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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 Super Wild Card. The NFL announced the schedule for its seven-game Super Wild Card slate next week, led by Packers-Bears, Chargers-Patriots, and Texans-XXX in primetime and games on five different networks.

📺 Tomlin to TV? Ahead of the SNF finale to decide the AFC North, NBC’s Mike Florio was the latest to report on the momentum around Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin taking a broadcasting job after the season. Football media hasn’t had a big coach join on since Jon Gruden left ESPN nearly a decade ago.

🏈 Bowled over. Viewership for ESPN’s bowl games was way up this year, even as the transfer portal and earlier coaching changes lead to more opt-outs and roster flux. The Pop Tarts Bowl, in particular, brought in huge ratings for the Worldwide Leader in spite of Notre Dame’s power move to withdraw from the game to supposedly punish the network for its influence over the College Football Playoff.

😬 Chase-d off. ESPN rules analyst Mike Chase was the villain among NFL fans online on Saturday night after he repeatedly sided with questionable officiating calls during the Panthers-Buccaneers game. Pat McAfee called him (and the refs!) “ass.”

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

How Mike Tomlin could shake up the NFL broadcasting ecosystem

Head coaches have always had a prominent place in NFL media.

There is John Madden, perhaps the essential football broadcaster and the man who helped America fall in love with the sport. Jimmy Johnson helped turn Fox’s upstart pregame show into the ratings leader in the early 2000s. And as football asserted itself as the dominant American sport in the 2010s, ESPN’s Jon Gruden communicated a fervor and delirious love for the sport on Monday Night Football.

Elsewhere, the Mike Ditkas and the Bill Cowhers and the Tony Dungys and the Rex Ryans have made their mark.

But it’s been awhile — maybe since Gruden’s departure from ESPN — that the coaching ranks have produced a notable media personality. Enter Mike Tomlin.

The longtime Pittsburgh Steelers head coach has been rumored, by reporters and by other broadcasters, as a potential future media star. Now, those rumors appear to be manifesting into reality, pending the fate of Pittsburgh’s postseason run this winter.

Everyone from Adam Schefter to Peter Schrager to Mike Florio has indicated Tomlin will strongly consider going into broadcasting this offseason, with Pittsburgh likely headed toward a reset as Aaron Rodgers goes into retirement.

As Florio said, the Steelers are unlikely to fire Tomlin. But the coach may take matters into his own hands.

Tomlin seemingly has many qualities that would make him stand out in broadcasting: experience, honesty and an eye for talent and trends. Even as the industry trends more toward social media and streaming, sharp, respected analysts have shown they will break through. At just 53, Tomlin figures to be a refreshing option compared with Cowher, Dungy, Jason Garrett or Rex Ryan, who currently work as the coach placeholders at the major NFL broadcasting networks.

The question remains as to whether Tomlin would work in the studio or call games. One could easily imagine Tomlin replacing any of the above coaches in the studio, or joining Amazon, which does not have such a voice on its panel. Calling games would require a far larger shuffle. As we’ve documented with people like Greg Olson, Drew Brees and Dan Orlovsky, the networks have an incredible depth of color commentators right now. So much so that Brees is on a No. 3 team and Orlovsky has many weeks each season when he does not call any game.

In the past, Tomlin’s name has surfaced as one that networks might reshuffle their whole rosters for. Tom Brady and J.J. Watt have forced Fox and CBS, respectively, to do just that in recent seasons. We don’t know what the future holds for the unique Thursday Night Football booth or what the other streamers might do.

But the biggest question of all, and the one that will determine how networks handle Tomlin’s potential availability, is whether he sees media as a permanent gig. If so, maybe he displaces someone whose job we currently see as safe. If not, the hubbub might be for nothing.

Should Tomlin finally take the plunge and fulfill his destiny in broadcasting, he could be the latest notable coach to connect with a new generation of fans on television. Between now and then, he and the Steelers have a playoff game to think about, as well as the future of the franchise post-Rodgers.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

Group of Five complaints even more idiotic after early CFP blowouts

The nonstop arguments against Group of Five schools participating in the College Football Playoff — and the two in this year’s bracket — look pretty bad today.

Awful Announcing's Sean Keeley revisited the anti-G5 takes from across sports media in December after some of the top programs in the nation were also blown out this year in the CFP. Hint: They aged badly!

