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🎙️ Booth battle. Dave Pasch reportedly has the inside track on ESPN's No. 2 NFL booth, with either Jason Kelce or Kurt Warner expected to join him as analyst, per The Athletic's Andrew Marchand. Mike Monaco, Steve Levy, and Bob Wischusen are also in the mix.

🚨 Serious allegation. Former ESPN and Fox Sports host Marcellus Wiley has been accused of sexual assault by four new accusers, including a former ESPN production assistant who alleges Wiley lured her to his hotel room under the pretense of a work meeting in 2009. The new filings join three previous lawsuits against Wiley. He has been away from mainstream sports media since leaving Fox in 2022 and continues to post to his YouTube channel.

🏆 Pulitzer. Pablo Torre Finds Out won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting for its nine-part investigation into alleged salary-cap circumvention by the Los Angeles Clippers, beating out the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for the prize. The series, produced by Meadowlark Media and licensed by The Athletic, triggered an ongoing NBA investigation into the franchise. Torre is now the reigning AA Sports Media Person of the Year and a Pulitzer winner.

📅 Schedule watch. The 2026 NFL schedule release could slip to the week of May 18, per NFL VP of broadcast planning Mike North, who said the league is still waiting on the resolution of a five-game streaming package — with YouTube the reported frontrunner — before the full schedule can be finalized. To date, only two regular-season games have official homes: 49ers-Rams in Australia and Ravens-Cowboys in Brazil.

🏀 Draymond returns. Draymond Green will make three guest analyst appearances on Inside the NBA during the playoffs, filling in for Kenny Smith alongside Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, and Shaquille O'Neal. Per the Sports Business Journal, the arrangement is being handled under the TNT Sports umbrella, which retains full editorial control over the show under its ESPN licensing deal.

📣 Spoiled. The NCAA accidentally posted the brackets for both the men's and women's lacrosse tournaments on its website before the selection shows aired Sunday night on ESPNU, with the leak appearing around 8:15 p.m. ET, roughly 45 minutes before airtime. The NCAA attributed it to a "technical glitch."

The working assumption for Skip Bayless returning to First Take on Friday is that the two old partners have repaired their relationship, and Stephen A. Smith wanted to make it happen. That's true as far as it goes. It just doesn't go very far.

The reunion is being framed as a feel-good sports-media moment: old rivals burying the hatchet, the band getting back together, and ESPN restoring one of the most iconic pairings in the history of sports television. What it actually is, if you look at the timing and circumstances clearly, is something more revealing than that. It tells you exactly where First Take is right now, what Stephen A. Smith thinks about his own show, and how completely the power dynamic between these two men has been inverted since Bayless left for FS1 in 2016.

First Take doesn't need Skip Bayless. This is not an opinion. The show is, by every available metric, at the peak of its power. It is the number-one sports debate program on television. The competition that was supposed to challenge it — FS1's morning block, anchored for years by Bayless and Shannon Sharpe on Undisputed — no longer exists in any meaningful form. Undisputed collapsed after Sharpe's sudden departure in 2023, limped along for another year with rotating partners who never stuck, and was eventually canceled when Bayless himself left FS1 in 2024.

So why is Bayless walking back through the door? Why this week, in early May, in the middle of the NBA playoffs with no particular hook beyond the reunion itself?

We have a few working theories.

The simplest one is that Smith earned the right to run his show however he wants, and this is what he wants. That part is indisputably true. Smith signed a five-year, $100 million extension that also gave him executive producer status.

He’s spent the past several months on what amounts to a Bayless rehabilitation tour, crediting him on his SiriusXM show for building First Take into what it became, appearing on Bayless's podcast in March 2025, and being photographed with Bayless and his wife at a Beverly Hills deli in November. Smith was clearly building toward something, and Friday is what he was building toward.

The question is why Smith felt the need to build toward anything at all.

When you run the most dominant show in your space and have no meaningful competition, the natural instinct should be to protect what you have, not to reach back into your own history and create a news cycle around someone who, by any fair assessment, has spent the past two years struggling to stay relevant.

Look at it this way. This is not two peers reconnecting; this is the most powerful individual in sports debate television extending a lifeline to someone whose career he once helped define and then definitively outgrew. The terms have completely reversed. When Bayless left ESPN in 2016 for a reported $6 million a year at FS1, Smith was furious. Not only was he not invited to the conversation, but he was also not told directly by his partner. He would find out on his own that the person he'd built the show with for four years had decided to leave without so much as a warning.

