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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

⚾ A Midsummer Night’s tournament. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred joined WFAN yesterday to discuss a wide range of topics facing his league in the next few years. One of the more notable nuggets from the interview was that the league is considering an in-season tournament akin to the NBA Cup.

📺 Netflix’s next. ESPN and Marquee Sports Network reporter Taylor McGregor could be Netflix’s next sports hire, according to a report in Front Office Sports. The streamer is considering multiple other sports personalities, and nothing is finalized. Netflix recently hired former ESPNer Elle Duncan to serve as the face of its fledgling sports division.

⚽ TikTok ‘26. FIFA and the popular social media app TikTok have partnered to create specialized content surrounding the upcoming World Cup. TikTok will livestream parts of matches, allow creators to utilize FIFA-licensed footage, and more, all in an effort to reach younger fans.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

ESPN has a lot of checks to cash in 2026

Last month, Awful Announcing named “The Evolution of ESPN” as our top sports media story of 2025. It was a year of big, forward-looking moves for the Worldwide Leader. The company launched its direct-to-consumer app, bringing the ESPN family of networks outside of the pay TV bundle for the first time in its history. It struck a massive equity deal with the NFL, which will see ESPN own NFL Network and linear distribution for NFL RedZone if/when the transaction is approved. It restructured its deal with MLB, ditching Sunday Night Baseball for a more local-focused offering that includes licensing MLB.tv, the league’s out-of-market subscription service. ESPN’s parent, Disney, also inked crucial distribution deals, including an acrimonious one with YouTube TV that will see all ESPN content available directly within the Google-owned platform.

All of these moves were made with an eye towards the future. But if 2025 was defined by ESPN drawing up its proverbial playbook, 2026 will be defined by whether the network can actually execute on those plays. Right now, ESPN has a lot of grand plans on paper. But so far, implementation of those plans has been incremental.

Let’s begin with that all-important direct-to-consumer app. Now ,just over four months since its launch, the hasty nature in which ESPN rolled out its much-ballyhooed app is becoming quite clear. Prior to launch, ESPN was steadfast in its assertion that the app would be available to anyone with an ESPN subscription. Access ESPN through a cable or satellite company? Great, you can authenticate into the app. Access ESPN through a virtual provider like Fubo or YouTube TV? You get the app too. Want to purchase the app from ESPN directly? Even better.

Quickly, it became apparent that this wouldn’t be the case right off the bat. Yes, some cable and satellite providers had full access to the ESPN “Unlimited” tier right from launch. But quite a few don’t. Comcast customers, despite the company reaching a new distribution agreement with Disney in October, still do not have access to ESPN Unlimited and its troves of exclusive live content. YouTube TV customers are in the same boat. That’s two of the four largest pay TV services in the country right there. And as of early 2026, there’s still no clear timeline for when these customers will get access to ESPN Unlimited as was promised by ESPN prior to the app’s launch and, more importantly, negotiated into its new distribution deals with Comcast and YouTube TV.

And if that’s not frustrating enough, the reasoning behind the delays is quite frustrating in itself. Awful Announcing learned in October that the reason these major distributors don’t have access to ESPN Unlimited yet is due to technological challenges. Essentially, the engineers working on ESPN’s app are still trying to figure out how to onboard tens of millions of users into the platform.

That’d be a challenge for any engineering team, but it’s fair to say ESPN should have been more prepared. After all, the company was openly discussing, prior to launch, the fact that everyone, no matter where they got ESPN, would have access to all of the app’s bells and whistles.

Perhaps it was partly a misallocation of resources. ESPN's app developers clearly spent time on features like ESPN Bet integration. Of course, the network ditched ESPN Bet mere months after the app launched, opting to partner with DraftKings instead. That’s time ESPN’s engineers could have spent focusing on the core product. 

So the first check ESPN has to cash in 2026 is getting every person currently paying for ESPN access to its app as promised. As it stands, tens of millions of ESPN subscribers are without content like WWE’s Premium Live Events and programming that was previously exclusive to ESPN+, including college sports, PGA Tour coverage, NHL games, and much more.

The second check for the network to cash also has to do with the app. Earlier this week, we learned that ESPN’s app would not be carrying in-market broadcasts for the MLB teams under the league’s media arm this season, as was intended. That group might grow from six clubs to as many as 16 this season, with the Washington Nationals seemingly set to become the seventh team after leaving MASN, and nine other MLB teams officially terminating deals with FanDuel Sports Network on Thursday. Instead, in-market fans looking to stream their local MLB team will need to utilize the league’s own platform.

The reasoning again boils down to infrastructure, it would seem. ESPN’s app is simply not ready to handle local broadcasts for those teams on such short notice. 2027 now seems to be the likely launch for in-market MLB streams on the ESPN app.

