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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📯 After months of silence, ESPN finally confirmed that Around the Horn will come to an end on May 23. It’s still a decision that doesn’t make much sense, but at least there is some finality and closure approaching. So who should have the honor of being on the show’s final panel?

🏀 In a huge symbol of the shifting power dynamic in college basketball, Dan Shulman and Jay Bilas will call the SEC Tournament for ESPN this year and not the ACC. It’s adding insult to injury after all the ACC has been through with ESPN on the football side the last few years.

☕ In what may unfortunately be the last headline from the Starbucks Showdown, Jordan Schultz finally spilled the beans from his side of the famous fracas with Ian Rapoport. We will miss the obnoxious coffee puns the most.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Hard Knocks Life

The news that Bill Belichick and North Carolina’s deal with NFL Media to appear on the offseason edition of Hard Knocks has fallen through should serve as a blow to sports documentary enthusiasts. And it’s another symbol of an over-saturated medium that is losing its impact in the sports world.

When sports documentaries first hit the mainstream, ESPN and HBO were continually putting out great, interesting, narrative-changing content. Then seemingly everyone else got on board and wanted to cash in on the craze. Along the way, the sports documentary space started resembling the Los Angeles freeways. Everyone was on the road and nobody was going anywhere. Either it seems every sports league is trying to copy Netflix’s Drive to Survive or personalities are producing documentaries to present as their own personal legacy projects.

That’s why the offseason Hard Knocks featuring the New York Giants was so interesting. It was new, it was fresh, and for once, it didn’t seem like a vapid public relations project. It actually showed the franchise being vulnerable and making mistakes. While that made for great content, it’s also why something like it will never happen again.

Belichick and the Tar Heels have already indicated that they could shop a documentary of their own elsewhere with a studio already on board. If the report from CBS’s Jonathan Jones is true that creative control was part of the deal between North Carolina and NFL Media falling through, then we’re not likely to get anything truly moving if it does eventually air.

Will we see Belichick struggle with recruits? Trying to figure out how to adapt to the college game? Navigate the muddy waters of NIL? Questioning his own legacy? We may see some of that, but it’ll probably only be the good stuff personally approved by Belichick and Michael Lombardi. And what could have been a can’t miss show will likely turn into something else that’s easily skippable.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

We are more than a year out from the 2026 World Cup in North America, but we’re already getting strange rants from Fox News hosts who are still afraid of soccer for some bizarre reason. At least we won’t have to worry about weird politics affecting the event jointly being hosted by the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Wait a second…

If Howie Roseman has this colorful comparison for winning his second Super Bowl, what will he say if the Eagles win their third? It may not be safe for public airwaves.

In this week’s episode of “Stephen A. Smith is definitely not running for president but if he did he would totally win,” Stephen A. Smith went on The View to say he is definitely not running for president, but if he did he would totally win.

🔦 IN THE SPOTLIGHT ☀️

ESPN Bet may be living on borrowed time if the pessimistic vibes from Penn Entertainment are to be believed. But was it doomed from the start in trying to achieve the impossible of breaking the DraftKings-FanDuel duopoly?

🏄 CHANNEL SURFING 🌊 

🎙️In an interview with The Athletic, Chris Cuthbert and Sean McDonough both reflected on calling the 4 Nations Face-Off final with McDonough ranking it among the best sporting events he’s ever called.

📱The NBA and NASCAR admitted to Front Office Sports that their social media accounts were hacked with crypto scams.

💰 Don’t expect Congress to address anything with NIL and college sports if the first hearing is any indication, according to Sportico.

📺 DATA DUMP 📺 

In this week’s ratings news…

🏒 Is the NHL already experiencing a 4 Nations Face-Off ratings bump? The Blue Jackets-Red Wings Stadium Series game is ESPN’s most watched regular season game since winning back rights in 2021.

🏎️ In the series racing debut on Fox Sports, IndyCar saw a significant increase in viewership for their race at St. Petersburg. It was the most watched IndyCar race outside of Indianapolis in 14 years.

⛳ On the flip side, in spite of its critical success that has exceeded expectations, TGL ratings on ESPN are starting to slip. Just 160,000 viewers watched on Monday afternoon on ESPN2, a new low for the sim golf league. On the positive side, TGL still outdrew ESPN2’s comparable programming from a year ago.

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

NASCAR ratings deserve more respect

Speaking of ratings, one thing that’s a bit overlooked by most of sports media is just how well NASCAR races perform compared to their peers. While a lot of focus on NASCAR ratings is on how far they have fallen from the sport’s peak in the mid-2000s, the viewership figures are still very strong relative to what other sports are on television after football season.

For each of the last three weeks, NASCAR has had the most watched sporting event of the weekend. 6.7 million viewers watched the Daytona 500, 4.6 million watched the following week at Atlanta, and 4.1 million viewers tuned in for this past weekend’s race at the Circuit of the Americas. Those are numbers that any league not named the NFL would love to have on a weekly basis.

The unfortunate thing for NASCAR is that ratings tend to trend down throughout the season, especially once football rolls around. Even though races now are reaching over 4 million viewers, the 2024 average race viewership was 2.9 million viewers, up slightly from 2023’s total. But once NASCAR moves races to TNT and Amazon Prime this year and the racing league embraces streaming, those viewership numbers could slip even more.

But for now, it might be time for sports media at large to appreciate just how successful and relevant NASCAR is as a television product in comparison to other sports that get a lot more coverage on a daily and weekly basis.