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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺 Hulu Knocks for the Tar Heels. The previously reported Hulu docuseries on Bill Belichick’s first season at North Carolina is officially on. The program confirmed the news (first reported last month by Front Office Sports) on social media with a video of the legendary coach telling his players about it. After a deal to feature the Tar Heels on Hard Knocks reportedly fell apart due to a disagreement with HBO and NFL Films over creative control, Belichick will be in the spotlight this season. Just like he… apparently… now wants it. The series will seemingly air on Hulu and Disney+.

🏈 New CFB season, new look for ESPN. Dave Pasch and Dusty Dvoracek kicked off the 2025 college football season with a Big 12 clash in Dublin this weekend, and fans got their first look at the Worldwide Leader’s new CFB graphics package. As one of our wonderful readers noted on Bluesky, it will create a more cohesive branding between SEC broadcasts and other CFB games on ESPN.

🏀 Kobe to the big screen? Warner Bros. has reportedly acquired the rights to develop a spec script based on the arrival of the late, great Kobe Bryant to the Los Angeles Lakers. Tentatively titled With the 8th Pick, the film would be coproduced with Tom Brady’s Religion of Sport. It would be the latest narrative sports film from a major studio amid a resurgence for the genre. Just this year, we have gotten Happy Gilmore 2 and F1 plus the forthcoming Him, The Smashing Machine and Marty Supreme.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Everyone is covering college football now

If last week was being honest with us, mainstream sports media will be covering this college football season more completely than ever before.

Four companies announced moves that will bolster their coverage ahead of the second season in the expanded College Football Playoff era. At The Ringer, the versatile Van Lathan will be the face of Ringer Tailgate, the network’s first-ever college football podcast. New Barstool hire and former LSU lineman Bobby “T-Bob” Hebert announced he will be a “very big” part of the company’s coming TV show on FS1. Over at TNT, former NBA talent Adam Lefkoe and Allie LaForce are now working on the Big 12 as the network wrings everything it can out of its CFB rights. Last and perhaps most notably, ESPN has hired independent CFB commentator Josh Pate as a contributor. It is the latest in a slew of new partnerships for Pate, who also will work with On3 and Bussin’ With the Boys this season.

Clearly, college football is soaking up more coverage than it used to. Media companies can’t play in the big leagues in 2025 without covering the sport.

One main shift is the consolidation of power. For years, big-time hosts and producers would claim, people had forgotten about Saturdays by the time the Monday radio and TV shows came on. A few college football stories would break through. There would be segments on the Heisman race or the Alabama dynasty. If a sensation like Auburn Cam Newton came around, the media would cover him. Now, as we inch closer toward a Power 2 conference model and a few programs hold most of the sway in the sport, it is an easier sport to cover. Someone like Hebert or Lathan, with LSU expertise, has a corner on a key national narrative. It’s easier to ask a Stephen A. Smith or Dave Portnoy to keep track of a small handful of SEC and Big Ten schools than to read up on every game from across the country.

The professionalization of college football also made it easier to cover. Not because of the supposed ethics of covering athletes, but because of the cottage industry around transactions. On3’s expansive documentation of the NIL era or Todd McShay’s draft coverage at The Ringer help fans understand college football the way that it exists now: as a semiprofessional breeding ground for the biggest sports entity on Earth, the NFL. Where recruiting used to prop up websites and blogs, now there are NIL dollars, transfers, draft workouts and betting lines to track.

College football is also very likely just more nationally popular than it used to be. By milking the early non-conference schedule, creating more exclusive national windows like Big Noon Saturday, and making national spectacles out of teams like Colorado or North Carolina, the media has turned college football into more of a national sport. It doesn’t hurt that ESPN now has full SEC and CFP rights and can pump up the biggest games on its platforms. National championship game viewership fluctuates based on top players and teams, but the entire CFP slate undeniably brings more fans in for the biggest stages on the sport’s calendar.

As traditional networks cling to whatever sports rights they can buy and upstarts follow the eyeballs, college football is no longer a sleeping giant. If ESPN, Barstool and The Ringer are doing more in the CFB space, it is because fans and sponsors are pushing them that way. The only way a podcaster like Pate ends up on Get Up and Bill Simmons finally moves past his own disinterest in CFB to launch a Ringer show is that the feedback is so overwhelming that they have no other choice.

Heading into another Week 1, college football is a go-to sport for fans and impossible to ignore for any content company.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Check out Bill Belichick’s full announcement to his UNC players about the confirmed Hulu docuseries, and notice the strain to hit a quota for saying the word “Work” while also remembering that Belichick never wanted Hard Knocks in New England…

The ESPN broadcast crew couldn’t believe that a 12-year-old in the Little League World Series actually hoped to one day become an actuary.

