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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏀 Don’t doubt Jordan. After his NBC debut earlier this week, some skeptics were doubting Michael Jordan’s story about the last time he touched a basketball. It was last month in New York during the Ryder Cup, when he rented a home with a basketball court, and the owner wanted him to shoot a free throw for his grandchildren, so the story went. Well, Jordan proved the doubters wrong, as usual. Video emerged of the Chicago Bulls legend swishing the free throw, just like he said.

📺 Athletic’s new show. The Athletic and Amazon are collaborating on a new show to debut this Saturday, aptly named The Athletic Show. Robert Mays, host of The Athletic Football Show, Zena Keita, co-host of No Offseason and The Athletic NBA Daily, and Jason Goff, host of The Full Go podcast, will join together to cover wide-ranging topics throughout the sports world.

🎙️ Blue Wire makes moves. Podacst network Blue Wire has acquired nine new shows, including two formerly belonging to The Ringer, Sports Cards Nonsense and Still Against All Odds. Blue Wire’s other new additions include shows focused on the Jacksonville Jaguars, San Francisco 49ers, Los Angeles Rams, and Washington Wizards.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

ESPN drops the ball on Thursday’s breaking news

Early Thursday morning, news broke that Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were arrested in connection with separate FBI gambling probes. Hours later, FBI Director Kash Patel held a news conference outlining the cases, which allege that Rozier intentionally removed himself from a March 2023 game due to injury after a suspicious number of wagers were placed on “under” props for his various stats. After the bets cashed, Rozier received $200k at his home.

As for Billups, the FBI alleges the Portland coach is involved in rigged underground poker games backed by the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese crime families.

Unsurprisingly, the bombshell allegations dominated headlines throughout Thursday morning. Billups had just been coaching the Trail Blazers the night before his arrest. Rozier is set to rake in over $20 million this year from his contract with the Heat. The NBA has suspended both indefinitely.

In another era, ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in sports, would’ve spent all day with wall-to-wall coverage of the scandal. Frankly, the story deserves such coverage. Yesterday, that was nowhere to be found.

ESPN’s typical daytime lineup of Get Up, First Take, and The Pat McAfee Show went forward without preemption. And how each program handled the day’s top story says a lot about ESPN’s ability to cover breaking news such as this in 2025.

With the initial news breaking around 7:30 a.m. ET, Get Up was understandably left scrambling to cover the story, but didn’t touch it until almost 8:40 a.m., when host Mike Greenberg gave a short readout of the circumstances. Greenberg again gave a short readout of the news at the top of the hour, but Get Up did not do a full segment on the story until about 9:20 a.m.

Even then, Greenberg had to acknowledge the irony that he was discussing the story next to Will Compton and Taylor Lewan of Bussin’ with the Boys fame, both of whom are known for discussing gambling on their show. An ESPN graphics producer must’ve also noticed the irony, because an ESPN Bet ad was promptly removed from the screen when Greeny began the segment.

But ESPN’s gambling interests aside, how the network covered the first several hours of this developing story is a complete indictment of its ability to produce meaningful breaking news coverage. Not only was the story afforded just one full segment during the show (for context, Aaron Rodgers’ revenge game against the Green Bay Packers received multiple segments), but the folks discussing it were grossly unprepared.

Alongside the Bussin’ crew was NFL analyst Dan Orlovsky and NFL insider Adam Schefter. Get Up couldn’t even get an NBA reporter on there, much less someone who could’ve provided actual insight about the case.

But let’s extend a bit of grace. This story broke minutes before Get Up went on air. First Take, on the other hand, had several hours to prepare. And how Stephen A. Smith’s gang handled themselves made Get Up look Emmy-worthy.

At 10 a.m., right when First Take begins, the FBI held a press conference to discuss the multiple gambling probes that ensnared both Billups and Rozier. CNN aired it live. Fox News aired it live. MSNBC aired it live. ESPN did not.

