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.

🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📖 John Feinstein passes away. The legendary Washington Post sportswriter and author is dead at 69. Feinstein wrote 44 books ranging from reported sports stories to young adult novels. He wrote up until the very end, as his final column for the Post on Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo was posted the day before his passing. Throughout the weekend, sports figures from Michael Wilbon to Mike Krzyzewski paid tribute to the iconic Feinstein.

🏀 Big-time college basketball coaches were on one. Whether it was Bruce Pearl saying his Auburn guards weren’t “p***ies,” Rick Pitino foreshadowing his date with a bottle of Jameson’s after winning the Big East Tourney or Izzo talking about why he is never happy, the sports world’s annual embrace of NCAA hoops started with a bang as tourney season began.

📺 Get ready to hear more about NCAA tournament expansion. After NCAA president Charlie Baker got the ball rolling with a quote in November teasing a “modest” expansion, executives at both CBS and TNT pumped the brakes this week. TNT Sports CEO Luis Silberwasser doubled down this weekend in an interview with Puck’s John Ourand, emphasizing the need for the NCAA to be “thoughtful” and not expand just to pump revenue.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Saying goodbye

Early on Super Bowl Sunday, NBA fans were treated to vintage ESPN vibes when the network’s midday ABC broadcast doubled as a sendoff for the legendary coach and analyst Hubie Brown.

Alongside lead announcer Mike Breen, Brown was treated to a barrage of warm regards and kind messages from previous broadcast partners, executives and lead figures. Calling the game from Milwaukee where his NBA coaching career began, the 91-year-old Brown was gifted a full-circle moment most only dream of.

Saturday’s ACC Championship Game between Duke and Louisville most likely was not the final broadcast of Dick Vitale’s career. But Boog Sciambi and Cory Alexander were put in a unique position shepherding the 85-year-old through all he wanted to do with the precious airtime. Between his thoughts on NIL, his picks for the national championship game and a long farewell to viewers after another tumultuous season soured by complications from throat cancer, Vitale had a lot to say.

During football season, ESPN is walking a similar tightrope with another living legend and icon of the Worldwide Leader. Most Saturdays on College GameDay, Kirk Herbstreit and the production crew go all-out to keep Lee Corso comfortable and on his game. A few scrambled monologues and safety scares this season highlighted the precarious position the network is in with the patriarch of college football.

Elsewhere, Jimmy Johnson got to ride into the sunset at this year’s Super Bowl on Fox. The network put together a souped-up tribute video and gave Johnson a full segment late in the pregame show to announce his retirement. He passed on that opportunity before doing so on The Herd a few weeks later.

On CBS throughout March Madness, another man who’s already celebrated his 80th birthday will boom through our speakers and into our living rooms in Bill Raftery. The longtime voice of the men’s NCAA tournament shows no signs of stopping and has openly put off retirement.

It can go either way. Some stay on their game forever and leave when the time is right; others wait too long.

These men have given their lives to their networks and their sports. For Vitale, the final chapter was disrupted by an unthinkable disease.

But the complaints online grow louder when viewers see broadcasters in poor health or struggling to do their jobs. We never want to see anyone in rough shape.

There’s no easy way to say goodbye to a legend like Vitale, but this weekend served as a reminder of how deserving he is of a proper farewell — and how delicately ESPN must approach giving it to him.

📱SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 📱 

📺 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 👀

• Pat McAfee wants more life out of NHL broadcasts, calling out “lifeless” intermission interviews on his show Friday. The complaint led to an interesting conversation about how hockey culture revolves around the team and how that can get in the way of building mystique around individual superstars.

• Diana Taurasi’s first big post-retirement role will be a return to her ESPN alt-cast with Sue Bird for the NCAA women’s Final Four. The Bird & Taurasi Show will be back from Tampa, Florida, in April after making news last year for Taurasi’s comments about the WNBA rookie learning curve and how it could hit Caitlin Clark.

• Relevent is taking over global sales of UEFA Champions League rights from 2027 through 2032. The Stephen Ross-owned media firm will take broadcast rights of the European club soccer competition to market around the world under an agreement modeled after Relevent’s sales of UCL rights to Paramount in the United States. However, those U.S. rights to the UCL are locked in with Paramount+ and CBS through 2030.

WHAT TO WATCH TODAY

1. TGL Semifinals tee off from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, as Xander Schauffele’s New York Golf Club takes on Colin Morikawa’s Los Angeles Golf Club. Catch it at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN2.

2. Unrivaled Basketball hosts the championship game of its inaugural season a few miles south in Miami. It’s Arike Ogunbowale and Vinyl BC against Defensive Player of the Year and fan favorite Angel Reese’s Rose BC. Catch it at 7:30 p.m. ET on TNT and truTV.

3. It’s the MVP versus the hottest team in the Western Conference as the Golden State Warriors host the Denver Nuggets. Tune in at 7:00 p.m. ET on ESPN.

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥 

A Simmons domino effect?

With a new media rights deal setting in this fall and the stars drafted in the late 2000s finally headed toward retirement, this has been the season of NBA concern-trolling.

On daytime sports studio shows and top podcasts, more breath has been devoted to “fixing” the league than analyzing its teams and players. But until last week, few of the top voices were willing to directly confront NBA leadership.

That changed Thursday when Bill Simmons challenged commissioner Adam Silver to amend the “antiquated” schedule, shorten the season, and bring the league into the modern media and sports environment. If the league does not confront the realities of evolving sports fandom and the competition for attention, Simmons said, “I’m going to really start thinking that they need new leadership at the top.”

From the 2023 collective bargaining agreement to the new media deal to the past several All-Star games, criticism has been growing louder than usual and seemingly has fallen on deaf ears. Even if the NBA believes its on-court product is as great as ever and their economics are solid with growing media, sponsorship and gate revenues growing, the perception of a problem is as bad as a problem.

People believe the NBA is fading, which unfortunately can become self-fulfilling. When Silver was on his media tour earlier this year, he appeared to agree. The commissioner sounded like a man ready to act simply for the sake of acting, considering ideas as surprising as 10-minute quarters. Silver showed fans he was listening and willing to change.

But as Simmons notes, the bigger problems concern player availability and TV consumption — not how many 3s the best teams take. It takes real fortitude to disrupt a good thing, a thing that just signed contracts worth nearly $80 billion, to maintain the future standing of it. That’s the job Silver has now.

Before now, Silver appeared to have the cover of stubborn owners and fickle players. With the latest comments from Simmons, who is as connected to the NBA as anyone in national sports media, the arrow is pointed directly at Silver and his top lieutenants.

Simmons gave other critics a target, and set the parameters of the debate. Get ready for others to follow suit.

Thank you for reading The A Block! Sign up for free to make sure you never miss it.