WFAN’s Boomer Esiason could hardly hold in his contempt while reading aloud his invitation from the cheapskate Cincinnati Bengals to join their latest Ring of Honor ceremony this fall.

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• Pour one out for Love/Hate, the beloved staple of fantasy football commentary written by Matthew Berry for most of the 21st century. Berry announced last week that he is done writing the column, instead dedicating his time to his company Fantasy Life and his television duties at NBC.

• A new broadcast deal between MLB and ESPN is close, and it looks great for baseball. Per the WSJ, the new pact will bring in $550 annually for MLB — same as the deal both sides opted out of earlier this year. However, this package is effectively the inverse of the previous one. ESPN will license the MLB.tv service for local games and MLB Network through its new app, while continuing to broadcast a 30ish-game package of games nationally.

• Awful Announcing can exclusively report that ESPN is removing the paywall from its written content. As the company unwinds its ESPN+ offering, premium web content will no longer be cordoned off for paying subscribers. Instead, the fantasy breakdowns and insider analysis that used to be paywalled (think Tristan Cockroft, Kiley McDaniel or Kevin Pelton) will now be free for all once again.

• A little insight into the economics of NFL broadcasting came this week as CBS Sports analyst turned Arizona candidate for U.S. Congress Jay Feely revealed his broadcasting salary in political filings. Per Sportico’s reporting, Feely made $220,000 last year. Not bad for a special teams specialist in the middle of the network’s pecking order!

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

• “You will never see him. He’s hiding, which is where he should stay. I don’t ever talk about him because I don’t think about him, because I don’t care. You’re never going to see him. I don’t think he goes to the grocery store. You’re not going to see him. You can wait forever, you’re not going to see him.” - Joy Taylor finally responded to Jason Whitlock’s ghastly comments about her, at the behest of Cam Newton

• “We’re trying to figure out — our best stuff is 40 minutes after the game, when we can just have some fun. But are they going to say, ‘Hey, you guys got five minutes or 15 minutes, then we gotta go to SportsCenter.’ So, we don’t know, but, hey, the deal’s been made. When October 22 gets here, we’re going to be ready to go. But we have no parameters of what the show’s going to be, so that’s a little disconcerting to be flat-out honest with you.” - Charles Barkley on Inside the NBA’s uncertain transition to ESPN

• “…This is a different place for me to be in than probably some of the other times where I’ve done this, where I know exactly where I’m at.” - Ryen Russillo isn’t sure of his future at The Ringer as his contract nears its end

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Two former SportsCenter anchors step into the future

In the next five years, there will be a major new sports media star who makes a successful business creating a livestreaming show on Twitch.

Will it be the Stan & Neil Show? Former SportsCenter anchors Stan Verrett and Neil Everett are betting they can do it. On Sunday evening, the pair confirmed they will host a Twitch stream each Tuesday and Friday. They intend to interview guests, talk sports and “just have fun,” as Verrett wrote on X.

I am skeptical the Stan & Neil Show will be the one to break through. For one, their audience is not an online audience. I am not sure who is a big fan of the average SportsCenter anchor these days, but I don’t believe that audience overlaps much with Twitch users. And they do not have big followings that they will port over to Twitch. Most Twitch viewers click directly into their favorite creators’ streams, so Verrett and Everrett cannot rely on the algorithm to send them viewers either (though they will seemingly upload the stream to YouTube).

Separately, the biggest thing that makes Twitch what it is is the chat. In order to turn viewers into an audience, they need to feel part of a community. This will keep them coming back, get them to engage directly and even spend their money on a subscription. While Verrett says that he and Everett used the summer for a boot camp on digital content, it is a difficult skill to master.

Interacting with the chat means reading their comments without getting too distracted, clicking the links they send, and making them feel like they are part of the show. Celebrities like Kyrie Irving or the singer Lizzo have been slow to make a business out of Twitch partially for this reason. Two TV anchors in their 60s will have an even tougher time with it.

However, I could see Verrett and Everrett at least making enough noise to convince someone else to try it. Twitch is an untapped platform for sports creators, with its lenient fair-use policy on footage and instantaneous feedback. Between what Shannon Sharpe and Chad Johnson built with Nightcap or Bleacher Report’s growing in-app livestreams, there are plenty of examples. All it will take is someone with a knack for community-building to take this format to the moon on Twitch.

Add in the growing interest in betting and fantasy sports, and there are numerous strong Twitch stream concepts. From late-night highlights to pregame previews, Twitch could easily host legions of fans hungry for live sports content, either covering one league or the whole space.

Here’s hoping Verrett and Everrett either succeed on their own or inspire imitators. It’s time for sports on Twitch.