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📰 Banner Raising in D.C. The Baltimore Banner registered dcbanner.com and thedcbanner.com and hired its first Washington Post staffer after WaPo eliminated its entire sports section earlier this month. The Banner plans to hire at least three more reporters, plus an editor, to cover DC sports teams.

🏀 Trademark trouble. Kalshi scrubbed all March Madness branding from its prediction market platform after the NCAA sent a cease-and-desist letter over trademark violations. Users can still bet on tournament games, just without calling it by the name everyone actually uses.

🔥Fire makes its first hire. The Portland Fire hired The Athletic's Ben Pickman as a salary cap and strategy analyst, marking one of the WNBA expansion franchise's first front office moves ahead of its 2026 debut. Pickman spent three years at The Athletic covering the WNBA and women's college basketball.

🏈 Trump's national championship grievance. Donald Trump complained that the 2025 College Football Playoff National Championship game was scheduled on the same night as his inauguration, calling it "not good" and suggesting the timing hurt ratings. The game drew 22.8 million viewers — down from previous championship games —but hardly the disaster Trump suggested.

🎾 Roddick returns to Wimbledon. Andy Roddick signed a multi-year deal with ESPN to work Wimbledon and US Open coverage, filling part of the void left by Pam Shriver and Brad Gilbert. The 2003 US Open champion will make his debut at the All England Club in June, 22 years after reaching his first final there.

🏒 Let them play. NBC's Eddie Olczyk would prefer 5-on-5 overtime for at least 10 minutes before going to 3-on-3 in Olympic gold medal games after Jack Hughes scored one minute and 41 seconds into Sunday's 3-on-3 extra frame.

Josh Pate spent more time explaining his Donald Trump interview than Donald Trump spent talking about college football.

That math alone tells you everything about how Sunday night went. Ten minutes of the president rambling about NFL kickoff rules, recycling stories from his Joe Rogan appearance, and declaring Herschel Walker the greatest running back in college football history. Twenty minutes of Pate defending why he took the interview, insisting it wasn't political, and claiming 95% of his critics are bots.

The college football YouTuber who built his brand on staying out of politics got rope-a-doped by an administration that's been running this playbook for a decade. Pate spent more time defending the interview than extracting a single substantive answer about NIL, the transfer portal, or any federal action that might actually affect the sport he covers.

The Trump administration identified a host flattered enough to say yes in five minutes, inexperienced enough not to negotiate the terms, and committed enough to an apolitical brand that he'd spend 20 minutes insisting an interview with the president wasn't political.

Pate walked into every trap — the time reduction, the topic pivots, the non-answers disguised as folksy stories — got exactly what everyone who'd watched Trump do media for the past decade predicted he'd get, and then acted blindsided when people pointed out he'd been used as a prop in a propaganda exercise that produced zero substance about the sport he covers.

The Trump administration came to Josh Pate. They approached him about doing an interview. Thirty to forty minutes, they said. Pate had been hearing whispers — his word — that federal action on college sports issues was coming. NIL reform, maybe. Transfer portal regulation. Something that would make this conversation substantive and newsworthy rather than just another celebrity appearance.

Here was validation that Pate's platform had arrived. The president of the United States sought him out, not the other way around. A YouTube creator got the same treatment as traditional media. Here was proof that five and a half years of building an audience meant something.

"It's the president of the United States requesting to come on a college football show that didn't exist 5.5 years ago," Pate said in his explanation video. "That's why we did it."

Pate made his decision in five minutes.

Think about that. The most consequential interview of his career, the one that would define how people view his credibility and his willingness to wade into politics despite years of insisting he wouldn't, took him five minutes to decide.

No consideration of why the Trump administration wanted this specific platform at this specific moment. No consideration of whether Trump would actually engage with college football issues substantively or just use the airtime to talk about himself. No consideration of what it would mean to his audience that he was breaking his no-politics rule for a president currently at the lowest approval ratings of his political career.

Thirty to forty minutes became ten.

