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.

🎙️ Booth review. The NBA regular season is complete, and the playoffs are underway, which means it's time to grade your local announcing team, a particularly loaded ballot this year given all the RSN upheaval and crossover between local booths and the new national rights landscape.

🏈 Simms City. Chris Simms revealed on PFT Live Monday that NBC informed him last week he won't be returning to Football Night in America, a role he'd held on the primary panel alongside Maria Taylor, Jason Garrett, and Devin McCourty after joining the network in 2016.

📏 Short-armed. Michael Irvin appeared on SportsGrid's Outspoken with Dan Sileo to call ESPN's decision to display Rueben Bain Jr.'s arm length in the chyron as he walked to shake Roger Goodell's hand at the NFL Draft "an assault on a young man in Miami," with Irvin — himself a Miami alum — saying the moment was "classless and uncalled for."

🏒 Eve of destruction. The NHL announced last week that the 2027 Winter Classic will feature the Utah Mammoth hosting the Colorado Avalanche on Dec. 31 at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City. It’s the second time in three years the league has scheduled the game on New Year's Eve, a date that produced 920,000 viewers in 2024, the smallest audience in the event's history.

🏀 Personal foul. Paige Bueckers opened Dallas Wings media day Monday with a prepared statement saying her relationship with No. 1 draft pick and former UConn teammate Azzi Fudd is not up for public discussion, after the Wings' PR team shut down a question about the two at Fudd's introductory press conference earlier this month. "Quite frankly, I believe me and Azzi's personal relationship is nobody's business but our own," Bueckers said, adding that she only planned to address it once.

🌊 Rivers flows to broadcasting. Following Mike Tomlin's signing at NBC, Philip Rivers is emerging as NFL media's top TV target, according to Front Office Sports, with CBS, Fox, and NBC all holding open chairs. Rivers came out of retirement at 44 to start three games for the Colts in December and has said he hasn't ruled out a broadcasting career, but that nothing has felt right yet.

📻 Man of his word? Pittsburgh radio host Andrew Fillipponi went on air at 2 p.m. Monday and quit his afternoon co-host job at 93.7 The Fan after the Steelers drafted Penn State quarterback Drew Allar on Day 2 of the NFL Draft, making good on a social media promise he'd made in February. The station hired him back less than an hour later.

Read more of today’s top stories at Awful Announcing.

The clearest sign that NBC understood it had a problem with Football Night in America came during a weather delay last September.

The Eagles-Cowboys season opener — 28.3 million viewers, the second-most watched Kickoff game in NFL history — ground to a halt for an hour in the second half. Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth handled it from the booth the way they handle everything, which is to say without incident and without making you feel the time pass. Then the studio show filled the silence. And if you were watching closely, you noticed, maybe for the first time with any real clarity, that the studio show was operating in a completely different universe from the broadcast it was supposed to complement. Maria Taylor and the main panel were in a building in Stamford, Connecticut. Tony Dungy, Rodney Harrison, and Jac Collinsworth were sitting on location at Lincoln Financial Field. Two separate crews, two separate sets, one show that had spent years trying to convince you it was a coherent thing rather than two shows that happened to share a name and an hour of television.

NBC appears to have reached the same conclusion as Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner did.

The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported in February that Dungy was "likely out" as NBC prepared to overhaul the show for the 2026 season. A few weeks later, Awful Announcing reported that Rodney Harrison was also unlikely to return, and that Jac Collinsworth's future on the show was uncertain. Dungy has since confirmed his departure, while Harrison and Collinsworth’s futures haven’t been officially decided.

The main panel saw its own attrition. Awful Announcing reported earlier this month that Matthew Berry, who joined NBC in August 2022 after 15 years at ESPN, is unlikely to return, with his contract still technically active and discussions ongoing, but no new deal in place. And Chris Simms, who joined the network in 2016 and spent the next decade assembling one of the more expansive portfolios in the building — PFT Live, Chris Simms Unbuttoned, eventually landing a spot on the primary FNIA panel alongside Taylor, Jason Garrett, and Devin McCourty — learned last week that he wouldn't be back either.

What NBC is replacing all of that with is Mike Tomlin, traveling on location every single week.

NBC officially introduced Tomlin over the weekend during Sunday Night Basketball, with Taylor announcing that Football Night in America will travel to Sunday Night Football each week of the 2026 NFL season, rather than splitting its operations between Stamford and the game site. Tomlin will join Taylor, Garrett, and McCourty on that traveling show, with Mike Florio returning as well. In the past, NBC brought the full panel on the road for marquee occasions — the season opener, the occasional high-profile Sunday night game — but kept its primary setup in Connecticut throughout the regular season. That hybrid arrangement, which required maintaining two separate productions simultaneously, is now gone.

