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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

⚖️ Skip Bayless and Joy Taylor strike back. The former and current FS1 hosts each submitted court filings earlier this week laying out their defense against the workplace misconduct lawsuit filed by the network’s former hairstylist Noushin Faraji last month. Bayless claims Faraji “consented” to the alleged acts, while Taylor asserts Faraji’s emotional damages were caused by “outside factors.”

⚾ MLB threatens to walk. Major League Baseball is reportedly prepared to “walk away” from a renegotiation with ESPN should the network exercise its opt-out option next month, which would terminate its current agreement with the league following the 2025 season. That would mean MLB is prepared to leave potentially hundreds of millions of dollars per year on the table.

🏎️ Netflix eyes Formula 1. The streamer is reportedly considering a U.S. media rights deal with the global racing circuit. According to The Times of London, F1 exited its exclusive negotiating period with current rightsholder ESPN without a deal. The Worldwide Leader pays $85 million per year to air races stateside as part of a three-year agreement that expires this year. Of course, Netflix already has a cozy relationship with F1 thanks to the wildly successful show Drive to Survive.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Super Bowl LIX will set a viewership record

Every year, without fail, the Super Bowl is the most-watched television event in the country. And frankly, nothing else comes close.

In recent years, Super Bowl audiences have only gotten bigger. Last year’s game between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs set an all-time record with 123.7 million viewers across CBS, Univision, Nickelodeon, and Paramount’s digital platforms.

At least, it was a record according to CBS.

Whether last year’s Super Bowl was actually a record is up for dispute. Had the New England Patriots’ infamous 28-3 game against the Atlanta Falcons used modern-day measurement standards, that would be the most-watched Super Bowl in history with 126.3 million viewers, according to data from Sports Media Watch.

Nielsen, as many know, has made substantial changes to its methodology in recent years, particularly when it comes to its out-of-home viewing measurements. Prior to 2020, Nielsen did not include out-of-home viewing in its final tally. As such, Super Bowl audiences have seen a lift ever since.

That lift will be especially prominent this year, with Nielsen recently announcing an expansion of its out-of-home viewing measurements. Previously, the company sampled only two-thirds of the country, but it has now expanded to cover 100% of the USA — from sea to shining sea.

But this alone doesn’t guarantee a viewership record for Fox this Sunday. Several other factors will contribute.

One such factor is the amount of simulcasts that’ll all be rolled into the final number. Not only can one watch Sunday’s game on Fox, but they can also catch it on Telemundo, Fox Deportes, the Fox Sports App, and Tubi. None of these platforms will capture significant audiences by Super Bowl standards, but they’ll all chip in a little bit. And that little bit could be the difference between airing the most-watched Super Bowl in history or not.

But even beyond methodologies and simulcasts, Super Bowl LIX has another key ingredient: the Kansas City Chiefs.

As much as so-called “Chiefs fatigue” has become a narrative this postseason, the data simply does not back this theory up. Out of the 12 postseason games so far this season, just three have seen year-over-year viewership increases. Two of those three games featured the Chiefs (who have only played two games this postseason).

They’re the only team holding up their end of the viewership bargain this postseason.

Dynasties (or emerging dynasties) tend to outperform other matchups in championship games. One only needs to look at how well Steph’s Warriors or LeBron’s Heat teams rated compared to the NBA’s recent randomly generated Finals matchups to see this.

It’s much easier for casual fans to watch a game with a storyline they’re already familiar with than one that’s brand new. The Chiefs offer a familiar story and familiar characters, which will draw in the casual fan.

Not everyone is buying into this narrative. In fact, out of 35 media observers participating in Programming Insider’s Super Bowl viewership prediction pool, yours truly has offered the most bullish prognostication.

Like FS1’s Nick Wright, I am hitching my wagon to Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The official Awful Announcing Super Bowl LIX viewership prediction: 128 million.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• Jason Kelce had his monster ESPN salary revealed on Thursday. Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reports the former Philadelphia Eagles center is raking in $8 million per year from the network. Clearly, ESPN likes being in the Kelce business.

• Amazon Prime Video will continue to air an exclusive NFL Wild Card game the next two years. The streamer aired its first playoff game this season, securing 22.1 million viewers for a Steelers-Ravens game. Amazon reportedly paid $150 million for the game, but could pay more in 2026 and 2027.

