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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

Phil Didion-USA TODAY NETWORK

🏈 Collinsworth keeps his grades. Teamworks officially acquired the data side of Pro Football Focus in a deal north of $100M, with Collinsworth retaining the consumer-facing arm and joining Teamworks in an advisory role. The deal has come alongside significant layoffs at the company.

🏒 Canucks not budging. The Vancouver Canucks released a statement regarding their revocation of a press credential to a reporter who wrote a story about a business owned by the team owner, saying they felt the since-deleted story was “unquestionably defamatory” and do not intend to reinstate the credential.

📺 Netflix wants more NFL. The streamer is eyeing a four-game package that would include the new Thanksgiving Eve game and an international slot, per the WSJ, while still finishing out its current Christmas Day deal.

🏐 Wrigley gets spiked. Fox is airing Nebraska-Missouri and Penn State-Kentucky in primetime on Sept. 6 as part of the inaugural Big Ten/SEC Volleyball Challenge Week, the first time the network is programming the sport without an NFL game nearby to prop it up.

Benetti gets his guy. Jason Benetti will be joined by Tigers analyst Andy Dirks and Cardinals alum Brad Thompson for NBC's April 6 Sunday Night Baseball broadcast, essentially making it a Tigers regional broadcast plus one Cardinal.

📊 50-50. ESPN VP Susie Piotrkowski revealed that the network's women's sports viewership is tracking at roughly an even gender split, with men 18-34 among the fastest-growing demographics.

🎙️ Crossover move. Former ESPN NBA reporter Kevin Pelton is leaving the press box for the front office, joining the Connecticut Sun — soon to be the Houston Comets — ahead of their franchise relocation.

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

🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

Golf media can’t keep covering Tiger Woods like this

GREG LOVETT-PALM BEACH POST

On Friday afternoon in Jupiter Island, a Land Rover — clocked traveling well above the posted 30 mph speed limit on a residential road — clipped a truck trailer and rolled onto its side.

The driver was Tiger Woods.

Woods was arrested Friday and charged with driving under the influence, causing property damage, and refusing to submit to a urinalysis test after police say he attempted to overtake a truck hauling power-washing equipment at high speed on a two-way residential road.

This is the fourth time since 2009 that Woods has been involved in a reckless driving incident serious enough to require a police response. Not the fourth time he's made a poor decision. The fourth time that he’s created a situation where people could have died. The golf media has been given four separate opportunities to reckon with the gap between Tiger Woods the transcendent athlete and Tiger Woods the 50-year-old man with a demonstrable and serious problem, and the response this weekend — across platforms, at every level of the coverage ecosystem — was, shall we say, illuminating?

Riggs — Sam Bozoian, the Barstool golf personality who parlayed his Fore Play podcast into proximity to Woods over the past several years — posted a video Friday evening in which he admitted, with visible satisfaction, that he had instructed Barstool's digital team not to post about the arrest.

"You want me on that wall," he said, paraphrasing Jack Nicholson. "We'll protect Tiger Woods until we f*cking die."

The easy response to Riggs is that he's a content creator, not a journalist, and his relationship with Woods is personal enough that asking him to cover the story dispassionately is like asking someone to write fairly about their own family. That's a reasonable point, as far as it goes. The problem is that Riggs and the Fore Play crew have spent years operating as golf's most influential media product precisely because of that access and proximity. They've been credentialed at majors. They've conducted sit-down interviews. They've been invited inside the tent. You can't have it both ways. You can't spend years trading on your closeness to Woods as a media credential and then invoke personal loyalty as the reason to suppress news about him the moment that closeness becomes inconvenient.

Dan Rapaport's video was harder to watch, and not in the way he intended. Posted Saturday morning from Japan — where he'd been at a karaoke bar the night before, by his own admission — it showed Rapaport practically in tears, calling the arrest "another twist that none of us wanted to see." He talked about Tiger's love of driving, about a line from the HBO documentary in which Woods goes scuba diving because he can just not talk to people, about how the fish don't know he's Tiger Woods. About how a man who was on national television at three years old and has been a global phenomenon ever since has almost nothing in his life that belongs only to him — and that getting behind the wheel and blasting '90s hip-hop might be one of the few things that does.

What he didn't do was say that Woods had a serious problem and had just put people's lives at risk for the fourth time in 17 years.

To his credit, Rapaport went on Barstool’s The Yak on Monday and acknowledged that he understood why the video landed the way it did. But he also didn’t offer much of a meaningful reconking, either.

And then there is CBS Sports, the most important piece of this puzzle: it is the institution with the most power and the most to say, and the Masters begins in nine days.

On a press call Monday morning previewing CBS's Masters coverage, no member of the assembled sports media asked about Tiger Woods for 54 minutes. Not until Awful Announcing raised the question. When the question was directed at Jim Nantz — who has narrated more Tiger Woods moments than perhaps any broadcaster alive — CBS Sports president David Berson stepped in to field it, or rather, punt it.

Berson acknowledged the arrest was a significant story. He said it would be inappropriate to comment before Woods' camp issued a statement. He said the network's job during the tournament would be to cover the tournament.

"It's not fair to anyone for us to speak about it or speculate," Berson said. "He and his team are going to have to be the ones who speak about it."

