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

Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up for free to make sure you never miss it.

📉 Sophomore slump. Unrivaled's Year 2 championship averaged 314,000 viewers — down 14% from 2025 — capping a season where the league sold out Barclays Center on three weeks’ notice, broke the all-time record for a women's professional basketball regular-season game in Philadelphia, and still couldn't move the needle on TV.

🎙️ Hot mic, cold take. Florida Gators women's lacrosse announcer Sean Salisbury (not the former NFL quarterback) — apparently unaware his mic was still live at the end of a 23-9 blowout — was caught dropping an f-bomb about an official before announcing he was going to "cut her brakes on her way out of here." Neither Salisbury nor Florida has addressed it publicly.

🏀 Dead horse, live complaint. Louisville women's basketball coach Jeff Walz used his postgame press conference following a 70-65 overtime loss to Duke in the ACC Tournament championship — with his team sitting at 27-4 and ranked in the top 10 — to light into the national media for what he called lazy "dead horse" narrative journalism.

⚖️ The NFL's day in court. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals peppered the NFL's outside counsel with tough questions during oral arguments on Monday on the Sunday Ticket antitrust case, with three Democrat-appointed judges appearing skeptical of the league's defense of the judge who overturned a $4.7 billion jury verdict in 2024.

🏀 Kicked out. A reporter claims he was ejected from Jontay Porter's USBL debut over the weekend, where the NBA's lifetime-banned forward — still awaiting federal sentencing on a wire fraud charge carrying up to 20 years — posted a 21-point, 14-rebound, 14-assist triple-double for the Seattle SuperHawks in a season-opening win over the Lilac City Legends. The USBL said it believes in second chances. The reporter apparently was not extended the same courtesy.

🤼 Moving on. Pat McAfee closed the door on a WWE return Sunday night via Instagram, telling a fan, "It does not feel like it is something that's supposed to happen. It feels like that business has kind of passed me by a little bit." McAfee had returned to the commentary desk alongside Michael Cole every January for three straight years after football season ended. This is the first year he hasn't.

See what else is trending on Awful Announcing.

The sports media industry has spent the better part of a decade dismantling the institutions that made investigative journalism possible. The Washington Post gutted its sports desk. HBO shut down Real Sports. Newsrooms that once employed teams of accountability reporters now run skeleton operations producing wire copy. The infrastructure for doing hard, slow, expensive journalism about powerful sports institutions has been collapsing in slow motion, and nobody has rushed to fill the void.

Nobody, that is, except ESPN.

ESPN spent about a decade performing the slow-motion mercy killing of Outside the Lines while insisting it was doing the opposite. In 2013, the network moved the daily show from ESPN to ESPN2 — cutting its viewership nearly in half overnight, from 336,000 viewers to 160,000 in a single week — to make room for Colin’s New Football Show (remember that?) In 2019, with Bob Ley retired and the daily show drawing its last breaths, they killed the weekday edition entirely and spun a Saturday morning replacement as an "expansion," with executive vice president Norby Williamson claiming the show would now "impact more people." It was, as we put it at the time, a less effective spin cycle than one from a washing machine. By February 2023, when the standalone Saturday show was put down for good after Super Bowl LVII, there was nothing left to spin. The network said the OTL brand would live on in SportsCenter segments. That's the sports media equivalent of telling someone their dog didn't die, it just went to live on a farm, somewhere deep inside a noon SportsCenter rundown.

HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel followed in December of that same year, signing off after 29 seasons as the last true investigative magazine show in sports television. The outlet that exposed child slavery in the UAE, documented the NFL's concussion cover-up, and held the IOC accountable for decades was gone because the appetite for that kind of journalism — at least on traditional television — had evaporated. In his final sign-off, Gumbel said the work was never done. He wasn't wrong, and the void left behind was enormous.

