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🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Why doesn’t the NFL want teams on Bluesky?

On the January 26 episode of Patriots Unfiltered, New England Patriots VP Fred Kirsch off-handedly admitted in response to a fan question that the league had asked them to take down an account they created on Bluesky.

“We had an account briefly on Bluesky but the league asked us to take it down because it’s not an approved social media platform for the NFL yet,” he said, surprising his three co-hosts. “Whenever the league gives us the green light we’ll get back on Bluesky.”

As we noted in our post, several authentic-looking NFL team Bluesky accounts have sizable followings. However, none of them are verified, and no NFL team promotes a Bluesky account on its website’s social media sections.

Even then, while Bluesky doesn’t have the gross numbers of X, Threads, or TikTok, its user count is about to cross the 29 million mark and seems primed to keep growing as people flee X and try to figure out TikTok’s future. So even if the NFL doesn’t have an official presence, why go as far as to block teams from even being there?

Before stepping into the newsworthy considerations, there are some logical possibilities to think about. The NFL is notoriously controlling about its brand, and subsequently, its team’s brands. So it does make sense to find out that they might just say no for now until they have a game plan.

It’s also worth considering that they might have existing partnerships and contracts that a Bluesky presence would endanger due to the kinds of content shared. They might feel the need to dot their i’s.

And then there’s the reality that Bluesky isn’t a large corporation like X, Meta, or TikTok, where NFL executives can recognize the names of their C-suite leaders and check a stock price. There might still be some hesitancy to get into bed with a company they view as small potatoes, at least for now.

Of course, it’s hard not to consider how Bluesky has made a name for being home to those who want to leave X (formerly Twitter) behind due to Elon Musk’s many, many, many deficiencies. The NFL and X have a strong partnership and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that they might just pump the brakes on Bluesky as a gesture of good faith to Musk, who would almost certainly have something to say about the NFL pushing fans to that platform. It’s a headache they might simply not want to deal with.

Still, if the NFL is good at anything, it’s finding ways to make money. And as X becomes more toxic and people continue moving over to platforms like Bluesky, at some point they’ll realize they’re leaving money on the table. At the very least, you’d think they’d want to make sure they lock up all the pertinent usernames.

There are a lot of factors at play here, whether directly or indirectly, and the NFL’s eventual move to Bluesky (or lack thereof) feels like it will be a bellwether of where things are going in the sports social media space.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

🎤 MEDIA MOMENTS ✍️

❌ NFL and NBA Reddit communities have banned X posts. The news that several notable Subreddits, including R/NFL and R/NBA, have banned posts and even screenshots from X, is more than just performative. Reddit has become a valuable part of Google’s search algorithm and a viral post on those subreddits can garner tens of thousands of views and site visits. It’s also the kind of decision that might push sports media holdouts to other platforms since they want to keep showing up there.

🏈 Dan Wolken had “threatening'“ experience in Notre Dame locker room. The USA Today reporter followed up his social media post about “bizarre scenes” in the Notre Dame locker room after their loss to Ohio State expounded on his experience Wednesday, saying players “said some pretty threatening and insulting things to me” and other reporters. No words from the school yet.

⛳ TGL producer jokingly told player to ‘keep it close.’ Billy Horschel told ESPN’s Marty Smith that TGL producer Jeff Neubarth “asked us nicely to keep it close” following a series of blowouts. Horschel later said he was being sarcastic and that the comments were made in jest. We tend to agree, though considering the competitive and gambling implications, it might be best to keep those kinds of jokes to yourselves.

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• As expected, NBC named Mike Tirico as their lead play-by-play announcer for the NBA’s return beginning next season. Tirico will call “one or more games per week” following the end of the NFL season and the 2026 Winter Olympics.

• Mike Golic and son Mike Golic Jr., are sports media free agents once again after DraftKings chose not to renew their contracts, first reported by Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports. “DraftKings said that they were going to stop all in-house produced shows,” Golic told Barrett Media.