The on-location piece is what actually changes the show. The problem with Football Night in America wasn't just the structure, but that the structure exposed how little the personnel had to offer once you stripped away the format's ability to hide it. The Stamford panel could speak knowledgeably about the game you were about to watch without conveying anything about what it felt like to be there. The on-location crew — Dungy, who spent his final appearance on the show refusing to say whether he'd voted for Bill Belichick for the Hall of Fame, Harrison, and Collinsworth — felt the atmosphere at the stadium, but always operated at a remove from the show's center of gravity, filing dispatches back to headquarters from whatever city NBC dropped them in that week.

Tomlin is the bet that this new version earns the format it's inheriting. He coached in Pittsburgh for 19 seasons, the last of which ended in January 2026. He doesn't need to explain what coaches are probably thinking. He was one, recently enough that the coaches walking past his camera on Sunday nights will have worked for him, played under him, or competed against him.

The question NBC hasn't fully answered is what surrounds him. McCourty and Garrett are both expected to return, and Taylor anchors it, which gives you a functional crew. But functional is different from good, and going on the road with a stripped-down panel every week for 18 weeks is a logistical and creative bet that doesn't necessarily get easier just because you've made the right call in principle. College GameDay can absorb a flat week because the crowd is doing half the work. A Sunday night pregame show in a stadium parking lot in November doesn't have the same margin for error.

The hybrid structure wasn't working, and the league's most-watched package deserved a pregame show that could justify the adjective. Tomlin is a genuine hire, not a celebrity placeholder, and committing to on-location production every week is a structural decision that forces the show to be better, because the alternative — being mediocre on the road, every week, in front of the stadium where the game is about to happen — is too costly to contemplate.

The show NBC is building looks, at least from the outside, like something that might actually be worth watching before the game. That's more than you could say about it a year ago, which is either a low bar or a promising starting point, depending on how charitable you're feeling about a network that spent years treating one of its best assets as an afterthought.

For years, sports fans have complained that studio shows talk down to them, prioritize casual viewers, and reward ignorance over expertise. With the NFL Draft wrapping up and WWE taking over ESPN, Awful Announcing's Demetri Ravanos decided to dig into why that is, and whether networks have made a conscious decision to leave educated fans behind.

Read Demetri's full piece at Awful Announcing.

"Taylor has forgotten since he's living in the broadcast booth of what it's like to be a player…. He can have whatever opinion he wants. I don't really care." — LA Galaxy head coach Greg Vanney responding to Taylor Twellman's on-air criticism that his team didn't look aggressive for a full 90 minutes.

"He is as good as there is, and I would watch him call anything." — Multiple broadcasters praising NBC's new Sunday Night Baseball voice, Jason Benetti, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at two years old and spent more than two decades working his way to one of the most prominent play-by-play jobs in the country.

"There was enthusiasm from the start about trying to tell the story." — ESPN senior writer Baxter Holmes on turning his nearly 10,000-word ESPN.com piece about the Oklahoma City Thunder's relationship with the city into The Oklahoma Standard, a 49-minute E60 documentary now available on the ESPN App.

"And I know that managing is a much more delicate operation than it used to be, but at some point, you gotta call people out." — SNY play-by-play voice Gary Cohen on the Mets' catastrophic weekend series against the Colorado Rockies, who went 43-119 last season, as Carlos Mendoza's job status hangs in the balance.

"That's the only thing that sucks about March Madness. Every commercial is me because of Capital One, they're like the number one sponsor." — Charles Barkley admitting to ESPN LA that the Capital One "Sorry Sam Jackson" commercial that aired on a loop throughout the NCAA tournament was just as insufferable for him as it was for everyone else watching.

Sam Neumann and Brendon Kleen discuss the head coach subplots of the 2026 NFL Draft, inclduing Mike Vrabel's week of cascading damage control, from the "laughable" denial to the Tuesday presser to missing Day 3 for counseling, and Sean McVay's viral post-Round 1 press conference after the Rams took Ty Simpson 13th overall, where his eight-word answers and refusal to commit to anything became a story of their own.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

Carlos Mendoza texted Howie Rose before the season and told him the Mets were going to win it all for him. It was a generous thing to say. It was also, in retrospect, a lot to promise.

Rose is in his final year in the booth after 39 seasons, battling bladder cancer that has made travel too difficult, calling every home game and Subway Series matchup and — if the Mets somehow find their way there — every postseason game, wherever it is. He said in March that a World Series parade down the Canyon of Heroes, with him as master of ceremonies, would make the dream complete. The Mets are currently 9-19 and were just swept at home by the Colorado Rockies.

There is a version of this story where it ends the way Mendoza promised. The honest version is that the window Rose was counting on is not open right now, and 134 games is not as much runway as it sounds when you are ten games under .500 in late April.

What won't change is that Rose will be there for every home game. The Mets have put him through worse. He has called uglier Aprils than this one. And somewhere in the back of every Mets fan's mind — Rose included, probably — is the knowledge that this franchise has a way of making the impossible feel routine in both directions.

Read more at Awful Announcing.