📺 SchragerTime. According to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, a program centered on Peter Schrager is the leading candidate for ESPN’s 2 p.m. hour, which currently airs an edition of SportsCenter. The quest to permanently fill Around the Horn’s former 5 p.m. slot continues…

📱 Sharpe object. Don’t expect Skip Bayless’s one-time return to First Take as a sign that Shannon Sharpe is coming back, too. A source familiar with the situation tells Awful Announcing that Sharpe’s return to First Take “is not under consideration” at the moment. Of course, if Stephen A. Smith puts his foot down, that might change.

🏇 Not my Tempo. For the second consecutive year, the winner of the Kentucky Derby is opting out of the Preakness Stakes. On Wednesday, Kentucky Derby-winning trainer Cherie DeVaux announced her horse, Golden Tempo, would not participate in the second leg of the Triple Crown later this month. Sounds like the Preakness might want to consider moving, despite protests.

🎙️ Bringing Joy. Joy Taylor has found her next platform. Nearly a year after her departure from Fox Sports, Taylor is launching a new daily sports podcast called The Daily Play with Joy Taylor on the Urban One Podcast Network. The show is described as a micro-podcast — five to 10 minutes per episode — covering the biggest sports stories of the day with Taylor’s opinions mixed in alongside the news.

🏈 Disney-NFL dance. The Walt Disney Company has yet to begin negotiations with the NFL to reopen its media contracts, even as the league is keen to redo all of its deals originally inked in 2021 for over $100 billion, which went into effect with the 2023 season. Disney chief financial officer Hugh Johnston told analysts on an earnings call this morning that the company expects to be in business with the NFL for a long time.

Read more of today’s top stories at Awful Announcing.

“I think that what he did back then really has set the standard for what we’re doing these days, how we watch live sports.”

That was longtime TNT Sports host Ernie Johnson paying tribute to Ted Turner, who died on Wednesday at 87.

To anyone over the age of 40 who has spent time in the sports, media, or sports media worlds, Turner needs no introduction. After taking over his father’s outdoor advertising company and parlaying that success into a collection of radio stations, he then sold them to finance the purchase of a TV station. After acquiring the rights to telecast Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks games, he moved his newly dubbed “SuperStation” to cable networks, bought the Braves and Hawks, renamed the network TBS, and he was off to the races.

While turning the Braves into a national team on TBS, Turner launched CNN, ushering in the 24-hour newscycle as we know it today. TBS and eventually TNT were key parts of the push for major sports media rights from networks to cable. While he failed in his attempt to buy ESPN, he offered alternatives to the sports channel behemoth of the 1980s and 1990s.

Professional wrestling is seemingly inescapable these days (Thanks, ESPN). In many ways, you have Turner to thank for that as well. His World Championship Wrestling (WCW) went head-to-head with WWE (then-WWF), initially humbling Vince McMahon’s company by producing live programming against their pre-taped shows. The Monday Night Wars were a necessary push for the product’s evolution, even if Turner ultimately lost badly. But today’s WWE product owes him a debt of gratitude all the same.

Looking at the 2026 sports media landscape, the cornerstones that stand out include billion-dollar media rights, corporate behemoths vying for viewership, the synergy of sports and entertainment, the constant churn of the attention economy, and the billionaireization of pro sports ownership.

For better or worse, Ted Turner had a significant hand in shaping all of those things. Whatever you think of him and his legacy, there’s no denying his impact on American media and culture, even if the companies he created are just names on a ledger now.

To me, he’ll always be the guy who made sure I could watch The Beastmaster practically every weekend when I was growing up and The Shawshank Redemption practically every weekend when I was in my 20s. But of course, that’s just one tiny aspect of an enormous legacy left behind.

“Watching him flop during an NBA game is like, to some degree, it’s like inserting one of those Life Alert commercials, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’ into Cirque du Soleil. It kind of tears at the fabric of the creativity of the NBA.” - Colin Cowherd on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s patented flops.