Pate doesn't explain how that happened. He doesn't say if the administration changed the terms at the last minute, if logistical constraints cut things short, or if they always planned to give him a fraction of what they promised. In his explanation video, he acknowledges the time reduction but treats it as if getting 25% of what you were promised is just how these things go sometimes.

Ten minutes isn't enough to discuss federal legislation. Ten minutes isn't enough to get past Trump's rehearsed talking points about kickoff rules and Herschel Walker. Ten minutes guarantees Trump controls every second of the conversation because there's no time to circle back, no time to push for specifics, no time to do anything except let him exhaust his prepared material and wrap.

"If you were promised something by the administration, did you really think that they were gonna hold up their end of the bargain?" I asked on Awful Announcing’s The Play-By-Play podcast. "That Donald Trump was gonna sit down for 30 to 40 minutes to talk about college football without it ending up being about himself?"

The answer was always no. Trump doesn't do substantive policy interviews about niche topics. He's been in public life for a decade. We know exactly what these conversations look like. When given airtime, Trump talks about Trump. He reminds everyone how much he's won, how unfairly he's been treated, and how great his instincts are. That's the show. Every single time.

Josh Pate built his brand on being apolitical. For five and a half years, he's made a point of keeping politics out of his show. His audience appreciated that. College football is already suffocating under the weight of regional politics, conference realignment drama tied to state legislatures, and culture war battles. Pate's show felt like an antidote — a place to talk about the sport without wading into the garbage that infects every other corner of the discourse.

Then he interviewed Donald Trump and insisted it wasn't political.

"You can't have your cake and eat it too," as I said on the podcast. "If you wanted to interview Trump because you wanted to interview Trump, go right ahead. But you can't tell us that it's not about politics when everything Trump does is inherently political."

The president of the United States is a political figure. Every word he says carries political weight. Every appearance serves political ends. Every platform he uses becomes, by definition, political because that's what happens when you give airtime to someone whose entire existence is defined by political power.

Pate can say he's not a politics guy all he wants. Trump made it political the moment he started talking about winning elections, endorsing candidates, and praising political allies. The interview's content was political. The context was political. The fallout was political.

Pate thought he could wall off the political implications by declaring his intentions pure. I'm just interviewing the president about college football. I'm not taking a side. This isn't about politics.

But intentions don't matter when you're dealing with Donald Trump. What matters is what actually happened. And what happened was that Trump used Pate's platform to reinforce his political brand while offering nothing substantive about the topic Pate supposedly wanted to discuss.

"He has good reasons for wanting to do the interview," as I noted. "But I think he's misguided in the approach that 'I'm not a politics guy, so therefore, this isn't gonna be politics.' How many times do we have to go over this?"

Pate will now carry the label of right-wing media, whether he wants it or not. That might be unfair. It might not accurately represent his beliefs or his body of work over five years. But it's the reality of interviewing a president who's spent the past several months testing the boundaries of democratic norms with mass deportations and executive overreach, whose approval has cratered even among Republicans, and who's facing renewed scrutiny over a cover-up that would sink any other politician's career.

Trump needed friendly platforms because fewer people were willing to give him one. Pate provided it and will wear the consequences.

"People don't forget these things," AA’s Brendon Kleen said on the podcast. "That's another thing that has been ironed into stone by the Trump era — people attach political labels to folks depending on their actions in public, whether that's fair to them or entirely representative of their character and belief system or not."

The Baltimore Sun is betting it can differentiate in Baltimore's crowded sports podcast market by leaning on beat reporting instead of hot takes. Awful Announcing talked to Ravens reporter Sam Cohn about launching Early Birds, a twice-weekly Orioles and Ravens podcast that's using daily access and source relationships to stand out and drive traffic to the Sun's paywalled content. Read more.

"I'm really pumped about it, and I'm grateful for the opportunity because when I think of iconic sports properties, the NBA on NBC is in a class of its own." - John Fanta on making his NBA play-by-play debut for NBC next Tuesday when the Timberwolves visit the Trail Blazers.

