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⚾ Farewell, Mike. Longtime San Francisco Giants color commentator Mike Krukow will retire following the 2026 season, he told NBC Sports Bay Area on Thursday. Krukow’s health has limited his ability to travel. He has called road games remotely in recent years and uses a wheelchair and golf cart to get around Oracle Park in San Francisco.

🏈 USA x Pac-12. USA Sports announced its three broadcast teams for its inaugural year of Pac-12 football this season. Nate Gatter, Ryan Leaf and Lauren Green will be the lead broadcast team for Pac-12 coverage on USA Sports. Ted Robinson, Darius Walker, and Dalen Cuff will be the No. 2 team. In weeks when USA Network has a third game, Guy Haberman, Alex Brink, and Kate Harrison will be on the call.

💰 Case settled. The dispute between the Mountain West and Pac-12 Conference has officially been resolved. The two conferences announced a settlement this week over enforcement of poaching fees related to the Pac-12’s raid of Mountain West teams. The Mountain West is expected to receive around $70 million from the settlement.

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

The NFL returned to our television screens last night as the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers competed in a rip-roaring Hall of Fame Game sure to be watched by an all-too-obscene number of people (more on that later).

But the biggest NFL news of the day by a country mile came from Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch, who told investors on Thursday morning that his company would not be changing the terms of its current NFL broadcast deal until the league’s contractual opt-out option hits following the 2029-30 season. In other words, Murdoch just told NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to get lost in its effort to shakedown its broadcast partners for more dough several years earlier than its current contracts allow for.

It’s a surprising move considering the existential importance NFL programming has to Fox, but perhaps not all that shocking given the network’s already bold maneuvering against the league’s efforts. As you’ll likely recall, it was just more than two months ago that a Wall Street Journal report revealed that Fox Corporation patriarch Rupert Murdoch met with President Donald Trump earlier this year to discuss the NFL’s efforts, which conceivably led to the federal government’s sudden and intense interest in the issue.

The Department of Justice opened an investigation into the league, examining its mission-critical antitrust exemption that allows the bundling of media rights inventory among the 32 teams to package and sell to networks. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission began to frequently opine on whether the NFL had run afoul of that exemption by selling games to streamers. Congressional hearings were held on the fragmentation of live sports broadcasting. Legislation was introduced addressing the matter.

None of this, it’s important to note, posed a direct threat to the NFL’s business model. A revocation of its antitrust exemption would only serve to accelerate fragmentation and make watching NFL games more onerous for fans. That was never going to happen. But the bluster in Washington served its purpose. It provided a series of jabs and hooks that the NFL was forced to swat away rather than getting down to brass tacks with its broadcast partners. It delayed the proceedings enough to where the NFL couldn’t get new deals done prior to kickoff in September, as was the league’s goal. Instead, the best case scenario became next offseason, when the NFL would only stand to secure three seasons at higher rates, muddying the calculus for whether the league should even look for early deals at all, or simply wait until 2029-30 when it can completely rejigger how it divvies up its inventory.

From that perspective, the move by Fox was savvy. Instead of adding another billion dollars or more to its NFL rights bill the next several seasons, it’ll continue paying a much more affordable price tag of $2.25 billion per year. Whether the network’s gambit will come back to bite them when the NFL, now inevitably, opts out of its deal following the 2029-30 season, remains to be seen.

The NFL has a long memory, but also doesn’t let past vendettas get in the way of a good business decision. Recall the years of borderline criminal Monday Night Football schedules the NFL gave ESPN which just so happened to coincide with the network’s aggressive reporting on issues like concussions, Bountygate, and Colin Kaepernick. Well, fast-forward a decade and the NFL now owns a part of ESPN and MNF gets its fair share of high-caliber matchups.

Similarly, the NFL won’t forget Fox’s pressure campaign in just a few short years between now and the negotiations in 2030. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Fox will be on the outside looking in.

Fox is making the bet that in three years, when talks start back up again, the NFL will still see the value in broadcast television as a primary distribution method for its games. That’s not so far-fetched. Live sports on broadcast television continue to draw larger audiences compared to those distributed via cable or streaming. The NFL is built on reach and accessibility, and while streaming is certainly catching up to broadcast in those areas, it has not yet proven it can match the audiences broadcast television can draw.

The Sunday afternoon package that Fox possesses is particularly well-suited for broadcast television. Fox’s television business is centered on local affiliate stations, both the ones it owns and the ones it licenses the Fox brand and content to. The NFL’s Sunday afternoon package is regional by nature. Buccaneers games are going out to people living on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Titans games to Tennessee. Seahawks games to Washington. Broadcast networks are uniquely qualified to capitalize on this type of regionalized model compared to, say, a streamer. The Fox affiliate in Tampa can leverage Buccaneers games to bolster other parts of its business, like selling an advertising package that bundles NFL ads with ads for its local evening news telecast.

