💊 House rules. During an over-two-hour hearing on Wednesday, members of the House Judiciary subcommittee laid out a compelling case that the NFL has potentially run afoul of the antitrust exemption it is afforded under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. Of particular interest throughout the hearing were the inconsistencies between how the NFL markets its out-of-market Sunday Ticket package and who the league has argued in court that Sunday Ticket is designed for.

🏛️ Finals frenzy. The NBA Finals returned to Madison Square Garden for the first time since 1999 on Monday, drawing the largest television audience the NBA has seen in nearly a decade. Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs averaged 23.8 million viewers across ABC and ESPN on Monday, marking the largest Game 3 audience since 1998 and the most-watched NBA game across any series or network since 2017.

🏀 Watson speaks. For the first time since October 2024, Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson spoke with the local media on Wednesday, telling reporters he’s “great mentally.” Watson is currently in a battle for the starting position with Shedeur Sanders.

🎙️ Big Ev back. Evan “Big Ev” McDowell broke his silence Wednesday in a video posted to social media, confirming that he checked himself into a residential treatment center for a gambling addiction, in what amounted to his first public statement since disappearing from Barstool Sports content in early April amid allegations that he stiffed multiple illegal bookmakers out of thousands of dollars.

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

The New York Knicks completed the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history on Wednesday night, rallying from a 29-point deficit to defeat the San Antonio Spurs in Game 4, 107-106.

Not only do the Knicks lead the best-of-seven NBA Finals 3-1, with a chance to clinch the title on Saturday in San Antonio in Game 5, but they have also reignited the all-night party and excitement surrounding NBA basketball in New York City after a certain Game 3 guest had sucked the life out of it.

In the aftermath of the historic and shocking comeback win, there were so many ways it could have been discussed, analyzed, and broken down. Thankfully, we had the Inside the NBA crew there to handle the situation as only they could.

Ernie Johnson, looking diminutive surrounded by NBA players, slowed the post-game show down almost immediately to let the moment breathe.

“What the hell did we just see?” he asked honestly.

Kenny Smith attempted to make a salient point, but it was Charles Barkley who laid everything out as only he can.

“We saw the dumbest basketball team in the history of civilization,” he said of the Spurs, who led 81-52 at one point during the third quarter.

“Congratulations to the Knicks for coming back, but Chuck, I agree with you,” Shaquille O’Neal said. “They played terrible basketball. They got comfortable. They got comfortable with the lead. They were already talking about going back to San Antonio. They just didn’t play smart.”

Barkley also zeroed in on De’Aaron Fox, who retrieved a loose ball with 12.8 seconds remaining and chose to go up for a contested layup (that was blocked) rather than dribbling time off the clock.

“That was a dumbass play,” Barkley said. “He did not have to shoot that ball! He could have just gotten fouled! There was no reason for him to shoot that ball!”

When host Ernie Johnson got the message in his ear from the production team that they were ready to start running through the highlights, the longtime host rightly asked them to hold off, saying that this was the kind of situation that required further real-time reaction. And he was right, as the rest of the studio show attempted to explain how the seemingly impossible had happened.

That also gave us time to appreciate Charles Barkley’s attempt at a Mike Breen impression, which Johnson noted was the worst he’d ever heard.

When it came time to show game highlights, they only made it to halftime before wisely abandoning them so they could speak with Knicks star Jalen Brunson.

Again, it was Johnson who perfectly summed things up in the simplest of ways, asking Brunson, “How on Earth did that just happen?” They then wisely let the Knicks star explain how he felt and what he’d experienced on his own terms.

None of this was rocket science, but the stripped-down, conversational, sometimes-awkward presentation that Inside has perfected was the ideal way to come down from the nonsensical way the game had ended. Johnson allowed everyone at home and on the panel the opportunity to wonder how this had happened without having to come up with a definitive answer, much as everyone tried.

That’s one of the beauties of Inside the NBA. Yes, they’re trying to inform you, but it’s at its best when you’re just a fly on the wall to their candid conversations and reactions. What they say might not matter as much as how they say it, and how they interact with one another. On paper, it might sound like a mess, but somehow, it works. And does so in a way that’s so much more entertaining and appreciated than a generic post-game show.

If there was one aspect of the show that could be scrapped, it’s Draymond Green. Green has interesting things to say, but he often seems too caught up in making things about himself (surprise!), and his acerbic tone just doesn’t gel with the rest of the panel.

But aside from Green, there’s a reason ESPN threw in the towel and brought Inside over to be their studio show when it matters. They’ve mastered the studio show by breaking it and remolding it around themselves. And when you’re left speechless after witnessing a historic NBA finish on the biggest stage, there’s no other group you’d rather have holding your hand as you all attempt to figure it out together.