Click to read more on why the CFP’s continual expansion and the takeover of college football by realigned mega-conferences and TV networks is to blame for bad CFP games — not the G5.

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• Fox game analyst Joel Klatt went public with criticisms of ESPN for its exclusive coverage of the College Football Playoff, saying it’s bad for the sport to have one network tell the story of an entire postseason. Especially, per Klatt, when that network has such a strong alliance with one arm of the sport (in this case, ESPN and the SEC).

• Philip Rivers’ return to the NFL field this fall couldn’t have gone better. Rivers acquitted himself well on the field for a 44-year-old, and after reports that he could be interviewed for head coaching roles, Rivers also left the door open for a potential media career in an interview with Kay Adams.

• ESPN announced that Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit will call Miami-Ole Miss from Phoenix while Sean McDonough and Greg McElroy will call Indiana-Oregon from Atlanta this week in the College Football Playoff semis.

• The Washington Nationals are reportedly leaving MASN to become the seventh team to have its local television broadcasts produced in-house by Major League Baseball. These games will be distributed via the ESPN app starting next season.

• WWE fans were treated to a wonderful New Year’s Day gift last week when the entire Premier Live Events Collection appeared on Netflix. The library lived on Peacock from 2021-25, until ESPN took over distribution of the monthly PLEs. But Netflix, not ESPN, will get the PLE archive.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Missed opportunity for the Kelces and New Heights?

Caitlin Clark is notoriously careful about where she does publicity.

Aside from game coverage around the NCAA women's tournament or WNBA, the Kelce brothers are on the short list of people to have interviewed Clark.

The Indiana Fever star returned to the New Heights podcast this week for the second time, at an inflection point for the WNBA and in turn her career. The players' union is embroiled in difficult labor negotiations with the league, and recently authorized a strike.

But rather than discuss those talks and the future of the WNBA, Clark sat for more than half an hour with the Kelces and did not address them once. Instead, Clark spent the majority of the interview promoting her new Nike campaign and forthcoming signature sneaker and her return to the court with Team USA before flashing her NFL knowledge while talking ball with the brothers.

Mission accomplished: Clark updated her fans and the broader sports world about the latest in her career, without jeopardizing the position of the union. The primary goal of the appearance was to stay present in fans' minds and hype up the 2026 release of her long-awaited sneakers.

When and if Clark does ultimately offer a public stance on the negotiations, she will have no issue getting that message out. And of course, the Kelces' show is designed to welcome these types of conversations: Casual, relatable and fun.

Still, it is a disappointing symbol of where we are with sports coverage that nobody involved seemed to feel an obligation to address such a huge and important story.

Athletes like Clark and their reps (not to mention the fan accounts, aggregation sites and message boards that stan for them) clearly believe that publicity and promotion are still important. Otherwise, Clark could simply post the new #FromAnywhere ad spot to her Instagram account and be done with it. But the soft landing offered by New Heights beats that; it portrays Clark in a more accessible light and showcases her passion for sports and personal career journey.

As athletes like the Kelces have overtaken reporters as the hosts of these conversations (with Jason in particular having shown strong interviewing acumen in the past and pursuing a more traditional media career at ESPN), the majority of them are designed to be scripted and friendly. Many of these hosts still aim to produce revelations about their interview subjects. In this case, anyone who sees Clark's name pop up as a guest on a podcast will immediately think of the uncertain future of the WNBA, which could realistically miss games due to a strike or lockout for the first time in its history.

To not address this landmark sports moment with the woman at the center of the story is a discredit to the audience, who have built up a relationship and loyalty to the Kelces and Clark. The expectation is not that Clark blow up the union's spot, so to speak, by revealing the status of CBA talks or her views of the union's work toward a new deal. At the very least, a simple statement would suffice. Friendly hosts do this all the time; we've all heard many a podcaster say to their guest, "I know you can't really answer this, but..."

And then the guest, in turn, does not really answer the question. At least they respect the audience's expectations.

If the most popular and family-friendly sports show in the space doesn't feel an imperative to check this box, it sets a precedent that is even worse than the "you can't really answer this" cliche. The message, in full clarity, is that goofing off and promoting things to buy is really what matters.