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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏀 Shaq Fu(ll of it). The “Inside the NBA” analyst made many of the current NBA players’ points when he said he wasn’t impressed by the surging Detroit Pistons before revealing that he thought Chauncey Billups was their coach (he’s in Portland) and admitted that he doesn’t even watch them. With media friends like these…

📺 Molly Qerim’s health battle. The “First Take” host took to Instagram to reveal she had previously been diagnosed with and treated for endometriosis. March is Endometriosis Awareness Month, and the disease affects roughly 10 percent (190 million) of reproductive-age women and girls globally, per the WHO.

🏈 Schefter skewers Rodgers. Aaron Rodgers isn’t an Adam Schefter fan, so he won’t like the ESPN NFL insider expressing his frustrations over the quarterback's indecision over a new team. “Either you want to play, or you don’t,” he said. Rodgers will undoubtedly respond on his next “Pat McAfee Show” appearance. 

⚖️ Gastinope. The only mildly interesting thing about the New York Sack Exchange “30 for 30” was Mark Gastineau confronting Brett Favre. Favre didn’t appreciate it, and it turns out neither did Gastineau. He’s now suing ESPN for “intentionally and maliciously” editing the video to make him look bad. Somewhere, Joe Klecko is shaking his head.

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🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

NFL free agency will eventually become an event, right?

I had the pleasure of appearing on the most recent episode of Sports Media with Richard Deitsch alongside Sports Business Journal’s Ben Fischer and Austin Karp. Our discussion was wide-ranging, but the main topic was how much of a media event NFL free agency has become.

It’s no surprise, really. Anything and everything the NFL touches turns to ratings and interest gold. They’ve been able to commodify things like the Draft, Combine, and even the announcement of the upcoming season schedule. If they can turn watching a 20-year-old you’ve never heard of running in a straight line into must-see TV, they can make just about anything matter.

The beginning of this year’s free-agency period was no different. NFL fans rushed to ESPN, NFL Network, social media platforms, and their favorite apps to breathlessly await news that their favorite team had signed a mid-tier cornerback to a three-year, $60 million deal.

However, X just so happened to experience significant outages due to a cyberattack that day, throwing a massive wrench into how that information has historically been received and shared. Many of the NFL’s top insiders have counted on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter as their home base to break news and communicate what they’re hearing. When that no longer became dependable, many of them set up shop elsewhere in search of an audience.

The situation also had to make the NFL stop and wonder why it was outsourcing so much of the day’s circus-like atmosphere to places like X or even ESPN. If there’s so much demand for a piece of your product and you can’t trust external sources to deliver it, why not do it yourself? Especially when you’ve already done just that with the Draft, Combine, and other NFL events?

In our conversation, Fischer noted that NFL Media costs are now at the top of league owners' minds. But even so, putting together a studio show or something akin to CNN’s Election Night coverage seems pretty doable.

Deitsch even threw out the example of Scott Hanson pulling a Steve Kornacki and showing us player movement across teams while using financial figures to point out team salaries and other interesting factoids as each signing is announced. You could pull in Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo to break the news live during the event. Keep a representative from every franchise handy to discuss why they decided to sign (or not) each player. You might even have a Big Board that shows the real-time shifts in team power rankings depending on which quarterback signed where.

Fischer noted that the NFL might have one incentive never to do any of this. “The NFL might like the status quo because it costs them nothing,” he said. And that’s true; ESPN, NFL media members, and social media platforms bend over backward to make all this news as accessible as possible, so why feel the need to sink some money into what’s already a success?

My rebuttal would be that the NFL never turns down an opportunity to own something outright and make sure everyone knows it. Not needing to do something rarely stops The Shield if it thinks it can make a statement (and a buck). And every time they seem to have tapped out those opportunities, they discover a new one.

Even with so few worlds left to conquer, Alexander might not need to start weeping just yet.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

The only thing that will cause MLB announcers more agita than calling a Nick Kurtz home run this season is trying not to refer to the Athletics as “Oakland.” Giants broadcasters Jon Miller and Duane Kuiper previewed the annoyance and mental work their colleagues will have to endure this season during Tuesday's Giants-A spring training game. Enjoy this thread as the broadcasting duo works through the four stages of grief.

