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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 ESPN/NFL Media together at last? Talks between the Worldwide Leader and the Shield over the potential acquisition of NFL Media appear to be heating up once again. According to Andrew Marchand, ESPN’s acquisition of NFL Media could be for as much as $2 billion and possibly see the league take an ownership stake in the network. Just in time for ESPN Flagship???

🎤 Mina dunks on Dov. NFL aggregator account Dov Kleiman (which may or may not still be run by Kleiman) seemed to take a shot at ESPN NFL analyst Mina Kimes, implying that many viewers want her fired for discussing the Jackie Robinson DoD controversy (???). Kimes responded by dredging up the long-rumored allegation that Jennifer Lawrence filed a restraining order against Kleiman.

🏀 Charles in charge. Charles Barkley took a break from criticizing ESPN during his CBS NCAA Tournament coverage to criticize Fox News. After his co-hosts were surprised to find out he’d picked his alma mater (Auburn) to lose in the Final Four to Florida, he said, “We’re supposed to be unbiased. What are we, Fox News?! What are we, Fox News in here now? This ain’t Fox News, we don’t have to repeat everything the idiots say every day.”

💡 Barstool logic. CBS and TNT Sports have made being able to watch every tournament game so easy thanks to the March Madness Live app and YouTube TV both having a multi-view option. However, that’s creating a problem for those who don’t want to be spoiled, thanks to a feed slightly ahead of TV broadcasts. The Barstool bros realized the solution was simply to push the app feeds back 30 seconds. And either because of that (or general common sense), that’s exactly what happened. Crisis averted.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

The NBA ratings crisis was completely overblown

If you’ve only been casually paying attention to the narratives and arguments around the NBA this season, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking the league was on the verge of collapse.

When the league began the 2024-2025 season with disappointing television ratings, it became a free-for-all for critics to lambast the NBA and its players over why things were going so poorly. And if you were an NBA television rights partner, you were probably leading that charge.

Three-pointers are ruining the game! The season is too long! Load management! The games are boring! The games are too long! There’s no face of the league! The NBA was better in my day! and, of course, BECAUSE OF WOKE!

That’s not to say that the league doesn’t have issues (the NHL vs. NBA All-Star Weekend experiences certainly drove that home). But a funny thing was happening during all of this complaining: The ratings were course-correcting.

“…As the NBA season has played out, the real truth about the league’s health has come to light. And as it turns out, the NBA is doing just fine,” wrote Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder on Thursday. “With just under a month in the regular season to go, the NBA’s television ratings are basically flat compared to last year’s, averaging 1.85 million viewers per game. However, their top national television property, the NBA on ABC, actually experienced a significant increase over last season.”

In other words, despite the issues driving discourse around the league, no one is fleeing the product. In fact, considering how much ESPN, NBC, and Amazon just paid for the NBA media rights package, it should have been obvious to everyone that fans hadn’t gone anywhere. (Not to mention, Bill Chisholm didn’t just spend $6.1b on the Boston Celtics because it's a losing proposition).

There’s a lot of room for change and evolution, for sure. And perhaps the league lucked out when the Dallas Mavericks lost their damn minds. But the point stands that just like every other major American sports league, the NBA is doing just fine.

📈🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎤

On the latest episode of The Play-By-Play, Awful Announcing’s Brendon Kleen and Ben Axelrod discuss the symbiotic relationship between NFL insiders and agents, drafting the breakthrough sports media stars of the digital age, and how we’re supposed to talk about Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson.

Click the video above to watch or find The Play-By-Play wherever you listen to podcasts!

📈 DATA DUMP 📊

• While they’re not involved in broadcasting March Madness games, ESPN had itself one heck of a men’s college basketball season. The Worldwide Leader saw college basketball ratings rise 8% in viewership over last season. That was spurred by a massive 21% growth during Championship Week. Both the entire season and flagship show, College GameDay, saw their most watched seasons since 2020.

• Along with putting up massive numbers in Japan, the Tokyo Series games between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs gave Fox its “best-ever performance for an Opening Day game played in Asia,” which is a very funny qualifier but nonetheless true. Game 1 on Fox averaged 838,000 viewers while Game 2 on FS1 delivered 361,000 viewers.

