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🙏 Erdahl’s absence. Good Morning Football host Jamie Erdahl addressed her recent absence from the show on Wednesday, sharing in a social media post she has been dealing with “an extremely personal + tragic health situation of an immediate family member.” She will return to the NFL Network show on Monday.

⚾ Sunday sermon. Veteran broadcaster Matt Vasgersian will be the voice of Peacock’s MLB Sunday Leadoff package this season. The semi-exclusive early Sunday window begins May 3. It’s unclear who will serve as analysts for the games, though if NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball strategy is any indication, it could be local analysts each week.

🎙️ Opening Night names. Netflix has officially announced its full broadcast team for MLB Opening Night on March 25. The aforementioned Vasgersian will call the game alongside CC Sabathia and Hunter Pence. Albert Pujols and Anthony Rizzo will hold down the studio alongside host Elle Duncan. Lauren Shehadi will serve as the reporter. And for some reason Bert Kreischer will be there too.

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

On Wednesday, reports surfaced that the NFL is looking to establish a new standalone window game as early as the upcoming season. This time, it’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving that the league has its eyes on.

Yes, as if Opening Night, a Week 1 Friday international game, all of the Sunday morning international games, three Thanksgiving games, one Black Friday game, a Christmas Day doubleheader, and various late-season Saturday games weren’t already enough, prepare to add Thanksgiving Eve to your list of NFL commitments.

Of course, from a business perspective, it makes sense. It always does with the NFL, after all. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is traditionally one of the slowest days on the sports calendar. Last year, the NBA took advantage by scheduling a tripleheader that did very well in the ratings. But typically, Feast Week college basketball is holding down the live sports fort that night.

But the NFL has games to sell. As you’ll likely recall, the league clawed back four games from ESPN as part of its equity deal with the network. In recent years, those games had been allocated for Monday Night Football doubleheaders (RIP, you won’t be missed), but are now free for the NFL to do with as it sees fit.

Well, one of those four games could nicely fit into that Thanksgiving Eve timeslot.

The NFL has been open to scheduling games on odd days of the calendar when holidays afford the opportunity. In 2024, the league arranged a Christmas Day doubleheader on Netflix that was played on a Wednesday.

However, a pre-Thanksgiving Wednesday game would likely require a bit more planning. The 2024 Christmas doubleheader required the four teams participating to play the prior Saturday in order to simulate the same cadence of what a typical Thursday short-week game would bring. That’s only possible late into December, when the NFL can legally broadcast games on Saturdays. A Wednesday game before Thanksgiving would likely necessitate that both teams are coming off a bye in the previous week.

But beyond the special arrangements that would likely be necessary to make this game happen, it’s worth looking at the bigger picture. The NFL seems intent on continuing down a path of fragmentation. Each and every season, the league finds some new date on the calendar for a game, some new platform to put it on, and cashes the nine-figure checks that come with it.

Not only is this a burden for fans, but it’s increasingly caught the attention of the federal government.

Just within the past month, the FCC has opened an inquiry into the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, federal legislation that grants the NFL (and other professional sports leagues) an antitrust exemption which allows the league to pool its media rights together to sell to broadcasters, rather than each team sell its own media rights individually. Less than a week later, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition, Policy, and Consumer Rights, called on the DOJ and FTC to reexamine the antitrust exemption granted to leagues under the bill. Then earlier this week, FCC chairman Brendan Carr questioned whether the Sports Broadcasting Act, written at a time when “broadcasting” meant appearing on one of three channels available via antenna, even applied to leagues selling games to streamers.

To say that interpretation of the legislation would be a threat to the NFL’s business is an extreme understatement. The antitrust exemption granted in the Sports Broadcasting Act is the medulla oblongata of the NFL’s operation. Without it, the business model that has turned the league into a $10 billion per year media behemoth would cease to exist. It’d be starting over from square one, with individual teams selling their own rights.