There's a version of that answer that's defensible. CBS genuinely doesn't know yet whether Woods will attend the tournament, whether he'll play, or what his legal situation will look like by next Thursday. Speculation ahead of facts is a real journalistic pitfall, and Berson isn't wrong that the network's primary obligation is to cover the golf tournament. None of that is dishonest.

But "we'll cover things as news dictates" is doing an enormous amount of work in that answer, and the 54-minute silence before anyone in the room thought to raise the question in the first place says everything about the golf media's collective disposition toward this story. Woods' arrest isn't a piece of contextual background noise that might affect coverage at the margins. It is the biggest story in golf right now. It has been the biggest story in sports since Friday afternoon. The casual viewer who tunes into Augusta National next week — the one who doesn't know the difference between Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy's swing but knows Tiger's name and knows what happened last week — is going to expect the broadcast to address it with some gravity.

Golf media, at every level from Barstool fan-journalists to legacy broadcast institutions, has organized itself around the proposition that Tiger Woods is the sport's most valuable asset and must be handled accordingly. That proposition was reasonable for a long time, and it remains largely true, given that Woods remains the most important figure in professional golf even as his playing career winds down.

What's never been true is the corollary, that because Woods is valuable to the sport, he’s owed protection from the people whose job it is to cover it. That assumption has operated quietly for years, rarely articulated and never seriously challenged, because it never had to be. The incidents that required a reckoning kept getting absorbed into the larger Tiger narrative — the comeback, the demons, the complexity of the man — and the coverage moved on.

The legal process will play out on its own timeline. The Masters will happen regardless of whether Woods shows up. But this story isn't moving on — not this time. CBS has the biggest platform and the greatest obligation, and what it does with four days of live coverage from Augusta will say more about the state of golf journalism than anything that's happened this weekend. Jim Nantz has narrated every major chapter of the Tiger Woods story. How he handles this one — whether the broadcast addresses it with the directness it deserves or lets the cathedral silence of Augusta do its usual work of softening everything — will be the real verdict on whether golf media has learned anything at all.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

Robert Deutsch-Imagn Images

The 2026 NCAA Tournament is down to four teams, which means it's time to grade every announcing crew that worked the CBS and TNT coverage — all 11 of them, including Jason Benetti's surprise appearance after Brian Anderson lost his voice in the First Four.

Voting closes Friday, April 3, at 10 p.m. ET.

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

Denny Medley-Imagn Images

  • NBC's MLB debut averaged 2.7 million viewers across its Opening Day doubleheader, with the primetime Dodgers-Diamondbacks game drawing 3.2 millionthe most-watched Opening Day game in nearly a decade.

  • Terry Gannon will host Amazon's Masters debut from Butler Cabin on Thursday and Friday from 1-3 p.m. ET alongside Jack Nicklaus, the first time a main feed has existed before ESPN's traditional 3 p.m. window.

  • NFL owners are voting to reclassify Friday games so they no longer count against a team's two-game short-week limit, a rule change that primarily benefits Amazon in seasons when Christmas falls on a Friday.

  • Perfect Game launched Uncommitted, a new YouTube series hosted by travel ball coach Nelly Gonzalez, spotlighting high school players who haven't yet landed college offers. The first three episodes are also available on the free PGTV app.

  • Michael DeCourcy is retiring from Sporting News after nearly 26 years, signing off with a column on his favorite Final Four memories.

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

Credit: Big Ten Network

"This is not Maryland lacrosse." - Big Ten Network analyst Mark Dixon, going scorched earth on Maryland attackman Leo Johnson for taunting a Michigan defender after a goal.

"I'm not sure I have ever been part of as chaotic and thrilling end … This is maybe the new Laettner moment." - CBS analyst Grant Hill, still processing the Duke-UConn finish a day later.

"When I was younger, before I was in the scoop game, I looked down on it. To me, it was a lesser form of journalism." - ESPN's Jeff Passan, explaining how becoming an MLB insider changed his view on breaking news, and how chasing scoops ultimately made him a better long-form reporter.

"I laid down in traffic on it." - FS1's Nick Wright, describing the moment he put his reputation on the line to install Chris Broussard as First Things First co-host over management's objections.

"You feel like you're playing MLB The Show or something." - Hunter Pence, on calling his Netflix Opening Night debut alongside Matt Vasgersian, whose voice apparently has a hypnotic effect on first-time broadcast partners.

"Let 'em fret. The rest of us can just enjoy the show." - Ken Rosenthal, making the case for ABS after an opening weekend that included back-to-back overturned strike-threes on CB Bucknor and a manager getting tossed over a ninth-inning challenge.

"Busy doing our own coverage, so I haven't seen him play." - Jim Nantz, admitting on a Masters press call that he's only watched Bryson DeChambeau on YouTube this year.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Who's really behind the FCC's sudden interest in sports?

Liam McGuire-Comeback Media

Sometimes, writing about what's happening in the media industry is simply about connecting dots. And with every passing day, some dots are seemingly coming into alignment that are almost too coincidental not to notice.

Those dots center on the FCC's recent interest in sports fragmentation, and the threat the federal government poses to the antitrust exemption granted to professional sports leagues via the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.

Click to read more from Awful Announcing's Drew Lerner on whether the Murdochs and Ellisons are behind the FCC's sudden interest in threatening the NFL's antitrust exemption right as Fox and CBS head into rights negotiations.

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