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⚽ Too hot to handle. Director Rand Getlin's five-part HBO documentary U.S. Against the World covers every major milestone of the 2022-2026 USMNT cycle, except the Reyna-Berhalter family drama, in which Gio Reyna's parents reported a decades-old domestic violence incident involving Gregg Berhalter and his wife in retaliation over their son's playing time at the 2022 World Cup. Getlin told NYCFC broadcaster Glenn Crooks the story was "too complex" for the series, that doing it right would require earning the trust of both families and conducting a full multi-hour investigation.

💉 Roids, records, and a refund. The Enhanced Games — a doping-permitted alternative to the Olympics backed by Peter Thiel and co-founded by Aron D'Souza — held its inaugural event in Las Vegas over the weekend and produced exactly one world record across hours of weightlifting, sprinting, and swimming. Swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev touched the wall in 20.81 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle, besting Cameron McEvoy's clean world record by seven one-hundredths of a second, and collected a $1 million bonus. In the marquee event, Fred Kerley — who had publicly guaranteed he would destroy Usain Bolt's 9.58-second 100-meter world record — ran a 9.97. Several events were won by athletes who weren't using performance-enhancing drugs at all.

📺 Pulled from the air. Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine challenging five-term incumbent Susan Collins, ran a campaign ad during a Red Sox game on NESN last Friday, targeting private equity's role in Fenway Sports Group ownership. The ad referenced RedBird Capital's 11% stake in FSG, blamed private equity for "running the Red Sox into the ground," and signed off with a reference to the Mookie Betts trade. NESN — which is owned by Red Sox ownership — pulled the ad midway through the broadcast, citing "unauthorized use of third-party intellectual property" without specifying what intellectual property was actually violated

🏀 99 to 1. SiriusXM NBA Radio host Justin Termine was the only voter out of 100 to leave Wembanyama off the All-NBA First Team, placing Nikola Jokic ahead of him at center and putting Wemby on the second team instead. In a video posted to social media, Termine was explicit that this was not a slight on Wembanyama — whom he called the best player in the world — but a protest vote on behalf of Patrick Ewing, who was shut out of every All-NBA team in 1994 despite being one of the most dominant centers of his generation, simply because Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, and Shaquille O’Neal all happened to be playing at the same time.

📊 Cooking the books. Gilbert Arenas pushed back on NBC's announcement that Spurs-Thunder Game 1 averaged 9.2 million viewers, which the network declared the most-watched Western Conference Finals opener in history. Arenas argued on Gil's Arena that the 9.2 million figure is a live average snapshot, not a total audience count, and that NBC is selectively presenting the metric that makes its debut NBA season look best while withholding the full cumulative viewership.

🎬 Too much Netflix, not enough baseball. Netflix sports chief Gabe Spitzer admitted on the Marchand Sports Media podcast that the streamer's MLB Opening Night broadcast in March went too far on self-promotion. "Maybe there were a few too many Netflix promos," he said. The pregame show featured John Cena explaining the automatic ball-strike system as a tie-in for his Netflix movie, Bert Kreischer shirtless in a kayak in McCovey Cove, a Stranger Things teaser on set, and a Monday Night Raw promo 20 minutes into actual game coverage. Spitzer said Netflix surveys viewers after every live sports event, calling overall sentiment "incredibly positive," and pointed to the NFL Christmas Day games as proof that the platform improves with experience.

🏈 Kiff and tell. SEC and Ole Miss discussed a potential reprimand of Lane Kiffin — including a possible fine — after his Vanity Fair profile quoted him suggesting that Ole Miss's history with Confederate imagery made it difficult to recruit some Black athletes to Oxford, a problem he said does not exist at LSU. Kiffin apologized, then immediately walked it back, telling USA Today, "People don't read the actual words I used in the article. I said, 'A parent said.' That's not me saying it as my opinion." The SEC is expected to address potential sanctions at its spring meetings this week.

There is a version of this story where the NFL is simply too big to fail, where the 10% viewership increase last season and the highest ratings since 1989 and the fact that every single broadcast partner finished in the black are proof enough that the league has figured out how to grow a product that was already the most dominant force in American sports, and where Hans Schroeder, the NFL's head of media, is simply stating the obvious when he says on a conference call that "giving more football to NFL fans is only a good thing." It’s a hard argument to dispute on its face, especially as viewership has continued to climb through every new window the league has pried open, as if the audience will follow the product wherever the league decides to put it, indefinitely, without consequence.

The problem with that argument is not that it's wrong about where the NFL is right now, but that it doesn't account for how the NFL got there, or what it's quietly trading away in the process of trying to get somewhere bigger, one broadcast deal at a time, with Sunday getting a little smaller every time it does.

"Sunday is the NFL," Jason Kelce said. "Outside of going to church in the morning, Sunday is like where so many games happen, and that's what you grow up, and you gear your entire week around watching football on Sunday — it's an institution at this point."

The NFL's rise to cultural dominance was never really about the quality of the product alone, but about the ritual that grew up around it over decades, the 1 p.m. kickoffs on CBS and Fox that turned into late-afternoon games that turned into Sunday Night Football on NBC, eight straight hours of football that millions of Americans absorbed every week not as a conscious choice so much as a standing appointment they'd inherited from their fathers and their fathers before them, with RedZone running in the background and the fantasy scores updating in the corner of the screen and the whole apparatus of American fall life organized around the fact that the games were always in the same place, on the same channels, at the same times, and had been for as long as anyone could remember.

