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🏀 Burleson gets buckets. CBS’s most versatile employee is adding another role. Nate Burleson, who already stars on The NFL Today and CBS Mornings for the network, will add hosting the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament to his resume this March. Burleson will fill in for Ernie Johnson through the regional finals, before Johnson takes over for the Final Four.

🎙️ A Baltimore bye-bye. Lightning rod radio host and NFL commentator Jason La Canfora is reportedly out at 105.7 The Fan in Baltimore. Per La Canfora, the decision was sudden, and his program director had held positive meetings with him about the show’s ratings as recently as last Friday. The former Washington Post columnist joined The Fan in 2020.

⛹️‍♀️ Women’s Sports Sundays. That’s the branding ESPN is going with to market its replacement for Sunday Night Baseball this year. The primetime Sunday window will now feature marquee games from both the WNBA and NWSL for nine weeks this summer.

We’ve talked a lot in this newsletter about the business implications of the ESPN-NFL tie-up that is sending NFL Network under the purview of the Worldwide Leader. But perhaps the most immediate impact of the deal will be felt by talent, both on-air and behind the scenes, at NFL Network.

As the channel prepares to make a formal transition into the ESPN family in April, questions will start to be answered about who’s in and who’s out under new ownership.

On the rosy end of the spectrum, NFL Network becomes a more robust version of SEC Network, but for pro football. The network will still have its own studios in Inglewood, just like the SEC Network has its own shop in Charlotte. It’ll have dedicated studio programming, hosts and analysts associated primarily with the league-focused network, and its own look and feel, different from the ESPN mothership.

At least for a while, this is the most likely scenario. ESPN wouldn’t be buying NFL Network to completely overhaul the channel. On some level, ESPN had to already like what NFL Network was doing to want to acquire it in the first place. But the longer NFL Network operates under ESPN, the more it will start to look and feel like an ESPN property.

For now, however, the most pressing questions revolve around talent. Who’s in? Which shows? And for how much money?

We started to get a taste of what current NFL Network personalities know on Thursday, when insider Ian Rapoport was interviewed by The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand. In the interview, Rapoport, whose contract expires in May, made it very clear he has no idea what is coming. He doesn’t know if he’ll have a job at ESPN. He doesn’t know whether his colleagues will have jobs. He doesn’t know what shows will or won’t make the cut. It’s all up in the air.

But if there’s one thing we all know about mergers, it’s that there are almost always layoffs. The only question is, how extensive?

A person like Rapoport would seem to be a huge asset for ESPN on paper. His social following is massive (he has over five million followers on X alone), and he’s one of the most well-connected insiders covering the NFL. But so is ESPN’s Adam Schefter. The two have been rivals for years, competing to publish their scoops milliseconds before the other. Does having both Rapoport and Schefter on the payroll make sense? Rapoport thinks so.

“If [Schefter and I] were to work together, I think that would be awesome. I have no idea if it will happen. But it would be like The Avengers,” he told Marchand.

There’s certainly precedent for NFL insiders to coexist under the same network umbrella. Schefter worked alongside Chris Mortensen at ESPN when he joined the Worldwide Leader in 2009.

Rapoport, for his part, currently hosts The Insiders on NFL Network alongside two other insiders, Mike Garafolo and Tom Pelissero. They all made it work under one umbrella. But will all three of them have a place at ESPN?

At a certain point, ESPN will start circling the redundancies. The network already employs more NFL talent than anyone. Why can’t they start appearing on NFL Network while we trim the fat? Unfortunately, it’s a question that any competent executive will have to ask.

The insiders are far from the only people facing uncertain futures. NFL GameDay Morning, the Sunday morning NFL Network pregame program, had already said a quasi-goodbye at the Super Bowl, not knowing what the future held. Will ESPN feel the need to restructure that program? One would assume they’ll keep it around, despite already producing a pregame show of their own. After all, if the SEC Network and ACC Network actively counter-program College GameDay on Saturdays, the NFL Network can surely have its own show against Sunday NFL Countdown.

