sneakily have a bunch of really capable broadcasters surrounded by legendary former athletes.

For a network that was seen as a sad little brother for most of 2024, TNT Sports feels big when you tune in. The French Open showed how well TNT’s trusty touch can translate to new properties.