Welcome to The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter where you’ll always find the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis.

Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up for free to make sure you never miss it.

📰 The Seattle Times up. Longtime sports columnist Matt Calkins opted to resign from The Seattle Times after the paper allegedly declined to publish his story in support of Sophie Cunningham and her stance on transgender athletes, he announced on Thursday. Calkins said leaving was entirely his decision after the paper allegedly refused to publish several of his other columns. Luckily for Calkins, Clay Travis is hiring.

🏈 Wednesday night’s not alright. NFL media executive Hans Schroeder told reporters Thursday that the league plans to be “selective” in deciding when to utilize Wednesday games in the future. The league will open the season with a rematch of Super Bowl LX on a Wednesday next month, then play another Wednesday game the night before Thanksgiving in November.

📺 Ratings squabbles. Despite clamoring for changes to how Nielsen measures co-viewing (industry parlance for multiple people watching something in the same room) over the past year, the NFL is now apparently upset at the company’s latest methodology designed to address the league’s very concern. The NFL doesn’t believe Nielsen has gone far enough. Keep that line moving up and to the right, Nielsen!

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

If you thought ESPN’s decision to put Pat McAfee on Monday Night Countdown didn’t give him enough exposure on the Worldwide Leader’s airwaves, you’re in luck. Just one day after ESPN’s big announcement that McAfee would be joining the network’s NFL pregame panel, The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand said, “But wait, there’s more.”

Pat McAfee will also star in a Monday Night Football altcast, pending the league’s formal approval (the NFL approves all alternative telecasts before they make it to air). Assuming the league gives McAfee and his motley crew a thumbs up, he’ll hold down the fort on ESPN2 in weeks that the Manning bros are off. Peyton and Eli are scheduled for 12 games this upcoming season.

Should the McAfee altcast come to pass, the former West Virginia University specialist will be featured on ESPN and ESPN2 for up to seven hours some Mondays during the football season. If there’s a threat of overexposure, ESPN clearly isn’t worried about it.

It’s an interesting strategy given that the near-universal reaction to this week’s news is that McAfee is too many places where people don’t want him. Just take a look at what the internet machine has cooked up about him in recent days.

Sure, these are people on the internet trying to make a joke, but there’s clearly a feeling that ESPN is going to the McAfee well a bit too much. After all, he’s now going to be a centerpiece on the network’s two biggest properties: the NFL and college football. Like it or not, McAfee is going to be involved in your football-watching experience at some point this season, unless you plan to boycott every game on ESPN.

So why is the network choosing to put him everywhere while knowing that doing so is upsetting a portion of its viewers? Well, the answer is quite simple. Very few people are going to turn off a game because McAfee’s in the studio or doing an altcast. They might cringe when they tune in a bit early for the pregame. They might take a trip to the fridge when he’s on at halftime. But they’re still going to watch the game.

Meanwhile, McAfee’s fans will tune in in droves. They’re loyal. And more importantly, many of McAfee’s fans exist outside the pay-TV ecosystem. These are potential customers for ESPN. The 52-year-old father of two with enough disposable income to not think about his DirecTV bill? ESPN doesn’t need to please him. The 25-year-old recent college grad who’s a couple years into his career and has a bit of money to play around with for the first time in his life? That’s where McAfee’s audience is, and that’s where ESPN needs to make hay.

See, as it stands, McAfee fans don’t really need ESPN to consume the vast majority of the McAfee content they want. His show streams for free on YouTube each and every day. A McAfee superfan without ESPN only stood to miss his College GameDay appearances and the odd college football altcast last year. Now, he’s part of the Monday Night Football pregame and he’s doing regular NFL altcasts in addition to all the college football content. It’s becoming harder for the person that wants to keep up with all things McAfee to do so without an ESPN subscription.

If ESPN is able to convert some of these McAfee fans (McAfans?) into bundle subscribers or ESPN Unlimited subscribers, its strategy will pay off. The network knows no one is going to cancel their subscription because they can’t escape McAfee. But quite a few people might purchase ESPN to see him. And if a few fans get upset along the way, so be it.

ESPN “soft launched” the scorebug it plans to use for Super Bowl LXI this upcoming February during a Raiders-Texans preseason game last night. Here are some looks at the new graphics.

With the fate of Tony Romo at CBS firmly up in the air, Rich Podolsky, a longtime newspaper man, author of “You Are Looking Live!”, and former writer for The NFL Today, took a look back on the circumstances that led to Brent Musburger’s ouster at CBS 36 years ago.

The network had a similar refrain about its star broadcaster then: We have a deep bench.

Podolsky revisits the Musburger situation and teases what it could mean for Romo’s future at the Tiffany Network. Check out the full story here, which is excerpted below.

Back in 1990 CBS was in a similar position as today, having to decide whether to keep one of its top broadcasters. Brent Musburger’s $2 million-a-year contract was due to be renewed that year. He was the face of CBS Sports, and he had come a long way since first joining the network full-time as the host of The NFL Today 15 years earlier.

