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🤒 Sick day. Jason Benetti will pinch hit for TNT Sports play-by-play voice Brian Anderson during the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Thursday. Anderson was noticeably ill during his First Four assignment on Tuesday. Benetti was initially scheduled to call first-round games for Westwood One’s radio coverage. Anderson hopes to be available Saturday for the second round.

🏈 SEC Saturdays. ESPN anchor and reporter Laura Rutledge will relinquish one of her many jobs next football season, stepping away as host of SEC Nation, the Saturday-morning pregame show on SEC Network. ESPN mainstay Matt Barrie will succeed Rutledge on the show.

⚾ Opening Day. NBC’s MLB Opening Day booth is now fully known. Former New York Mets pitcher Al Leiter and former Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Neil Walker will serve as game analysts alongside Matt Vasgersian. Adam Ottavino will join Ahmed Fareed in the studio. Analysts for Jason Benetti’s opening game that night have not yet been reported.

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

As the country prepares to enjoy what many believe to be some of the best days on the sports calendar — the first Thursday and Friday of March Madness — this year’s production might be best viewed through a slightly different lens than normal.

For the 16th consecutive season, CBS Sports and TNT Sports will partner to bring viewers the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Soon, those two entities will combine into one, when Paramount’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, in all likelihood, gets the necessary government approvals, both at home and abroad, needed to finalize the transaction.

Much has already been written about what a combined CBS/TNT Sports would look like; the vast array of live sports properties it would control, the potential collaboration between on-air talent, picking and choosing the best elements of both divisions to create a sports behemoth that could maybe even rival ESPN.

But perhaps what a combined CBS/TNT Sports would look like has been hiding in plain sight all along these past 16 years.

Yes, if you’re looking for clues about the future WarnerMount (or ParaBros) sports division, look no further than March Madness. The three-week marathon of college basketball gives us plenty of hints as to how these two companies can maximize the value of their sports portfolio once a merger is formalized.

First, let’s look at the inventory split of March Madness. The Final Four and National Championship rotate each year between CBS and TNT. That’s a completely normal setup for a lot of sports rights deals. The Stanley Cup Final, for instance, rotates between ESPN and TNT each year under the current contract.

But even when Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combine, there’s likely wisdom in keeping the rotation, rather than moving the marquee games onto CBS every year. Allowing TNT, TBS, and truTV to broadcast huge events like the Final Four is critical if the combined company wants to maintain (or even grow) distribution fees with the likes of Comcast, YouTube TV, and DirecTV. It’s the same reason why, although it’d make all the sense in the world from a viewership standpoint, the merged company may opt to keep TNT Sports’ sublicensed College Football Playoff inventory on TNT rather than moving it to CBS. TNT’s distribution agreements (and sublicense agreement with ESPN) may also have language obligating such games remain on the network, which would take the option out of WarnerMount’s hands to begin with.

Regardless, this sort of sharing of inventory could prove beneficial. In just a few years, the CBS/TNT Sports division’s live sports portfolio is likely to look a lot different. Warner’s rights deals with MLB and the NHL expire in 2028, as does its CFP sublicense. Paramount’s Big Ten deal is up in 2030, as are its golf deals with the PGA Tour and PGA Championship. Paramount is going to need to shell out somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion per year more for NFL rights than it currently does, but it’ll also have to spend some significant money to fill out what will quickly become a scattered sports calendar in 2028. Striking deals designed to share inventory between both its broadcast and cable nets, no matter which leagues it partners with, will certainly be part of the strategy.

That much, however, is rather straightforward. What about how the combined company would handle its actual production?

For March Madness, CBS and TNT split their studio teams between the Paramount studios in New York and the Turner studios in Atlanta. Who knows if it’s viable for the combined company, and its tens of billions in debt, to continue operating production hubs in two separate cities. (This is also a question for Atlanta-based CNN.)

But in terms of production sensibilities, there are certainly elements from both CBS and TNT that are worth keeping when the merger is finalized. The March Madness studio shows, for instance, are more “TNT” than “CBS” in how they’re produced. TNT has an emphasis on big personalities that isn’t always part of the CBS ethos. Think Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal on Inside the NBA. Paul Bissonnette on NHL. Pedro Martinez on MLB. Andre Agassi on the French Open. CBS is more Bill Cowher and Matt Ryan on NFL, Rick Neuheisel on college football, and Seth Davis on college hoops. Not exactly personalities that jump off the screen.