"I'm not even always standing up for myself to be right, as much as I'm just standing up for myself to be understood." - Ryan Clark, addressing fake quotes circulating on social media that falsely attributed racial accusations to him about Fernando Mendoza.

"He slid and rolled his fat ass past the base, the son of a b*tch."** - Hall of Famer Jeff Kent goes on a profane rant about Alex Rodriguez during a Giants broadcast, stunning the commentary team.

"The three-point line should be an LED line that just comes and goes." - Paul Pierce pitching a wild revamp for the NBA's three-point problem, suggesting a toggleable line that changes during games.

"I just think that LeBron James dressing professionally on the bench would do absolute wonders for him." - Stephen A. Smith, suggesting the Lakers star should dress more professionally while injured instead of wearing hoodies.

"I don't know exactly what I'm going to do, and it's kind of exciting." - Joey Votto on his NBC role, admitting neither he nor NBC has figured out exactly what his pregame analyst position will entail despite joining the network months ago.

"Boxers are always going to need the money, man." - Bomani Jones on Netflix announcing Mayweather-Pacquiao II, questioning why two fighters past their prime would return for another bout.

MLB Network is cramming its entire 30 Clubs, 30 Camps series into eight days this year. Four broadcast teams will hit all 30 teams between Monday and March 2, making it the most compressed version of the series since the network launched in 2009.

The reason for the squeeze is the World Baseball Classic. With WBC play starting in March, MLB Network had a narrow window to complete its annual spring training tour before shifting to international coverage. The network usually spreads this out over a few weeks. This year, there's no time.

Lauren Shehadi and Chris Young, Robert Flores and Cliff Floyd, Siera Santos and Jake Peavy, and Greg Amsinger and Yonder Alonso will fan out across Florida and Arizona, visiting multiple camps per day to cover all 30 organizations in just over a week.

"When looking at the Spring Training schedule, we only saw a week window for our annual series after games began and the WBC starts ramping up," Ben Friedfeld, MLB Network's VP of content logistics and field production, told Awful Announcing. "It has led us to an action-packed week with our most aggressive plan yet."

The value of spring training coverage isn't just showing up and interviewing players. It's about building relationships that carry through the entire season. Shehadi, who co-hosts MLB Central during the regular season, spends most of her time in the studio once games start. Spring training is when she gets face time with players and coaches across the league.

"It's nice to put eyes on the teams so during the season we can speak to what we've seen," Shehadi said. "When you invest in the players, they respect your opinion because they know you care about covering them in a proper way."

Jake Peavy, who joined MLB Network in 2022 after pitching 14 seasons in the majors, has found spring training to be one of his favorite parts of the job. Players aren't guarded in February. They're not worried about protecting their at-bats or explaining a slump. Coaches aren't managing the media cycle around a losing streak. The atmosphere is loose. Conversations happen naturally.

"One of my favorite parts of the job is getting on site in a relaxed environment with the players," Peavy said. "Each team has big optimism and is excited for the opportunity ahead, which means good moods. Being on site, you can really feel who has 'special' ingredients brewing and a real shot at a title."

Every team arrives in February with optimism. And that optimism is genuine, even when it seems misplaced. Nobody shows up to spring training thinking they're going to finish last. Siera Santos, who hosts Intentional Talk, has learned to embrace that part of the coverage rather than be cynical about it.

"The best part of our Spring Training coverage is seeing the optimism from every team and each player," Santos said. "You walk away from a camp and say, 'Yep! They could go all the way.'"

The compressed schedule means MLB Network's talent will have visited every team in baseball in eight days. That's a lot of airports, rental cars, and hotel rooms. But it's also a chance to see the entire league before anyone's played a game that matters.

The series kicks off Monday with visits to the Dodgers, Orioles, Blue Jays, and Royals. By March 2, MLB Network will have checked in on all 30 clubs and shifted focus to the World Baseball Classic. Spring training optimism meets reality soon enough. For now, everyone's going to the World Series.