That's the context for what ESPN did Monday. The network hired six former Washington Post reporters — Kent Babb, Kareem Copeland, Chuck Culpepper, Robert Klemko, Tom Schad, and Ben Strauss — to join its newsgathering, investigative, and enterprise teams. The hiring comes five weeks after Jeff Bezos gutted the Post's sports section, effectively shutting down one of the most storied sports journalism operations in the country. Klemko, a member of the Post's 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning team, will focus on sports-related crime and major scandals. Schad covered the Dan Snyder era of the Commanders and will handle data journalism. Strauss was the Post's sports media and business reporter, bringing those chops directly into the ESPN beat that will matter most to readers of this newsletter.

Over the past year, ESPN has been quietly making the most significant investment in investigative journalism in its post-OTL era. Dan Wetzel — a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most accomplished college sports scandal reporters of the past two decades — joined the network as a senior writer in March 2025, ending a 22-year run at Yahoo Sports. Wetzel spent years breaking stories on the Jerry Sandusky scandal, the Aaron Hernandez case, and NCAA corruption that others wouldn't touch, and ESPN hired him specifically to do investigative reporting across multiple platforms.

The most concrete answer to the skeptics who say ESPN can't actually do independent journalism is Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler, and what they built around the NFLPA story this past summer. It started in May, when ESPN reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into the union's financial dealings with OneTeam Partners, a multibillion-dollar group licensing firm. That report directly triggered the union to hire outside counsel to review Lloyd Howell's activities as executive director. Then Van Natta and Kahler confirmed not only that an arbitration ruling on NFL owner collusion existed — first unearthed by Pablo Torre Finds Out in late June — but also that Howell had secretly agreed with the NFL to hide its contents from the very players he was supposed to represent.

What followed was a run of exclusive reporting that became a case study in what ESPN's investigative unit can achieve when operating at its peak. Kahler — who had joined ESPN from The Athletic in July 2024 — broke with Van Natta that Howell had charged the union $2,426 at Atlanta’s Magic City strip club during the annual NFLPA summit, listing the purpose of the outing as a "Player Engagement Event to support & grow our Union," complete with two VIP rooms and a car service tab submitted to the union by an employee on Howell's instructions. On the same day the story was published, two executive committee members were still on record giving Howell a ringing endorsement. He resigned hours later.

That is accountability journalism. And when Dan Patrick questioned on his radio show whether ESPN could cover the NFL independently, given its equity stake in the league, Van Natta responded accordingly on social media.

Patrick's underlying question, though, deserved more than a social media clapback. And Van Natta himself has acknowledged as much. When he spoke with Puck's John Ourand about the ESPN-NFL equity arrangement, he admitted the conflict concerns him, said he'd been given assurances that nothing would change, and noted he was deep into an NFL investigative project that he expected to be published the same way it would have been before the deal closed.

The space ESPN is trying to fill didn't just open up when OTL died or when the Washington Post gutted its sports desk. It cracked open when Pablo Torre left ESPN a few years ago, launching Pablo Torre Finds Out at Meadowlark Media, a podcast that has become the closest thing to Real Sports currently available. Torre brought down NFLPA leadership, broke the Kawhi Leonard salary cap circumvention story, and documented the Jordon Hudson-Bill Belichick relationship in ways that made him the most consequential investigative sports journalist working right now. His whole show was built on the premise that the infrastructure for this kind of reporting no longer existed at big media companies, that you had to do it independently, with an entertainment wrapper that made the audience care.

He proved the demand was there. ESPN watched and took notes.

The question isn't whether ESPN can attract journalists. Monday proved they can. The question is what happens when the investigative unit produces something the NFL doesn't want published, or something that threatens a league partner's business interests. Bob Ley used to be the answer to that question. Outside the Lines at its best was proof that the E in ESPN didn't have to stand for entertainment all the way down.

Jimmy Pitaro's journalists will have to be that proof now. And the sports media world — including Pablo Torre Finds Out, which has been filling this gap more than anyone — will be watching to see if ESPN actually means it this time.

"There's really no excuse for you to be avoiding me. All I want to do is ask the questions that people want to hear." — Stephen A. Smith, confronting Gavin Newsom during Super Bowl week in San Francisco — and then, weeks later, going on Sean Hannity's debut podcast to publicly call out the governor for still not showing up.

