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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 Drew Brees reborn. After serving as a game analyst for Netflix’s international NFL broadcasts last Christmas, the former New Orleans Saints quarterback is getting another shot at the big time, this time in front of a domestic audience. Brees has been open about wanting to get back into broadcasting after a poor start at NBC temporarily derailed his media career. He’ll have his best opportunity since then on December 25.

👀 Lloyd Howell steps down. After another round of excellent reporting by the tag-team duo of Pablo Torre and Mike Florio, NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell issued his resignation late on Thursday night. “It’s clear that my leadership has become a distraction to the important work the NFLPA advances every day,” Howell wrote.

📺 NFL Media deal heats up. The NFL may hold a “special league meeting” in August about a potential sale of its media arm to ESPN, according to a report by Austin Karp and Ben Fischer in Sports Business Journal. The two sides have been talking for well over a year now, and ESPN is certainly incentivized to get a deal done prior to the launch of its direct-to-consumer product this fall.

🦚 Peacock jacks up. NBC-owned streaming platform Peacock will be raising the price of its ad-supported tier by a whopping 40% next week, according to a report in Vulture. The monthly price will jump from $7.99 to $10.99, largely due to the streamer’s focus on expensive live sports content. This fall, NBC will start paying the NBA over $2 billion per year for its package of games, about half of which will air exclusively on Peacock. The ad-free tier will see a similar jump from $13.99 to $16.99 per month.

️‍🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

ESPN and MLB are in a situationship

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred revealed in an interview published by CNBC yesterday that the league has received bids from at least three potential media rights partners for some or all of the package ESPN famously opted out of earlier this year. The suitors are NBC, who has been tied to the Sunday Night Baseball package, Apple, who Sports Business Journal reports as the most likely streamer to join the party, and ESPN, the network that started this whole debacle in the first place.

After an initial war of words between Manfred and the Worldwide Leader, the two seem to be getting along better on account of a well-timed ratings boost and a realization that, well, being on ESPN is probably a good thing for baseball.

In his CNBC interview, Manfred suggested that the rights that are up for grabs could be split between “a couple” partners. MLB, for its part, has been eager to gain more broadcast exposure. NBC, for its part, has a summertime gap to fill between the end of its new Sunday Night Basketball package and the start of Sunday Night Football in the fall. That would seem to make a lot of sense.

ESPN, for its part, could also potentially offer up some ABC windows to MLB if that’s a sticking point in negotiations. And if MLB wanted to split up Sunday Night Baseball, maybe giving the beginning and end of the season to ESPN, when NBC is airing basketball and football, would be a good way to do it.

Whatever the case may be, and however this eventually resolves, it seems more likely with every passing day that ESPN will end up with some portion of MLB’s available inventory.

Per CNBC’s Alex Sherman, “ESPN sources tell me there’s renewed optimism a deal can be struck with MLB – when a few weeks ago it looked like a long shot.” That’s the type of reporting you hear when things are moving in a positive direction. And given just how nasty things got, at least from MLB’s side of things, just a few short months ago, that is quite the about face. Rob Manfred is once again seeing the light that the Worldwide Leader provides.

But ESPN isn’t doing this out of goodwill, of course. They want to be in the baseball business, just not at the $550 million price tag they were paying previously. One sweetener, other than paying less money, is the possibility of gaining the local media rights for five teams.

As it stands, MLB currently controls the local broadcasts for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Guardians, Colorado Rockies, Minnesota Twins, and San Diego Padres. Per Manfred, those rights are on the table should ESPN want them. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro has been clear about his desire to be part of the local rights solution in baseball. What better way to get a jump-start on the competition than rolling out a five-team platform integrated in your brand new direct-to-consumer product?

Should negotiations go that way, and ESPN ends up with these local rights, they’ll be a step ahead of MLB’s other suitors come 2028, when the league looks to nationalize its local rights deals into a single package. That ought to be a pretty good incentive for Pitaro and Co. to look past some of the cheap shots MLB took at them a few months ago, and figure out a way to keep part of its baseball inventory.

💬 AROUND AA 💬

Does anyone have it worse than Ohio State fans? /s

Ohio State fans will have to endure yet more horrors coming off of their national title last season. Yes, World Class Buckeye Hater Dave Portnoy will be heavily featured on Big Noon Kickoff, A.K.A. the Ohio State Pregame Show, starting this fall.

Matt Yoder, one of our many resident Buckeye fans at Awful Announcing wrote about the all-time hate-watching experience it will be for Ohio State supporters.

📈INDUSTRY INSIGHTS💰

• ESPN reporter Michele Steele announced she is departing the network after 14-years of service. Steele joined ESPN in 2011 after serving as the first full-time sports reporter for Bloomberg Television. Throughout her career at ESPN, she’s interviewed the likes of Roger Goodell, Robert Kraft, and Jerry Jones. Her primary role at the Worldwide Leader was as a reporter. Steele was based out of Chicago and covered numerous stories throughout the Midwest for ESPN. She made regular appearances on SportsCenter as both a reporter and fill-in anchor, on NFL Live, and on Outside the Lines. It’s unclear what’s next for Steele, though she alluded to a future announcement on social media.

• Warner Bros. Discovery and David Zaslav filed a memorandum in the Southern District of New York defending the company’s actions during its NBA rights negotiations after an investor lawsuit was filed in November. The plaintiffs in the case are claiming fraud based on suggestions by WBD executives that the company would be able to retain NBA rights no matter what due to the matching rights present in their contract. WBD claims “the speculation about whether WBD could effectively exercise those rights was also widely discussed in the media,” suggesting that investors should have known the limitations of the clause, or at the very least known there was a possibility the company would lose NBA rights in spite of its existence.

• NBA commissioner Adam Silver poured cold water on expansion talk earlier this week, suggesting the league needs to figure out its local media rights situation first. “We would be malpracticing if we didn’t figure out how local regional television is going to work before expanding,” Silver said, per Front Office Sports. “The notion that we would hand over a team into a city where we’re not currently operating and say, ‘You’re going to have to figure out how you’re going to distribute your games to your local fans,’ doesn’t make sense.”

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Bomani Jones was really into the Astronomer CEO affair debacle

Happy Friday, A-Block readers. You’re in for a lighthearted Closer today.

I’m sure many of you saw the viral video yesterday of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron getting caught red handed embracing a woman who was most certainly not his wife at a Coldplay concert. Ironically, that woman happened to be the C-suite HR executive at Astronomer, Kristin Cabot. The video is objectively hilarious for any fan of instant karma, especially as Coldplay frontman Chris Martin immediately called it out without missing a beat.

Anyway, the video has racked up almost 100 million views on X alone, 99 million of which seem to have come from sports media veteran Bomani Jones. The former ESPNer was having a FIELD DAY with the story on his X timeline and on his podcast. At the time of this writing, Jones has posted about the Coldplay affair incident at least 11 times, including a clip from his podcast where he gives the blow-by-blow in quintessential Bomani fashion.

Jones wasn’t the only sports media personality having fun with this story yesterday. We went ahead and compiled some of the best reactions, which you can check out here.

The incredible thing about this story is it would’ve gone viral whenever, wherever. But the fact that sports media X/Twitter was gifted this video on what could quite literally be one of the slowest days on the sports calendar made it so much better.