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⚽ Not bad for daytime TV. The USMNT’s game against Australia last week averaged 14.781 million viewers, a few million shy of the opener against Paraguay but a strong number for a Friday at 3 p.m. ET, especially given the game’s quiet second half.

🏁 NASCAR on deck. The latest experiment in the race to put on the biggest spectacle sporting event saw NASCAR host a race at Naval Base Coronado, with the Prime Video team broadcasting from an aircraft carrier. To make things even more interesting, a fan was arrested on air for trying to enter the track.

📺 Coke ad makes history. A Coca-Cola ad during last Thursday’s Mexico-South Korea World Cup match became the first picture-in-picture placement for Fox Sports during a hydration break, which the network said it would use as part of a hybrid approach to airing commercials during the FIFA-mandated stoppages.

🎙️ Cowherd’s conditions. Colin Cowherd revealed he could sell a minority stake in The Volume, though he does not have interest in fully divesting from the digital media company he founded in 2021, and wants to stay involved with content strategy.

🎧 Slow on the uptake. A Hollywood insider reported engagement with video podcasts on Netflix has been “low” after a spending spree last year, though survey data from Edison earlier this month showed 14% of respondents had consumed a podcast on the streaming platform.

Somewhat lost in a critical report from Puck’s Matt Belloni about Netflix’s supposedly poor consumption numbers for expensive video podcasts it is licensing from top production companies was that Netflix continues to cede ground in what we can best describe as attention share.

Belloni reported that one group of analysts had estimated Netflix’s daily engagement per subscriber was down roughly 8 percent last quarter. This has always been the best argument for why Netflix should pursue more live sports, but for now, it is focusing its attention on another vertical of content that it for too long let others own: podcasts.

Netflix has struck several deals since last fall to license video podcasts from popular networks like The Ringer, iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports. The lone indicator of how much it is paying came from Barstool, which is supposedly set to receive eight figures annually from the streamer for three of its biggest shows. Netflix also launched several new shows that it owns and produces, but are not distributed on traditional podcast feeds.

Podcasts are an obviously useful way to increase the time users spend on a platform, especially as they have become more bloated in recent years. Like re-runs on cable or talk radio in the car, audiences hit play on a podcast and let it go in the background for hours.

While podcasts are nowhere near the driver of engagement of a live sports package, Netflix seems to indeed be getting a bump. Fourteen percent of respondents told Edison they had used Netflix to watch a podcast.

We typically think of sports as a category where Netflix is competing with traditional networks, but here it is using the popularity of sports to draw podcast audiences that had learned to go to YouTube. The experiment is part of the media industry’s growing effort to compete with YouTube by becoming more like it.

Netflix likely won’t draw many new subscribers solely to watch podcasts that are available elsewhere. These shows are intended to keep people on the app and show that users can have YouTube-like experiences there. The same is true, increasingly, on most other streaming apps.

The ESPN app is perhaps the most glaring example. Scroll down far enough on the more personalized, expansive app that the Worldwide Leader launched last fall, and you will see video clips straight from the company’s YouTube channel, matching thumbnails at all. Watch one, and another will autoplay shortly after. The app caters to your team affiliations and favorite sports.

Sound familiar? Now what happens if all of Disney, on a more centralized app, mimics YouTube’s user interface and algorithm to feed you not only Stephen A. Smith takes or sports highlights, but also clips from Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, The View, and a Marvel trailer?

A similar evolution is playing out on Fox-owned Tubi and Fox One as well as on Spotify, where users can now add “chapters” or segments of podcasts individually into their queues or playlists. The segmentation of longform talk content no longer only lives on YouTube or vertical video apps.

Because sports is one of the main drivers (and least controversial verticals) of these conversation shows, it will, as seen with Netflix’s spending spree, continue to drive this push across the industry. If it is successful, the popularity of sports and sports content will be a big reason why.

Fox Sports has drawn all sorts of takes and critiques for its flashy new World Cup studio team, which includes two rentals from rival networks and an ultra-confident newbie alongside the polarizing Alexi Lalas.

YouTuber and longtime Bay Area broadcaster Brodie Brazil joins The Play-By Play LIVE to explore what Americans actually want from World Cup coverage as well as Fox’s acquisition of Roku, Pat McAfee’s extension talks with ESPN, and more.

