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

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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

👊 ESPN+ flubbed its broadcast of UFC 313, giving subscribers an error message when they attempted to pay for the event through the app. In response, ESPN offered video of the full card on-demand for free to ESPN+ subscribers but did not offer rebates. The snafu comes amid ongoing negotiations between UFC parent TKO and the Worldwide Leader on a renewal of their broadcast rights deal — and TKO execs are reportedly “furious.”

🟣 LeBron James confronted Stephen A. Smith during a game last Thursday night at Crypto.com Arena, stealing the shine from Stephen A.’s massive new contract. While the two had been fighting from afar through social media for over a week, the in-person disagreement appeared to stem from Smith’s slights toward James’ son, Bronny. Video of the confrontation went viral, leading Smith to address the incident for a full 10 minutes at the start of Friday’s First Take.

🏀 Kenan Thompson did a Kendrick Perkins impression on Saturday Night Live, spoofing the relationship between Big Perk and Stephen A. Smith. In a twist of fate, Perkins and Smith clashed Sunday afternoon on the network’s airwaves over the race for NBA MVP.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

The era of the sports media mascot

A common response to the news of Stephen A. Smith’s record new contract at ESPN, including in this newsletter, was to observe that the great debater was getting a big raise to work less.

Where Smith previously hosted an ESPN Radio show and, from 2019 through this season, cohosted NBA Countdown, the new deal only commits him to hosting First Take each day. Yet in spite of that, Smith is going from $12 million to $20 million annually.

Some of us in our cluttered home offices or saggy khakis might be jealous, but Smith isn’t as unique has he seemed at first blush when the news broke. Instead, Smith’s latest ESPN contract is a product of a new moment in sports media.

The mascot era is here.

In a world in which attention is a commodity, life is consumed a vertical video clip at a time, and the scope of commentary grows for everyone, the ability for ESPN to claim Smith matters more than ever. They are paying for the acronym “ESPN” to be on the chyron when Smith goes on with Chris Cuomo or Bill Maher or The View. They are paying for Smith to plug First Take on his own podcast. They are paying for @firsttake and @ESPN to be in Smith’s Instagram bio.

On his new deal, Smith won’t have a formal, full-time role on any live sports studio show. But that might mean we actually see him more. Monday Night Countdown, the newly licensed Inside the NBA, heck even College GameDay — they’re all on the table.

All this attention, this is the benefit that TNT reaps with Charles Barkley and that Fox gets from Tom Brady.

It sounds insulting to call Smith a mascot. He is much more than that. But to get to the salary stratosphere he’s now in, that’s the role he will fill.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

The WNBA season is almost back, but Chicago Sky second-year forward Angel Reese never left the headlines.

This time around, social media aggregators spread multiple so-called “quotes” from Reese from a podcast conversation around WNBA pay and the upcoming Collective Bargaining Agreement. The only problem is they were not exactly real.

As usual, Reese addressed these exaggerated and fabricated comments directly in a post on X.

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

📺 New details are emerging on Stephen A. Smith’s new deal. The same day his agent (and former ESPN content head) Mark Shapiro clarified that Smith “will not” run for president in 2028, new reports suggested that Smith will have a more consistent presence on Monday Night Countdown as part of his five-year, $100-plus million contract extension.

🏛️ The Democratic Party is flocking to sports to course-correct after getting walloped in online media during the 2024 election. Democratic politicians are joining shows as big as The Stephen A. Smith Show all the way down to the AllCity Network or Locked On Podcast Network to relate to their constituents through sports. According to 2024 Dem VP candidate Tim Walz, knowing sports “shows you’re a real human being.”

🎤 Dave Portnoy wouldn’t rule out the idea of Barstool Sports utilizing a spot in the White House press corps after the idea was surfaced by Fox News. So get ready for PFT Commenter asking Donald Trump’s press secretary a question about building a statue for Robert Griffin III.

🙄 Jemele Hill and Jay Mariotti butted heads over the end of Around the Horn. In blaming wokeness on the end of the beloved ESPN show, Mariotti blamed the Worldwide Leader for giving anti-Trump commentators spots on the show, citing Hill as an example. Unfortunately for Mariotti, the record shows that Hill joined ESPN 10 years before Trump became president and appeared on ATH about five years prior. So she let him know about it.

