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⚾ Blacked out, tuned out. According to a new Athletic survey, 40% of MLB fans say they are regularly impacted by blackouts in their home markets — a number that should embarrass a league that keeps insisting it's serious about growing its audience while making it structurally impossible for an MLB fan in Iowa to watch their own team.

🎙️ Shouldn't have laid off all those reporters. Timberwolves podcaster Dane Moore publicly rejected ESPN's repeated requests to use his Anthony Edwards locker room content, telling the network's assignment desk exactly what the problem was in nine words.

👋 The last call. Tommy Hutton, the longest-tenured television analyst in Marlins history, announced he will retire at the end of the 2026 season after nearly three decades in the South Florida booth, including the stretch between 2015 and 2018, when Jeffrey Loria pushed him out for being "too negative" before the organization came to its senses.

🤖 Slop on the screen. The Pat McAfee Show aired an AI-altered photo of Lorenzo Styles Sr. that made the former Ohio State linebacker look roughly the size of a building, apparently sourced from a well-documented fake sports insider account.

🏀 The doctor will not be taking questions. Steve Kerr admitted he made a "stupid mistake" after going on the radio to dismiss Kristaps Porzingis' POTS diagnosis, then walking it back two days later.

⛳ Lowry, unfiltered. Shane Lowry blew a three-shot lead with three holes left at PGA National on Sunday, losing to the Bear Trap in about as dramatic a fashion as the course allows, and then did something rare. He stood in front of microphones and talked about it honestly, including the part about wanting to win for his four-year-old daughter, who was waiting on the 18th green.

🎧 Nothing to see here. Bill Simmons and Max Kellerman pushed back on criticism of the Rich Paul Game Over podcast, with Simmons comparing the backlash to the reaction Draymond Green got when he launched his show.

Colin Cowherd used to love the combine, and the fact that he doesn't anymore is more revealing than anything that happened on the field in Indianapolis this week.

It isn't that Cowherd's viewing habits determine the event's future — they don't — but rather that someone who genuinely cared about the convergence of college and pro football, who found real value in the scouting theater of it all, has reached the point where he turns it on for 20 minutes and changes the channel. That kind of disillusionment doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's the product of an event that has been pulling in two directions for years, trying to be legitimate scouting infrastructure and made-for-television entertainment at the same time, and has ended up doing neither particularly well.

John Middlekauff's prediction that the combine gets shut down within a decade is the more aggressive version of the same argument, and he has the credibility to make it. Middlekauff has worked in NFL front offices and understands what teams actually want from the week in Indianapolis, which increasingly isn't what the week actually provides.

Day 1 of this year's combine had a 37% participation rate for on-field drills. Fernando Mendoza, the projected No. 1 overall pick, didn't throw, continuing a trend of top quarterbacks opting for pro days organized in environments where they control the conditions, the audience, and the narrative.

The official 20-minute interviews between teams and prospects, once a genuine selling point of the combine, have been so thoroughly professionalized by agents that NFL executives openly admit the conversations have become useless. Agents now run formal combine prep programs designed specifically to ensure nothing genuine gets said in those rooms, because the financial difference between being drafted 20th and 50th is significant enough that nobody can afford an unscripted moment. The Rams recognized years ago that they could do better work on their own — through tape, through the Senior Bowl, through the visits they control — and stopped treating Indianapolis as essential. Other teams have quietly followed.

What's striking about this week's criticism, though, is how confidently it treats the combine's decline as a scouting tool as evidence that the event itself is in trouble, when the more you look at what the combine has actually become, the less those two things seem connected.

The combine hasn't functioned primarily as a scouting event for a long time. What it actually is — and what it has been for at least the better part of a decade — is the sports media calendar's most effective solution to one of its most persistent problems, which is the dead zone between the Super Bowl and the NCAA Tournament where there are no NFL games, March Madness hasn't arrived yet, and the appetite for football content significantly outpaces what's available. The combine fills that hole completely, and the way it fills it has very little to do with what NFL Network puts on air at noon. Pat McAfee broadcasts live from the floor. Beat reporters who just spent a week at Radio Row for the Super Bowl fly back out for another week of access and sourcing. Middlekauff himself recorded the podcast where he predicted the combine's demise at the combine, which captures the dynamic almost too neatly.

By the end of the week, Sonny Styles had gone from a prospect people were genuinely lukewarm on entering Indianapolis to one generating legitimate top-five buzz. And none of that had anything to do with his 40 time. It had to do with the week of reporting, conversation, and content that surrounds him simply because he showed up somewhere that every scout, reporter, and podcaster in the sport was already going to be anyway.

None of that goes away because the on-field participation rate is declining, and that's why Middlekauff's doomsday scenario — while understandable — misreads where the actual leverage is. The NFL is not going to voluntarily give up a week of football content, and the media infrastructure built around the event — the shows, the podcasts, the access, the clips — has become valuable enough on its own terms that it would survive even a significant reduction in on-field activity.

What is unsustainable, though, is the TV broadcast as currently constructed, and that's where the criticism should be directed. Eight hours of live daytime coverage of position groups that casual fans struggle to evaluate was a difficult product to defend, even when the stars showed up. You could argue that the broadcast is still pretending to be something the event stopped being years ago, and that pretense is what's eroding the combine's reputation, not the participation numbers themselves.