At that moment, Bayless was the one making the power move. He had leverage. ESPN wanted to keep him and couldn't. FS1 was willing to pay a premium to use him as the centerpiece of a challenger show. He left on his own terms.

None of that is true anymore. Bayless doesn't have leverage. ESPN isn't bidding against anyone for his services. His partner's decision-making isn't blindsiding Smith — he is the decision-maker. The entire reunion happens on Smith's timetable, in Smith's building, on Smith's show, under terms that Smith negotiated with an employer that now gives him executive-producer authority. When Bayless sits down across from Smith on Friday, he will be in a chair controlled by Smith.

Which raises the second theory: that Smith is doing this not because First Take needs it but because he needs it.

This one requires some reading between the lines, but the evidence points in an interesting direction. Look at what Smith has put together this week alone. Kid Mero. Cam'ron. Now Bayless. That's not a programming strategy built around the NBA playoffs. That's someone making programming decisions designed to create noise, generate social media reaction, and remind the audience that unpredictability is still on the menu. When everything is going well, when the ratings are strong, and the competition has folded, the risk is that the show becomes comfortable. Predictable. A machine that runs efficiently but no longer surprises anyone.

Smith is, at his core, someone who needs friction to perform. The years when First Take was at its most electric were the years when he and Bayless genuinely couldn't stand each other, yet couldn't stop generating confrontational TV anyway. The Max Kellerman era never recaptured that. Sharpe's arrival helped because he brought his own combustible energy, but that partnership barely lasted before he was gone. The rotating cast of debate partners since then has produced good television without producing the kind of must-watch tension that defined the Smith-Bayless era.

Whether Smith actually wants to recreate that dynamic on a recurring basis, or whether this is a one-off designed to generate a week of conversation, is the most important unanswered question arising from this announcement. The safe read is that it's a one-time thing — ESPN's own framing describes it that way — and that once Friday passes, Bayless goes back to YouTube and his Underdog show and Smith moves on to the next provocation. The more interesting read is that Smith has been laying the groundwork for something more permanent, and that Friday is a soft launch of a more regular arrangement.

What makes it uncomfortable to fully celebrate, even for fans of the original pairing, is what the rehabilitation arc actually required. Smith spent years publicly distancing himself from Bayless, building a post-Bayless identity for First Take that didn't depend on the old format, and making fairly unambiguous statements that the partnership was over.

"I have moved on" came in the context of Bayless leaving FS1 and speculation that a reunion was spiking, and it was meant to close the door. The door is now being reopened, but not due to any change in the underlying circumstances. Bayless did not do anything differently. He didn't rehabilitate himself through some impressive new work or reinvent his media identity.

What changed is that Smith decided he wanted this, which means the public positioning of the past several years — the distancing, the "I have moved on" language, the suggestion that the partnership had run its course — was always more flexible than it appeared. That's fine, people change their minds, relationships evolve. But it's worth noting that the entire arc of rehabilitation ran from Smith toward Bayless, not the other way around. Smith did the work. Smith issued the apology. Smith extended the invitation. Bayless mostly waited for his former partner to decide his rehabilitation was complete.

The answer to "why now" is probably less complicated than all of this analysis suggests: Stephen A. Smith wants to do it, he can do it, and at ESPN in 2026, those are the only two conditions that need to be met.

Sports Illustrated's Pat Forde has covered 39 Kentucky Derbys. He's never seen one quite like Golden Tempo's last-to-first sprint Saturday. He talked to Awful Announcing's Michael Grant about all of it: the Disney-movie storyline, what makes Cherie DeVaux the most interesting person in horse racing right now, and why Churchill Downs couldn't care less that it blew up Louisville's restaurant economy to run the Oaks at night.

On DeVaux becoming the first female trainer to win the Derby: "Her life could have gone in several other directions. She was a pre-med major and planned to work in medicine." She chose the racetrack over organic chemistry. Hard to argue with the results.

On whether the Derby itself eventually goes primetime: "I would say to keep your head on a swivel on that." Churchill Downs set a record handle and massive ratings for the night's Oaks. They got exactly what they wanted. The tradition argument tends to lose when the numbers look like that.

On how far back Golden Tempo actually was: "At the half-mile point, he's still not even in the screen. You can't see him. It was pretty dramatic. It makes for unbelievable television."

