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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

💣 Pablo bomb, part two? The Kawhi Leonard episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out sent shockwaves through the basketball world. And the fun could just be beginning. On his Basketball Illuminati podcast with Tom Haberstroh and Anthony Mayes, former NBA executive and current media personality Amin Elhassan (who appeared on the episode with Torre and David Samson) teased that there is a sequel that has already been recorded and will drop soon. When Awful Announcing reached out to Torre for comment, he replied: “😬.”

⚾ Tigers’ troubles. The Athletic’s investigation into misconduct within the Detroit Tigers organization revealed that two former Tigers players, who worked as broadcasters (Cameron Maybin and Craig Monroe), were removed from the air following allegations of inappropriate behavior.

🦊 Fox moves forward. Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch took the stage at a Goldman Sachs conference on Wednesday to extol the virtues of the newly reformed trust, which solidified his position as owner and chief executive of the company for years to come. “It’s great news for investors,” he said. “It gives us a clarity about our strategy going forward.”

📺 Running it back. According to a report by Michael McCarthy in Front Office Sports, FanDuel TV has renewed Michelle Beadle’s show Run It Back for a fourth season. The show’s usual crew, including Beadle, Chandler Parsons, and Lou Williams, will remain intact. The show will continue to air on FanDuel TV, stream on YouTube, and potentially secure distribution on some of the FanDuel-branded regional sports networks nationwide.

🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

Beyond the Top 25 sports media personalities of the 21st century

Earlier this week, we released our list of the 25 most influential sports media personalities of the 21st century so far. In case you missed it, you can click that link to see all 25 people (well, technically 28), or you can skim this handy graphic:

We toiled over who to include, who to leave off, what the true meaning of “influential” was, and how to justify our selections. You don’t make a list like this and expect everyone to agree with you. In fact, you basically know going in that you are going to get some strong feedback regarding some of your choices and, more importantly, your omissions.

We stand by our ranking, but we were certainly curious to see which sports media personalities our readers were flummoxed not to see included. Here’s a rundown of some of the names that appeared most frequently in our comments, DMs, and emails, along with my $0.02 on why they might not have made the cut.

Rich Eisen: The former SportsCenter anchor, who was the face of NFL Network for a significant portion of the quarter-century and later found success with his own show, has undoubtedly been an ever-present and delightful sports media personality throughout this entire time. But influential? We’re not so sure about that.

Bomani Jones: If ever there was a sports media trailblazer who can dish it out and back it up, it’s Bomani. We’re big fans, but we didn’t see his influence growing over the course of the quarter-century.

Craig Sager: The well-dressed and irreplacable TNT Sports reporter was defintely an icon before he sadly passed away in 2016. We’d consider him very much in the Honorable Mention category.

Tony Reali: Reali’s rise from StatBoy to the longtime face of Around the Horn was very impressive. However, the show’s spot in PTI’s shadow, coupled with ESPN’s lack of a promotional push around it, dampened his overall impact.

Lee Corso: The iconic College GameDay analyst, who just wrapped up his storied broadcasting run, was one of one. In some ways, that lessened his influence, especially as he entered the autumn of his career and was overshadowed by larger personalities.

Mike Greenberg: Greeny has done a lot. From Mike & Mike to SportsCenter to Get Up and more. He’s one of the hardest-working people in sports media, but we put him in the Honorable Mention category when it comes to influence.

Shannon Sharpe: There’s no denying Sharpe’s meteoric media rise over the last decade, but things have taken a decidedly weird turn over the previous year, and his influence has suffered for it. Plus, his media career only really got rolling midway through the quarter-century. If he can recapture the trajectory he was on, perhaps we’ll come to regret not including him.

Jim Rome: We saw a lot of people saying we shortchanged the longtime TV and radio presence, who has hosted shows on ESPN, Showtime, CBS Sports Radio, and now X. While Rome and his “clones” keep powering along, we felt like his influential peak was in the 1990s (nothing will ever top the Jim Everett interview) and early 2000s, dropping off in the decades since.

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• The changes to Nielsen methodology in the new Big Data era are paying big dividends for the NFL. ESPN’s Monday Night Football was the biggest beneficiary, but numbers were way up across the board. They all have this new approach that combines Nielsen’s traditional panel measurement with data from millions of set-top boxes and smart TVs to thank.

• Amazon’s Prime Video has unveiled the trailer for an upcoming three-part docuseries on Owen Hanson. Cocaine Quarterback will detail his unfortunate path to prison after walking on with the University of Southern California football team over two decades ago.

• NBC Sports NFL Draft analyst and PFF’s NFL Stock Exchange co-host Connor Rogers has been tapped as the new midway co-host for Chris Simms Unbuttoned, replacing the outgoing Ahmed Fareed, who is expanding his NBC duties.

• ESPN has announced that EverPass, which distributes live sports to commercial establishments, will offer ESPN+ content to bars, restaurants, hotels, and other commercial establishments starting next month.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

During last week’s debut episode of Wake Up Barstool, Dave Portnoy took a jab at the ratings of the FS1 morning show’s predecessor.

“When we come back from the break, let’s see what the people are saying,” the Barstool Sports founder said as he threw it to a commercial. “They’re usually pretty mean. Like, ‘this show stinks, I’m never going to watch it.’ I’ll tell you this: it didn’t have the greatest ratings before we got on. So you can’t go from zero to negative zero. So we can only go up.”

As it turns out, an upward trajectory on traditional television wasn’t as guaranteed as Portnoy had believed it would be. Turns out, none of the first four episodes of Wake Up Barstool eclipsed the 20,000 viewer threshold during the show’s opening week on FS1. For comparison’s sake, its premiere averaged 20,000 viewers, a sizable year-over-year drop from the two shows (Breakfast Ball and The Facility) that it replaced.

Awful Announcing’s Ben Axelrod wrote about how Wake Up Barstool’s rough ratings might not necessarily be a referendum on the show’s quality, but rather the reality that it may not be a fit for linear television.

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️

“There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. And this is very much a highlights-based sport.” - NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s interesting answer to a question about the rising costs of watching NBA games.

“I think there will be a time in the next, I will say, let’s call it two to four years, that I will start to wind down a little bit.” - Dan “Big Cat” Katz on his desire to do less Barstool and more Pardon My Take.

“There’s a Detroit Red Wings fan…” - San Francisco Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow, being unable to place the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off cosplayers at the game.

“…we’re actually getting together in about two weeks and going to finally sit down with ESPN face to face and say, ‘Hey, can you tell us how this thing is gonna work?’” - Charles Barkley on the impending meeting between the Inside the NBA crew and ESPN.

“What I didn’t like about what Ryan did … when you’re on live TV with people, there’s a nakedness to that. You really have to trust people that you’re with.” - Bill Simmons on the Ryan Clark-Peter Schrager incident last week.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

The killing of 31-year-old right-wing activist Charlie Kirk sent shockwaves through America on Wednesday. As a sports media outlet, it wasn’t the kind of thing that often falls under our purview, but sports media is media, and those worlds invariably overlapped.

There’s plenty to say about what happened, why it happened, and where we all go from here. In the meantime, we rounded up reactions from notable figures from the sports media world as a timestamp of the moment and how it was discussed.