Sticking with the tech theme, yet another big-ticket item on ESPN’s to-do list is to fully integrate its programming into YouTube TV. As part of its new distribution agreement, all ESPN content, including that exclusive to the ESPN Unlimited tier, will be available directly on the YouTube TV platform. This has yet to happen, and a timeline for this integration is still unknown. However, it’s something that YouTube TV customers are eager to have for obvious reasons. Instead of needing to switch from the YouTube TV app to the ESPN app to watch content not available on one of ESPN’s linear networks, viewers could access everything within one platform.

Eventually, when ESPN does implement all of these initiatives, it’ll be great. “All of ESPN. All in one place,” as the app’s slogan touts, makes a lot of sense. No matter how you pay for ESPN, you should get everything the network has to offer. So far, it hasn’t been that simple.

These things take time. But it’s reasonable to say ESPN has over-promised and under-delivered regarding its app so far. 2026 will be an important year for ESPN to implement its vision. Once the network’s plan is in place, it’ll undeniably be more fan-friendly than the prior setup, which necessitated both a pay TV subscription and an additional ESPN+ subscription to access all that ESPN has to offer.

But in the meantime, as we wait for ESPN to fulfill all of these promises, it’s a wonder just how patient fans will be. And at some point, the onus is on ESPN to tell us when these features will become available. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

While many prominent sports media hosts have either addressed the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by an officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on social media or not at all, Fox Sports host Nick Wright was one of the lone voices to tackle the somber story head-on in an episode of his podcast on Thursday.

In a 17-minute solo monologue on the What’s Wright feed, Wright expressed frustration with the messaging from the Trump administration in the aftermath of Good’s death before imploring his audience to look deeper than the surface-level “tribalism” or social media chatter and to think critically about whether they are OK with how ICE is operating on the streets of American cities.

Wright, who is openly left-leaning politically, does not often discuss politics or news stories on his podcast or his FS1 show, First Things First. But in the opening moments of the episode, as well as a follow-up post on X, the host called this emotional monologue “the best and most important thing I’ll do all year.”

While Wright acknowledged that mass deportations were expected based on the GOP platform in the 2024 election, he argued that the way ICE is operating in raids like the one that led to Good’s death in Minneapolis was “not put to a vote.”

“Are we OK with giving masked, armed, often badgeless men who have had far less training than your local police force, absolute power over us as American citizens any time we run into them?” Wright asked. “And to further that, are we OK with the growing consensus in some corners of American life that the justifiable penalty for failing to comply with a law enforcement officer very likely may be lethal force?”

Read the rest of Wright’s sharp commentary here.

🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎙️

On the latest edition of The Play-By-Play, Ben Axelrod and Drew Lerner draft media storylines for the upcoming NFL postseason. Check it out!

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

RIP FanDuel Sports Network, we hardly knew ya

It’s been a week to forget for Main Street Sports Group, owner of the FanDuel Sports Networks, as the company faces down its increasingly certain demise.

Yesterday, we got the latest regarding Main Street’s fate. Each of the nine MLB teams currently under contract with the company decided to terminate their contracts to preserve flexibility should Main Street file for bankruptcy.

That scenario appears likely: less than 24 hours before reports that those teams were terminating their deals, it was reported that a potential Main Street purchase by London-based streamer DAZN was no longer on the table. That acquisition, as previously reported, was Main Street's only chance of survival beyond the current NBA and NHL seasons.

Now, it seems Main Street is hoping for a Hail Mary from a company that may or may not be Fubo, though a deal with any company seems like a pipe dream at this point.

More realistically, the 29 teams currently under contract with Main Street will need to find alternatives. MLB, the NBA, and the NHL have all indicated in recent years a desire to centralize local broadcast rights for sale to a streamer. The Main Street teams reentering the market sooner than anticipated could speed up those plans.

However, there’s a small chance that at least some of these teams will return to Main Street despite the struggles. As shocking as it might seem, the rights fees Main Street can offer, even in a reduced capacity, may still be more lucrative than streaming or over-the-air alternatives.

And therein lies the problem. Teams and leagues have yet to find a way to replicate the economic prosperity that regional sports networks once afforded. Even in their diminished state, regional sports networks are able to pay more than local over-the-air broadcasters.

The hope is that, eventually, when leagues can sell a centralized package of local rights to a big company like Amazon, Netflix, or Disney, they’ll be worth more in the aggregate than they are piecemeal, on a team-by-team basis, as they’re sold now.

More immediately, nine MLB clubs need to secure broadcast rights for a season that starts in just over two months. 13 NBA teams and seven NHL teams need to prepare for the possibility of switching broadcast partners mid-season.

It’s not that the demise of regional sports networks wasn’t expected. That book has long been written. It’s the speed with which Main Street, which emerged from bankruptcy just one year ago, returned right back to where it started, and put 29 teams into precarious situations in the process.