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🏈 An NFL five-pack. YouTube and the NFL are reportedly finalizing an agreement that would see the platform exclusively broadcast five games this upcoming season. While the exact contents of the five-game package is not certain, likely candidates include the Week 1 game in Australia, a Thanksgiving Eve game that is not yet official but appears inevitable, a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve game.

💵 Miles apart. The NFL is reportedly seeking new TV deals that would approximately double its current media rights haul of $10 billion per year. Networks, on the other hand, believe an increase in the 25% range is more reasonable.

⚽ A MetLife masterpiece. FIFA president Gianni Infantino recently revealed the World Cup final from MetLife Stadium will include a halftime performance curated by Coldplay frontman Chris Martin. Infantino did not reveal the artists, but said “it’s more than one.”

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

Lawmakers and appointed officials in our nation’s capital have kicked the anti-NFL sentiment into overdrive in recent weeks. FCC chairman Brendan Carr has been all over creation threatening the league’s antitrust exemption. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) urged the DOJ to investigate that exemption. Reports surfaced that the DOJ is investigating the exemption. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) sent a letter to the FCC urging the agency take action to ensure access to live sports remains affordable. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) announced she would introduce legislation designed to codify keeping sports broadcasts free within local markets.

On and on we go. Those politicians in D.C. must’ve finally found an issue that resonates with voters.

Digression aside, it’s funny to compare all the noise in D.C. to the relative silence of the NFL. The league has issued exactly one public statement regarding all of this, after reports surfaced last week that the DOJ is formally investigating the antitrust privileges granted in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.

That’s it. Three sentences clearly articulating why the league thinks all of this is a bit ridiculous.

But actions speak louder than words. And on Thursday, reports surfaced that YouTube is finalizing a deal with the NFL for a five-game package that will potentially include the Week 1 Australia game, the new Thanksgiving Eve contest, a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve game.

If the NFL were truly worried about keeping games tethered to broadcast television, it’s certainly not showing it.

There’s plenty of reason for the NFL to be confident in that perspective, too. For one, the NFL has gotten away with bending the rules of its antitrust exemption for decades, as has every other professional sports league to ever sell games to cable networks. The original language of the Sports Broadcasting Act refers to “sponsored telecasting of the games,” which most interpret to mean freely accessible telecasts funded by sponsorships. Paid cable networks certainly do not fall under that category.

But perhaps more importantly, the NFL can see through D.C.’s bluster to its all-too-predictable end. The myriad lawmakers and appointees taking issue with the league are coming from a million different viewpoints. Carr thinks the NFL has run afoul of its exemption by selling too many games to streamers, threatening the health of local broadcasters that rely on NFL programming to survive. Sen. Baldwin wants to keep the framework of the Sports Broadcasting Act, including the exemption, but ensure games are freely available in local markets. Sen. Warren and Rep. Ryan barely make mention of the exemption at all, instead focusing on media consolidation as the culprit driving prices up for fans.

No one in D.C. has an actual plan. There’s no alignment. And the NFL can see right through it.

Moreover, the NFL knows how this ends if its exemption is actually rescinded. Fragmentation becomes exponentially worse as media rights revert back to individual teams, which are then free to sell games as they see fit. Cowboys games on Fox. Jaguars games on Apple TV. Saints games on Victory+. Fans become furious at the newfound complication of watching their favorite sport, and what was once a politically advantageous issue becomes political suicide overnight.

It won’t take long for the well-compensated lobbyists at the NFL’s D.C. office to convince lawmakers and agency heads of this reality.

The truth of the matter is, there’s a reason the NFL is so successful in the first place. Its antitrust exemption worked as intended. By pooling rights and implementing revenue sharing for all 32 teams, the antitrust exemption allowed the NFL to create a compelling, competitively balanced product, rather than a league where the most-popular teams are able to afford the best players and win the most games. Additionally, centralizing rights into a small handful of packages sold to a small handful of broadcasters has kept the league easy for viewers to follow. And the vast majority of those games still end up on free-to-air broadcast networks. It’s the perfect storm for creating a league as popular as the NFL.

The reported five-game YouTube package fits that ethos to a T. YouTube is perhaps the most-accessible video platform in the world, even more accessible than the traditional over-the-air broadcast networks upon which the NFL has built its empire. YouTube is the natural evolution of the NFL model for the digital age.

Are politicians really going to go after the league for putting games somewhere anyone with an internet connection can access?

Taken in totality — the disparate goals of lawmakers and officials, the fact that NFL games are already widely accessible, decades of a singular interpretation of the Sports Broadcasting Act, a dramatic increase in fragmentation if the antitrust exemption is revoked, the NFL embracing free digital platforms like YouTube — it seems silly to think the NFL could be genuinely influenced by the hubbub in Washington, D.C.

The next few months will be very telling regarding how seriously the league is taking discourse in the nation’s capital. The NFL is reportedly in active negotiations with CBS over a new media rights deal. Fox is said to be next up. Per a Thursday report by CNBC, networks and the league remain very far away on price. The NFL wants to double its current fees, while networks believe something in the neighborhood of a 25% bump is fair.

If the NFL wants to play hardball with the broadcast networks, particularly CBS, which is actually at risk of losing NFL programming due to the change-of-ownership provision triggered from Skydance’s purchase of Paramount last summer, as opposed to the rest of the networks, which are locked in through at least the 2029 season, the league can cleave more games from broadcast networks to sell to streamers. Conventional wisdom would suggest that if the legacy broadcast networks want to afford the NFL’s price hikes, they’ll need to sacrifice some amount of inventory. That seems even more true following the CNBC report.

