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🏈 Shock and awe were at an all-time high on Tuesday night as the sports media world reacted to the Baltimore Ravens backing out of their blockbuster trade for Maxx Crosby.

🏀 Shock and awe were also at an all-time high on Tuesday night as the sports media world reacted to Bam Adebayo surpassing Kobe Bryant for the second-most points scored in a single NBA game by dropping 83 on the Wizards.

🎥 ESPN and ABC will attempt a sports-pop culture crossover, with social media guru Omar Raja helping to host the Oscars red-carpet show.

⚾ Matt Vasgersian and Lauren Shehadi have been named to the Netflix MLB broadcasting team that will debut on Opening Night.

🏈 College GameDay may be way more influential in the college football world than even ESPN would give it credit for.

🅰️ Letter grades for WWE premium live events are no more at ESPN, reportedly at the wrestling promotion’s request. Editorial independence, anyone?

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

It wasn’t an announcement met with much fanfare, but the PGA Tour's partnership with NFL Films to create a Hard Knocks-style series surrounding The Players Championship is a fascinating news story.

Once upon a time, Hard Knocks was at the cutting edge of sports documentaries. Their behind-the-scenes access at NFL training camps was one of the most talked-about sports stories every summer. The HBO series offered unique access that was never before seen and featured so many incredible and intimate moments that it felt like we shouldn’t even be allowed to see it in the first place.

And ultimately, the NFL and the powers-that-be throughout the league agreed with that assessment.

As teams became less and less comfortable with HBO cameras all up in their business, the original training camp series has almost become unrecognizable from the tour de force that it was when it began. The most recent edition featuring the Buffalo Bills was so sanitized and watered down that it could have been produced by the team itself.

Unfortunately, the same thing happened when the series first tackled the offseason with the New York Giants. Again, Hard Knocks was leading the way. It was candid. It was revealing. And it was too much for the NFL world. When the Giants’ decision-making process around letting Saquon Barkley sign with the rival Philadelphia Eagles and lead them to the Super Bowl became a meme, it was the last time we would ever see anything compelling like that happen again from the NFL.

Because of the success of Hard Knocks and Drive to Survive, every sport has gotten in on the fly-on-the-wall docuseries. Even the PGA Tour has Full Swing, a DTS-inspired series for Netflix. But the proliferation of these series has come at a time when sports documentaries are now a dime a dozen. And instead of offering real, honest, raw insights, we are seeing these vehicles become little more than expensive public relations tools for the athletes or teams in question. The space is littered with vapid vanity projects that only seem to satisfy egos and narratives and not much else.

But maybe that’s where the PGA Tour can come in to give the concept a second life.

An inconvenient truth in all of this is that the NFL doesn’t need Hard Knocks anymore. The league will still be watched by tens of millions of fans and will still generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue without it. But the PGA Tour does need Hard Knocks. Every sport not named the NFL is facing a major inflection point, with leagues preparing for impact as football takes yet more money out of the media rights market, perhaps as early as this year. Everyone else, including professional golf, will fight for the leftovers.

It’s incumbent on sports leagues to be more innovative in reaching new fans now more than ever. Younger generations are turning away from sports; paywalls and streaming platforms are making it more cumbersome to follow; and the attention spans of the masses are much harder to break through.

It’s no coincidence that this news arises right as new PGA Tour commissioner Brian Rolapp addresses the media at the tour’s flagship event at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach for the first time. Rolapp is an NFL Media alum. And he knows that the tour is at a crossroads when it comes to fan engagement and finding new ways to reach new demographics.

Rolapp has already emphasized the need for the PGA Tour to improve on its storytelling capabilities and provide better access for fans. So what better way to do that than by returning to a proven formula that he knows works from his NFL days? But hopefully, he takes the lessons that will tell him what to do to attract fans and provide insight and entertainment from the OG days of Hard Knocks instead of what not to do from its recent installments.

Hard Knocks may have outlived its usefulness to the NFL, but maybe its impact in the wider sports world is just beginning.

When it comes to tense, awkward moments between broadcast colleagues, this exchange between CoCo Vandeweghe and Chris Eubanks on the Tennis Channel is a Hall of Fame entry.

Dave Portnoy has turned against Tom Brady after bending over backwards to stay neutral about the New England Patriots.

Speaking of Brady, he sent out his newsletter this week as a tribute to the late Tim McCarver. However, he thought the Cardinals legend and longtime MLB lead on Fox analyst had died last week, when he actually passed in 2023. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s A Block, where we pay tribute to the recently deceased Howard Cosell.

“This company just got $7.7 billion. Like, there’s no reason that they can’t afford to pay their athletes at least a living wage.” - Ronda Rousey torched UFC and their abysmal fighter pay at a press conference to promote her Netflix fight against Gina Carano.

"But it's like you were this part of this really special 2.5-week period where it's like you can't recreate that because of the emotions that go along with it.” - Lindsay Czarniak spoke to AA about her experience hosting the 2026 Winter Olympics.

“I make them here on my radio show, I make them on my YouTube channel. ESPN, not so much, that’s the challenge. But you know, it’s a work in progress.” - Stephen A. Smith says it’s ESPN that is preventing a Shannon Sharpe return to First Take, even though he wants it to happen.

"I love the WNBA. I wish you women nothing but the best. But this notion that you were just going to hold everybody's feet to the fire and get whatever y'all wanted, that's not the way it works.” - Charles Barkley is warning WNBA players against an extended work stoppage and to take the best deal they can get.

Team USA’s Tuesday disaster aside, it’s already been a great March for baseball, and the MLB season hasn’t even started yet. The World Baseball Classic has picked up right where the Olympics left off, giving casual sports fans an opportunity to engage in international competition. And even while attention is on the WBC, Spring Training games are also seeing numbers not seen in years.

First, Spring Training games on ESPN are reaching their biggest audiences since 2008. The network’s four-game slate averaged 531,000 viewers, up 84% compared to last year.

As far as the World Baseball Classic goes, audiences for Fox Sports are up 142% over 2023 through the same stage of the tournament. Two USA baseball prelim games each scored over 2.6 million viewers. And that’s not to mention the incredible social numbers from Shohei Ohtani and Japan as well.

Baseball has seen ratings and interest rise in the last couple of years on a consistent upward trajectory. But now we’re talking about two different competitions on two different networks, both of which are performing extremely well. It has to be a great sign for Rob Manfred and everyone else in the game that things seem to be so healthy from a fan engagement perspective.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the upcoming labor negotiations that promise to be the most seismic since the strike that cancelled the 1994 World Series. Those who follow the sport closely are already sounding the alarm as existential issues like salary caps threaten to derail baseball’s momentum.

Will the continued growth and progress that the sport is making in modern times help both sides feel the need to sacrifice and compromise for the greater good? Here’s hoping a resolution can be reached before all that positive energy goes careening off a cliff and baseball has to start all over again.