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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

😬 “We want Vince.” That’s what WWE fans in Washington, D.C., chanted at chief content officer Paul “Triple H Levesque as he entered the ring following John Cena’s final match. Wrestling faithful were seemingly disappointed that Cena’s legendary WWE career ended with a tap-out, going so far as to beg for disgraced leader Vince McMahon in place of Levesque.

🏈 Danielson’s last big one. Legendary CBS college football analyst Gary Danielson, who narrated countless SEC clashes across 36 years in the booth, called his penultimate broadcast on Saturday at the annual Army-Navy game. Danielson’s final call will be Dec. 31 at the Sun Bowl.

📺 The return of ‘Field Pass.’ On Friday, Pat McAfee announced he and his crew would be back next weekend during the first round of the College Football Playoff with their Field Pass alt-cast from College Station as Texas A&M hosts Miami.

🍿 Torre vs. Wright. The burbling beef between Nick Wright and Pablo Torre hit a boiling point last week on The Dan Le Batard Show, as the two New York-based Millennial sports hosts duked it over their professional successes. The central question was whether each could do what the other does, between Torre’s investigative work and Wright’s daytime debating. Nobody won.

🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

Paul Finebaum shows his backbone

Say what you want about Paul Finebaum.

The legendary radio host and ESPN commentator certainly doesn’t hold back in what he says about anyone in the college football world.

However, Finebaum seems to have found one third rail that he won’t touch. While pursuing a potential run for U.S. Senate this fall, Finebaum revealed this week, he realized the people encouraging him to run wanted him to take aim not at politicians on the other side of the aisle, shady corporate oligarchs or even our foreign adversaries, but his own bosses.

So Finebaum declined to run, returning to ESPN and the SEC Network on a contract that runs two more years.

You have to respect that.

“They told me the clearest and cleanest path to victory, I was running as a Republican in Alabama, was to run, and I’m just going to paraphrase the political operatives’ words, ‘you need to run against woke Disney,’ and I could not do it,” he told CBS News late last week.

According to Finebaum, multiple active members of Congress and numerous political operatives told him that bashing Disney would be his “cleanest path” to become the next Senator in Alabama.

Beyond the sour taste he felt toward the idea of going at his bosses, Finebaum was turned off by the overall level of negativity he was encouraged to embrace as well.

“…the one thing I’ve always wanted to do on a program is bring people together and let them fight under the tent and I couldn’t get up there and just draw a line and say, ‘I’m for you and I’m against you,’” he added. “It was against every fiber of my body.”

Now, back when Finebaum first revealed he was considering a run, he did take a couple subtle shots at ESPN. The “Mouth of the South” laughed in an interview with Outkick that the Worldwide Leader “tells” talent not to discuss voting for Donald Trump. At that time, Finebaum also made a point of calling out the “bias” of the news media, which would seemingly present a natural opportunity to attack ABC or any other news network as a creature of the industry.

And of course, ESPN’s partial suspension of Finebaum when he teased a run would have been the perfect launching point for his grievances.

While Finebaum explained that he considered a run largely in response to the assassination of GOP organizer Charlie Kirk this past summer, he stopped short of describing his exact response to the killing. And he did not lay out any policy positions or goals as a Senator, instead going into the most detail about his love for Alabama.

If you dislike Trump (who is enormously unpopular less than a year into his second term) or the MAGA movement, you probably discredit Finebaum for aligning himself there in the first place. Still, there is a vast difference between a voting record and some talking points and absorbing that far-right ideology to get into office.

Whereas we’ve seen numerous sports and media figures like Tommy Tuberville, Herschel Walker, Arizona’s Kari Lake and even Kanye West who have embraced the MAGA worldview to run on a conservative cultural platform, Finebaum declined. If the above list is any indication, Finebaum would have had a strong chance to win the seat. But the idea of burning bridges that he built across a prolific and enormously successful career connecting with college football fans across the country just to wield power didn’t jibe with him.

The evolution in American politics that led to someone like Finebaum (or Stephen A. Smith) being a real candidate for national office are strange and deep-seated. But undoing them, to the extent that we all agree these people are unqualified and unserious national leaders, will require people like Finebaum rejecting the delicious temptation of power at the expense of personal pride.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

As his reign atop sports media enters its fourth year, Pat McAfee continues to be defined as much by conflict and confrontation as anything.

With 2025 coming to a close, our Matt Yoder retraced the top 11 (yes, there were ELEVEN) major McAfee beefs of the year:

Pat McAfee vs. Canada

In the early part of 2025, international relations between the USA and Canada were at an all-time low as Donald Trump kept trying to adopt the great white north as the 51st state. Unsurprisingly, Canadian fans at February’s WWE Elimination Chamber event booed the American national anthem. McAfee then responded by calling it a “terrible country.” Sadly, it did not lead to a grudge match against Bret “the Hitman” Hart.