Again, we’re not only talking about the biggest story of the day in sports. We’re talking about one of the biggest news stories of the day period. Inexplicably, First Take opted to go forward with pre-planned segments about Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs, then Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers, before getting to the FBI’s arrests at 10:30.

At that point, Smith explained the story, aired a few clips from Patel’s press conference, then brought on NBA insider Shams Charania, who did his best to cosplay as a legal analyst despite having no such background.

It didn’t take long for Stephen A. to take the story into fantasy land from there. In a three-minute diatribe that seemed only tangentially related to the FBI probe, Smith took aim at the Trump administration, repeatedly saying “he’s coming” for professional sports leagues, seemingly because the NFL shut down his bid to purchase the Buffalo Bills in 2014.

“How many times, for one incident after another, have I said, Trump is coming. He’s coming,” Smith began. “I’m gonna say it on national television again. Bad Bunny is performing at the Super Bowl, and all of a sudden, you're hearing ICE is gonna be there looking to engage in mass deportations. The Super Bowl, disrupting things. Big night for the NBA; Wembanyama put on a show. That has now been smeared because we’re talking about this story. Remember, Trump has a long, long history connected to the world of sports because he had those casinos.”

“Anybody that has been around him. Anybody that has talked to him. Anybody that has seen his reactions from the sports leagues and the positions that people have taken, they are not surprised at what’s going on today,” Smith continued. “It’s a statement and it’s a warning that more is coming. And that’s what they’re saying here. I’m just telling you, it’s as serious as it gets. This ain’t the platform for me to get into it the way I’m going to get into it. But I’ve been saying, he’s coming. He’s coming.”

Now, to be clear, there’s a definite political angle to this story that shouldn’t be discounted. But this is hour three of a developing situation in which viewers are likely confused about what exactly is happening, especially considering ESPN itself had very limited coverage of the story to that point. There will be a time and place to talk about the politics of it all, but there are several other more pressing storylines to cover.

First, what exactly is going to happen next with Billups and Rozier from a legal standpoint? Second, what does this mean for the Trail Blazers and the Heat, who are now without a head coach and a player? Third, how does the NBA respond? The league had already cleared Rozier in a prior investigation, and hadn’t yet announced its suspensions when First Take was on the air. Fourth, what are the larger implications of this investigation regarding pro sports’ embrace of legalized gambling?

At best, the political angle is probably the fifth most important story for a sports outlet to cover. And even then, you’d prefer someone with some level of expertise in federal investigations to give that opinion, not Stephen A. Smith.

But alas, this was all ESPN had. It’s a far cry from the network’s heyday, when they could call on Bob Ley or the like to anchor a special edition of SportsCenter with wall-to-wall coverage of the story. Instead, ESPN viewers were treated to the political ramblings of Stephen A. Smith and a panel of hot-take artists wholly unprepared to discuss a story of this kind.

Yesterday would’ve been a perfect time for ESPN to lean on its sister network, ABC, and bring on a legal analyst from ABC News to parse through the minutiae of a case like this. That happened, eventually, in the 3 p.m. hour, after every cable news network had already ran laps around the story throughout the day.

ESPN might’ve been better off simply cutting to an ABC News special report about the story during its morning programming if the network didn’t have a breaking news team ready to handle coverage. That’s not as unprecedented as it might seem. FS1 preempted its studio programming during the Kansas City Chiefs parade shooting in 2024 to simulcast Fox News coverage of the event. News divisions have the resources, personnel, and expertise to cover an FBI probe that sports channels simply do not in today’s day and age.

(Side note: Let’s not let FS1 off the hook here, either. That network was airing a rerun of Wake Up Barstool during the 10 a.m. hour.)

ESPN’s coverage didn’t start to mirror the importance of this story until 2 p.m., when SportsCenter came on and interviewed ESPN NBA reporter Tim Bontemps, who, by the way, attended the FBI press conference Thursday morning. Was he not available to remote in for First Take?