“Remember when I had a broken arm in 2000? I had to tape my other arm because they were literally stepping on it, knowing I had a broken arm. I didn’t complain about it. It’s part of the risk of playing hurt. So, stop being a b*tch.” - WFAN’s Tiki Barber to Sixers star Joel Embiid.

“I’ve been saying this since I worked at ESPN and CBS Sports. This greatest regular season crap has been a myth for years!” - Fox’s Tim Brando, pushing back on arguments against a 24-team CFP.

“It’s been a long time since he’s had direct involvement with the company, and the way things go these days with acquisitions and mergers and all that stuff, but deep down, in here, I’ll always be Turner.” - TNT’s Ernie Johnson, remembering Ted Turner.

“The fact that it appears that he was the guy talking trash on all of his teammates is so embarrassing,” Parkins said. “But I think it is only the type of thing that could happen to a millennial, Gen Z-era person who is looking for currency in validation online. But it’s so embarrassing for a person of his stature.” - Danny Parkins on Kevin Durant’s apparant burner account scandal.

Nostalgia is defined as the sad pleasure experienced in recalling what no longer exists; a wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to, or the return of, some real or romanticized past period, or an irrecoverable past condition or setting.

We live in the era of nostalgia. We’re steeped in it, especially in pop culture. You can’t make a movie or TV show that isn’t a remake, a reimagining, a legacy sequel, or some other kind of referential work. Whatever artistry or creativity ever existed in Super Bowl commercials has been replaced by “Hey, remember this?” beats.

ESPN knows nostalgia well. The recent Rich Eisen-hosted episodes of SportsCenter have been perfect nostalgic rituals, the latest of which even included the iconic theme song and graphics packages that elicit a Pavlovian response in any sports fan of a certain age.

On Friday, Skip Bayless returns to First Take for the first time since June 2016. For one morning only, he’ll sit across from Stephen A. Smith on ESPN airwaves to recapture the tête-à-tête energy that was the cornerstone of the Embrace Debate era of sports television. This will all go down almost nine years to the day everyone assumed it would never happen again.

As far as I can tell, aside from those who are participating in or associated with First Take, no one wants this.

There is no sad pleasure to be experienced in recalling what no longer exists. For all intents and purposes, it seems that everyone who participated in the Smith-Bayless experience, whether as an audience member or a cataloguer, regrets it.

There is no wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to the Embrace Debate era. Successful as it may have been, it’s widely regarded as a cultural ebb that ushered in the modern ESPN era of entertainment over sports.

There’s nothing romanticized about this time period. No one outside of ESPN’s and FS1’s walls is happy it happened and glad we’re still dealing with the aftershocks. There’s little happiness over Smith’s already-tired political ambitions, and Bayless haunts the sports-centric corners of social media like a Ghost of Debates Past.

The reunion is happening because Smith wanted it to happen. Not out of any demand other than that of Bayless, whose cultural cache is practically non-existent at this point. February’s Smith-Bayless reunion on The Arena: Gridiron passed like a fart in the wind. Most people probably don’t even know it happened.

Smith and Bayless are doing their part to hype Friday as an event years in the making. And sure, perhaps the show gives First Take a ratings pop. There is a certain fascination in it. Not in a nostalgic sense, but in the kind of morbid desire one has to see the aftereffects of a car crash. You slow down, you look, you see something you wish you hadn’t, and you speed off, hoping to forget all about it.

For as much as the Smith-Bayless era of First Take was popular, it actually didn’t leave much of an imprint behind. It’s like a hit CBS show in that way.

Everyone remembers that Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless used to yell at one another every morning on ESPN, but no one could tell you anything about what they yelled about. There are no iconic moments. No memes from that era continue to populate social media platforms or Slack channels. There isn’t a single debate, take, or zinger that has stood the test of time.

Perhaps in that way, this reunion is the perfect embodiment of the modern nostalgia ritual. Resurrected IP shoved out there to arouse a mild curiosity from an audience that remembers the names and faces involved. It sounds slightly interesting on paper, and you might even convince yourself that you’ll watch, for old time’s sake. But then, when the time comes to buy your ticket (or tune in), you remember….

‘Wait, I don’t actually care about this.’