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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🥊 UFC’s lead anchor. CBS has tapped Kate Scott to lead its newly acquired UFC coverage beginning with UFC 324 on Jan. 24. Scott, of course, has a deep history in combat sports, having anchored boxing coverage on Netflix, Showtime, DAZN, and Fox Sports throughout her career.

🏀 We Like Mike. But we won’t be seeing much more of NBC’s special contributor the rest of NBA season, or so it seems. Speaking with Sports Illustrated, Mike Tirico indicated there are no plans in the works for Michael Jordan to sit down for another interview this season. That could change, of course, but expect NBC to keep splicing clips from the same interview we’ve been seeing all season long.

🏌️ Euro-vision. Golf Channel announced on Thursday that it has extended its media rights agreement with the Europe-based DP World Tour through 2030. The Versant-owned network will provide nearly 600 hours of live broadcasts for the American audience each season. It’s the latest move for the NBC spinoff company, which has placed a huge emphasis on sports.

🎙️ Stugotz it. Fox Sports Radio officially announced yesterday that Stugotz and Company will debut next Monday at 3 p.m. ET, emanating just miles from the College Football Playoff National Championship. The show will feature his regular crew along with a rotating cast of guest co-hosts.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

Yet another gambling scandal arrives

On Thursday, the FBI dropped another bomb on the sports world, this time implicating 39 current and former college basketball players for alleged point shaving in more than 29 Division-I games during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons.

The scheme targeted players, predominantly at mid- to low-major schools with losing records, to play in such a way that would ensure their team would not cover the spread in a given game. These players were then offered between $10,000 and $30,000 for each game they participated in the scheme.

Now, college basketball has a long history of point shaving, most infamously the 1978-79 Boston College team in which nine games were said to be compromised. (Funnily enough, the scheme’s syndicates only went 4-3-2 during that stretch.)

In the nearly 50 years since the BC scandal, college basketball fans haven’t lost faith in the sanctity of competition. For as much as people might joke about games being “rigged,” few actually take those allegations seriously.

But core to the product of college basketball, or any sport for that matter, is a belief among fans that the competition happening in front of them is pure. That the players are trying to win the game.

That’s why these scandals are so vital to the future of sports as entertainment. If public perception ever crosses some undetermined threshold where too many people believe games are being rigged, it’ll be impossible to put that genie back in the bottle. Fans will forever be skeptical of a game’s results, and interest will crater accordingly.

So this is serious business, not only from a legal standpoint, but a financial standpoint as well.

And the interesting thing is, it’s not clear if leagues saw this coming. When sports betting started to become widely legalized about five years ago, leagues and their television partners saw it as manna from the heavens. An entire new advertising vertical opened up. Fans would become more engaged because they’re wagering on games. More engaged fans might buy more tickets and merch. What was there to lose?

But it seems, at least as we sit here in January 2026, that leagues and their television partners severely underestimated the reputational risk associated with embracing sports betting in the cozy manner in which they did. If fans think the outcomes of games are being altered, or if that’s even a possibility that crosses their minds, that’s a problem.

The grand irony here is, this could’ve been happening all along, just beneath the surface. Out of sight, and out of mind. Proponents of sports betting have long argued that bringing the industry above board makes it much easier to detect fraud. After all, when there’s a $231,000 handle on a Northwestern State-Texas A&M Corpus Christi game, something is a bit fishy.

And that argument could very well be true. If gambling syndicates are solely using offshore sportsbooks to wager, it becomes much more difficult to track down what’s happening, and these cases never become public.

But the mere fact that more of these cases are becoming public knowledge poses a threat to the business of sports, regardless of if point shaving is more or less prevalent now than it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That, in a nutshell, is the oversight leagues made in their embrace of sports betting.

It doesn’t matter if these scandals are happening at the same rates they always have. They’re being talked about (and reported on) at much higher rates, and that’s bad for business. It’s not as if these stories are exclusive to low-major college basketball either. Similar gambling scandals have rocked the NBA and MLB just within the last couple of months.

The next frontier for leagues and, by extension, their television partners, will be to convince fans that sports betting isn’t jeopardizing the integrity of games. The first step is likely eliminating prop bets and live wagering, markets that are ripe with opportunity for bad actors to capitalize on.