"I ain't giving up my money. Let me put the presidential aspirations to bed. If I have to give up my money, it's not happening." — Smith, on the same Hannity podcast, closing the door on a 2028 presidential run less than a month after he told a CBS correspondent he was giving the idea "strong consideration."

"No, I'm not getting into that. That's something that — I think he feels that way, but not for me." — Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers, flatly dismissing Stephen A. Smith's on-air claim that Rivers is "definitely" retiring after this season. Smith delivered the news as fact on SiriusXM while answering a caller's question about Ja Morant. Rivers is under contract through 2026-27 at roughly $10 million.

"I think that's a bunch of crap. You can think what you want to think. We've pulled away in a lot of those, too. Yeah, next question. I didn't like that one very much." — Illinois coach Brad Underwood, ending a press conference question about his team's struggles in close games.

"Excited, grateful to the Giants for this opportunity. I have a pretty good understanding of the responsibility and the expectations that come with being a Giants broadcaster." — Glen Kuiper, breaking his own news on social media that he'd been hired by San Francisco to call 10-15 regular-season games in 2026. It’s his first sustained MLB broadcast work since the A's fired him in May 2023 after he used a racial slur on a live pregame broadcast while describing a visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

One year ago, Adam Schefter showed up on ESPN2's SportsCenter free agency special instead of The Pat McAfee Show — both airing at the same time, on different ESPN channels, effectively competing against each other — and it set off a 100-day shadowban that became one of the stranger sagas in recent sports media history.

Monday, Schefter was cordoned off in a glass room inside the Thunderdome in Indianapolis, serving as McAfee's personal free agency correspondent. Peter Schrager was there. Dan Orlovsky was there. ESPN2, rather than running counter-programming, re-aired First Take. On one of the biggest news days on the NFL calendar, McAfee's team ran the entire show from noon to 2 p.m. Not a single ESPN producer touched the flagship free agency coverage. It was all his.

And it was good. As Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina put it, the show covered all the news, captured the excitement, had fun doing it, and — crucially — didn't feel 30 minutes behind social media the way most NFL free agency TV coverage does.

That last part is the real indictment of what ESPN's traditional coverage had become. The SportsCenter special model, with its tickers, tight rundowns, and talent-share logistics, was always going to be slower than the moment. McAfee's show, built natively around the chaos of breaking news and the willingness to just react out loud, is structurally better suited for it. On our Play by Play podcast, Brendon Kleen and I noted what this day actually represented: this is exactly the version of McAfee at ESPN that made sense in theory from the beginning, which is his reach and energy funneled through ESPN's reporting firepower and production resources. The fact that it took 30 months to get here is the part worth examining.

Because the picture Drew Lerner painted in his piece today is the one that cuts through it all. McAfee has spent his entire ESPN tenure positioning himself as the outsider railing against the suits — calling Norby Williamson a "rat" on air, pushing ESPN publicly to hire Shams Charania, demanding creative control that no other talent on the network has anywhere close to. And ESPN, at every turn, gave him what he wanted. Williamson is gone. Shams is there. Schefter is in the glass box. Stephen A. Smith — who built his entire ESPN identity on being the most important person in the building — has acknowledged McAfee is the face of the network now. The outsider won. He got everything.

Which is exactly how the outsider becomes the establishment.

The suits McAfee complained about are now firmly in his corner. The talent he wanted around him traveled to Indianapolis to serve at his altar. The network that counter-programmed him a year ago handed him the biggest NFL news day of the offseason with zero competition on its own channels. McAfee hasn't changed. ESPN has changed around him, and in doing so, made him exactly what he always claimed to be fighting against. As our own Drew Lerner said, the ESPN ethos is slowly becoming the McAfee ethos. He just hasn't admitted it yet, and ESPN is too smart to make him.

The ethos he brought — loud, fast, personality-first, structurally hostile to the buttoned-up production sensibility that dominated ESPN for 30 years — is now just how the network operates on its biggest days. He'll keep calling out the suits when it suits him. ESPN will keep absorbing it because the alternative is losing him. And next March, Schefter will be back in Indianapolis, Orlovsky will make the trip, and nobody will remember that any of this was ever a negotiation.

The outsider playbook works right up until the moment you win. Then you're just running the place.