And for those wondering what the post-First Take coverage looked like, A.J. Hawk was running point for ESPN from 12-2 p.m. as a fill-in host for The Pat McAfee Show. If anyone wants a quick laugh, go check out how that coverage went.

Suffice it to say, the days of ESPN having the infrastructure to properly cover a breaking news story like this are long gone. The death by a thousand cuts that has happened to the network’s news division over the years in favor of investments in opinion programming came to bear yesterday. No one was ready to step in. The shows didn’t know how to handle a story so complex in nature. And viewers tuning in to learn about what the hell was happening and why the FBI arrested two active NBA figures were left with more questions than answers.

ESPN showed its ass. And unfortunately, this full moon is never going away.

📈 DATA DUMP 📊

• Major League Soccer released a couple morsels of viewership data yesterday. The league says it averaged 3.7 million “gross live match viewers per week” across both streaming and linear platforms. That figure represents the “global aggregate viewers for a full slate of weekend games,” Sports Business Journal clarifies. In other words, across all platforms, the average combined audience for a weekend slate of MLS games (typically 12-15 matches), is 3.7 million viewers. The league says this represents a 29% year-over-year increase.

• Through eight weeks of college football, the SEC boasts seven of the 10 most-watched teams in the country, including all of the top-five (Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma). The Big Ten, ACC, and independent Notre Dame account for the other three teams.

• Game 7 of the ALCS between the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners averaged 9.03 million viewers on Fox, the most-watched ALCS game on any network since Game 7 of Yankees-Astros in 2017. Of course, all of the normal Nielsen-related caveats apply.

📣 THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎙️

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Another day, another carriage dispute

Thursday evening, we got our first official acknowledgements from Disney and Google that the two companies are actively in a carriage battle. We’ve known this has been coming for some time, but now the rubber is hitting the road.

YouTube TV, of course, has been involved in two other high-profile carriage disputes recently. Last month, the service locked horns with NBC over the normal carriage sticking points (pricing and distribution), along with a new-age issue, ingestion. The two sides were able to avoid a blackout after a bit of sabre-rattling and a compromise on the ingestion issue.

In August, YouTube TV and Fox engaged in a dispute right before college football season kicked off. As far as these disagreements go, this one was pretty standard, and the two sides were able to avoid a blackout.

Now, it’s Disney’s turn, and there are a few factors that make this negotiation a bit unique.

For one, ESPN recently launched its new direct-to-consumer app that is available via an authenticated pay TV subscription across several cable providers, such as Charter and Verizon. As of now, YouTube TV customers do not have access to the “Unlimited” tier of ESPN’s new app, which includes exclusive content like WWE premium live events and the full slate of ESPN+ programming. No doubt, YouTube TV will push for its subscribers to receive authentication into ESPN “Unlimited” as part of any new deal, just like Disney has granted other pay TV providers.

Secondly, Disney has stakes in two of YouTube TV’s direct competitors, Hulu + Live TV and Fubo. Should Disney content go dark on YouTube TV, Disney could hypothetically attract a portion of those subscribers for its own services. Perhaps this means Disney has a bit more of an appetite for a blackout than others would.

There’s also the ongoing lawsuit that Disney has brought against Google for poaching former executive Justin Connolly, the person in charge of negotiating Disney’s distribution agreements with pay TV providers like YouTube TV. Connolly has reportedly recused himself from these negotiations, but Disney’s lawsuit alleging a breach of contract remains in the background.

Of course, what you want to know if you’re a YouTube TV subscriber is whether or not you’ll have access to ESPN and Disney’s other channels come Halloween, when the current agreement expires.

Based on recent history, you should be safe. But that’s no guarantee. Disney has shown it is willing to dig in when necessary, as it did with Charter two years ago in that precedent-setting carriage battle that saw its networks go dark for 10 days at the start of college football season.

Will that be the case with YouTube TV? It’s hard to say. My gut says no, but there could always be an unforeseen sticking point that drags things out longer than anticipated. Stay tuned.