Should that be the case — fewer games for broadcast networks and more games for streamers — perhaps we can begin calling the NFL the No Fear League, since it’ll be clear they are not scared of anything being said in D.C.

Paul O’Neill walked right into an announcer jinx on the YES Network broadcast yesterday.

Before anyone says it, I know. The first letter of ESPN stands for entertainment.

Yes, the Worldwide Leader in Sports shares its “E” with WWE. That’s World Wrestling Entertainment, decidedly not a sport.

Last August, ESPN embraced its dual mandate by signing a media rights deal to become the exclusive presenter of WWE’s Premium Live Events. And in the process, the Worldwide Leader in Sports has increasingly sacrificed some of its S in favor of E. But no one is calling ESPN the Worldwide Leader in Entertainment, at least not yet. In fact, there’s another network for that. It’s called E!.

So, while I acknowledge entertainment is quite literally in its name, please miss me with the suggestion that ESPN, a brand synonymous with sports coverage, is operating within its mission statement by giving an obscene amount of real estate on its daily studio programs, which ostensibly cover sports and not entertainment, to the WWE this week as WrestleMania 42 rolls into Las Vegas.

This didn’t happen for the several decades that ESPN had no financial stake in WWE. And when it occasionally did, it certainly did not happen at the levels seen this week during ESPN’s flagship programming.

Per data compiled by Awful Announcing, ESPN’s three flagship studio programs — Get Up, First Take, and The Pat McAfee Show — spent more time discussing WWE this week than MLB and the NHL combined. In total, these shows dedicated 14 segments to WWE this week, while dedicating only 7 to MLB and 5 to the NHL.

WWE was the third-most-discussed “sport” in ESPN’s daily programming this week, behind the NBA (44 segments) and the NFL (25 segments).

And generally speaking, the WWE segments went much longer than those dedicated to MLB or the NHL. Across the three shows, WWE segments accounted for 104 minutes of programming, while MLB and NHL segments each accounted for 56 minutes. However, the MLB and NHL data come with some massive caveats.

One would expect the inclusion of The Pat McAfee Show in this dataset to skew the numbers towards WWE and away from MLB and the NHL, especially considering that McAfee himself is a storyline for the upcoming WrestleMania main event. However, the opposite is actually true. If not for extended segments with MLB insider Jeff Passan, MLB Network analyst Mark DeRosa, Pittsburgh Penguins star Sydney Crosby, and NHL reporter Jackie Redmond on The Pat McAfee Show this week, the MLB and NHL representation would’ve looked much more dire than the data shows.

McAfee’s program accounted for nearly 90% of all MLB and NHL content across the three shows. Yet all three shows contributed about equally to WWE coverage.

On Get Up and First Take, WWE coverage took up exponentially more real estate than both MLB and the NHL. Only one MLB segment extended for more than a couple of minutes. Each WWE segment, however, lasted longer than the longest MLB or NHL segment on those shows.

I’m not here to tell ESPN to stop promoting WWE, a property it reportedly pays $325 million per year for. I’m here to tell ESPN it doesn’t need to jam professional wrestling down the throats of viewers who, by and large, enjoy their sports unscripted. (By the way, ESPN pays $400 million per year for the NHL and $550 million per year for the MLB. The price ESPN pays for WWE isn’t a justification for the amount of time the network has spent promoting it.)

So what’s going on here?

Well, WWE is backed by some of the most powerful individuals in sports business. Ari Emanuel, Hollywood superagent and CEO of the UFC and WWE holding company TKO, reps Pat McAfee, who is increasingly vital to ESPN’s bottom line during daytime hours and on key programming like College GameDay. Then there’s WWE president Nick Khan, who has previously repped some of ESPN’s biggest talents, including Get Up host Mike Greenberg.

When it comes to the dark arts of influence, WWE has two of the best in the business.

So it’s no surprise to see ESPN going all out to promote WrestleMania. Stephen A. Smith and First Take will be live from Las Vegas on Friday, while Randy Scott and Gray Striewski’s SportsCenter begin their on-site coverage on Thursday. On Saturday, ESPN2 will simulcast the first hour of WrestleMania, and on Sunday, the flagship ESPN channel will do the same. Both nights will also include a one-hour pre-show on the linear networks.

All of this for something ESPN showed next to no interest in prior to September 2025, when it aired its first WWE Premium Live Event.

There are plenty of ways ESPN has changed throughout the years. Once upon a time, Outside the Lines was a daily show. You would have expected cogent and well-reasoned discussions on The Sports Reporters. We all acknowledge that those days are gone. Most of us have come to accept, and even sometimes appreciate, the new era of ESPN anchored by First Take and Pat McAfee.

But the reason we’ve stuck around all these years through every iteration of ESPN is that the network’s north star has been sports. WWE is a lot of things. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. It’s athletic. But it’s not sports.

Sure, there’s plenty of overlap between WWE fans and traditional sports fans. But hardcore wrestling fans are not turning to ESPN for their coverage; they’re going to myriad online publications, podcasts, and social media communities. Meanwhile, loyal ESPN viewers accustomed to NBA and NFL coverage this time of year are getting bombarded with promotional WWE segments.

The question, as is often the case in sports media these days, is who the hell is this for? It’s not for wrestling fans, who are getting their coverage elsewhere, nor for ESPN viewers, who are tuning in for sports talk. Yet, WWE was the third-most-discussed topic on ESPN’s big three studio shows this week.

There’s promoting your network’s content, and then there’s piledriving your viewers into submission. This week, ESPN viewers have simply had to submit to WWE, whether they like it or not.