Cowherd and Middlekauff are right that the current version isn't working. Where they go wrong is in assuming that means the combine itself is dying, when what's actually dying is a broadcast that never figured out what it was covering.

The combine has already made its peace with what it is — a week-long content event that happens to involve some football drills — and the teams that have quietly stopped going have made their peace with it too. The only ones still pretending otherwise are the people responsible for filling eight hours of television with it.

That’s all to say that combine doesn't need saving. It just needs a broadcast that finally tells the truth about what it's been covering all along.

In yesterday's newsletter, we mistakenly stated that early in Paramount's bidding process for Warner Bros. Discovery, the company had submitted a bid valuing WBD's cable assets at $3 per share. Paramount asserted throughout the process that those assets should be valued between $0-1 per share, while WBD argued they were worth upwards of $3.

"I tip my hat to the Cris Collinsworths that can go on two or three nights per week and regurgitate the same thing they said 30 years ago." - Former Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer explaining why he walked away from traditional broadcasting.

"The most extravagant bar mitzvah I went to was up in Woodstock...Me and Phil Simms did it. And the father of the son had flown in all of these exotic animals, from tigers to giraffes." - Mets broadcaster Ron Darling, recounting his days working bar mitzvahs to make rent during his early playing career.

"We're emotionally unstable at times. And it shows. We're up 10, 12 points, and then we just lose our f*cking mind and get f*cking techs." - Arkansas-Pine Bluff head coach Solomon Bozeman, after his team lost to Mississippi Valley State — the last-ranked team in KenPom.

"Per sources, Dalton Risner is signing back to the Cincinnati Bengals, and sources are me, baby." - Whitney Risner, beating the entire NFL insider industry to her husband's re-signing news and feeling like Adam Schefter about it.

"Ah damn Phil sorry you feel that way…see you 9/26/26." - CC Sabathia, responding on X after Phil Mushnick wrote a column arguing the Yankees shouldn't retire his number.

"The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women...Allowing this night to go forward without protest would reflect poorly on us as an NBA community." - Spurs center Luke Kornet, in a Medium post calling on the NBA to cancel the Atlanta Hawks' Magic City promotional night.

"When you the best player on the team, whatever you say, you right. Give him the ball, get the f*ck out the way. That's the offense." - Gilbert Arenas, in a since-deleted video ripping USC after Chad Baker-Mazara's sudden departure — with Arenas' own son on the roster.

Watching Mike Breen, Tim Legler, and Richard Jefferson call Saturday's Lakers-Warriors game on ESPN, the thing that stands out most isn't any individual moment but rather the sense that you're watching a booth still in the process of figuring out what it wants to be.

Breen dominated the broadcast in the way that he has always dominated broadcasts, peppering in statistics and contextual detail at a rate that occasionally made the whole thing feel like a radio call, the kind where the announcer is describing what he sees because he can't trust that you can see it yourself. That instinct isn't entirely wrong for a play-by-play voice, but it has a cost, and the cost here is that Legler and Jefferson spent significant stretches of the first half waiting for an opening that Breen wasn't quite leaving for them.

There's a version of a point guard who makes everyone around him better by knowing when not to have the ball, and there's a version who controls the game so thoroughly that his teammates stop moving without him.

Breen, at least on Saturday, was closer to the latter.

What makes that worth paying attention to is that Legler is genuinely one of the sharper analysts working in basketball right now, someone whose value to this broadcast goes well beyond what Saturday's blowout allowed you to see. He thinks like a coach in the specific rather than the generic sense — not just offering the reflexive "they need to get stops" observations that fill dead air on most broadcasts, but pulling from real conversations with people like Steve Kerr and working that context into the live call in a way that actually illuminates what you're watching.

He's unafraid to have a genuine opinion, willing to be critical of players and officials in a way that three-man booths often smooth away in the interest of keeping things comfortable, and he has a wit about him that comes through without ever feeling like he's performing. The floor of this broadcast is higher because he's in it, and the ceiling is genuinely interesting if Breen develops the kind of trust with him that made the Van Gundy partnership work so well for so long. That trust isn't quite there yet, but it's the thing most worth watching for as the season gets closer to the playoffs.

Jefferson is a more complicated conversation, and the complication isn't about his basketball intelligence, which is real. It's about fit. In a studio setting or on a podcast, Jefferson has the format that suits him — the time to develop a thought, to let his personality and his player's perspective come together in a way that makes people want to listen. Some of his best television moments have come in exactly those environments, and they're genuinely good.

But in a three-man booth alongside Breen's encyclopedic play-by-play and Legler's analytical specificity, the space for Jefferson to do what he does best doesn't really exist, and what you end up with is a talented person whose gifts aren't particularly well-matched to the constraints of the job. That's not a condemnation — plenty of excellent television personalities are better in one format than another, and there's no shame in being built for the studio rather than the booth. The question is whether ESPN, having committed to this configuration and brought Jefferson back when there was outside interest in him, is willing to be honest with itself about what it actually has.

The good news is that this is a booth with real upside, and a January blowout with no Steph Curry is about the least flattering possible environment to evaluate it. A playoff series in May, with games that matter and stories worth telling, is where the chemistry either arrives or it doesn't, and there's enough here — in Legler's mind, in Breen's preparation, in the genuine warmth between the three of them — to think it might. But the window for this group to become something special is not unlimited, and the sooner Breen trusts his partners enough to let the game breathe, the better the odds that it does.