The same can be said for the NFL Network’s draft coverage, which has developed a sizable following over the years. There will always be an audience that wants a different flavor of draft analysis that NFL Network provides.

One can assume Good Morning Football is relatively safe, too, though who knows in what form and what will happen to its syndication structure.

But how about the shows that few are familiar with? Will NFL Network still produce a live studio show before Thursday Night Football? Will there be a highlight show during Sunday afternoon games? These types of programs seem most at risk.

Then there will be the jostling for game assignments. NFL Network will still air seven games next season, but who will call them? Will it be Rich Eisen and Kurt Warner, who have handled most of the NFL Network games in recent years? Or will ESPN put its own broadcast team of Chris Fowler, Dan Orlovsky, and Louis Riddick in there?

Nobody, not even the NFL Network talent that will transition to ESPN employees in a matter of weeks, knows the answers.

Our in-house ratings wiz Manny Soloway took a stab at estimating how many people could tune in for a matchup between the United States and Canada in a potential gold-medal hockey game on Sunday morning. The neighboring countries have faced off twice for gold: once in 2002 and again in 2010. Manny digs into how those games fared, as well as last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, to figure out what kind of number this game could pull for NBC.

The 2026 Winter Olympics have already been a strong ratings draw for NBC, but a United States-Canada men’s hockey gold-medal game could be the cherry on top.

Previous big United States-Canada hockey games have already proven themselves to be massive audience draws. The two countries faced off in gold medal games at both the 2002 and 2010 Winter Olympics. During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, 17.1 million people watched. In 2010, 27.6 million people watched during the Vancouver Games. Outside the Olympics, just last year, 9.3 million people watched the United States and Canada play each other in the final of the 4 Nations Face-Off.

So how high could viewership for the same matchup be in this year’s Olympics?

The 2010 game is the third most-watched hockey game in U.S. history, so beating that number seems unlikely. On the other hand, while last year’s 4 Nations audience was large, the game aired on cable via ESPN. The Olympics on NBC is far more likely to pick up casual viewers than a weeknight cable game.

A major factor holding viewership back is that all three previous games were played in the Western Hemisphere. That meant mid-afternoon starts for the 2002 and 2010 Olympics, and a primetime start for the 2025 4 Nations tournament. This year, the gold-medal game will be at 8 a.m. ET.

But aside from the time, NBC has a lot going for it, ratings-wise. For one, Nielsen’s new Big Data methodology, introduced in September 2025, has generally led to increased sports viewership. Big Data certainly can’t be hurting because NBC says it is averaging 23.8 million viewers for its “primetime” coverage of the Winter Olympics, up from Beijing in 2022.

For better or worse, the gold-medal game could also feel the effects of the popular Heated Rivalry television series. Unlike viewership for other sporting events, the Olympics rely on Americans who don’t regularly watch sports. Those are exactly the types of new hockey fans who might be drawn in by Heated Rivalry.

The 2002 figure of 17.1 million viewers, which falls between the 2010 Olympics and the 4 Nations in terms of audience, may be a good baseline for 2026. Last Saturday, NBC’s daytime Olympic coverage, without a gold-medal hockey game, was already averaging 7 million viewers, according to the TV Media Blog Substack.

While more than doubling viewership may seem like a hard task, that day-long number is an average from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET and does not include viewers on Peacock. The final hockey viewership number will only include the three or so hours the game is actually played, and will also include Peacock viewership.

They have already gotten close to beating that mark with hockey. NBC says that Team USA’s win over Sweden on Wednesday averaged 6.9 million viewers on NBC and Peacock.

Of course, a 2025 Canada-United States final is not a sure thing. Canada has to get through Finland, and the United States needs to beat Slovakia in the semifinals.

If those results come through, NBC will surely be happy.