Yes, the top talent at ESPN feuding with an entire country is so typical that it is just one of nearly a dozen similar stories across 2025.

Reminisce on all of them at Awful Announcing.

📈 DATA DUMP 📊

• Both Big Noon Kickoff and College GameDay saw increased viewership in 2025, but the ESPN show maintained its ratings lead, with nearly 1 million more viewers on average each week than its competitor on Fox.

• The MLS Cup last weekend drew 4.6 million viewers worldwide as Inter Miami beat Vancouver Whitecaps. Promisingly for the league, 3.6 million people watched on Apple TV or overseas linear networks compared with fewer than 1 million on Fox.

• The numbers are out for “Dookie,” the debut single from newly minted recording artist Pat McAfee. As of Friday, the track has more than 153,000 streams on Spotify and 84,000 on YouTiube — plus considerable traction on social media.

• Even amid a down season, the Kansas City Chiefs still have a claim as America’s team. Patrick Mahomes and Co. played in four of the top five most-watched games of the NFL season, and five of the top ten, per the league.

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

“They deport those. We do not want Victor Wembanyama deported. Let’s go with a different nickname.” - Prime Video’s Stan Van Gundy to broadcast partner Michael Grady when Grady referred to Wemby as an “alien” …

“I want every kid out there who feels overlooked, underestimated to know, I was you. I was that kid too. I was in your shoes.” - Indiana QB Fernando Mendoza after winning the Heisman trophy. Score one for earnestness!

“My very simple stance on G5 is the strength of schedule that they play does not warrant inclusion into the playoff because you’re not playing the same caliber of football.” - Josh Pate, apparently stating the correct opinion about why the G5 should not have a guaranteed spot in the College Football Playoff (which is not consensus!)

“I think the answer for me would be yes. I’m not allowed to anymore because I’m a minority owner of the Raiders, so I can’t unretire.” - Fox’s Tom Brady on the return of Philip Rivers and whether he could still play in the NFL.

“It’s not about how many times you get hit, it’s about how many hits you can take and keep moving forward. And it’s not a knock on the FAN or whatever, it’s just life in general.” - Departing WFAN host Sal Licata in his final moments on air as the midday host on New York City’s legendary sports talk station.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Why is the NFL pushing back on prediction markets?

Even as the NFL continues its alliance with sports betting operators unabated, it has landed its first punch on prediction markets.

The league recently submitted written testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, according to ESPN, arguing for greater regulation of sites like Kalshi and Polymarket, where users can wager on markets related to everything from who will win a game to whether certain phrases will be uttered on a broadcast. Beyond football, bettors can put money on just about anything under the sun with fixed outcomes and enough fellow wagerers to form a market.

Media companies like CNN and CNBC have partnered with Kalshi in recent weeks, going the opposite direction of the NFL’s warning shot. However, sports has seen most directly the threats to the integrity of games that can come when betting goes big. The NFL has been able to avoid a scandal as big as that of Terry Rozier or Emmanuel Clasé. The threat is even worse for some of the micro-events seen in prediction markets, such as whether a broadcaster will say “late hit” — an example the NFL cited directly in its testimony to the congressional committee. If a play-by-play voice were to get wind of the market, they could directly alter it.

On Sunday, more than $400,000 was bet on whether the CBS broadcast team would say the words “What a catch,” “windy,” or “safety.”

The NFL sees a near future in which Polymarket or Kalshi partner directly with sports events, and the problems that could come along.

“Congress and the CFTC should prohibit these and other types of objectionable bets among the many consumer and integrity protective measures needed before sports-related events contracts are legalized,” executive Jeff Miller wrote.

Still, recent history shows that sports leagues and media companies hardly ever resist such deals based solely on ethics. Just as the NFL partnered with DraftKings and FanDuel once it made business sense to do so and Disney recently struck a deal with OpenAI to license its characters into the Sora generative-AI program, it won’t be long before leagues do hook up with prediction markets.

The NFL’s testimony should probably be taken as a sign that these markets are getting big enough to get the attention of an entertainment business even as big as the NFL. The league likely does not want to lose out on its chance to make money off the new industry. Its request to the federal government is more about protecting its likely future business partnerships rather than a concern over users’ safety while investing their money on bets that are easy to manipulable.

Either way, prediction markets are clearly the next frontier of our loosely regulated, brain-melting new era of legal sports betting — in sports and beyond.