An Awful Announcing analysis found that the NFL will air 197 Sunday afternoon games in 2026, down from 211 in 2021, the first year of the expanded 18-week schedule. The league has been methodically pulling inventory out of the traditional Sunday regional windows on CBS and Fox and handing it to Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock, and whoever else is willing to pay the highest rights fees for the privilege of hosting a game that would otherwise have aired on free broadcast television in front of every household in America.

Of course, each of these decisions came with a rationale, but what the league has not fully reckoned with is that taken together they represent a restructuring of where the NFL lives, one that has moved the product steadily away from the free broadcast windows that made it universally accessible and toward a fragmented ecosystem where following the full slate of games on any given Sunday requires a fan to hold in their head which games are on CBS, which are on Fox, which moved to Prime, which are on Peacock this week, which are in London and therefore on at 9:30 in the morning, and which require a separate subscription because they’re not in the local territory.

Kelce is probably early, in the sense that the NFL's cultural reserves are deep enough to absorb these withdrawals for years before they show up as a problem anyone in Bristol or Inglewood or 345 Park Avenue has to explain to a partner, and Schroeder is not wrong that the numbers have continued to climb through every new window the league has opened. But the NFL is not the first institution to mistake the depth of its reserves for the permanence of its position, and Sunday is not the first institution to be picked apart one reasonable exception at a time — a Wednesday here, a Thanksgiving Eve there, a Christmas package because it felt like a natural fit — until the exceptions have accumulated into a new normal that nobody quite decided on and nobody quite knows how to walk back. The numbers are up, the product is fine, and somewhere between now and whenever the bill eventually comes due, the league is going to find out whether Schroeder was right that more football is always a good thing, or whether what a hundred million people actually wanted was football in its place.

Bill Rosinski spent 13 years as the original radio voice of the Carolina Panthers. He's called games for two NFL teams, spent a decade at ESPN Radio, and has been working on PGA Tour Radio for years. Last week, he applied online for the Baltimore Ravens' open play-by-play position and received a form rejection letter telling him they were pursuing candidates "more closely aligned with the requirements of the position."

He posted it because he thought it was funny. Two million people saw it in less than 24 hours.

Our Michael Grant caught up with Rosinski to talk about why it resonated so far beyond sports media circles:

"I believe that's true. That really struck a chord with people. I'm 72, and I'm sure there are people in their late 50s and early 60s who are looking for work. They got phased out, and it's just not broadcasting. It can be any business. I don't think you should ever give up."

Read Michael's full piece here.

"Love or hate the Enhanced Games, they challenged societal norms, and the growth of humanity is dependent upon that challenge." — Emmanuel Acho defending the Enhanced Games after just one world record fell across an event that couldn't land a traditional TV partner.

"They're pissing me off... You've got these clowns on TV talking about, 'Oh, they're going to hurt poor Wemby.'" — Charles Barkley sounding off on the narrative that Oklahoma City is playing dirty against Victor Wembanyama in the playoffs.

"I'll always remember him as a guy who hated to lose more than anybody." — Dale Earnhardt Jr., remembering Kyle Busch in a tribute on Prime Video ahead of the Coca-Cola 600.

"[Prime Video] deserved an exclusive." — Charles Barkley chiding Shams Charania for breaking Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's second MVP award before Amazon's broadcast could announce it themselves.

There is a version of sports television that the industry keeps saying it wants to make more of and then rarely does, something that actually teaches you something about how the game works, that puts a real player in front of a real analyst and lets the conversation go somewhere unscripted and genuinely illuminating rather than landing on the same three talking points every segment ends with. MLB Network's MLB Central does it better than almost anyone on television right now, and the Junior Caminero-Yandy Diaz segment that aired last week is as good an example as you're going to find of why.

Caminero, the 22-year-old Rays slugger who came into this season having already established himself as one of the more dangerous young hitters in the American League, was in-studio with Mark DeRosa — working through a translator for portions of the conversation — and walked through his actual hitting approach in a way that was genuinely illuminating. Viewers of the segement were able to learn that Caminero’s entire approach at the plate is built around waiting for a pitcher's mistake regardless of the count or situation, that his pregame work is focused on keeping his hands separated and staying back long enough to get under the ball and let it ride, that the ground balls he was generating early in his career were something the entire hitting staff identified and worked to correct, and that the adjustment he made — becoming more patient, driving the ball up the middle and the other way rather than pulling everything — was less a mechanical overhaul than a discipline decision, a conscious choice to be more selective and trust what he was seeing.

The in-studio player segment is one of the most underused formats in sports television, which is strange, given that, in an era when athletes are more protective of their image than ever, it’s the one format in which the player holds all the cards.

MLB Central has figured out something that most shows haven't, that the best version of this format is not an interview but a lesson, that putting a player next to someone who can actually interrogate what they do and why they do it produces television that is far more compelling than a panel debate and more informative than a highlights package, and that the audience is smart enough to follow along if you give them the chance to.

More of this, please.