“I’m hoping they fire me. I got six or seven years left on my contract, and they know I got no chance of doing it. I would love for them to fire me and have to pay me for the next six or seven years.” - Charles Barkley on potential blowback from his “Cardi Ds” comment.

“Your job, my job is to tell the truth, and it’s really, really important. Because the fans only know what they read and what they hear. And so you have to do it for the player, the organization, their family, everything.” - Phil Simms’ advice to new NFL Today analyst Russell Wilson.

“I think now the only path is going to be federal legislation because without antitrust protection, there’s going to be no entity, whether it’s the NCAA or the CSC, College Sports Commission, no entity that’s going to have any backbone whatsoever in terms of enforcement, and that’s what we have to have is enforcement. If you can’t enforce this rule, then what, what are we doing?” - Joel Klatt on where college football goes from here following the Brandon Sorsby ruling.

“Sports will never be the same. And when I say that is because, what is the biggest thing that’s evolving when it comes to sports right now? Gambling. Everybody and their mama and their aunties, great aunties, great grandmothers, everybody places a bet. Emotions are high.” - Kendrick Perkins, blaming gambling for violence following NBA Finals games.

“We know that if they don’t get this worked out, baseball will suffer. They cannot afford to have a stoppage with all the good that has been done and all the great games that have played late lately with the World Series.” - John Smoltz’s warning on potential MLB lockout.

"I just became the coolest grandpa in the history of the world.” - Ernie Johnson after snapping a photo with Taylor Swift at Game 4.

Pat McAfee is set to become the highest-paid talent in sports media. Well, kind of.

The former Indianapolis Colts punter, who has built his daily sports talk show into an empire that fills the noon-to-2 p.m. ET window on ESPN, is reportedly in negotiations with the network for a deal worth between $60 million and $65 million per year. It’s a huge step up from where McAfee currently sits — ESPN licenses his show for a reported $17 million per year and then pays McAfee an additional $13 million or so for his work on College GameDay, various altcasts, and other ancillary assignments.

Suffice it to say, McAfee already finds himself in the upper echelons of ESPN talent salaries. Now, he’s prepared to blow everyone out of the water. At least, to a point.

The McAfee situation is unique compared to normal talent contracts. ESPN licenses The Pat McAfee Show, and that licensing fee is used to compensate the entire production team, from McAfee’s fellow on-air talents to the staffers who handle the show’s audio. So, to say McAfee himself is prepared to sign a $60 million-per-year contract is a bit misleading, since much of that money goes toward funding the show. With that in mind, let’s dive into the arguments for and against the McAfee mega-deal, beginning with the skeptic’s perspective.

Drew Lerner dug into the details to make the cases for and against Pat McAfee’s potential $60-million deal.

For as long as Hudson River Blue existed, the site did something that no outlet in the Tri-State Area with a larger staff and bigger budget ever quite managed to pull off: it showed up.

Every week, for 13 years, through five executive editors, two platform structures, and a divorce from SB Nation, someone at HRB was filing something about NYCFC. Not because there was money in it — there wasn’t, really, not for most of the people doing the work — but because a specific community of readers in New York had built their relationship with the club around that coverage, and the people producing it understood that and felt its weight.

Andrew Leigh felt it as much as anyone. He joined HRB in 2022 as a contributor and eventually became its executive editor, fully aware that the arrangement wouldn’t pay him. That’s not unusual in this space — the number of people in the United States who are paid full-time to cover American soccer is vanishingly small — and it doesn’t change much from year to year. Most of the serious local coverage that exists does so because individuals have decided the work matters enough to do without compensation. Leigh is one of those people, which is why, when Hudson River Blue went dark in March — for reasons that were never made fully transparent to him — he spent about three weeks figuring out how to start over rather than simply walking away.

“There was very little transparency around the state of affairs,” he tells Awful Announcing. “We thought we had established ourselves as a sturdy, independent publication. We had a growing audience. We weren’t really operating under that assumption that this could happen.”

A publication can have a loyal audience, a growing readership, real journalistic value, and still disappear because the business forces governing it have nothing to do with any of that. The readers weren’t the ones who decided to close Hudson River Blue. They were just the ones left without it.

“We knew that people valued what we did before,” Leigh said, “but when you’re presented with it disappearing, it helped us kind of pick it up again.”

The result is the New York Soccer Journal, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit Leigh launched in April with roughly five other former HRB contributors.

Click to read more of Sam Neumann’s discussion with Leigh and how independence has become a fresh start for so many MLS team sites.