• As noted above, NBA viewership has declined just 1% across ABC, ESPN, and TNT compared to this point last year. Games on those three networks average 1.58 million viewers. Per ESPN PR, NBA viewership on ABC is up 10% compared to last season, at an average of 2.68 million viewers per game. ABC’s NBA Saturday Primetime window averages 2.82 million viewers, a bit higher than the network’s overall average.

✍️ AROUND AA ✍️

• “I hope when we get to broadcast the game together, it gets to give people a little bit of a window into what our dynamic is like as father and son,” said Nico Cantor of Thursday’s CONCACAF Nations League semifinals call with father Andrés Cantor. “We’ll have to behave a little bit more than we do on the couch on a Sunday watching soccer, but I think it’s going to be fun.” AA’s Andrew Bucholtz spoke with the father-son duo before their “bucket list” call.

• “I would say, looking back, it was a little amusing. I was part of it, I guess? I really, honestly, was just standing there,” said Ian Rapoport on Friday’s episode of The Awful Announcing Podcast, detailing his infamous run-in with Jordan Schultz at an Indianapolis Starbucks. “It was sort of amusing, and people got a real kick out of it. I mean, doing something like that in front of 50 reporters, I’ve never seen news travel faster.” Listen to the full episode here.

• Thanks to well over 10,000 votes, we have reached Round 2 and the Sweet 16 of our 2025 Best Broadcast Booth Bracket as Awful Announcing names the best broadcast booth in all sports. Check out the bracket and cast your votes now!

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

ESPN is probably pretty happy RGIII doesn’t work for them today

It wasn’t that long ago that Robert Griffin III appeared to be one of ESPN’s rising stars. So when the company fired the Heisman Trophy winner in August 2024, it felt like a shock. We even wrote at the time that it was a big mistake for the Worldwide Leader to let such a talent go.

In the months following, there were rumors and rumblings. Some felt he’d often rubbed people like Paul Finebaum the wrong way. There were rumors that ESPN saw his social media accounts as liabilities. Others noted that his announcing style didn’t quite fit what the company was looking for.

RGIII has praised his time at ESPN and even said he would return one day if the stars aligned. In the meantime, Griffin has dabbled in broadcasting work, most notably for Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL studio show. But most of the time, if you hear about him, it’s because of something he said or did on social media.

Specific to the sports media world, he mostly appears as an engagement baiter, offering up a “safe space” on his X account for people to discuss major stories and political issues, like LeBron confronting Stephen A. Smith or Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE operation.

On Thursday, the former NFL quarterback reinserted himself into the mainstream conversation by posting on X that “sports shows on TV should be about sports not politics.” 

RGIII didn’t note what this was a reference to, but given what had been discussed on ESPN that day, the timing was hard not to notice. During First Take, Jay Williams said that Cooper Flagg could rally the “America first” crowd, while Stephen A. Smith challenged Donald Trump to a debate on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) after the Department of Defense temporarily deactivated an article about Jackie Robinson’s military career on Wednesday. That article was reinstated after ESPN talent such as Jeff Passan and Mina Kimes spoke on Robinson’s importance on the network’s airwaves.

RGIII’s whole schtick has become a kind of “I’m just asking questions” facilitator that doesn’t take sides but reaps the engagement rewards. However, that didn’t work for many people, and he was forced to respond, saying that his post was “not about Jackie Robinson,” adding, “Breaking the color barrier in baseball in itself is not political.”

That, as you might imagine, did not go over well.

RGIII’s responses to Hill and Dennis were similar, saying that Robinson was signed by the Dodgers because he was good at baseball, not as a political statement. The problem with that response is that it’s well-documented that Dodgers owner Branch Rickey wanted to break Major League Baseball’s color barrier and sought out Robinson to do just that. You couldn’t ask for a more overtly political act in 1947.

What’s RGIII’s end goal here? Why make a stand on this particular topic? Is he, as some suggested, “playing both sides” so that he can remain attractive to certain people he might want to canoodle with or have on his podcast? Is it simply an engagement tactic? If so, it’s certainly working in an “all publicity is good publicity” kind of way.

Whatever the reason, we have to imagine the suits at ESPN are breathing a big sigh of relief this morning, knowing he’s not their problem to deal with anymore.