Watch the episode on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify.

Jubilee Media is one of the big success stories of the decade in digital media, with a YouTube channel posting more than 10 million subscribers and several popular, recognizable series designed to make political content more engaging for young audiences.

I was struck this week by the great content coming out of an imitator in the sports world, CLASH, which is produced by TNT Sports subsidiary Bleacher Report.

Last week’s episode featured Carson Breber of the Nerd Sesh podcast bringing an analytical perspective to debates over NBA history against a group of casual hoops fans. I found it delightful; the 45-minute runtime flew by. CLASH borrows a snappy, harsh editing style from Jubilee’s Surrounded series and foregrounds a mode of content that continues to perform quite well on YouTube even as it is ignored almost entirely by traditional sports media.

This reality TV-style sports debate competition doesn’t have an exact parallel on an old sports network, but the point isn’t the format, exactly. CLASH is, effectively, a new spin on radio hosts taking callers, or ESPN’s Sports Nation, or a classic David Letterman man on the street segment. The subjects, somewhat surprisingly, of Breber’s episode were players from across NBA history, like Bill Russell and Steve Nash, whose names would rarely be spoken on a modern sports television show.

But some of the CLASH videos pull television-level audiences or better. A video from February titled “1 Gen Z vs. NBA Old Heads” has been watched by more than 700,000 people.

I always try to point out examples where online sports content draws on the passions and nerdiness of fans, even and especially younger ones, when I find them. Because my operating thesis about why these fans are flocking to live-streaming, social media and YouTube for their sports content is because that is where they can find the stuff that has always been entertaining and fun. The problem is that mainstream sports media ditched it a while ago as their deteriorating business models forced them to produce only shows that generate massive attention or are attached to live games.

Content creators and digital companies, meanwhile, are free to riff on ideas we all know still work. Stuff like Sports Science, “Stump the Schwab,” investigative pieces and documentaries. Yes, that is what the top YouTube and social media creators are putting out.

CLASH clearly came from someone saying “what about Surrounded for sports” at a B/R brainstorm meeting, but it works because it taps into the old curiosities and fascinations of sports fans. People with microphones barking at one another about why one player is better than the other is a sports media recipe that will never grow stale.

“I don’t care what people think they know, they see stuff. It’s not right … everyone loves each other, I promise.” - Fox Sports World Cup anchor Rebecca Lowe, insisting there’s no beef among her cohosts on the network’s top studio team.

“He’s a self-appointed moral compass of America, when he’s had zero success on any platform he’s ever been on.” - WFAN’s Craig Carton, laying into Dan Le Batard over his supposed hypocrisy and reliance on media beef to fuel his content.

“These are Tiger’s progeny, if you will. And it rains f-bombs on the PGA Tour.” - Golf analyst Brandel Chamblee, laying the blame of the seemingly increased profanity on the PGA Tour at the feet of the legendary Tiger Woods.

“If you grew up calling it soccer and changed out of insecurity or some misguided belief it makes you more authentic/credible…it doesn’t. … It makes you look like a weak poser.” - Fox’s Alexi Lalas, offering a typically over-the-top take on the name of the sport he covers.

“…when that seven starts getting close as the first number, when I’m about 70, we’re probably around the corner.” - Colin Cowherd, sounding off on his eventual retirement after recently signing an extension with Fox Sports after interest from ESPN.

CBS Sports is heading into the 2026 NFL season with presumably two open slots in its fourth broadcast booth.

ESPN re-signed Jason McCourty to a new multi-year exclusive deal on Thursday, pulling him away from the CBS booth he shared last season with play-by-play man Andrew Catalon, analyst Charles Davis, and sideline reporter A.J. Ross.

Davis is gone too, heading to college football full-time after being named Gary Danielson’s successor as CBS’s lead Big Ten analyst alongside Brad Nessler and Jenny Dell.

That leaves Catalon and Ross as the only returning pieces of a booth that has now cycled through three different analyst combinations in as many years.

Click to read more from Awful Announcing’s Sam Neumann on the opening in CBS Sports’ No. 4 NFL booth, which has cycled through several combinations in recent seasons.