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📺 Even though NBC has built Peacock around live sports, the network's upfront was light on sports news compared to rivals at Fox.

🏈 ESPN named the first two College GameDay trips to Baton Rouge and Austin, for Clemson-LSU and Ohio State-Texas.

🏈 The NFL Honors awards night is moving to Netflix as the streaming service continues to expand its football haul. But Ted Sarandos says the streamer still isn’t interested in full-season rights.

📺 David Letterman’s favorite show isn’t in late night, it’s Pardon the Interruption.

🏈 SEC commish Greg Sankey isn’t a fan of scheduling college football games on Friday nights like some of his colleagues.

⚾ Aaron Gleeman explains to Awful Announcing why he’s taking his Twins coverage independent after leaving The Athletic.

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

The middle of May is not the time you expect to see college football headlines from the coach of a team coming off a nine-win season. But Lane Kiffin is not your ordinary college football coach.

This week in particular is one of the busiest on the sports calendar. We are in the middle of the NBA and NHL playoffs. The NFL schedule release is slowly taking up as much oxygen as possible, with staggered releases ahead of the full launch, which will see social media flooded with skits and everyone projecting their favorite team's records. Then we've got the PGA Championship and the second leg of the Triple Crown in the Preakness Stakes. The WNBA season is getting underway. And the end of the European soccer season is upon us, with the World Cup just a month away.

And yet, somehow, impossibly, all anyone can talk about is LSU Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin. And he would not have it any other way.

Drama follows Lane Kiffin everywhere he goes. But nothing could ever top the saga surrounding his decision to leave Ole Miss on the doorstep of the College Football Playoff for conference rival LSU. And what was arguably the most controversial coaching move in the history of the sport has raced back into the headlines thanks to Kiffin's comments in a lengthy Vanity Fair profile talking about the racial dynamics of Oxford, Mississippi, making recruiting more challenging than in Baton Rouge.

Lane Kiffin sheepishly apologized for the comments, but by this point, the damage had been done, and there's no way that he could take them back.

Kiffin has tried to portray his remarks as innocuous, as part of a four-hour sitdown interview with Vanity Fair writer Chris Smith. But it's naturally raised a lot of questions about what his true motivation or perspective is.

Is he trying to recruit negatively against Ole Miss and damage the school he left behind? Is he aware of the history of Baton Rouge and Louisiana as a whole when it comes to segregation? Is this a real concern of Kiffin's, or is it all just a show for him so that he can pretend to present himself as a great reconciliatory and civil rights leader? The fact that this conversation is happening against the backdrop of the destruction of the Voting Rights Act and the erasure of Black representation across the South in Congress is an entirely different dimension that the LSU coach probably didn't plan for.

But maybe that's the biggest takeaway from all of this. The only plan that Lane Kiffin has is to promote Lane Kiffin.

There is no actual world in which this man can just put his head down and get to work on building the LSU program into the contender that he appeared to have at Ole Miss. How many times has Vanity Fair ever sat down with a college football coach for lengthy profile pieces? Especially in the middle of the offseason? And how quickly did Kiffin agree to it because he knew the publicity that it would provide?

This is the same person who tried to get on the Sugar Bowl in the broadcast booth as the LSU coach while his former team was playing in the playoff that he abandoned. That is not something that any sensible, logical person would even fathom to do. It would be like Dianna Russini and Mike Vrabel wanting to do a podcast giving marriage advice.

It's also the same Lane Kiffin who posts more thirsty social media content than every other coach in college football combined. There's even debate about the truth behind his dog, which had its own social media account at Ole Miss.

The messy way Kiffin left Oxford was quintessential soap-opera fare. The deadline dramas, the indecision, the demands about the coaching staff, the airport tarmac interviews, the press conferences, it just went on and on. Kiffin couldn't make a decision and stick with it. He chose to create a spectacle.

And that's exactly what this Vanity Fair controversy has been. It has been a gift from the content gods, and it's found a way to get talked about on First Take amid one of the busiest sports stretches of the year. But in many ways, it's just yet one more example of Lane being Lane.

But anyone trying to decode what Lane Kiffin truly thinks or believes about Ole Miss, the south, its culture, and racial reconciliation is likely going to reach a dead end very quickly. Because, as he has consistently shown over the years, there are no real guiding principles or foundation on which to stand. There is no 4D chess game that is taking place here.

There is only what suits Lane Kiffin in the moment. If that's being the best friend of sorority girls or a great unifying force for people of all kinds, it doesn't really matter. Because this is a one-man show. It always has been, and it always will be.

Rory McIlroy naming these golf swings just by their silhouettes is more impressive than winning back-to-back green jackets.

Was the camera operator fooled on this high fly ball at Fenway Park, or was it just that good of a troll job to make fans think it was a home run?

Elmo is coming to the World Cup thanks to a collaboration between Fox Sports and Sesame Street. Can we have Elmo replace Alexi Lalas?

"USC and Notre Dame are talking again because Notre Dame came crawling back.” - Colin Cowherd has some interesting thoughts on the USC-Notre Dame rivalry, as always.

“My biggest fear is to not be great at the very end. If anything, we’re more aggressive with these last two years than I’ve ever been with this show of what we’re doing, where we’re going, and I said I want to go out that way.” - Dan Patrick on how he wants to finish his broadcasting career strong.

“This could be a situation where... we look back on Caitlin Clark, and we're not gonna look back on her like she's Michael Jordan. She's Jeremy Lin. This is just Linsanity." - Tyrone Johnson, co-host of The Craig Carton Show, has the hottest Caitlin Clark take you will ever hear.

Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And as I’m sure he envisioned in 1687, this applies to the National Football League television schedule.

The NFL schedule release has become one of the most important sports media events of the year. And it’s not just for fans who are eager to learn where and when their favorite teams will play during the upcoming season. It has become a marquee happening for networks and advertisers, with NFL content growing increasingly valuable as a tentpole event.

Each network now consistently rolls out some of its top games before the full schedule release because it’s just that important. And this year is also notable for networks revealing more standalone games than ever before. Each broadcast network is getting an extra game, and Netflix is cashing in with an expanded package. While that means more NFL game windows are coming to national television and streaming, it also has an adverse effect on the NFL’s bread and butter on Sunday afternoons.

As Jimmy Traina points out in Sports Illustrated, more standalone games mean a weaker lineup on Sunday Ticket, especially later in the season, when Saturday and even midweek games become commonplace.

If you’re watching NFL games on your local affiliates on Sunday afternoons, the increase in standalone games may not be a huge issue. But when we’re talking about a product worth hundreds of dollars with no option for single-team packages, then it becomes a problem.

The NFL will put as many games in standalone windows as possible. But the biggest pushback might not come from overexposure or fans tiring of games and becoming bored with the NFL. There is no end in sight to the NFL’s success and dominance on television. The biggest problem might just be that the league starts to cannibalize itself.

More standalone games mean fewer out-of-market games that matter on Sunday afternoons. If your favorite team is playing two extra nationally televised games a season, Sunday Ticket becomes less of a necessity. If you’re watching for fantasy purposes, maybe you would consider just doing RedZone alone and being willing to live with it if there are only one or two Sunday afternoon games actually worth watching.

During the 2024 Sunday Ticket lawsuit, Roger Goodell defended the platform's high cost as a “premium product.” The more games that move off of Sunday afternoons, the more fans will take issue with that label.