Click here to read the full interview, including Forde's Derby betting picks, which did not include Golden Tempo.

In yesterday's newsletter, we incorrectly stated that FS1 is set to lose NASCAR Cup Series rights after this year. That is not accurate. Fox and FS1 are under a seven-year deal covering NASCAR Cup Series races that went into effect in 2025 and runs through 2031. We regret the error.

"God, do I hate the idea of the NCAA Tournament expanding to 76 teams. Who wants Mastro's to add McNuggets to the menu? We come for the steak, not the sweet-and-sour sauce." - Fox's Colin Cowherd making his case against expansion, adding that college basketball is "finally finding its footing again" and that the average margin of victory in this year's first round was 17 points. Adding weaker teams won't bring that number down.

"I think that college football should be run by people who like college football. And every decision, every idea I've seen about playoff expansion seems like it's come from people who don't like college football, don't know why we like it. A 24-team playoff would be a disgrace." - ESPN's Kevin Clark on The Paul Finebaum Show, arguing that the Big Ten's push for a 24-team bracket would ruin the regular season and that athletic directors are trying to bail themselves out from their own bad decisions on the back of TV money.

"Words were used like 'con artist,' 'liar,' 'salesman.' How did you come to a different conclusion than I was able to come to in a very short time?" - Toronto Sun columnist Steve Simmons at the John Chayka introductory press conference, telling Maple Leafs CEO Keith Pelley that of the 20 NHL people he contacted, 19 called the hiring a sham.

"I've actually spoke to some refs, and they said it was an agenda going into each game. 'So anytime Jaylen brings his arm up, just from reputation, just call it.'" - Celtics forward Jaylen Brown on his Twitch stream after Boston blew a 3-1 series lead against the 76ers, also claiming Joel Embiid "flops" and that flopping has "ruined our game.”

"Shane Doan was stabbed in the back, and I'm out. That's it." - Spittin' Chiclets co-host and NHL on TNT analyst Paul Bissonnette declaring himself done with the Maple Leafs following the Chayka hiring, citing the likely departure of assistant GM Shane Doan as his breaking point.

Sam Neumann and Brendon Kleen discuss whether Fox's Jay Glazer is facing a double standard compared to what Dianna Russini experienced, and whether the sports media world has been too willing to look past Glazer's close personal relationships across the league. Plus, Russell Wilson weighs a move to CBS, and ESPN pursues Steve Kerr for a broadcasting role.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

John Sterling passed away Monday morning at 87, from complications following heart surgery after suffering a heart attack earlier this year. The news broke on WFAN, the station where he spent 36 years as the radio voice of the New York Yankees, delivered by morning hosts Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti.

There is no clean way to summarize a career like Sterling's, because the career was really just an extension of the person, and the person was genuinely unlike anyone else in the business. He called 5,060 consecutive games starting in 1989. He had a personalized home run call for nearly every Yankee hitter who came through the Bronx. He never wrote anything down. What came out of him, as Suzyn Waldman put it Monday, "came out of his heart." When Waldman described her favorite Sterling call, Derek Jeter's 3,000th hit, she didn't talk about the words. She talked about the tears running down his face, even as he delivered it perfectly.

Michael Kay, one of Sterling's closest friends, broke down on his radio show, revealing that Sterling had been pushing himself through rehab with a single goal in mind. His oldest daughter is getting married this summer. He wanted to walk her down the aisle. "That's why he was hanging on," Kay said, pausing to collect himself.

The tributes that poured in on Monday from across sports media kept returning to the same word: irreplaceable. Tony Reali wrote that next to his mother and father, John Sterling was the voice he had heard most in his life. Chelsea Janes said he narrated entire periods of her life, a constant amid change. Howie Rose, calling in his own final season while battling illness, said he was "truly one of a kind" and that "there will never be another." That phrase appeared in some variation in nearly every tribute posted.

The conventional criticism of Sterling, if you want to be precise about it, is that he occasionally got too cute, pulled back a home run call prematurely, or let his enthusiasm outrun the actual play. All of that is true, and none of it matters. Imperfection was part of the texture. What he brought to the booth every night for 36 summers was joy, in the purest sense of the word: a genuine, unconstructed love of baseball that came through whether the Yankees were winning a World Series or losing a rain-delayed game in September.

The Yankees win. They always did, as long as you were listening to him call it.