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🏈 Russ goin’ Long. CBS formally announced Super Bowl-winning quarterback Russell Wilson will be joining The NFL Today this upcoming season. However, in a minor surprise, Kyle Long will also be joining the show. Wilson’s links to a full-time position on the show had been previously reported. Long began chipping in on the program late last season and clearly made a positive impression on CBS executives.

🎙️ Leaf analyst. USA Sports is set to take over rights for part of the new-look Pac-12 this season, and one of Washington State’s most recognizable former athletes will serve as lead analyst. Ryan Leaf will be named lead football analyst for the Pac-12 on USA, and also contribute to the network’s basketball coverage.

🤖 AI backlash. ESPN’s NBA Finals coverage might be on the mend compared to last year, but the network still caught flak during Game 1 for using an AI-manipulated photo of San Antonio Spurs great Tony Parker. The network is reportedly “evaluating” its continued use of the AI technology, which aided in the creation of Parker’s “moving portrait” and two other portraits during Game 1 on Wednesday.

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

The Pat McAfee Show‘s new DraftKings partnership is taking an interesting early turn.

On Thursday, McAfee announced that his show will host a Family Feud-style competition between his cast and the cast of NFL Live next Thursday, June 11, at 1 p.m. ET on ESPN, dubbed Progrum Feud. That part is innocent enough. The catch is, this competition seems to be one grand marketing exercise for DraftKings’ new prediction market, DraftKings Predictions. Users in most states will be able to “trade” (read: wager) on the outcome of the contest.

The announcement comes just days after McAfee’s show unveiled a new partnership with DraftKings, ESPN's official sportsbook and odds provider. While promoting the event, McAfee displayed a map of the United States showing which states were available for “trading” and which states were available for a free version of the contest.

“Everybody in the United States of America is able to predict or trade on if they think [The Pat McAfee Show] or NFL Live will win Progrum Feud,” McAfee explained.

Progrum Feud and will feature Tone Digs, AJ Hawk, Boston Conner, Ty Schmit, and Darius Butler on Team McAfee, and Laura Rutledge, Dan Orlovsky, Mina Kimes, Adam Schefter, and Peter Schrager on Team NFL Live.

The event, which originated as McAfee’s idea and was approved by ESPN, comes at a time when prediction markets are facing heavy criticism. Companies like Kalshi and Polymarket have been accused of circumventing state prohibitions on sports gambling, evidenced by the vast majority of trading volume on those platforms coming from sports prediction markets. There have also been numerous instances of alleged insider trading on prediction market platforms in recent months, adding to the scrutiny.

Nevertheless, traditional sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel have rushed to create prediction markets of their own as Kalshi and Polymarket threaten to take market share away.

The decision by McAfee to host a made-for-prediction-markets event on his own ESPN show is a line that has not yet been crossed. Sports shows have long promoted traditional sportsbooks since states began legalizing sports betting following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling ending a federal ban on the practice. These shows will often highlight picks or parlays they believe have a chance to win. But creating a contest for the express purpose of having your show’s fans “trade” on the outcome of said contest is completely different.

It’s one thing for a sports show to promote sports betting; after all, viewers watching a sports show are probably already inclined to enjoy betting on sports. It’s another thing to create a contest that is tangentially tied to sports, and is essentially encouraging viewers to wager money on whether they think one show’s cast is better at Family Feud than the other.

McAfee himself is not participating in the contest, and he stressed that the survey responses were only known by a select few individuals, including the company that conducted the survey. There’s nothing nefarious going on from that perspective. If you choose to trade on this, it’ll be a fair fight. But this is a pretty blatant cash grab with some ethical concerns sprinkled in for good measure.

Consider what ESPN’s content president, Burke Magnus, has said of McAfee’s ability to reach a younger demo as recently as this week, and the decision to host this event becomes even more troubling. The Pat McAfee Show is tailored towards a younger audience than the rest of ESPN’s studio programming. It’s those same young men who are disproportionately impacted by problem gambling.

