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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺 Kaep’s story on the move. “Da Saga of Colin Kaepernick,” a Spike Lee series on the infamous San Francisco QB planned for ESPN, is no more. Reuters reported over the weekend that the doc, which saw Jemele Hill re-enter the ESPN fold as well, is leaving the Worldwide Leader over creative differences. A long time coming, the shuffle will see the series hit the market once again to potentially air elsewhere.

🏈 Belichick ducking Chapel Hill press? New North Carolina head football coach Bill Belichick will not participate in the customary weekly radio interview in Chapel Hill this year. Instead, Belichick will appear once preseason before being replaced by UNC general manager and longtime Belichick lacky Michael Lombardi. It is the latest sign of Belichick doing Belichick in Chapel Hill, and a frosty relationship with the press before ever coaching a game.

🏀 ESPN analyst’s son ranked No. 1. Marcus Spears Jr., the son of ESPN’s Marcus Spears, is the top men’s basketball recruit for the class of 2027. Spears Jr. plays for Dynamic Prep in Plano, Texas, while his father is a panelist on NFL Live and Monday Night Countdown. According to the younger Spears, papa Swagu discouraged his son from playing football. Heck of a parenting move.

️‍🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Manfred teases expansion

During an appearance on the SNY broadcast of Mariners-Mets on Sunday, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred dropped a bomb.

In his most specific public comments about expansion yet, Manfred outlined the league’s thinking on growing to 32 teams. And right at the center of Manfred’s answer was broadcasting.

“I think if we expand, it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign,” Manfred said, noting the positives for reduced travel and players’ health. “I think our postseason format would be even more appealing to entities like ESPN because you’d be playing out of the East, out of the West. And that 10 0’clock time slot, where we sometimes get Boston-Anaheim, would be two West Coast teams. And that 10 o’clock slot that’s a problem for us, sometimes, becomes a real opportunity for our West Coast audience.”

USA Today columnist Bob Nightengale recently reported that Nashville and Salt Lake City would be the two most likely MLB expansion cities. Given that neither of those two teams are in the Pacific time zone, Manfred could be spelling out a fairly significant reshaping of the league.

Would Manfred go so far as to create an “Eastern” and “Western” league similar to the NBA or NHL? In order to “play out of the East, out of the West” in the postseason, the bracket would need to be regionalized. Right now, division winners are seeded based on record. The NL West winner could play the NL East winner in a best of seven, traveling across the country several times.

A full geographic revamp catered to regional battles would certainly be in line with Manfred’s other recent moves. Baseball clearly wants to become more national as the local TV infrastructure breaks down and it seeks out multiple new broadcast partners. Manfred wants MLB to have games dotting the schedule each week on big, national platforms. And ultimately, he wants to sell one of these partners the full slate of local rights to house and sell on their platform.

It is also likely no coincidence that, despite the fact that Manfred was indeed just answering a question on SNY, he mentioned ESPN. This answer can be seen as a carrot dangling in front of the network’s nose: Stay in business with us, you won’t regret it. Better days await.

In order to find the big payday it seeks on its next broadcast deals and get the most out of its content as a media rights holder into the 2030s, MLB is prepared to throw history to the wind and reconfigure the entire sport as we know it.

💬 THINKING OUT LOUD 💬

Big Ten floats massive expansion of CFP

The SEC and Big Ten are up against a Dec. 1 deadline to decide upon changes to the format of the College Football Playoff ahead of a new TV deal with ESPN starting next season.

At issue are the number of automatic bids per conference compared with at-large bids to be voted upon by the CFP committee. Layered within that debate is whether the SEC will ultimately add a ninth conference game to make its schedule. This would satisfy recent additions to the CFP voting criteria valuing strength of schedule more greatly. However, it would likely result in lower records for SEC teams.

And while SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is stating the 12-team model “could stay,” the Big Ten is reportedly floating outlandishly large bracket concepts to member schools. These formats would give seven auto bids to the SEC and Big Ten.

So here we beam in our boss and Big Ten correspondent Ben Koo with this thoughts on the latest reporting:

imo i think the Big Ten's sole motivation at this point is trying to propose stuff that undermines the SEC and specifically ESPN.

No way this type of playoff would just have 1 TV contract and that's imo what's behind this. Fox is saying "making the playoff so big, that we get a piece of it!"

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Fox is already making changes to the scorebug it debuted at Super Bowl XLIV this past February, replacing the abbreviations of team locales with team logos.

Leave it Kevin Harlan to take a touchy issue like virtual down and distance measurements and make them hype.

…And leave it to an NFL head coach to drop an F-bomb while mic’d up on live television.

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Who really wants a Super Bowl in London?

A London Super Bowl has been rumored for years, but this time the push is coming from none other than the British ambassador to the U.S.

If the NFL indeed wants a full, 17- or 18-game international game package and has eyes, eventually, on European expansion, a Super Bowl in London makes sense. It is the English-speaking capitol city of the region and the closest European city to America. It is where the NFL has played the most games since kicking off across the pond for the first time in 2007.

As Awful Announcing’s Sean Keeley recently wrote, the most obvious issue with this plan is timing. To play a Super Bowl in London, the NFL would have to give up its precious 6:30 p.m. ET start time. If that wasn’t enough of a logistical pain, don’t forget all the travel and setup that would go into such an experiment. Not just the game, but the meetings and fan festivals and concerts that touch down upon the host city in the weeks prior to the big game.

Of course, the league wouldn’t even entertain the idea if it didn’t believe it could pull that side off. The more fascinating question at this moment in time is who even wants a London Super Bowl.

Until it has an NFL team, the city has no real need to bring the crown jewel of NFL events onto its turf. If it got a team, you could envision an argument that a Super Bowl would hype up the arrival of the NFL. Would that be necessary? We’re going on two decades of NFL games in England. The Super Bowl is already well-known and popular in the United Kingdom. More than 1 million people watched this year’s blowout Super Bowl in the dead of night.

From the NFL’s side, the big game is often used as a bargaining chip. Unless the NFL somehow convinces new ownership to build yet another massive stadium near London, they don’t need to dangle a Super Bowl over those talks. We would expect at least one game in the market if it were to get a team, despite the ugly February weather there. Perhaps it would be a “get it over with” move?

The big issue facing the NFL when it comes to uptake of American football in the U.K. is consistent, passionate fandom. Filling stadiums nine times a year and sitting down every Sunday to watch on television. Buying merchandise and supporting the club like it’s their own.

A Super Bowl is the type of big, singular event that can draw attention and make stakeholders happy. It doesn’t make sense for the current section of the timeline that the NFL is in, still attempting to drum up intrigue and excite potential diehards.