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🏈 Still consulting. Troy Aikman says he plans to keep working with the Dolphins after consulting on both their GM and head coaching searches this offseason and personally championing new GM Jon-Eric Sullivan.

🏀 NIT gutted. For the second consecutive year, just four power-conference schools will compete in the NIT — Auburn, California, Wake Forest, and Oklahoma State — down from 18 two years ago. Virginia Tech, Indiana, Florida State, and Oklahoma are among those declining bids this year.

🎙️ Name wrong. Travis Etienne revealed at his Saints introductory press conference that his last name is French and has been mispronounced for years, saying he gave up correcting people during his freshman year at Clemson. Kyle Brandt used the moment on Good Morning Football to argue NFL broadcasters should be doing that work themselves.

🏒 Brady's shadow. Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen will call the Fanatics Flag Football Classic together on Fox this Saturday, their first broadcast since Tom Brady replaced Olsen as the network's lead NFL analyst ahead of the 2024 season.

🥍 No takers. No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 2 Richmond meet Saturday, April 4, at Northwestern in the top men's lacrosse matchup of the regular season, with no broadcast home currently announced.

⚾ Moving on. Jared Carrabis addressed the future of Baseball is Dead and Section 10 following his split with Underdog Fantasy, saying Jomboy is not in the picture, going independent is genuinely on the table, and there will be no paywall regardless of what deal gets made.

🎙️ Full stop. Jason Goff announced that The Full Go Podcast is ending after more than 600 episodes at The Ringer.

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

The NFL is about to do something it's never quite done before: negotiate new TV deals while the current ones are still in full swing. And of its five broadcast partners, one is walking into those talks with far less leverage than the others.

That would be CBS, and the reason has nothing to do with ratings, reach, or Jim Nantz.

As CNBC's Alex Sherman reported last Friday, Paramount and the NFL are now formally negotiating a restructured version of CBS's current Sunday afternoon deal. The broad strokes are this: the NFL is looking to raise CBS’s annual payment by more than $1 billion over its current $2.1 billion per year fee. In exchange, the league would drop the opt-out clause it holds at the end of the 2029 season, letting the deal run through 2033-34 as originally written.

That's a steep ask for a company that, even under David Ellison's Skydance ownership, isn't exactly swimming in cash. But here's where it gets genuinely interesting.

When Skydance closed its purchase of Paramount last summer, it triggered a change-of-ownership clause buried in CBS's NFL contract. That clause gives the league a two-year window — expiring in the summer of 2027 — to simply walk away from the deal entirely if it wants to. Roger Goodell said at the time that he didn't anticipate using it. That was then.

Now the NFL is openly renegotiating all of its media deals early, and suddenly that clause is a loaded gun sitting on the table. Fox, NBC, ESPN, and Prime Video can all sleep soundly knowing, at worst, the league can't touch their deals until at least 2029. CBS doesn't have that luxury. The NFL can leave whenever it feels like it, and both sides know it.

This is why the league is deliberately going to Paramount first, before any other partner. Puck's John Ourand has reported that the NFL plans to announce new deals piecemeal as they're finalized. The strategic logic for starting with CBS is obvious. If negotiations collapse for any reason, the league can grab that Sunday-afternoon inventory and use it as a bargaining chip with everyone else.

The realistic probability of that happening is low. Ellison didn't engineer a multibillion-dollar purchase of Paramount just to immediately lose the NFL. The league has a financial stake in Skydance. And the NFL, whatever its appetite for leverage, still has strong incentives to keep Sunday afternoons on free broadcast television, not least because its antitrust exemption under the Sports Broadcasting Act depends on maintaining a certain level of accessibility for consumers.

But "unlikely" isn't the same as "impossible," and in a negotiation, the threat doesn't have to be entirely credible to be effective. The NFL's leverage here is structural, not just rhetorical. CBS has to negotiate knowing the other side has an exit ramp with a clear expiration date.

What happens after the CBS deal gets done — or doesn't — will set the tone for every other negotiation the league has. If Paramount folds relatively quickly and accepts its increase, the NFL walks into its Fox and NBC talks knowing the market has been established at that rate. If Paramount pushes back hard and the talks drag toward 2027, the league's timeline for restructuring the whole ecosystem starts to compress.

For a broadcast network that has built its entire primetime and Sunday identity around the NFL for three decades, that's a quietly terrifying position to be in.

In yesterday’s newsletter, we incorrectly stated that this past weekend marked Inside the NBA's last regular-season appearance on ESPN/ABC. One more show remains after the regular-season finale. We also cited Rob Perez's note that none of the four Inside postgame shows since Christmas had made it to 30 minutes — that figure came from an earlier tweet tracking only the first three appearances. There have been more than four Inside the NBA broadcasts on ABC this season.

"Ever since that Brewers thing last year, he's such a loser. Get him out. I don't want him anywhere near me anymore." — Barstool's Big Cat calling for Ken Rosenthal's removal from Fox's WBC and MLB coverage on Pardon My Take, citing the viral incident where Rosenthal stared down a Brewers cameraman after a postgame celebration last season.

"Objectivity for me, not an issue." — CBS and TNT analyst Bruce Pearl on The Dan Patrick Show, insisting he can cover Auburn objectively while still on the school's payroll as an ambassador.

"I'm so tired of all these podcasters and all these guys who never played the game talking about the sanctity, and they ruined basketball." — NBC's Reggie Miller defending Bam Adebayo and Erik Spoelstra during Sunday Night Basketball, redirecting any criticism toward the Wizards for their inability to guard him and invoking Malcolm X in the process.

"Some people just need to be quiet on-air sometimes." — SMU head coach Andy Enfield at his tournament press conference, taking a pointed shot at the "one or two media people" who questioned whether Miami (Ohio) deserved an at-large bid despite going 31-0 in the regular season.

"I just hope this young man can stay healthy and defeat the odds of every pitcher in the big leagues that throws like him that usually ends up getting something. An injury." — Fox's John Smoltz on Paul Skenes during Sunday night's USA-Dominican Republic WBC semifinal, while Skenes was actively pitching.

"The world is going to find out about Gunnar Henderson tonight. He's going to have a monster night." — MLB Network's Dan Plesac before Sunday's WBC semifinal, predicting Henderson would go off against Luis Severino specifically. Henderson proceeded to homer off Severino in the fourth inning of a 2-1 USA win.

"He is ahead of Nikola Jokić's pace. That's how good this guy is." — Fox's Jason McIntyre on Cameron Boozer on The Herd Monday, comparing the Duke freshman to the three-time MVP on the grounds that they are both unathletic big men.

The NFL won its grievance against the NFLPA over the 2026 report cards. The arbitrator ruled the union couldn't make the results public. The league got exactly what it wanted from the legal process, which mattered for approximately zero minutes, because the NFLPA had already sent the results to over 2,000 players, all of whom have agents, all of whom have families, and none of whom were bound by an arbitration ruling that only applied to the union itself.

When the results hit players' phones at the combine, Kalyn Kahler was mid-conversation with other reporters and power-walked back to her hotel room so she could make calls without being overheard. She and her editor built their own spreadsheet on the fly because the NFLPA presents the data alphabetically rather than ranked, sorted through every category for every franchise under deadline, and published before anyone else got there.

There's also something worth noting near the end of her interview with Michael Grant about what the public hasn't seen. The NFLPA holds certain survey results specifically for CBA negotiations, which begin in earnest in about two years. The report cards the NFL fought to suppress are the public version.

Click to read the full interview here.