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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 Danielson done. Gary Danielson has been a fixture in college football as an analyst for almost four decades. On Wednesday, CBS Sports announced that the 2025 season will be his last with the network. Current NFL analyst Charles Davis will be his replacement on CBS’s top college football package covering the Big Ten alongside play-by-play announcer Brad Nessler.

🏈 Up the Wattage. With the news that Davis will replace Danielson, the question became who would replace Davis in CBS’s No. 2 NFL booth. The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand quickly answered with J.J. Watt, who will move from the studio to the booth alongside Ian Eagle. Watt and Eagle then shared a text exchange that shows they’re off to a fast friendship.

🎤 Back to Bristol. ESPN announced it will return the Los Angeles-based SportsCenter to its Bristol, Connecticut headquarters. The move will also impact Los Angeles-based soccer programming, but ESPN’s NBA shows will remain on the West Coast. The final SportsCenter from Los Angeles will air on Friday, May 16.

🏀 LeBron lets loose. During his hour-long interview with Pat McAfee, LeBron James took a few swipes at ESPN talent. One was at ESPN senior NBA writer Brian Windhorst, who covered James extensively early in his NBA career. The relevance and truth behind his jabs are debatable, but there was no denying that they seemed personal. 

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Pat McAfee’s LeBron James interview was a message

“Pat McAfee getting LeBron for an hour should quiet McAfee critics,” wrote SI’s Jimmy Traina on Wednesday as the NBA superstar sat down for an hour-long in-studio interview on The Pat McAfee Show.

It’s unclear what that means, exactly. While McAfee has plenty of critics (sometimes including us), the one undisputed aspect of his value to ESPN has always been his ability to attract A-list talent to his show. 

McAfee has an uncanny knack for making superstars and the biggest names in sports comfortable, mainly because he combines a working sports knowledge with a reputation for soft interviews. He’s been the Aaron Rodgers Whisperer for years for a reason.

The LeBron appearance wasn’t earth-shattering by any means. The funniest part was that the conversation was so curse word-heavy that it often seemed like the audio feed was cutting out. If there was one aspect of the interview that stood out, it was the shots he took at Stephen A. Smith and Brian Windhorst.

It’s certainly not the first time someone on McAfee’s show (or McAfee himself) has taken shots at ESPN or its talent while broadcasting on ESPN. Still, it was something to watch LeBron, who is in the midst of a public feud with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, appear on an ESPN-hosted show and fight back on ESPN’s airwaves against Smith, who has to watch the company that just paid him $100 million let it happen.

Knowing Smith, he was probably fine with it since it gave him much to do on Wednesday afternoon. But it’s also not hard to see it as the latest move by McAfee to remind ESPN and everyone who works for them, regardless of how much they make, that he does what he wants and no one is gonna stop him. And furthermore, ESPN absolutely loves it.

More than any of that, the LeBron sit-down felt like a direct message to Smith, intended or not. He offered James a platform, sat back, and let LeBron do the talking. The talking points that came out of it dominated the day and reaffirmed that McAfee can set the agenda just as easily as Smith. And he can do it at Stephen A.’s expense while he’s at it, something that doesn’t work the other way around.

📈🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎤

On the latest episode, Awful Announcing’s Brendon Kleen and Ben Axelrod discuss the lack of upsets in the NCAA Tournament before being joined by Morning Consult’s Ellyn Briggs for a conversation about the latest sports, culture, and media trends.

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

📈💰INDUSTRY INSIGHTS🧐

• The last time LeBron James did a podcast with someone, that person became his head coach. We’ll see how it goes this time, now that Mind the Game is returning with former MVP and Brooklyn Nets coach Steve Nash in the seat opposite James in place of JJ Redick. New episodes return to YouTube and Prime Video on April 1.

• Former NFL Network host Rachel Bonnetta is returning to sports television. She joined the NFL Network in 2021 after beginning her television career at Fox Sports in 2016. On social media, Bonnetta revealed that she will appear on Vice Sports’ new series, The Grudge, which begins its 12-episode run on Wednesday night.

• NBC will remain the television home to (most) of the marquee event inventory in horse racing. The network announced on Wednesday that it has struck a deal with Breeders’ Cup Limited, the administrators of the Breeders’ Cup World Championships, to carry the event’s races on its platforms through 2030.

• ESPN announced that former US Open winner Wyndham Clark and six-time PGA Tour winner Max Homa will serve as analysts for the Masters Par 3 contest. The pair will alternate working with Scott Van Pelt, who will serve as the lead announcer. In addition, the entire event will be streamed on ESPN+ and Disney+ for the first time.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Sometimes, you just can’t beat a good, old-fashioned LeBron James buzzer-beating game-winning shot, especially when you have someone like ESPN’s Mark Jones on the call to make an… Ashanti reference?

As for the following clip, we’ll leave you to see it when you see it.

Juvenile and sophomoric? Sure. But we never said we weren’t those things…

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Has Stephen A. Smith hit his saturation point?

Just last month, Stephen A. Smith appeared to have a rocket strapped to his back on the road to infamy.

Arguably the biggest name in sports media, Smith has spent the last year positioning himself for world domination. After long discussing his plans to evolve beyond First Take and NBA studio shows, he seemed to see the 2024 Presidential election as the perfect launching pad to an even bigger persona, if that was possible.

He’s jumped head-first into politics, playing footsie with the Democratic Party while also giving Republicans a shoulder rub. He’s made himself ubiquitous, from ESPN to his podcast to his regular appearances on Fox News and elsewhere. It’s become exceedingly hard to avoid Smith, even if you’re trying to ignore him.

As for what his endgame is, you could ask him 25 times and get 25 different answers. Maybe he wants to be president. Maybe he wants to host a late-night talk show. Maybe he wants to be a pundit. Maybe he wants to be “the Joe Rogan of the left.” Maybe he wants to be all of those things. Maybe he wants to be none of them.

On Wednesday, we were having a conversation in the Awful Announcing Slack Channel about Smith. We discussed the many articles we’d written about him in the last week alone and the potential articles we could write in the days ahead. We certainly had plenty of material to work with.

The thing was, we were starting to feel like Smith had crossed a dubious line. Not because he’d become too controversial or spoken about topics too far outside our comfort zone, but because he had finally become… boring.

There was a time, not too long ago, when Smith sharing his thoughts on a political figure might have garnered a red alert in the AA Slack. Now it barely registers. It used to be he was good for a hot take a day. Now, between all of his appearances and the need to stay relevant, he has at least four or five. And even when Smith does say something interesting, he dilutes himself by saying something else just a few hours later.

There was nothing more predictable than Smith taking to his podcast to slam LeBron after the NBA star appeared on The Pat McAfee Show earlier in the day. Even worse, Smith’s return volleys at LeBron didn’t feel powerful; they felt desperate. The fear of not controlling the news cycle for a few hours seemed to drive the rants more than anything. 

Steve Bannon and Donald Trump found a lot of success with their “flood the zone with shit” strategy. But that strategy doesn’t work for most people, and it’s not working for Stephen A. It’s not as though he hasn’t been disliked for a long time, but dislike is still an emotional reaction. Being hated was always good business for him.

By making himself ever-present, Smith seems to finally be stoking the one reaction he must fear most: Apathy.