The event also opens the door for ESPN, or any network for that matter, to leverage its most popular personalities and create contests designed solely for viewers to trade on. Maybe Tonight Show viewers will soon be able to trade on whether Jimmy Fallon’s celebrity guests win one of the show’s mini-games. Whoopi Goldberg could start hosting trivia contests on The View for viewers to trade on.

If revenues from prediction markets help keep the lights on for a declining industry, these possibilities aren’t as far-fetched as they seem.

But really, the ultimate question is who, exactly, is this for? Are Pat McAfee Show fans truly thirsting to watch a mocked-up version of Family Feud? I’d argue, no.

This contest, mind you, will take place a mere two hours before the freakin’ World Cup kicks off. It’s the day after Game 4 of the NBA Finals. It’s the day of a potential Game 5 in the Stanley Cup Final. And instead of talking about any of that, ESPN viewers will be treated to a silly game show? Are we serving the sports fan here? Or are we serving the pocketbooks of DraftKings executives?

For the first time, ESPN is presenting the NBA Finals in 1080p HDR, which is nerd speak for better picture quality than in any previous year. Yet, when Game 1 came around on Wednesday night, there were plenty of complaints that ESPN’s picture quality still looked poor.

Awful Announcing publisher Ben Koo dove into why that was the case, and caught up with Kristian Hernández, a senior editor at the invaluable Sports Video Group, to explain why some viewers are experiencing the so-so picture quality. Here’s part of what Hernández said:

Check out Ben’s full piece and explanation here.

Among the many micro-controversies at play in the lead-up to this summer’s World Cup centers on the mid-half mandatory hydration breaks FIFA has implemented for the tournament. (Most World Cup-related controversies qualify as “micro” following 2022 in Qatar.)

The decision by FIFA to mandate these breaks can at least be spun as being in the interest of player welfare. Some World Cup sites will undoubtedly face sweltering heat in the next month-and-change, and there’s no sense in forcing athletes to go without water for 45 minutes at a time.

The controversy stems from the commercial opportunity these three-minute hydration breaks offer broadcasters. In March, FIFA announced it would allow broadcasters to sell advertising during these breaks, so long as they conformed to FIFA’s guidelines. There must be a 20-second buffer between when the whistle blows for a hydration break and the start of advertising, and networks must return to coverage at least 30 seconds before play restarts. That leaves two minutes and 10 seconds per half that broadcasters could hypothetically sell advertising for.

It’s unprecedented in the sport of soccer, which is famously inhospitable to advertisers, unlike, say, American football. But that type of commercial real estate doesn’t grow on trees. In fact, FIFA arguably just opened up the most valuable advertising inventory ever created in the sport. Networks, if they sold each 30-second spot available during the hydration breaks of every game at this World Cup, could air 832 commercials that would not have existed at any prior World Cup. It doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that’s a lot of potential dough for broadcasters.

But, for fun, let’s math it out anyway. Imagine Fox, the English-language World Cup broadcaster in the United States, sold out those 832 commercials for a rather meager average of $100,000 for a 30-second spot. (For reference, 30-second Super Bowl commercials fetch about $8 million per. Granted, a lot of these World Cup games won’t be in the same stratosphere as a Super Bowl, but $100,000 is a fairly conservative estimate nonetheless.) Even at just $100,000 per spot, Fox would stand to cash in $83.2 million just by selling the hydration break advertising.

For context, Fox is paying a reported $485 million for this year's World Cup. If the network could average, say, two- or three-times the above estimate, it could cover almost half of its rights fee from just hydration-break advertising.

That’s why it’s so notable that Telemundo, the Spanish-language broadcaster for the World Cup in the U.S., is opting not to air any advertising during the hydration breaks. Who knows how much money the network is leaving on the table because of that decision, but it’s likely significant.

Fox has yet to make a decision. Last month, the network said it was still having “conversations” behind the scenes as to how it would handle the hydration breaks. One could venture a guess that the network will place some sort of advertising during the break. The question is simply how much? Will the network be bold and sell out all 832 spots — which would be eight per game/four per half — or decide on something more modest — like two per game/one per half?

We’ll soon find out.