In 1975 new CBS Sports president Bob Wussler wanted The NFL Today to be the first pregame show to go live. He also wanted it to have the first black football analyst (Irv Cross) and the first woman co-host (Phyllis George). A year later he added Jimmy The Greek Snyder to discuss point spreads and gambling. Musburger was the one who made it all work. He invented the position of studio host as we know it today, and that first year The NFL Today won an astounding 13 Emmy Awards.

Musburger’s popularity grew along with the show’s and by 1990 he had his brand on just about every major event CBS Sports did. Besides The NFL Today, he was the lead broadcaster for the NBA on CBS, NCAA Football, the Belmont Stakes and the wrap-around host for coverage of the U.S. Open and the Masters.  Plus, he was due to be the lead on CBS’s newly acquired Major League Baseball and the ’92 and ’94 Winter Olympic Games.

Back in the early days of The NFL Today, Ted Shaker was the program’s producer. He and Brent used to drive together to the studio every Sunday morning from their homes in Connecticut. By 1990 Shaker had moved up to become the network’s lone executive producer and in that role he built a deep bench behind Musburger. That bench included Jim Nantz, James Brown, Greg Gumbel, Andrea Joyce, Brad Nessler, Verne Lundquist, and Lesley Visser. Shaker asked Brent to give up some of those plum assignments, but Brent refused.

Imagine you were the manager of the New York Yankees and you had four terrific starting pitchers. But instead of rotating them every fourth day you started the same guy every game and the other three just sat in the bullpen. That’s the dilemma Shaker and CBS Sports’ president Neal Pilson faced. The starting pitchers were Musburger, Nantz, Brown, and Gumbel, but only Brent was handed the ball.

Recent weeks on the NFL media rights beat have marked a changing of the tides.

Last September, the NFL publicly acknowledged for the first time that it would seek to strike early renewals with its broadcast partners several years prior to the 2029-30 season, when it has the contractual option to exit most of its agreements. The goal for the league was simple: negotiate higher rights fees now and, in return, remove the exit option at the end of the decade, allowing its partners to guarantee themselves NFL inventory well into the 2030s.

At first, it looked as if new deals were inevitable. After all, NFL programming is borderline existential to legacy broadcast networks like CBS, Fox, and NBC, all of which still rely on lucrative retransmission fees from distributors and local affiliates to fund their businesses. But then, things began to change. The NFL started facing pressure from all corners of Washington. Congress, the FCC, the DOJ, and others all started scrutinizing the shift of live sports off of linear television and onto streaming services. Those roadblocks seemingly bought league partners enough time to where no new deals were finalized prior to the 2026-27 season, as the NFL reportedly wanted.

Now, any early deals would only grant the NFL three additional seasons at higher rights fees (assuming it would otherwise exercise its opt-out clause at the end of the decade). And it seems like the league’s broadcast partners are starting to sense they have a bit of leverage to hold out without risk of losing the NFL following the 2029-30 season.

During a recent earnings call, Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch outright said his network won’t negotiate early, instead saying Fox will negotiate with the NFL on a normal cadence around the 2029-30 timeline. Further reporting suggested that negotiations between CBS and the NFL were “on hold” amid Paramount’s ongoing effort to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. And while CBS Sports president David Berson did not outright rule out early negotiations when speaking with Awful Announcing last week, the undertones of his answers suggested nothing was imminent between the two sides.

But despite all of the headwinds, the league itself doesn’t appear to be frazzled. Asked by Awful Announcing during a conference call on Thursday whether its outlook on early media rights renewals had changed, the league said no.

“As we’ve said before, we’re always talking to our partners, right? We’re always talking about what we can do better, both in what’s right in front of us and what’s longer term. So, I don’t think anything’s changed on our end,” the NFL’s head media executive Hans Schroeder said. “We’re always going to look at opportunities to sort of make sure we have the right model, partnerships, in place for the future. We’re lucky and incredibly fortunate to have great partners today. And we have partnerships that are in place for a number of years with our existing partners, so we and they remain committed about delivering the best experience for our fans. And we’ll continue and stay focused on that, and continue to engage with our partners about opportunities that we have ahead of us, where we can better and even better serve our fans. So nothing’s changed.”

As Schroeder makes clear, it is not admitting defeat on this front. At least not yet. But without any firm details about the status of talks or any potential timelines, it’s fair to wonder how seriously the league is pursuing this path now. If the NFL holds out until 2029-30, it has the potential to rework the entire structure of its broadcast layout. If it strikes new deals early, the league loses a lot of its flexibility and will more or less be stuck with the same core packages that exist today into the mid-2030s.

Is it worth it for the league to sacrifice that flexibility for three years of additional revenue? The ability to almost fully reconfigure its existing packages at the end of the decade is arguably more valuable.

For now, however, the NFL seems to be keeping its options open. It just appears less likely that it’ll have willing participants on the other side of the table prior to 2029-30.