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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺 Feelin’ Breesy. Former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees will be joining Stephen A. Smith and Co. every Tuesday on First Take for the remainder of NFL season. His contract is non-exclusive, meaning he’s free to work for other networks as he wishes. Brees will not appear on other ESPN programming.

⚾ TNT gets Faustian. 36-year-old play-by-play announcer Alex Faust is filling some big shoes at TNT Sports, taking over for longtime broadcaster Bob Costas in the network’s MLB booth this postseason. Costas stepped away from baseball play-by-play last season. Faust currently calls Friday Night Baseball for Apple TV+ and works on TNT’s NHL coverage.

🏀 Harlan steps back. Veteran broadcaster Kevin Harlan will scale back his workload this upcoming NBA season as he begins his first year at Amazon. Harlan will work just one game each in October, November, and December, before picking up a fuller schedule in January.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

Dave Portnoy and Tom Brady engage in Fox-on-Fox crime

Fox is quickly learning that getting into the Barstool business isn’t going to be smooth sailing. Of course, given the company’s history, it’s not as if Fox didn’t know what they were getting into.

But Fox probably didn’t envision Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy getting into a public spat with its highest-paid and most-recognizable talent, Tom Brady, just weeks into the partnership. Alas, that is what happened on Monday after Portnoy took to the ratings-challenged Wake Up Barstool and suggested Brady accepted $75 million from Saudi Arabia to participate in a flag football tournament next March.

Brady did accept a large sum of money, but he disputes the figure. “Are we just picking numbers out of a hat and reporting them?” the future Hall of Fame quarterback wrote on social media.

It didn’t take long for Portnoy to respond. Five minutes after Brady’s post, the Barstool star defended himself. “That’s the number I was told. Let the record show we did ask you to come on Wake Up Barstool to discuss. The door is always open,” Portnoy wrote, adding in another post, “By the way wouldn’t that be a compliment to Tom Brady? Nobody would turn down 75 million. What do we think the real number is then? I feel like I trusted the people who told me but either way I’d rather the number in public be higher rather than lower.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. For one, this is two current Fox-associated stars in a public back-and-forth over how much one of them is getting paid by a foreign government to participate in a flag football event. Moreover, this comes just days after Barstool’s Dave “Big Cat” Katz revealed that he and Portnoy turned down $10 million to attend a boxing match in Saudi Arabia, but would have accepted $15 million.

It’s worth noting that the $75 million figure Portnoy was told isn’t wildly out of line with what Saudi Arabia is paying other athletes. Numerous LIV Golf stars have received contracts for several hundred million dollars, and soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo recently signed a two-year, $700 million deal to stay with Saudi side Al Nassr. $75 million for the most famous football player in the world is entirely within the realm of possibility.

However, even so, Portnoy throwing out an unverified number on Fox Sports’ airwaves about the network’s highest-paid employee (Brady is reportedly earning $37.5 million per year to call NFL games) is sure to irk the seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback. No doubt, Brady is likely asking his Fox bosses why Portnoy is spewing unverified information about his personal business dealings on the same network that employs him.

One could easily draw parallels between this situation and several instances on Pat McAfee’s ESPN show, in which the host or his guests disparaged Disney employees on air. It’s the price of doing business when networks cede editorial control to talent that has little or no loyalty to the company. You can bet no one on Breakfast Ball or The Facility was going to stir up drama about Brady and Saudi Arabia. But with Portnoy and Barstool in the fold, nothing is off-limits.

Lastly, there’s Portnoy’s suggestion that Wake Up Barstool invited Brady on to talk about the flag football deal. That may well be true, but even if Brady declined the invite, that doesn’t make it acceptable to tout unverified claims about his compensation from Saudi Arabia.

The whole incident is a perfect example of just how messy today’s media landscape can be. Fox gives Portnoy a platform to be himself, just as he’d be on any number of Barstool podcasts, but the network’s biggest talent is caught in the crossfire. All the while, another Fox talent, Olsen, is peppered with an uncomfortable question about how much he would require from Saudi Arabia to participate in a flag football event. Meanwhile, Fox itself is currently in business with Saudi Arabia via a media rights agreement with LIV Golf.

Portnoy’s premise throughout all of this would seem to indicate he believes there is something morally questionable about doing business with Saudi Arabia. After all, he declined a $10 million payday to work with them years ago. So, not only is Portnoy potentially spreading misinformation about Fox’s biggest star, but he’s also undermining the network’s own business dealings with Saudi Arabia in the process by insinuating that the ethics of doing business with the country are murky.

Obviously, any network getting into business with Portnoy and Barstool knows it’ll need to have some level of tolerance for this type of thing to happen. You just prefer these incidents not involve your most recognizable talents.

It’s unclear whether Fox will decide to address the matter internally to prevent similar situations from arising in the future, though it’d seem wise to have at least a conversation with Portnoy about topics he should and shouldn’t broach regarding Fox employees.

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

“As we sit here today, I could not imagine our daytime schedule without his show.” — ESPN content head Burke Magnus on how the network views the future of The Pat McAfee Show.

“I thought it was pretty poignant there when he [was] asked about the rhetoric of Rory [McIlroy] that he didn’t mention the goal this week of a Ryder Cup. Nope, he didn’t do that. He didn’t talk about playing on a team and how much that meant. Nope, he didn’t do that. What he did do was talk about his YouTube channel which, if we want to talk about the numbers that are generated from that, it’s pretty dubious. I have no doubt that bots are generating a lot of those views.” — Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee expressing skepticism over the legitimacy of Bryson DeChambeau’s success on YouTube.

“He had become a divisive person, it seems to me, intentionally. And I hope there was pressure to get him out.” — Michael Wilbon on Auburn men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl’s decision to retire just over one month before the season starts.

📱 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Peyton Manning proposed some rule changes for the NFL on last night’s ManningCast.

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Networks continue to reap the rewards of an expanded CFP

In a move aimed at improving the conference’s chances of placing teams in the College Football Playoff, the ACC has officially mandated that its teams play a minimum of 10 games against Power 4 opponents each season, the conference announced on Monday.

The move will also include shifting all but one ACC team to a nine-game conference schedule by 2027, with many teams beginning a nine-game slate next season. A mathematical quirk prevents the 17-team league from playing nine conference games a piece, meaning one school each season will play an eight-game conference slate.

It’s one of the rare moves in college football that wasn’t made entirely because of television. The ACC believes playing more Power 4 schools will help the league’s chances when it comes to CFP selection, especially after the playoff committee updated its criteria to place an emphasis on strength of schedule.

Of course, there are certainly television byproducts from the move. Networks will be blessed with more P4 vs. P4 contests at no additional cost. On a game-by-game basis, the viewership increase might be marginal. But let’s conservatively estimate that each ACC team will add one additional Power 4 opponent every year compared to their current schedules. That’s 17 additional games between power conference teams replacing some buy game against FCS schools.

Funnily enough, it won’t just be ESPN who benefits. If an ACC team schedules a road game at a Big Ten opponent, Fox, CBS, and NBC can benefit too.

The real winners are college football fans. Instead of struggling through the first few weeks of the season when half of games end in 60-point blowouts, there will be more good games to go around.

Combine this with the SEC moving to a nine-game conference schedule, and it’s easy to see where this is going. Cupcake games are going away, and we’re moving towards ratings optimization. Good news for TV networks. Good news for fans. Bad news for smaller schools, who will now have fewer and fewer opportunities to take down Goliath.