Given the relatively tepid interest streamers have in buying expensive NFL programming at scale (at least so far), Fox, perhaps rightly, believes that it can put together a more compelling offer than its competitors come 2030. And if Fox’s offer is truly superior, the NFL will have no issues continuing its partnership with the network, despite the aggressive lobbying that knocked the NFL off kilter this summer.

Mike Tomlin makes his NBC debut on Football Night in America before last night’s Hall of Fame Game.

Football is officially back (kind of) which makes it a perfect time to look at seven burning media questions for the upcoming season. Our guy Matt Yoder took a look at what us sports media dorks will be paying attention to once the season really kicks off next month.

CBS shocked everyone when they benched Tony Romo after his OWI arrest in Wisconsin and named J.J. Watt as his replacement in the top booth alongside Jim Nantz. Romo is currently on an indefinite leave. But given his hefty contract and the heavy criticism he has endured in recent years, CBS may be exploring its options to make it permanent.

Romo is still owed tens of millions of dollars on his contract that runs until 2030. And if Watt hits it off with Nantz and impresses the way he did when he was alongside Ian Eagle in his rookie season as an announcer, it will only motivate CBS even further to find a way out of his contract that has become an albatross.

Any negotiation or battle over morality clauses and whether or not CBS can actually get out from under the contract could get extremely messy. But given CBS took this extraordinary step, it looks like Romo will be their lead analyst again. A compromise solution could find Tony Romo brought into the studio where CBS needs more personality, and he could find a softer landing than the booth where his lack of prep has been exposed in recent years. But if the two sides can’t work together to find a path forward, Romo’s CBS tenure could come to a shocking end.

Former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has been one of the most sought-after television analysts in the league for years. With him finally deciding to step away from coaching, Tomlin signed with NBC as its lead studio analyst. It’s a perfect marriage in that Tomlin will provide the network with a much-needed central voice to lead their coverage. And it gives Tomlin the opportunity to shine in a place where he won’t be drowned out by several other analysts on set at the same time.

But will Tomlin actually deliver on the promise that everyone in the industry thinks he has as an analyst? Will he be willing to be strong and opinionated, or will he be reserved in the hopes of using this as a gap year before he gets back into coaching and not ruffle any feathers? And for that matter, will he actually be good on television? Some NFL personalities who we thought would translate immediately well haven’t clicked, while others from far off the radar have become television mainstays. Given the spotlight he is in and the role he has, NBC better hope he’s ready to go from day one.

Nobody has had a weirder offseason than NFL on Fox lead analyst Tom Brady, who seems to be suffering from several mid-life crises at once. It seems like every day Brady has a new business venture he’s investing in (this week’s example is card collecting) or he’s continuing his bizarre WWE-inspired feud with Logan Paul. What makes it so strange is that Brady’s feud with Paul looks like a WWE angle… that hasn’t been on WWE television at all. If you don’t have inside knowledge, you may be wondering why the GOAT has been acting like such a jerk.

And all this is happening while Brady is still trying to juggle being a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders and Fox’s $375 million lead analyst. The good news is that Brady was vastly improved in his second year in the booth. He was much more comfortable, authoritative, and entertaining. Football fans just have to hope that continues and his performance isn’t weighed down by… everything else going on.

Check out questions 4-7 here.

I know this has been a football-heavy edition of The A Block, but forgive me, I’ve been planning a mini-rant on this topic all week.

Every year when the Hall of Fame Game comes around, I’m amazed at just how many people tune in. Take a look at the last nine years of HoF Game viewership (per Sports Business Journal).

Let’s put these numbers in a bit of context. Since 2017, the Hall of Fame Game has averaged 6.45 million viewers. Arguably the most meaningless preseason game of the year. 6.45 million viewers.

That’s a number every other professional sports league in the United States would kill for during their regular seasons. Last season, the NBA’s most-watched regular-season game was Lakers-Warriors on Christmas Day, which averaged 7.76 million viewers, barely more than the average HoF Game. For MLB, the most-watched regular-season game of 2025 was a Red Sox-Yankees game on Fox that averaged 3.05 million viewers, about half of a HoF Game audience.

I don’t think there’s anything that captures America’s love of football more than these figures here. The six-month gap between Super Bowl and Hall of Fame Game is always more than enough to make any type of NFL football a must-watch for millions of people.

There are any number of stats you can point to to illustrate football’s dominance over every other sport, but this particular one is my favorite.