⛳ LIV and let die. Rumors ran rampant Tuesday and Wednesday that the LIV Golf league might be in serious trouble as Saudi Arabia’s PIF was considering cutting off the money hose. League officials spent the day scrambling and seemed to confirm the 2026 season will continue as planned, but the Financial Times reported that the end is indeed nigh, with an announcement on the tour’s future expected as soon as Thursday. There’s gonna be a lot of awkward phone calls to the PGA Tour next week.

🏀 Not ready for Prime time. Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service broadcast its first-ever NBA playoff game on Tuesday night, but what should’ve been a celebratory night for the streamer quickly turned into a nightmare during the last minute of overtime, when the stream went black before a screen read “Technical Difficulties.” The streamer said on Wednesday it was a “disruption due to a hardware failure in our production truck,” and they’re reviewing to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Regardless, not a great look!

📺 Fubo emerges. According to a report by Tom Friend in Sports Business Journal, the Disney-owned Fubo is pitching the 13 NBA teams currently looking for a local broadcast solution for next season on a “hybrid direct-to-distributor and direct-to-consumer model” that would provide teams rights fees “in the vicinity of $10M or slightly below.” The 11th-hour offers would see teams stream games directly on Fubo’s app, while the Disney-owned distributor simultaneously negotiates deals with cable distributors to keep games on linear television.

🏛️ Bill-y Baldwin. Per The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) will reportedly introduce the “For the Fans” Act, a bill designed to ensure that professional sporting events across numerous leagues are shown for free in local markets, reducing the cost of watching live sports for consumers. The bill is designed to work in conjunction with the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. Under the “For the Fans” Act, leagues would retain their antitrust exemptions but ensure games are made available for free in a team’s local market, either through an over-the-air broadcast or a free, ad-supported streaming service.

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

If you’re subscribing to this newsletter, you probably don’t need me to recount the whole story. You know about the Dianna Russini-Mike Vrabel photos, the ensuing narratives, the internal investigation, and Russini’s resignation from The Athletic earlier this week.

Yesterday’s newsletter pondered what’s next for the NFL insider, but today we’re more concerned with what’s next for us, as in the collective us.

Specifically, what did we learn from all of this?

The obvious answer is that, on a macro level, we were reminded about the often-dubious world of NFL insiderdom. It also apparently exacerbated tensions between The Athletic and staffers at The New York Times, who were already uneasy about the perceived standards at the sports-centric outlet, and may continue to ripple outward.

We wrote about it plenty over here and heard opinions from just about every person in sports media. Some derided the double standard at work, while others chided Russini for putting herself in that position, regardless of what did or did not happen.

Plenty of men had something to say about the situation, including myself, but when it came down to the comments and thoughts that stuck with me most, it only made sense that they came from women in the industry who know all too well the narratives at play here.

If there’s any piece that’s going to stay top of mind for me in the weeks ahead, it’s the one from Defector’s Diana Moskovitz titled “You Can Never Let Them Think They Have A Chance.”

From a different perspective, I was very curious to know what crisis and reputation strategist Molly McPherson thought of all this. “TikTok’s PR Lady” isn’t in the sports media industry, but I knew there was a strategy at play by both Russini and Vrabel, both of which backfired, and that she helped make sense of how and why.

McPherson explains that this was ultimately a “brand crisis,” and Russini was destined not to survive this with her job because of the way she and Vrabel responded.

“Their first defense was to deflect to friends,” said McPherson. “They delegated the response to their friends, and they did not share the memo with each other about who those friends were.

“This is not an inequity story, or we’re punishing the female and not the male. No, she was given a position of trust with The Athletic, and she broke that trust. That’s why she lost the job.”

She added that while Vrabel is unlikely to suffer any nominal punishment, the “contempt” that he showed in his initial statement is going to come back to bite him.

“Mike Vrabel saying that anyone thinking this is a story is ‘laughable,’ that’ contempt,” she said. “Contempt towards fans, anyone, the press. Anyone that found that to be a story. It’s ‘laughable.’ That’s the stuff that follows you.”

If there’s going to be a lingering conversation about this situation, it’s likely to be based on how things end up for Vrabel, as compared to Russini. And not everyone sees it the same way.

On an episode recorded before Russini resigned, The Sports Gossip Show podcast with Madeline Hill and Charlotte Wilder (which is part of The Athletic’s network) had a notable discussion that put Russini’s perceived actions in perspective when compared to those of some of her contemporaries who did not end up facing any significant punishment while also showing how this incident is a metaphor for the shakiness of insiderdom as a profession.

“My question with the whole coverage of all this, is how is Dianna Russini interlocking fingers with Mike Vrabel, different from Adam Schefter sending an email to a former team president with a full draft of an unpublished story and saying, ‘Mr. Editor, are there any changes you’d like me to make?’” said Wilder. “Adam Schefter still has a job. He wasn’t suspended. Dianna is still under investigation.