Will all of WarnerMount’s sports properties start having an Inside the NBA-type feel in the studio? Maybe. CBS, for its part, does have personality-driven studio programming like its UEFA Champions League show, but it’s more the exception than the rule.

CBS, of course, offers a refinement and elegance that gives game broadcasts an elevated feel compared to other networks. Think about how the network covers the Masters every April. CBS makes watching sports feel like cruising down the highway in your BMW. Smooth and comfortable.

The 16-year partnership between CBS and TNT would seem to indicate a willingness to collaborate, take the best of both networks, and put egos aside in the name of producing the highest-quality show possible. It’s fair to think that’ll translate post-merger.

One thing is for sure. Compared to the rest of the combined company, sports will have a head start in the “Getting Along Department” because of March Madness.

After more than a week of long nights and intense negotiations, the WNBA and WNBPA finally reached a verbal agreement on a new CBA. Several prominent WNBA reporters spent much of last week staked out outside the Langham in midtown Manhattan, covering the negotiations minute-by-minute. So it was curious, then, that ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania was ultimately the one who ended up with all of the crucial details about the new agreement on Wednesday morning. Charania does not dedicate much, if any, time to the W, which rankled numerous media members who found it odd that the prominent ESPN personality was spoon-fed the scoop, rather than someone who knew the ins and outs of negotiation. Here’s Brendon Kleen with more.

This is not the first big WNBA news Charania has broken. In the past, Charania has reported on the league’s expansion proceedings or player free agency moves. Some will remember Charania breaking NFL Draft news back in 2020.

However, the situation is far more blatant here. Charania did not report on the WNBA CBA talks at any stage. Even at his own network, Alexa Philippou and even TV reporter Holly Rowe covered the negotiations more deeply than Charania.

With this type of scoop, the news is usually fed to a particular reporter intentionally. In this case, it appears that the WNBA (and NBA) funneled the information through Charania to get it into the biggest possible microphone. We can tell this because on Get Up, Charania cited “industry” (as well as WNBA) sources while breaking the news. The WNBA is owned in large part by the NBA, and Charania’s comments appear to have come from even higher up than anyone at the Langham in midtown, where the other reporters sat all night.

None of the WNBA, its players, or the NBA owes it to the four reporters staked out at the Langham to give them this scoop. But within ESPN, Philippou and others are designated for the beat on which Charania just pulled rank. In this case, those designations didn’t matter.

Ever since NFL Sunday Ticket moved from DirecTV to YouTube TV in 2023, a cold war of sorts has been happening at commercial establishments like bars and restaurants. For years, bars were equipped with DirecTV’s satellite-based infrastructure to deliver NFL games, and practically every other sporting event under the sun, to its patrons.

But in 2023, with Sunday Ticket moving to YouTube TV, the NFL decided to tap EverPass for its commercial distribution. EverPass uses streaming, rather than satellites, to deliver its content to bars and restaurants.

If you, the household consumer, are annoyed at the transition to streaming, imagine what a pain in the ass it is for the hundreds of thousands of commercial establishments that have relied on satellite technology for years and years.

Acknowledging this reality, EverPass and DirecTV struck a three-year pact in 2023 which allowed DirecTV for Business to license NFL Sunday Ticket from EverPass, allowing these hundreds of thousands of bars to continue using their DirecTV infrastructure.

It appears that will no longer be the case this upcoming season. EverPass informed clients on Wednesday that they’ll need to transition to the company’s streaming hardware, or Spectrum’s Xumo box, in order to access NFL Sunday Ticket. In response, DirecTV penned a scathing rebuttal arguing EverPass is forcing commercial establishments to invest in new equipment “at a time when many businesses are already managing rising costs and tight margins.”

Now, it makes complete sense that EverPass, which pays the NFL lots of money to license Sunday Ticket, would want to leverage that power to compel businesses to transition to its own infrastructure, exactly like DirecTV did decades ago. But the problem is, unlike DirecTV, EverPass still holds a limited number of other, non-NFL properties compared to DirecTV, which has pretty much everything. As such, any self-respecting sports bar will likely need to have both DirecTV and EverPass to access all the sports their clientele will expect.

No doubt, some bars will choose to just have one or the other. And as always, when that happens, it’ll be the fans getting screwed.

Perhaps the companies will find a way to reach another licensing agreement before NFL season starts, but don’t count on it.