Now, this isn’t meant to be alarmist. The likelihood that the league’s antitrust exemption goes away entirely is fairly low. But the recent attention on the Sports Broadcasting Act should concern the NFL, especially when it continues to spread out its schedule, and especially if it chooses to put those games on a paid streamer.

Per Sports Business Journal, YouTube is the frontrunner for the NFL’s four-game mini-package. From the NFL’s perspective, it’d certainly be easier to convince federal officials it is upholding its obligations to consumers if, when further fragmenting its inventory, it places games on a free platform like YouTube, rather than a paid streamer like Netflix.

But this is one of the few arenas where there’s little the NFL can do. The federal government holds a big stick in its hands, and if the NFL wants to continue eating its carrot, it’ll have to take what Congress and the executive branch are saying seriously.

Perhaps the league would be well served to consider any further fragmentation of its schedule carefully, rather than simply chasing the most dollars possible and hoping for the best.

Awful Announcing contributor Michael Grant caught up with Seth Davis this week to discuss how he prepares for Selection Sunday, where he’s been part of the must-see broadcast since 2004. Check out Michael’s full interview here!

AA: What’s the most fun thing about the show?

Seth Davis: Everything I do involves covering the action—writing about it and talking about it. For this hour, we are the action. It’s just adrenaline. You spend the day waiting for it to happen, and then you’re off and running. It’s an incredible rush and a lot of fun. The best part is the people I do it with—not just my desk partners, but the behind-the-scenes folks as well. CBS has had many of the same people for all 21 years and longer. It’s a special experience.

AA: What’s the most difficult thing?

SD: Just organizing my thoughts. Everything happens so fast, and I don’t have much time to digest the bracket. I quickly fill out my own bracket. Then we’re going region by region, and I only have time to say maybe three or four things about each one. I could say a hundred things, right? It’s really about whittling that down.

AA: How else have you prepared?

SD: The NCAA has done an amazing job of being proactively transparent. You may know that a few weeks ago, they held a bracket-selection exercise for the media. I was there. It was great, even though I obviously know a lot about this process because I’ve lived it for 21 years. It was a really good exercise for me to refresh and talk to the people who do it and get a renewed feel for it.

Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in a game. Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in a game. Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in a game.

A lot of people in media are having trouble accepting that Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in a game.

What are we doing here, folks?

Chris “Mad Dog” Russo predictably called it a “complete disgrace” of a game. Another usual suspect, Gregg Doyel of the Indianapolis Star diminished Adebayo’s achievement in a column. The Athletic’s Sam Amick argued Adebayo should’ve stopped at 81, because who could dare pass Kobe Bryant’s second-place spot on the list?

Give it a break. Adebayo’s performance is exactly what makes the record book great, regardless of sport. There are anomalies to be found everywhere. Just because Adebayo didn’t have any history of dropping 50 points on a given night doesn’t make him any more or less deserving of the record than Bryant, or any other player for that matter.

But the NBA media continues to prove it cannot take the wins when they come. Even as the league smashes multiyear viewership records this season, young stars continue to transform the game, and no fewer than eight teams look to be legitimate contenders to make noise this postseason, the discourse continues to skew heavily negative.

We get it. Tanking sucks. Load management sucks. If that turns you off, you don’t have to watch. But plenty of people are watching. And plenty of people are enjoying the NBA.

So why does a player scoring 83 points in a game immediately devolve into some weird means testing of the achievement? It came against the Wizards. OK? Last I checked, even those guys on the Wizards are making millions of dollars to play basketball. Miami resorted to fouling to extend the game. OK? Let me introduce you to the chicanery that took place during Wilt Chamberlin’s 100-point game. It was disrespectful to surpass Kobe. Was it really? Would the purveyor of Mamba Mentality buy that argument?

To be clear, not everybody was being a Negative Nelly about Bam’s 83 points. There was plenty of praise.

But time and again, much of the NBA discourse gets bogged down with downers. It’s hard to explain why, but it’s entirely predictable each and every time.