• Charlotte Wilder, the longtime sports feature writer and on-air host, announced that she has left Meadowlark Media a little under two years after joining. Wilder hosted a daily basketball show called Oddball and contributed to Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz as well as Pablo Torre Finds Out and GoJo and Golic. Wilder teased she had a next stop in the works.

• Ashley Nicole Moss debuted her new NBA show Triple Threat Wednesday on CBS Sports Network. The show will air every Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET and will also be accessible on the CBS Sports YouTube page. “This show will focus on the unique intersection of basketball & culture,” per Moss.

• CBS, ESPN, and Amazon announced extensive broadcast plans for the 2025 NWSL season Wednesday.

📈 DATA DUMP 📊

• The first 12-team College Football Playoff has been deemed a success overall but the ratings for the national championship game might be cause for concern. Monday’s title game between the Ohio State Buckeyes and Notre Dame Fighting Irish averaged just 22.1 million viewers across the Nielsen-rated ESPN networks, the fifth-least watched title game since the debut of the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, per Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch. We’ll talk a little bit more about potential reasons why below.

• WWE’s “Netflix Era” got off to a hot start, with Raw drawing its biggest U.S. audience in more than five years. However, the second episode of Raw on Netflix saw global viewership drop from 5.9 million to 3.7 million — a 37 percent decline. Given the hype of the initial episode, this was hardly a surprise, but it will be worth keeping an eye on where ratings level out.

• The Media Rating Council announced Wednesday that it had accredited Nielsen’s innovative Big Data + Panel National TV measurement, which is good news for streamers who want to boast about their NFL ratings.

 ️‍🔥The Closer🔥

Have we finally maxed out the amount of football we can handle?

If you’ve listened to enough people in charge of college football, including those at ESPN, you know how much they’re always crying for powerhouses to play for national titles. Keep your Indianas, Boise States, and SMUs, they’d be happy as a clam if the CFP was just Michigan, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Alabama, Georgia, USC, Clemson, Texas, Penn State, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and LSU every season.

Based on that, you had to figure THE Ohio State vs. Notre Dame would pull in huge numbers. Especially when you factor in the Ryan Day drama and viewers getting very familiar with both of these teams very well from the previous two rounds.

Instead, the ratings fizzled. 22.1 million viewers, which certainly made it the most-watched college football game of the season, but one of the least-watched championship games since 1998.

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be exactly the kind of title game the powers-that-be have been clamoring for? Wasn’t this supposed to prove why we don’t want schools like TCU playing for the title? What happened?

There are actually quite a few possibilities. By the time the game was played, Ohio State was the prohibitive favorite, tamping down excitement. And when they raced out to a 21-7 lead at halftime and a 31-7 lead in the third quarter, it stands to reason that many viewers checked out.

A lot of people criticized the Monday evening timeslot. They certainly got the red meat they were looking for with this rating number. It’s certainly a possible factor, although we don’t think it’s as big a deal as critics made it out to be.

One factor that might be worth considering is that while the CFP was a huge success (despite early whining), it added a lot of football to the casual fan’s viewing schedule. Furthermore, it stretched the CFB season deep into January. That also meant it was splitting time with the NFL Playoffs, which have been gobbling up attention and ratings as expected (and not making any concessions for the CFP).

Also, consider that audiences have seen a lot of Ohio State and Notre Dame in the last nine weeks. They’ve heard the storylines. They’ve seen the big plays. They’ve done the dance. By the time Monday came around, it might have felt like fait accompli.

I know it might sound crazy, but one wonders if by the time we got to OSU vs. ND, some football fans were just a little tapped out for the first time in a long time. Perhaps ever. It’s hard to quantify and might not be true, but it’s certainly worth considering if we’ve finally stretched our football viewing pleasures beyond their max.

Of course, we’re always the first to say that you shouldn’t make sweeping judgments about something like the CFP based on the outcome of one season. So for now, this remains a theory and nothing more. But there’s going to be a lot of attention on next year’s championship game, especially if it’s another showdown between blue bloods. If that ratings number doesn’t pop the way it should, we have to believe this is a theory worth considering, crazy as it might seem for football-addled America.