Welcome to The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter where you’ll always find the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis.

Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up for free to make sure you never miss it.

🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏆 Longtime stalwarts and new faces in new places lead the top studio hosts and analysts in the 2025 Awfulies.

💰 DAZN is making a move to acquire Main Street Sports Group, the parent company of the FanDuel RSNs.

🥌 Rebecca Lowe will have a busy 2026 as World Cup host and NBC daytime Olympic host. She’s now the longest-serving Olympics host at NBC.

💰 Warner Bros. Discovery is telling shareholders to reject the takeover bid from Paramount and move ahead with the preferred Netflix deal.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Rooting for Cinderella's stepsisters?

If there’s one thing that is universally loved in sports, it is the underdog story. Just don’t tell Joel Klatt and Kirk Herbstreit.

College football is the most exclusionary sport in the world. It’s the only major sport where every team does not have an equal chance to win their way to a championship. Instead, narratives, eye tests, and subjectivity carry just as much weight as what happens between the white lines.

And with both James Madison and Tulane making the College Football Playoff in 2025, the protest from college football’s bourgeoise has never been greater.

Klatt launched an astonishing broadside attack against one of the most beloved sporting institutions in the world, the NCAA basketball tournament. His logic is that nobody actually wants to see Cinderella at the ball. Which… if he’s ever seen the movie, means that he wants to dance with her obnoxious stepsisters and her evil stepmother? Did he also root for Cruella Deville against those precious Dalmatians?

Herbstreit’s offense was much less direct, but still seemed to sting. In promoting his podcast with ESPN colleague Joey Galloway, he carelessly posted on X that the pair didn’t know what to do with no college football last weekend. That totally neglected the Army-Navy Game, the FCS playoffs, and multiple bowl games that actually took place.

While Herbstreit’s post (which he deleted after being called out by the Naval Academy) was nowhere near as outlandish as Klatt’s comments, it represents how deep the class system divide is in the sport. How can anyone in college football neglect the Army-Navy Game, especially when it has its own standalone window and was watched by almost 8 million people? If we’re going to make that game (of all games) meaningless because there aren’t CFP implications, then that’s a sad state of affairs for everybody.

It’s also a misunderstanding of what makes sports truly great. It’s not about who can make the most money for their rights partners. Sports is one of the last true meritocracies we have in the world, where you can earn your way to whatever you are capable of achieving. We still fondly remember George Mason’s Final Four run or Boise State beating Oklahoma with the hook and ladder and Statue of Liberty play.

If every year was a Dodgers-Yankees World Series or an Ohio State-Georgia championship game, what would be the fun in that? We need Cinderella stories because every fanbase deserves hope. And every generation deserves a story worth remembering. Cinderella stories are some of the best drama, intrigue, excitement, and entertainment that we have. To have a sports world without them would be a sports world that would be empty, joyless, and ultimately meaningless.

Would you want to live in a world where Shooter McGavin is the hero of the story and not Happy Gilmore? I think not.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

You haven’t seen anybody react to a loss quite like Scottish darts player Cameron Menzies at the World Darts Championship.

Elle Duncan said goodbye to ESPN in her last appearance on SportsCenter before making her high profile move to Netflix.

Dave Portnoy needs to put his money where his mouth is and pay off his OSU-Michigan bet to Urban Meyer.

🗣️ NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

“But I tell people as fans, you don’t have to be a Pirate fan. You can retire as a Pirate fan or trade yourself to the Dodgers.” - Jim Bowden has maybe the most discouraging advice ever given to fans, in line with the lead topic above.

“I think the cup thing is somewhat embarrassing. I’m disappointed that we have to make an in-season tournament to make these guys more money so they won’t do load management.” - Charles Barkley is not a fan of the NBA Cup.

“It’s stuff like this where all of that gets shoved aside because the classlessness, the juvenile tendencies, the lack of statesmanship, the trifling ass tendencies that he exercises and puts on display time and time again knows no limits.” - Stephen A. Smith reacted to the horrific Donald Trump comments on the death of Rob Reiner.

️‍️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Pablo’s World

Pablo Torre was the winner of the most prestigious year-end award in all of sports media, and maybe even the world, the Awfulie for Sports Media Person of the Year. The FIFA Peace Prize has nothing on us.

And in truth, given how much of a gamechanger his reporting and his podcast has been, it couldn’t have been anybody else. Torre was at the center of multiple major sports stories with his investigative work and his podcast has presented an entirely new way to do sports journalism.

AA’s Ben Axelrod sat down with Torre to talk about his incredible 2025, the state of sports journalism, and looking ahead to what’s coming in 2026.

On the success of Pablo Torre Finds Out and his reporting…

The thought I had as this year was unfolding was truly there has never been a bigger gap between what wealthy and powerful people want the public to know and what they’re actually doing. And the more that the work I was doing began to resonate, meaning that people started caring about it, the more rewarding it was in terms of realizing, ‘oh, there’s an audience for this stuff.’

On the state of journalism and his pursuit of stories that others aren’t going after…

It’s the most ancient lane in journalism, meaning hold powerful people to some sort of accountability and do it in the spirit of the public interest. I am unsurprised that the lane is otherwise going unexplored just because you could be sued into oblivion by the people that you’re reporting on if you don’t do it right, if you’re not doing the due diligence.

On how he picks his stories…

I think something that I struggle with is how to select a topic, how to select an investigation. And I struggle with it because there is a way to do it that is based on metrics. ‘Everyone’s talking about this thing, go investigate it.’ But what I try to take such care in doing and take pride in doing is picking the right angles, such that it is non-obvious sometimes.

On a potential Jordon Hudson lawsuit…

I have been waiting for anything resembling a formal legal notice, and nothing has happened.

On his goals for 2026…

To see my family more. To make sure that my deep dive into every possible rabbit hole does not result in me, myself personally going insane, while also continually showing people that journalism is the opposite of dead. It’s the thing that everybody, when they are on the internet, whether they realize it or not, is talking about.