“These are all the same kinds of violations, which is that to be an NFL insider, to be an NBA insider, to have any kind of transactional relationship where you are reporting on deals, you need people to like you, you need to get close to people, they have an agenda, you have an agenda, the lines are already blurry.

“It means we need to take a bigger look at the whole industry of having insiders in sports altogether, rather than saying ‘Look at this woman holding hands with this NFL coach.”

The ultimate lessons and takeaways from this sordid (or maybe not that sordid, actually) situation may not be clear for some time, but it’s these takeaways that will stick with me and, one hopes, inform where we do go here as an industry.

“They can send a tech bro to the moon, but they can’t f*cking broadcast a basketball game without ‘technical difficulties. I haven’t seen a technical difficulties slide on a basketball game since I was 12 years old, bro. And this is Amazon? Come on, guys.” - Bill Simmons on Prime’s NBA Play-In Game outage.

“I actually think it’s more of an unfair judgment of women, not to mention it. Like, why is this taboo? Why are two women in a relationship even remotely taboo in 2026? It shouldn’t be at all.” - Jeff Pearlman on the WNBA media silence around Azzi Fudd-Paige Bueckers’ romance.

“I messed up. It was a mortifying oversight. You know, I’m three days away from my 10-year anniversary at the network. If after the show yesterday, the bosses had called me and been like, ‘Turn your keycard in, you’ve lost it.’ I would’ve been like, I get it.” - Nick Wright after leaving Steph Curry off his all-time NBA guards list.

“LeBron said something about Memphis, and the world took over. They made it about race, which is what anybody does when they want to stir up controversy. Y’all are successful! Stephen A., you’re one of the most successful people we have in television. Come on, man. Y’all got to do better, man.” - Charles Barkley chiding Stephen A. Smith for his LeBron-Memphis take.

NASCAR got a 40% bump in its rights fee in its latest TV deal. The cost? Fewer people are actually watching the races.

The recent Cup Series race at Bristol on FS1 averaged just 1.945 million viewers. According to Braylon Breeze of RaceDay Report, that is the first time a Fox Sports race has averaged fewer than 2 million viewers without a rain delay.

Cable is a shrinking platform, which makes NASCAR’s media rights deal, signed in 2023 and implemented in 2025, all the more head-scratching. In the previous set of NASCAR media rights agreements, the NASCAR Cup Series aired nine races on Fox and seven on NBC. In the newest agreements, there are only five races on Fox and four on NBC.

Cord-cutting certainly wasn’t a foreign concept in 2023, so why would NASCAR make such an agreement?

Manny Soloway explains in his latest piece on Awful Announcing.

The NBA postseason is in full swing, so it's time to draft rosters of our favorite NBA announcers, analysts, and hosts. Check out the latest episode of The Play-By-Play for that and some further discussion around Dianna Russini’s resignation from The Athletic over allegations of impropriety with New England coach Mike Vrabel.

You can also find The Awful Announcing Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts.

“Brendan Carr Will Be An American Hero If He Keeps NFL Games On TV,” reads a headline published on OutKick Tuesday.

The self-explanatory gist is that the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation into the NFL, which comes on the heels of FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s months-long questioning of whether the NFL should retain its antitrust protections, would be a major win for consumers in ensuring that NFL games remain on broadcast television instead of increasingly moving to streamers.

The sentiment isn’t notable, but the fact that OutKick is owned by Fox Corporation is worth mentioning.

As Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner first mentioned, the political pressure on the NFL’s streaming strategy is not arriving in a vacuum. The Murdoch and Ellison families, who control Fox and CBS, respectively, are two of Donald Trump’s most prominent billionaire supporters and have more to gain than anyone from a federal government that pushes the NFL to keep games on broadcast television rather than stream them.

Conveniently, other outlets that have been championing the messaging behind the DOJ’s investigation into the NFL include the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Fox News, all of which, you guessed it, are owned by Fox.

And while the NFL’s antitrust exemption is ultimately too important to the league’s own business model for Congress to threaten it seriously, the point of all this hootin’ and hollarin’ appears to be a concerted effort to ensure Fox doesn’t get hosed in the ongoing NFL media rights renegotiations.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that Fox magically appeared to be in play for one of the NFL’s new five-game packages it had carved off, presumably for streaming partners like Netflix or YouTube. Whether that becomes Fox’s make-good or they save a few pennies on their renegotiated deal, one imagines that once that arrangement is complete, we’ll probably hear a whole lot less about NFL antitrust concerns from all these outlets.

And don’t be surprised if that DOJ investigation magically fades away as well…