• Local Telemundo reporter Adan Manzano, 27, died on Wednesday while in New Orleans covering the Super Bowl. A cause of death was not disclosed. His passing prompted an outpouring of support, including from Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. Manzano was born in Mexico City but moved to Kansas in 2018 where he worked for several local outlets.

✍️ AROUND AA ✍️

A three-man booth?

Tom Brady is set to call this Sunday’s Super Bowl for Fox, which has spurred plenty of discussion about the network’s former No. 1 analyst: Greg Olsen. While the former Carolina Panther kept Brady’s seat warm for a year while the GOAT was Fox’s analyst-in-waiting, some wondered why a three-person booth wasn’t a possibility.

On Thursday, Awful Announcing’s Sam Neumann dug into why a three-man booth between Kevin Burkhardt, Brady, and Olsen was never in the cards for Fox, despite speculation to the contrary.

Here’s an excerpt from Sam’s excellent column:

It was never a possibility.

Some outside the network wondered if Fox should have reconsidered after Olsen earned rave reviews for his Super Bowl LVII call and two strong seasons as the network’s lead analyst. But a second analyst shouldn’t be necessary when you’re paying Brady $375 million to be the face of your coverage. If anything, a three-man booth might have made it even tougher for Brady to break through the chemistry Olsen and Burkhardt had already built.

But according to those like Peter King, another factor was at play. The longtime columnist for Sports Illustrated and later NBC Sports shut down the idea from the start, explaining why the dream of a three-man Fox booth featuring Brady, Olsen and Burkhardt was never realistic.

Because of the salary gap between the two retired NFL stars—and the fact that Olsen is already so highly regarded—King argued that a three-man booth could risk embarrassing Brady.

And the dream of a three-man booth died then.

️‍🔥The Closer🔥

LIV Golf tees off its season on…FS2?

Golf season is officially in full swing. The PGA Tour has entered the meat of its schedule, securing a nice ratings number for Rory McIlroy’s win at Pebble Beach last week. And now, the Tour heads to Phoenix for the so-called People’s Open, one of its most popular events of the year.

But meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, 54 of the world’s, er, decent-to-good professional golfers threw a peg in the ground at 6:15 p.m. Riyadh time to compete under-the-lights in LIV Golf’s season opener. The league opted to play its first tournament at night to accommodate, wait for it, a Thursday, 10 a.m. ET window on the esteemed Fox Sports 2 cable network.

The rogue tour inked a new media rights deal with Fox Sports last month and recently announced its full broadcast schedule. FS1 will air 41% of the package, FS2 will air 24%, Fox 22%, the Fox Sports App 11%, and the Fox Business Network will air 2%.

With 78% of tournament windows on either cable or streaming, it’s difficult to say whether LIV’s deal with Fox will actually benefit them from a viewership standpoint compared to its old deal with The CW.

However, the tour has made some shrewd scheduling decisions later in the season that should allow it to capitalize on its new deal.

The final three weeks of LIV’s season coincide with the PGA Tour’s three postseason tournaments. As such, the warring tours will be competing for eyeballs in a way we haven’t seen in previous seasons.

LIV has smartly decided to start some of its final round broadcast windows well before the PGA Tour’s coverage typically comes on the air. On Aug. 10, LIV Chicago’s final round will begin at 1 p.m. ET on Fox, an hour before the PGA Tour starts main coverage for its first playoff event, the St. Jude Championship. A week later, Fox begins coverage for LIV Indianapolis at noon ET, two hours before the PGA Tour goes live for main coverage of the BMW Championship.

The following week, LIV’s Team Championship will actually take the opposite approach. Fox will end its broadcast window one hour later than the PGA Tour’s Tour Championship typically ends, allowing viewers to catch the final hour of play after the PGA Tour concludes its season.

No doubt, LIV is banking on some channel surfing golf fans finding its product and staying awhile. It’s a smart move for the tour, which has struggled to gain any traction in the ratings through its first two full seasons.

Of course, all of this is happening in the context of some sort of yet-determined partnership between the PGA Tour and LIV. On Thursday, the PGA Tour released a statement thanking President Trump for his support in golf’s reunification efforts. Predictably, no details were offered about Trump’s efforts, a timeline for reunification, or what an eventual tie-up would look like.

But at least we have night golf in Riyadh, right?