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• Bill Simmons and The Ringer are sticking with Spotify. No one denies this! Especially not Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, who broke the news. There had been rumblings that Simmons was unhappy with Spotify and engaged in “exploratory” discussions with other media outlets. However, whatever those concerns might have been, they appear to have been satiated.

• According to Front Office Sports, Norby Williamson, the former ESPN production executive tapped to lead production for FanDuel Sports Networks following Main Street’s emergence from bankruptcy, has hired four former ESPN producers to lead the regional sports networks. The four former ESPNers joining Williamson are Larry Holm, Jay Rothman, Ed Placey, and Mark Summer. FOS also noted that the company will move from a regional structure to a sport-centric one. 

• Despite more than likely exiting the MLB business next season, ESPN is still investing in alternative broadcast options for this one. The network announced Wednesday that it will produce six “Sunday Night Baseball” games this season, with an accompanying Statcast Edition to air on ESPN2 and the ESPN App. ESPN2 will also air a Statcast Edition of the Home Run Derby in July.

• The NFLPA co-founded and owns 45 percent of OneTeam Partners, the sports group licensing agency valued at billions of dollars. So why are the counsels for the union and the agency in a tense dispute over access to OneTeam’s internal records and the contours of the NFLPA’s ongoing probe into its ties to the marketing firm? Daniel Kaplan wrote about their ongoing legal tangle over equity options.

🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎤

On the latest episode of The Play-By-Play, Awful Announcing’s Ben Axelrod and Brendon Kleen are joined by Awful Announcing Podcast host Brandon Contes to discuss Stephen A. Smith’s new ESPN contract and AA editor Drew Lerner to discuss how TGL is performing in its inaugural season and how sustainable it can be.

Click the video above to watch or find The Play-By-Play wherever you listen to podcasts!

️‍🔥The Closer🔥

Why won’t Adam Schefter join Bluesky?

By all accounts, ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter should be on Bluesky by now.

Elon Musk-related ethics aside, Monday’s dramatic situation surrounding NFL free agency and a cyberattack at X proved to many of his fellow insiders that they need to spread the wealth to ensure fans can catch their breaking news no matter where they are. A day later, the list of skyrocketing Bluesky accounts is almost entirely NFL reporters and analysts (not to mention Schefter’s employer).

Most of Schefter's contemporaries are now on Bluesky, from Ian Rapoport to Dianna Russini, Field Yates, Jonathan Jones, and Tom Pelissero. They share news with the same consistency as they do on other platforms. 

Anyone in social media also knows that adding one more platform to your roster is not a heavy lift. That’s especially true for someone like Schefter, who has a team handy and is undoubtedly set up to share scoops simultaneously and easily across X, Threads, Instagram, and anywhere else. 

An Adam Schefter Bluesky mirror account was repurposing all of his X posts. However, the person who ran it stopped posting several weeks ago and asked followers to encourage Schefter to start his own account (which Mina Kimes is working on). 

All of which is to say, again, what’s the holdup? This isn’t me demanding Schefter be on Bluesky for personal gain or due to any ethical or political perspective. It’s simply an honest question because it doesn’t make much sense. For someone who trades so much in expertise, speed, and “the win,” why wouldn’t he jump to put his scoops in front of 33 million (and counting) users?

We might have found our answer Wednesday when the ESPN account shared one of his scoops and then pushed followers to “get breaking news alerts from Adam Schefter through the ESPN app.” Perhaps Schefter (or ESPN, or both) realized Monday that they shouldn’t put their faith in any external social media platform regarding their stock-in-trade. They saw that their years-long investment in X/Twitter was ultimately bound to fail (just like it is for everyone) because that platform is fallible and uncontrollable. And rather than invest in an alternative (that they also can’t control), they might as well start pushing people to their own products.

Or maybe that’s reading too much into it. Perhaps it’s just as simple as Schefter not getting around to it and ESPN figuring they needed to do something in the meantime.

Whatever the reason, it would be interesting to know, even if it is a lack of desire or care. Because it flies in the face of what we understand about insiderdom, and no one epitomizes insiderdom quite like Schefter. So what does he know (or not know) that we don’t know? Y’know?