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⚽ World Cup lineup reveal. Fox Sports announced its nine broadcast pairings for this summer’s World Cup on Wednesday. For the third consecutive men’s World Cup, John Strong and Stu Holden will serve as the lead team on Fox. Beloved commentator Ian Darke also returns to pair with USMNT legend Landon Donovan.

✍️ Rap’s term sheet. NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport has reportedly signed a four-year deal with ESPN that will see him remain on NFL Network and also contribute across ESPN’s other platforms. It appears as if Rapoport and Adam Schefter will coexist under one corporate umbrella.

👋 Farewell, Joel. Fox Sports college football analyst Joel Klatt says he’s likely called his final NFL Draft. Klatt has been part of NFL Network’s draft coverage since 2021, but with the channel now operating under ESPN ownership, the college football analyst believes it’s unlikely Fox will release him for the assignment in the future. Similar questions can be asked about Charles Davis, who also contributes draft coverage to NFL Network but will become CBS’s lead college football analyst this season.

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

Here we are again, talking about the NFL’s conquest to strike new media deals by the start of next season. And rightfully so. How these deals go will have ripple effects not only through sports media, but through the entire media industry.

But for the first time, it seems more likely than not that the league won’t have new deals in place when the season kicks off in September. The NFL is facing 4th & long and seems prepared to punt.

That’s the assessment of Puck’s John Ourand and Guggenheim Securities analyst Mike Morris, who both wagered on a recent episode of The Varsity podcast that there would not be new deals by the start of the 2026 season, when the NFL originally intended. (And yes, we coincidentally happened to write about that exact possibility the day before Ourand lent his reporting chops to the story.)

So what does this mean if, in fact, there are no new deals to be had this summer?

Well, first and foremost, it’s a pretty sizeable win for the networks, which all stand to save a few billion dollars combined by kicking the can down the road to next year. Based on reporting around the NFL’s talks with Paramount, the only media partner it is currently engaging in negotiations, the NFL is looking for an annual increase in the range of $2 billion just for the CBS package. Paramount, on the other hand, believes an increase of a mere $500 million per year is about fair.

Assuming the NFL would be targeting similarly sized increases across all of its current broadcast partners, Fox, NBC, ESPN/ABC, and Prime Video will all save a lot of dough simply by keeping the status quo for another year.

Paramount and CBS remain the big question mark for this summer it would seem. The network is already in negotiations with the league, and the change-of-control provision triggered by Skydance’s merger with Paramount last summer has a two-year expiration, meaning that if the NFL wants to exert full leverage in its CBS negotiation, it’ll want to have in place by summer 2027.

If it’s true the NFL is prepared to punt to next year, there’s a legitimate question to be asked about whether the NFL should attempt to renegotiate early at all.

As reported, the NFL’s early negotiations aren’t so much looking to rewrite completely new deals. Instead, the league is asking networks for more money and, in return, will forfeit its opt-out clause following the 2029 season (or 2030 for ESPN), allowing the current contracts to remain in place through 2033-34. There would certainly be room for minor changes to the active contracts, especially if networks like Fox or CBS were willing to sacrifice some of their Sunday afternoon inventory in exchange for more affordable deals. But the nuts and bolts of the “new deals” would look largely similar to the current deals.

But let’s say the NFL punts to next season, as it appears likely to do. Now, instead of four full seasons until the 2029 opt-out, there’s just three. At that point, the NFL could decide it’s better to simply bide its time for three more years with deals that are below market value, then take all of its inventory to the open market (sans ESPN’s Monday Night Football), and reallocate that inventory however it sees fit.

That scenario introduces a lot more uncertainty for the NFL’s broadcast partners. Right now, between the pressure from all corners of Washington, D.C. and needing to work within the bounds of its current contracts, the NFL is quite limited in what it could do to materially change how it distributes games. If the league waits until 2029, all bets are off. There will be a new administration in the White House, the league won’t be beholden to any of its current broadcast partners, and it could make wholesale changes to how it delivers football games every Sunday.

Of course, there’s reason to believe the networks might be willing to gamble on a 2029 negotiation themselves. For one, they’d avoid paying substantially more for the NFL in the interim, saving some decent money. Second, they might make the assessment that the NFL isn’t ready for wholesale broadcast changes come 2029, and that there might not be enough other potential buyers in the market to threaten them. And third, the federal government could remain invested in keeping NFL games on broadcast television, lessening the threat from streamers.

There is still plenty of reason, however, to believe the NFL will want to continue its early negotiation plans in time for the 2027 season. The league would still like to secure its increased rights fees sooner, rather than later. And the NFL would likely prefer having its TV deals last through 2033-34, a moment when streaming could become even more ubiquitous than broadcast television, rather than renegotiating in 2029 when mass media is still in a transitional phase. Not to mention, the networks won’t mind having stability well into the 2030s, so long as they can afford whatever price the NFL is demanding.

Whatever the case, it appears as if the NFL media rights saga is about to extend well beyond this offseason.

ESPN college basketball analysts Seth Greenberg and Jay Williams had some diametrically opposite opinions on the NCAA’s decision to expand March Madness to 76 teams.

A fascinating story came out of Cleveland.com earlier this week explaining why longtime Guardians broadcasters Matt Underwood and Rick Manning were absent from a recent series against the Blue Jays.

As one might expect, the duo was simply taking a series off. That’s fairly common for baseball broadcasters, especially a booth that has called Guardians games for a combined 57 seasons.

But what was interesting about the report is that it wasn’t exactly Underwood’s or Manning’s decision. Per Paul Hoynes, the reporter who authored the story, “there are changes being made in who will call Guardians games on TV. The moves started last year as directed by MLB, and they will continue this season.”

The Guardians are one of 14 teams whose games are produced and distributed by MLB itself, but this is seemingly the first we’ve heard of the league stepping in and influencing what on-air talent appears on its broadcasts.

We did some digging, and a source confirmed to Awful Announcing that MLB is “encouraging the Cleveland announcer team to take more time off throughout the season to stay fresh over the course of the 162 game season,” and that the league and team are “aligned with this approach.”

It’s a fascinating development. No one had really thought to consider the possibility that the league itself could exert influence on the broadcasts it brought in-house.

The idea of MLB meddling in who announces a local broadcast, even a local broadcast that it produces and distributes, won’t sit well with many fans. But if this becomes a trend, especially with MLB and the NBA looking towards more centralized local broadcast models in the next couple years, this type of scenario could become commonplace.

Good luck being critical of the league office when they can yank you right off the broadcast.