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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺 Sunday Ticket flub. Viewers tuned into NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV missed approximately the first 11 minutes of the Super Bowl rematch between Philadelphia and Kansas City on Sunday afternoon. When the Cowboys-Giants early game went to overtime, Fox stayed on that feed. That appeared to doom both Fox viewers and Sunday Ticket viewers for much of the start of Eagles-Chiefs.

❌ SEC for SBA. As Congress investigates sports broadcasting laws and a new ad lobbies for college football to gain antitrust protections under the 1961 federal Sports Broadcasting Act, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is pushing back. “There’s a lot more to that than just some magic button,” said the most powerful man in college football, citing the length of the existing media deals for major conferences and the Playoff.

😂 AI-ron Rodgers. For some reason, Fox Sports used artificial intelligence to produce a package summarizing the historic career of Aaron Rodgers, from Cal to the Steelers. The segment was full of inaccuracies, and viewers certainly took note. Note to Fox: All of these moments occurred on live television. There is plenty of footage to parse through for B-roll; you don’t need AI for that!

🦚 “Why are you still watching us?” NBC Sports football analyst Chris Simms implored the Peacock audience for the Battle of the Bricks between Ohio State and Ohio U on Saturday night to flip channels. “It’s company-on-company crime,” Simms joked, pushing the audience toward the Notre Dame-Texas A&M nail-biter on NBC. Even Simms’ mother, he revealed, changed over.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Stop looking at the ratings

It’s been going on for years now, but it’s getting worse: Every sports network wants you to believe they are breaking viewership records every time a new event airs. This past week alone, the WNBA, Monday Night Football, YouTube as well as both CBS and Fox all celebrated highs in viewership dating back decades.

This month, Nielsen began using its updated Big Data + Panel methodology. The new calculation incorporates a combination of Nielsen’s usual randomly selected “panel” (with expanded out-of-home viewing) and proprietary numbers from streamers “at the device level.” It is Nielsen’s first attempt to work alongside streamers to more effectively measure viewership of live-streamed events from digital players.

When you combine the significant expansion of OOH viewing, which has powered the past two Super Bowls to record ratings, with this new “Big Data” measurement, games airing now have a head start in viewership. We may be getting a better understanding of how many people are actually watching events, but it is almost impossible to compare the current numbers to any history.

As more streamers get involved, the numbers are getting stranger. YouTube drew the ire of industry types this week when it updated its Brazil NFL numbers up by more than a million after the initial number was panned. YouTube blamed an internal technical error, but Fox’s Michael Mulvihill appeared to speak for many of his colleague when he wrote that he didn’t buy it.

We don’t know the number for Netflix’s huge Canelo vs. Crawford fight this weekend, but nobody believed the streamer’s viewership mark for its last fight. Allegedly, the Tyson-Paul fight in Dallas last year drew more than 100 million viewers. This comes from the company that counts viewership in “minutes watched” and only recently started showing commercials.

As more big events begin to air on places like Netflix and YouTube, and Nielsen gets cozier with these types of streamers (along with the new ESPN app, Fox One, or Paramount+), it will be increasingly difficult to compare across formats and across history. Broadcasters are also making money in different ways, with side-by-side ads like what Sunday Ticket airs or more interactive commercials on streamers. And often with streamers, subscriber count and churn rate are front of mind as much as ad revenue.

The game is different from how it used to be. Numbers still matter for context. For advertisers and influencers and all of us to tabulate what’s hot. For broadcasters to place a financial value on an event they want to air. But it is no longer a simple equation where viewers times ad rates equals revenue.

As a result, when we measure viewership, we have to contain modern numbers to this modern context. It hardly matters that Texas-Ohio State on Fox was the most-watched Week 1 college football game ever. Fans watched that game through a wide array of platforms, and Fox monetized that game is different than it was two decades ago. The same is true for Monday Night Football or YouTube’s NFL game.

The more prudent focus is to see how live events compare to one another these days and how a given event generates engagement and subscribers. Where ratings used to help us understand which channel the vast body of cable subscribers chose to tune into on a given night, today’s viewership numbers ask new questions: How did people watch? What did they pay to do so? Did they stick around?

Making money off a user is far more complicated under this system than it once was, and therefore, the simple act of watching is no longer the only metric we need. So it’s time to stop focusing so much on ratings.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

This week’s College GameDay was the perfect opportunity for Pat McAfee to show of all the ingredients that make him the most unique multi-hyphenate in sports media today:

America got to watch new Atlanta kicker Parker Romo meet his defensive teammate Leonard Floyd on national TV after his perfect 5-5 field goal performance helped secure a Falcons victory on Sunday Night Football:

Tennessee resident Theo Von made an appearance on SEC Network as the centerpiece of a bet he made with Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia:

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• The Athletic will produce original content utilizing NFL highlight and game footage under a broad new partnership that will allow the NYT-owned outlet to monetize the footage within its web and app platforms, its social media feeds, and its digital video shows. An Athletic executive spoke with Awful Announcing about the deal.

• The lead NFL on Fox producer and director explained how they see Tom Brady “paring down” the information he doles out on-air and turning himself from a “walking encyclopedia” to a more polished broadcaster.

• Paramount is launching a new division called Paramount Sports and Entertainment, led by former Skydance president and COO Jesse Sisgold. This new group will coexist alongside CBS Sports, which will reportedly retain editorial control over live sports and studio programming.

• Michael Eaves signed an extension with ESPN to continue his role on SportsCenter and PGA events into a second decade in Bristol.

• Jomboy Media is making another deal with traditional media, producing a weekly radio show in partnership with WFAN. This comes on the heels of Jomboy’s recent announcements with MLB and Dan Patrick.

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Al Michaels is BACK

Prime Video NFL announcer Al Michaels earned high marks for his season debut on Thursday Night Football between Washington and Green Bay.

For better or worse, Michaels’ performance is under constant scrutiny by football fans and sports media nerds as Amazon continues to get its sea legs as an NFL network and Michaels ages.

Awful Announcing writer Sam Neumann broke down Michael’s strong season debut and what it means for the Prime Video broadcast:

But something shifted this past Thursday. When he went off on tangents about the moon or took a moment to mark the anniversary of September 11, it felt like the Al Michaels who could find stories in the margins while calling the main event. The guy who made even routine Sunday night games feel consequential through the sheer force of his storytelling.

The difference might be as simple as having better material to work with. Quality matchups like Commanders-Packers give him something to sink his teeth into, unlike the Thursday night dregs that have defined too much of his Amazon tenure.

Read Sam’s full column here.