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😬 Russini/Vrabel update. Management at the New York Times Co. is formally investigating Dianna Russini over photos showing her at an Arizona resort with Patriots coach Mike Vrabel. Russini will be sidelined while the investigation takes place by The Athletic's parent company, while Vrabel will reportedly skip out on New England’s annual pre-draft press conference.

📺 Fox enters the chat. As the NFL shops around a five (or four, depending on who you ask) game package to its broadcast partners for next season, Fox Sports has cropped up for the first time as a suitor. The news comes as Fox reportedly works its government connections to put pressure on the league around its antitrust exemption.

🏀 Jones out. ESPN announcer Mark Jones is leaving the network after more than three decades. Jones has primarily called NBA and college football games for the Worldwide Leader since 1990. Sunday was his final broadcast, though the 64-year-old Jones plans to continue calling local Sacramento Kings broadcasts for “a long, long time.”

📺 Buck coming back? With his ESPN contract set to expire just ahead of the next NFL season, Monday Night Football announcer Joe Buck publicly stated this week that he has no intention of leaving the Worldwide Leader, where he has worked since 2022.

🏈 NFL Network uptake. Now that ESPN has formally absorbed NFL Network, its content is being built into the ESPN app. The network’s offering is expected to be available through an ESPN Unlimited subscription by season kickoff in the fall.

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

Mike Breen doesn’t have to say this stuff.

But as the longtime TV voice of one of the most fervently and widely loved franchises in the NBA, Breen clearly feels it deeply.

In his latest impassioned plea for the NBA to reconsider its long wind-down of local network coverage of the postseason, Breen argued that local announcers are “part of the family, such a big part of why you root for the team.” Even though his bosses at ESPN benefit from the new format, in which national partners get exclusive rights to all playoff games, Breen is correct.

For the most passionate fans, a local sports broadcaster can feel like a close friend. They certainly spend more time with us than some of our actual buddies. The long grind of the baseball, hockey, or basketball seasons favors booths that develop that kind of relationship. Comfort comes from the sounds, the rhythms, and the routines of the games you turn on after your day deposits you in front of the TV.

If our Awful Announcing reader polls are any lesson, fans still love to champion their local crews and critique the worst.

The NBA is removing a key part of how these crews connect with fans and make their money, and for good reason. National partners are willing to pay up, and the old model of regional sports networks is on its last legs. Local networks had rights to the first round of the playoffs under the last TV deal, and even that is gone now.

Leagues will create new models. There are too many games and too many teams for national networks to broadcast a full season. But as more inventory is pushed toward those national networks and fewer people pay for local packages, the relevance of local broadcasters is dwindling.

In the same weekend that Breen called attention to the plight of the local NBA broadcast team, MLB fought its own battle with fans. The national network premiere of Sunday Night Baseball saw NBC’s booth, with local analysts flanking lead announcer Jason Benetti, ripped by viewers.

NBC wants to infuse expertise and familiarity into games rather than parachuting in a national booth, as its competitors do. Here were top local commentators getting a bigger platform and a reimagined role, and it fell flat as well.

The question of how a local analyst can adapt will only become more pressing in the coming years as inventory dwindles for local networks and new financial realities set in. The impact on salary caps is the frontier we’re all waiting to explore, but the people who deliver games for us will feel the crunch far sooner.

Announcers who have called a team’s games for an entire career are valuable resources. It feels cruel to waste the knowledge they’ve developed. Whether through intra-network flexibility, as we see at NBC, or through creative new content offerings, crews will have to think hard about how to stay present in fans’ lives and, ideally, generate more revenue to stay afloat.

Young play-by-play announcers are already coached to film themselves, create their reels in real time, and showcase their personality and creativity online. Many also do local radio hits, podcasts, social media content, and are constantly exploring ways to connect with the audience. It isn’t hard to imagine a future where the strongest, most stable local announcers are the ones who expand beyond the broadcast.

Breen certainly wasn’t reading a eulogy for the local broadcast when he raised the alarm on the NBA postseason changes. Still, it holds more weight when the guy who calls Knicks games and the NBA Finals calls out the friction between the league’s bottom line and the communities of fans pouring their time into teams.

As Breen certainly knows, it is both a business concern and an emotional one. Local sports broadcasters didn’t need any more of a warning, given the rounds of bankruptcy and scale-backs we’ve already seen. But the NBA’s policy change may as well be a lit-up billboard for announcers to get creative sooner than later about how they can fit into whatever comes next.

Without any games being played, the NFL offseason news can be just as much shaped by media narratives as by what decision-makers do and say.

Popular NFL YouTuber and streamer Brandon Perna (aka ThatsGoodSports) joined our talk show, The Play-By-Play, to break down three such sagas: ESPN’s Jalen Hurts exposé, the Dan Orlovsky-Ty Simpson saga, and the allegations Dianna Russini is facing about her connection to Mike Vrabel.

Watch it on YouTube or listen wherever you get podcasts!

Something went haywire with the CBS shot of Rory McIlroy’s final putt to win his second consecutive Masters.

Our first taste of the new Sunday Night Baseball song from Zac Brown Band.

Fantastic farewell from ESPN to Mark Jones after 36 years.

But this was really the clip of the weekend, and wait until you Google what these two were bickering about…

“I gotta say, John Smoltz’s ability to turn every game into a lecture on what’s wrong with baseball today is generational.” - FanGraphs analyst Jon Becker, punctuating an eventful night of drama between Fox’s John Smoltz and the new ABS system.

“Look at any of my speeches at the Republican convention. They’re never political. I’m never talking about one side or the other side.” - UFC president Dana White, seeming to miss the point about a political convention and how it works.

“I can name you every conservative at this company on my hand.” - Barstool’s Connor “Big T” Knapp, claiming the company’s political leaning might be a bit more complicated than outsiders might assume.

On paper, going after the NFL under the banner of keeping games accessible is popular. But what if the NFL calls the government’s bluff and continues its conquest to place more and more games on paid streaming services? Would fans be happy if the government actually revoked the league’s antitrust privileges?

The answer is a near-definite no.

First and foremost, game broadcasts would become exponentially more scattered as media rights return to individual franchises, free to sell them as they see fit. Cowboys games might end up on Fox, sure, but Jaguars games might end up on Apple TV, and Colts games on Peacock, and Lions games on Prime Video. The fan experience would be appreciably worse, right off the bat.

Read Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner with a strong argument on why the federal government’s suddenly critical eye toward the NFL’s antitrust exemption is unlikely to lead to substantive change.