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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🚨 ESPN.com editor on leave. Executive editor Cristina Daglas has been placed on administrative leave, per a report by Front Office Sports. The decision to sideline Daglas, who has been with the Worldwide Leader for over a decade, resulted from various complaints from multiple employees to the company’s Human Resources department. The nature of those complaints were not disclosed. Daglas has headed ESPN.com for the past four years.

🏀 NBA eyes changes. Front Office Sports also reported Monday that the NBA is looking at multiple changes to its All-Star Game next season. The first change would be moving tip-off up to 5 p.m. ET so NBC, who will be airing the game next year, can use the Winter Olympics as a direct lead-in. The league is also considering a one-on-one tournament, which has already drawn support from star players like Giannis Antetokounmpo.

🐺 Bueckers just wants to ball. The UConn Huskies ended the South Carolina Gamecocks’ 71-game home winning streak on Sunday, and even up 22 points at the break, Huskies star Paige Bueckers wanted no part of Holly Rowe’s halftime interview. Fans caught Bueckers hilariously annoyed at being pulled aside while jogging to the locker room, though TV viewers would never have known based on the professional interview she gave Rowe.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

SEC, Big Ten eye expansion

The only constant in college football is change, and it looks like there’s plenty more in store if the SEC and Big Ten have anything to say about it.

Spoiler alert: they have a lot to say about it.

On Sunday evening, Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports published a deeply reported piece about possible expansion to the College Football Playoff. The SEC and Big Ten are seeking a 14 or 16-team format equipped with four automatic bids for each conference, leaving the rest of the college football ecosystem fighting for scraps.

This is what the powers that be in college athletics agreed to last spring. The Power-2 pledged fealty to the current structure, ending threats to upend the system entirely by breaking away and forming their own semi-pro college football league. And in return, college football’s peasant class (i.e. the ACC, Big 12, and Group of 5) agreed to a “memorandum of understanding” that, in practice, allows their P-2 overlords near autonomous control over the CFP’s new format.

And control they will. Under the reported new format, SEC and Big Ten schools will take up at least half (but likely more) of the slots in each season’s playoff. They’ll also triple their postseason media rights revenue in the process. Meanwhile, the ACC and Big 12 will thank college football’s kingmakers for their two bids each as the gulf between television revenue grows ever wider.

There’s plenty of knock-on effects to boot. Under a new playoff structure, the SEC will likely shift from eight to nine regular season conference games, securing yet more television revenue. The SEC and Big Ten will likely ink a scheduling agreement akin to cross-conference competitions in college hoops. That too will be sold as additional inventory to television partners.

And how about ditching conference championship games while we’re at it? Instead, the weekend will reportedly be used for CFP play-in games wherein teams three through six in the SEC and Big Ten compete head-to-head for automatic berths in the Big Dance. (By the way, that’s even more television inventory to sell for those counting at home.)

Sure, this might all sound like blasphemy to the traditionalist. But for fans that are more accepting of college football’s new normal, this means brand name teams facing off more often and for higher stakes.

There will certainly still be hurdles to all of this. Scheduling, for one, will be even more difficult when considering the NFL’s preference to play on Saturdays in late December. Then there’s also the dollars and cents component with CFP rightsholder ESPN, and any additional high-octane regular season inventory the conferences would like to upsell to ESPN and Fox.

But usually, when there’s tangible value added to a product (like the CFP’s original playoff expansion), there’s a way to make the money work.

2025 will likely be the second and final year of the 12-team playoff format. But what does it matter? College football fans are plenty used to change these days.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

📱 NBA on Bluesky. The league setup its official account on the X/Twitter competitor at some point on Sunday. Four teams have already joined up as well: the Trail Blazers, 76ers, Suns, and Mavericks. The NBA joins Major League Baseball as the two biggest U.S. pro sports leagues with Bluesky accounts.

🏀 Trail Blazers up big. The Portland Trail Blazers have taken advantage of ditching Root Sports Northwest in favor of free over-the-air broadcast by increasing its viewership by 69% year-over-year. However, it’s not all rainbows and lollipops. Portland has still lost $20 to $25 million in media rights revenue, per Sports Business Journal.

🦅 Tapper keeps receipts. CNN’s Jake Tapper, a cocksure Philadelphia Eagles fan (oxymoron), used his show recently to take on all of the “naysayers” that doubted the Super Bowl champs during the regular season. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, was safe.

✍️ AROUND AA ✍️

The NBA All-Star Game is beyond fixing

There’s really no need to pile on the NBA All-Star Game while its down, but Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder brilliantly broke down what went wrong Sunday night piece-by-piece.

First, it was LeBron opting out mere hours before the competition. Then, it was the new format falling completely flat. And during it all, a funeral for Inside the NBA, a show that will exist next-freaking-year with the same great cast.

Sigh.

Here’s how Matt concluded his piece:

If the NBA puts out a product similar to the last two years of the NBA All-Star Game alongside the Super Bowl and Olympics, it will only serve as a showcase for just how out of touch the league is compared to what fans actually want.

Options for Adam Silver and the NBA are limited. Maybe the league can just play the NBA Cup Final in place of the All-Star Game since the players have actually embraced the in-season tournament. Maybe they can roll the dice with a USA vs The World format. Maybe they can make it a $25 million winner take all game. Or maybe they could force the losing team to actually compete against Mac McClung in the Slam Dunk Contest to get players to try.

But right now, the NBA All-Star Game is doing more harm than good for the league. The NHL figured it out by replacing their All-Star Game with the 4 Nations, which has produced incredible hockey and the ratings to match. If the NBA can’t do something similar, they would be far better off just putting the NBA All-Star Game out of its misery.

Read all of Matt’s excellent column here.

️‍🔥The Closer🔥

An Apple a day keeps Messi away

As Major League Soccer enters Year 3 of its deal with Apple TV, the league is looking to make its product more accessible to casual fans. That is, unless you’re a casual fan that watches linear television.

It’s been an active offseason for MLS. The league has secured deals with Comcast and DirecTV for matches to be made available directly through their respective channel guides, though an MLS Season Pass subscription will still be required. T-Mobile customers can get a Season Pass subscription for free. And at long last, Android users can download the Apple TV app via the Google Play Store and access games on non-Apple devices.

These changes, on top of others — like introducing a premiere Sunday Night Soccer package that is available to anyone with an Apple TV+ subscription, no Season Pass required — should make the league easier for casual fans to access.

But those looking to watch the league’s biggest draw, Lionel Messi, will, by-and-large, still need to launch a streaming app on their device to see him. That’s because, of Fox’s 33-game linear MLS package, only two matches will feature Messi’s Inter Miami side. Twice, in July, on FS1, will be the only time fans can tune in and watch Messi with a traditional cable or satellite subscription.

On Monday, Jonathan Tannenwald of The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “Apple caps the number of Miami games Fox can air to push viewers toward the streaming platform.”

Now, it makes sense that Apple would want Messi all for themselves, but airing just two Inter Miami games on linear television across a nine-month season seems like a complete dereliction of duty on the part of the league. Surely, airing a few more Inter Miami games on linear would help drive more people to subscribe to MLS Season Pass, not fewer. Apple’s decision seems very shortsighted, especially in the context of their struggle to attract subscribers.

Messi’s career won’t last forever, and it seems like MLS is letting what’s left of it waste away behind a paywall, rather than leveraging his superstardom to grow the league in a meaningful way.

One of the world’s most popular athletes is playing in one of the United States’ most glamorous cities, yet he’s only on TV twice a year? Something is incredibly wrong with that equation, no matter what the media rights contracts say.