✍️ BEST OF AA ✍️

What’s next for Draymond?

Draymond Green does media the same way he plays basketball: constantly running toward the live wire ready to grab it.

That’s how he’s won four championships and become the heir apparent to Charles Barkley. But sometimes, he gets burnt.

Last week, getting burnt looked like trash-talking Karl-Anthony Towns for dodging former teammate Jimmy Butler, only to learn that Towns missed the game in question for a funeral. Asked about the mishap postgame, Green retorted that “The Draymond Green Show must go on.”

In a new column at Awful Announcing, Matt Yoder writes that it’s time for TNT to cut ties with Green:

It’s one thing to have bold opinions and big takes. That’s what the likes of Charles Barkley and Stephen A. Smith do for a living and why they both command huge salaries. It’s another to carelessly and thoughtlessly spread false rumors about fellow NBA stars. Is that the kind of person and presence that TNT or any other network that covers the NBA really wants on their airwaves?

Read the full piece here.

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

A sports betting bubble?

If the early part of the 2020s saw the legalization of sports betting and the development of an industry around it, the latter part of the decade could end with that bubble bursting in more ways than one.

A fascinating new investgation from Pat Forde and Michael Rosenberg at Sports Illustrated connects the dots between the NBA’s Jontay Porter ban and Terry Rozier investigation through to several instances of unusual activity on first-half over/unders in men’s college basketball. It hints at the type of potential scandal that gambling Cassandras warned of.

The article details two men with criminal pasts and unusual presences on social media who SI’s reporting suggests are co-conspirators in a fraud and money laundering case being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s office. The same case, according to SI, grew to involve Porter. A March 2023 game being investigated by the federal government featured Rozier on the court and one of the alleged co-conspirators sitting courtside, according to photos on his social media accounts. The case could potentially grow to include incidents at Temple, Eastern Michigan and North Carolina A&T.

At the same time, consumers are sorting the operators into a clear pecking order. There’s FanDuel and DraftKings, and then there’s the rest.

A fascinating breakdown from sports business analyst Joe Pompliano shows ESPN BET — a partnership between Penn Entertainment and the Worldwide Leader — has just 4.7% market share despite being affiliated with the most recognizable sports network brand on Earth. Pompliano suggests the project could shut down by next year if current trends continue.

Meanwhile, anyone who watches sports content may have noticed a consolidation in the sponsorship space. Gambling operators spent big to produce and license their own live content (think DraftKings Network or FanDuel TV) in 2020 and 2021, but are now cutting costs. A similar try by Fanatics to sponsor Ryan Clark’s The Pivot podcast ended after less than a year. One source who works on licensed content for a sports gaming company told me a best-case scenario for these deals is to break even. It’s hard for any sports personality to generate millions in new revenue to offset the gawdy contracts they give out to sponsor and license big shows and podcasts.

So all at once, the smaller online sportsbooks are falling by the wayside just as the dominoes begin to fall toward a potentially massive scandal. An evolution this grand surely would be the talk of the sports world, right?

Well in an appearance on the House of Strauss podcast this week discussing his ESPN Bet findings, Pompliano posited there was another layer to the sports betting story. Because so many of the top corporate sports media entities are in bed with legal sports betting, Pompliano believes these entities will not cover the underbelly.

The SI investigation would suggest there’s hope, but certainly mainstream sports media is not tackling this issue with the verve it deserves. Perhaps that’s because it’s an “outside the lines” issue in a world where those are increasingly overlooked. Or perhaps Pompliano is right and these companies feel the tug on their purse strings.

Yet compared with other palace intrigue stories (like the ripple effects of the Luka Doncic trade, for example), the impending problems surrounding sports gambling are in the shadows. The energy that was there when Shohei Ohtani’s translator allegedly committed fraud with access to Ohtani’s accounts has dissipated. This U.S. Attorney investigation could bring it back, but it certainly feels as if reporters are waiting for something massive to demand their attention.

In reality, the collision of addiction, desperation and a lack of regulation has already made this a story worth covering. Whether sports media rises to do so tells us more about it than this story.