But the message about a crackdown needs to come from the top. From league commissioners. From executives. And penalties for wrongdoers need to be clearly communicated, and harsh. The entire sports entertainment enterprise is predicated on the idea that athletes are competing to win the game. And when that’s no longer the case, there’s no business left to be had.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

We’ve seen plenty of athletes jump into media, launching their own podcasts, shows, etc. But until now, we haven’t seen that with agents. Especially not arguably the most powerful agent in all of sports. But here we are, with Klutch Sports super agent Rich Paul recently launching a podcast with Max Kellerman.

Unsurprisingly, the show has already drawn criticism from NBA teams, as Paul recently discussed a hypothetical trade that would send Los Angeles Lakers star Austin Reaves to the Memphis Grizzlies for Jaren Jackson Jr. It’s one thing for Bill Simmons, or heck, even a former player to boot up the NBA Trade Machine. It’s entirely different when its an agent, who is actively negotiating these things with teams.

Our Brendon Kleen dives into the absurdity of this conflict in his brilliant column. Read it in full here, with an excerpt available below.

Among the only reasons someone might have been excited to see Paul launch a podcast was to see precisely the type of mess he just created with the Reaves trade. Taking after his client, Draymond Green, Paul is proving to be the type of guy willing to go there with the industry and his colleagues.

Of course, that is a plenty good enough reason for Paul to host a show. It goes viral. The early-internet push from athletes and other figures to control their own message has gradually turned into these celebrities simply taking over the delivery mechanisms. At a time when dozens of active athletes are churning out content, and the tech executive goofs who host All-In are interviewing the president, we can’t exactly be precious about who gets to hold a microphone. Why shouldn’t an agent get in on the fun?

But unless you’re a Lakers fan or the agent of a player worried he might put his thumb on the scale of personnel moves, Paul can’t hurt you. Avoiding him is easy: Just don’t listen. Where Paul does run up against the bigger concerns of the average sports fan is in the gall he demonstrates in doing any of this in the first place.

🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎙️

If you want more on the Rich Paul story, check out the latest episode of The Play-By-Play!

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Laura Okmin just found the coolest job in the world

For 23 years, Laura Okmin patrolled NFL sidelines for Fox Sports, interviewing players and coaches about the games she was covering. Now, she’s putting her journalistic skill set to a much different use.

Okmin retired prior to the current NFL season. At the time, she said it was to focus on her company GALvanize, which helps mentor young women entering careers in sports. But until this week, we didn’t realize that Okmin was also dedicating much of her time to a startup that has been in the works for several years now.

According to a new story by Rustin Dodd in The Athletic, Okmin has been developing a service for NFL coaches to help them identify their “blind spots.” It all started five years ago when Dan Quinn had just been fired as the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons and called Okmin to check in. He revealed he was planning to call a list of players and coaches to document his mistakes, so he could do better when given his next opportunity.

Okmin had a different plan. What if she, an interviewer by trade, contacted the people on Quinn’s list for him. Then, those players and coaches could speak freely, and anonymously, about Quinn’s strengths and shortcomings. This way, those with the most intimate knowledge of Quinn’s processes could be fully honest, rather than trying to tell the coach about his weaknesses face-to-face. Then, Okmin could compile all of the interviews, find any commonalities or trends, and present them to Quinn.

Turns out, the process worked well. After landing on his feet as the Dallas Cowboys defensive coordinator, Quinn went on to take the Washington Commanders head coaching job, having immediate success. Speaking with The Athletic, Quinn said he “memorized” the 25-page document Okmin gave him in 2021, and began recommending the process to his colleagues.

Now Okmin’s “blind spot monitoring” has grown into a full-fledged business. She’s done the same process on 10 other NFL coaches over the past five years, including former head coaches Mike McCarthy and Matt Nagy. The former sideline reporter compiles a list of 40-50 sources, usually former players and coaches, mixing people that had both positive and negative experiences with the coach, interviews each person for at least an hour, and then presents her findings to the coach.

“It was probably my favorite professional season of my life,” Okmin told The Athletic.

What a cool application of the journalistic skill set. After two decades asking questions and building relationships, you get pretty good at extracting information from people, and then synthesizing that information for the audience. Now, Okmin is using that exact same process, only her audience became NFL coaches rather than fans sitting at home.