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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 NFL on Fox retains two. The top football broadcast in the country will retain both Erin Andrews and Charissa Thompson, two of its most visible talents. According to Front Office Sports, Andrews will continue as sideline reporter for the top NFL crew while Thompson splits time as a studio host for Fox and Amazon Prime Video.

🎾 Rodman’s request. USWNT star Trinity Rodman gave Wimbledon announcers a piece of her mind on Instagram after BBC’s Andrew Castle repeatedly called her “Tiffany” on the broadcast of boyfriend Ben Shelton’s fourth-round win on Monday while ESPN’s Mike Monaco continually commented upon her father and Basketball Hall of Famer, Dennis.

⚽ Rooney in the studio. Manchester United legend Wayne Rooney will join BBC’s Match of the Day studio show for the 2025/26 Premier League campaign and the network’s FIFA World Cup coverage next summer. Think of it as England’s version of Michael Jordan joining NBC, except Rooney has more than an honorary role.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

In praise of ‘The Domonique Foxworth Show’ from ESPN

or tons of sports hosts, the calendar flipping to July doubles as an invitation to mail in the content. The long NBA season mercifully ends, and we all start to see football coming on the horizon. This is the time for vacations and fill-in hosts, GOAT debates, and schedule talk.

But on The Domonique Foxworth Show, this might just be the best time of year.

The retired NFL cornerback took a circuitous path to hosting his own show for the four letters, writing features for Andscape before hosting weekend radio and breaking into the new-look Get Up roster. Since 2022, Foxworth has used the podcast to explore all the corners of his own skill set as a commentator. This summer, Foxworth and producer Charlie Kravitz have taken full advantage of the break from big-time sports to reach into their deep toolbag for conversations on labor, media, youth sports, and athlete health.

That these two would create compelling and creative content together is no surprise. Foxworth, beyond his playing career on the gridiron, is an experienced union leader. He was the president of the NFL Players’ Association executive committee, a Harvard Business School graduate, and a former COO of the NBPA. It would be no exaggeration to call Foxworth one of the most interesting and thoughtful people at ESPN.

As hard as it would seem to keep up with a host like that, Kravitz makes it look easy. Coming up in the Erik Rydholm branch of ESPN as a producer on Highly Questionable and then its digital spinoff, Debatable, Kravitz knows how to take the silly and make it serious. But, the Foxworth Show shines because of the chemistry Kravitz has developed with Foxworth and the effort he puts into shaping each conversation.

Their resumes make the Foxworth Show a place where the audience will see a television-worthy breakdown of Minnesota’s stifling secondary, followed by an Ivy League panel discussion on the economics of Caitlin Clark, within a few months. This is what podcasting used to be.

Read the rest of the column at Awful Announcing.

💬 AROUND AA 💬 

Looking back on ‘The Decision’

Fifteen years ago, we learned a term called “player empowerment” and the NBA transaction game became one of the top stories in sports.

It all began when LeBron James took the stage alongside ESPN’s Jim Gray at the Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich, Connecticut for The Decision.

Awful Announcing contributor Michael Grant wrote a retrospective this week looking back at The Decision and its wide-ranging legacy.

🎤 MEDIA MOMENTS ✍️ 

• MLB players scared of robo umps? Not quite luddites or scaredy-cats, ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian reported Tuesday on Pardon the Interruption that baseball players are nervous about taking control of ball-strike challenges when Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) comes to the majors. The long-anticipated move would require pitchers and hitters to call challenges themselves, rather than managers. And they worry it could make them look silly.

• Christine Brennan is back at it. USA Today columnist Christine Brennan is releasing her long-anticipated Caitlin Clark book on Wednesday. In the final stop on her pre-release press tour, Brennan teased WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert for her insistence on referencing other players alongside Clark when talking about the league’s growth. While Brennan appears to have substantive reporting in the book, some of her press tour has seemed oddly unproductive.

• The Big 12 wants 5+11. Commissioner Brett Yormark affirmed the conference’s preference for a 16-team College Football Playoff format that would include 11 at-large bids selected by the CFP committee. While this format would guarantee the Big 12 just one automatic bid instead of two, Yormark trusts the depth of the conference to deliver more CFP teams year to year than under the Big Ten’s preferred model, with just three at-large bids.

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥 

Ben Shelton is on his way up

I admit I could be late to the party, but this year’s Wimbledon certainly feels like a coming-out party for American Ben Shelton.

You can never predict, especially in this strange sports news environment in which not even the occurrence of a major tournament can cut through, what will go viral. But before even reaching the quarterfinal (which he will play on Wednesday), Shelton already made headlines three times.

Once was because he fell victim to a strange refereeing decision to cut short his second-round match ahead of match point due to darkness and a slick court. Next, clips of him asking his sister’s bosses to allow her more PTO to stay in London for the later rounds of the tournament shot through the internet.

The other came Monday, when Shelton’s victory in the fourth round became part of a story about his girlfriend Trinity Rodman and Wimbledon commentators. ESPN and BBC announcers called her “Tiffany” and repeatedly referred to her estranged father Dennis, the Basketball Hall of Famer. She asked them to stop in an Instagram story on Tuesday.

That’s not all there is to Shelton. On the court, he appears like a baby bear, all physical muster not yet under full control. The power he can unleash looks like Mario eating a Super Mushroom and powering up.

The 22-year-old is equally likely to fire up the crowd with a hand to his ear as he is to check in earnestly with his father and coach, the former tennis pro Bryan Shelton. After matches, Shelton flirts with the crowd like a pro wrestler.

Shelton is not the first to own the spotlight and turn his sport into a gladiator match. Before him, there was Andre Agassi, Novak Djokovic, even Nick Kyrgios. But where they were defined by a kind of pompousness, Shelton is boyishly charming.

Add in the sports star girlfriend, the close family and the rising talent and Shelton has a chance to be a breakthrough American tennis star. Most know the stat by now that it has been more than two decades since an American man won a tennis major. Maybe breaking that record is what it will take for Shelton to be a true celebrity.

If so, it will be because tournaments like this allowed him to prepare the recipe that would vault him to that level.