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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏌️ CBS nabs Wags. One of the biggest stars in golf media is on the move. Johnson Wagner will reportedly leave Golf Channel to join CBS’s golf coverage as an on-course analyst, filling the spot left vacant from Colt Knost’s recent promotion into the lead tower. The question now is whether Wagner will continue to try and recreate key shots before and after tournament rounds.

⛸️ Milan Cortina crew. NBC continues to reveal broadcast plans for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina. Thursday, the network announced Jac Collinsworth and Matt Iseman would join Scott Hanson and Andrew Siciliano as hosts on the popular Gold Zone whip-around program. U.S. figure skating champion Ashley Wagner will also join the show as an analyst.

🙇 Puka apologizes. Los Angeles Rams star Puka Nacua issued an apology after he made an antisemitic gesture on a livestream earlier this week. “At the time, I had no idea this act was antisemitic in nature and perpetuated harmful stereotypes against Jewish people. I deeply apologize to anyone who was offended by my actions, as I do not stand for any form of racism, bigotry or hate of another group of people,” his statement read.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

The TNT Sports Sweepstakes

There’s never a dull moment in the fight for Warner Bros. Discovery, is there?

For our purposes here, a sports media blog with a sports media newsletter, much of the chatter has been a bit outside the bounds of what we normally cover. Sure, ginormous media mergers are important, and sports are definitely playing a role in how the battle between Netflix and Paramount for control of WBD is being waged. But ultimately, the WBD-owned TNT Sports is but a wee rounding error in the big picture. It’s WBD’s studios, content library, and streaming service that are central to this story.

But the fate of TNT Sports is still important. Its collection of sports rights — which include postseason MLB and NHL games, nearly half of the College Football Playoff beginning next year, more than two-thirds of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, regular season college football and basketball, NASCAR races, AEW, the French Open, and Unrivaled — are still must-have properties in the United States. Over in Europe, TNT Sports’ broadcast agreements run even deeper.

If you haven’t followed the blow-by-blow of this saga, here’s the skinny. If Netflix’s deal goes through, as WBD is pushing for, WBD will continue with a planned split of its company between the streaming and studios assets, which will go to Netflix, and the legacy cable assets, which will operate under an independent entity called Discovery Global. If Paramount’s hostile takeover bid succeeds, all of WBD shifts under the Paramount umbrella, and TNT Sports would seemingly combine with CBS Sports.

One peg of Paramount’s pitch to shareholders as it tries to convince institutional investors to take its side is that Discovery Global is being vastly overvalued as an independent entity. Paramount’s most recent offer would see the company purchase the whole of WBD for $30 per share. Netflix’s offer, which the WBD board favors, would pay WBD $27.75 per share for the studio and streamer, and shareholders would receive equity in Discovery Global that they suggest would be worth between $3 and $4 per share.

If that $3 or $4 per share price is indeed accurate, Netflix’s offer would be worth more in the aggregate. $27.75 + $3 = $30.75, which is greater than the $30 Paramount is offering. Paramount owner David Ellison, however, suggests an independent Discovery Global would be worth just $1 per share, making his bid the more lucrative one for shareholders.

The Ellison premise took a bit of a hit this week as it was reported that WBD has been approached by “a number of potential buyers” for its legacy assets should the Netflix deal be consummated, according to the Financial Times. One such buyer is New York-based hedge fund Standard General. (Can we take a moment to appreciate just how unashamedly nondescript calling your hedge fund Standard General is?)

Standard General has a history of taking on “distressed debt deals,” having taken stakes in declining companies like RadioShack in the past. That’s not exactly the type of footnote those working at WBD’s cable networks are excited to hear.

The hedge fund also has a history of television network deals, having rolled up a series of smaller local broadcast network groups before eventually selling them to Nexstar. In 2022, Standard General announced a $9 billion deal to purchase a major local broadcast group, Tegna, but the deal was terminated in 2023 after facing regulatory scrutiny.

Mysteriously, in an SEC filing WBD issued on Wednesday, WBD mentioned a previously unknown bidder that was only interested in the cable assets set to be castaway to Discovery Global. The bidder was described as “an American media company,” which Puck and TheWrap later reported to be Starz. TheWrap suggests Starz offered a $25 billion all-cash bid for the cable networks, which WBD did not think was “actionable” amid bids from Netflix, Paramount, and Comcast. (It’s worth mentioning that at least one prominent media analyst is adamant the company mentioned in the filing was not Starz.)

Regardless, the interest from multiple parties in the cable networks would seem to suggest that Ellison might be misguided in his assessment of Discovery Global’s value. It also would seem to suggest that when/if WBD’s planned spinoff of Discovery Global does happen, which is currently slated for Q3 2026, the company might be purchased quite quickly.

Who that buyer would ultimately be is anyone’s guess. But from a sports fan’s perspective, let’s just say that on the spectrum of “American media company” to Standard General, “American media company” would likely be the preferable outcome if you watch TNT Sports programming.

📺 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🎬

• Joe Buck will call the first MLB game of ESPN’s new package with the league, the play-by-play announcer revealed on the SI Media with Jimmy Traina podcast. The longtime voice of the World Series will be behind the mic for the New York Mets-Los Angeles Dodgers game on April 15. Unfortunately for baseball fans who miss hearing Buck’s calls, it’s currently the only game of ESPN’s 30-game national slate that he’s scheduled to call. Buck made his return to national MLB broadcasting for ESPN’s Opening Day broadcast last year, calling a New York Yankees-Milwaukee Brewers game.

• Netflix has revealed the first assignment for its newest employee. Elle Duncan will host a live event featuring free solo climber Alex Honnold as he attempts to scale Taipei 101, one of the world’s tallest buildings. Duncan left ESPN earlier this week after nearly a decade at the network, where she hosted the 6 p.m. SportsCenter alongside Kevin Negandhi and led studio coverage for women’s basketball and the WNBA. Her final broadcast on Tuesday turned into one of the bigger send-offs you’ll see, complete with an emotional defense of ESPN against outside criticism.

• Speaking of Netflix, we have some new details about the streamer’s new podcast deal with Barstool Sports. The deal announced this week shifts video distribution for Pardon My Take, Spittin’ Chiclets, and The Ryen Russillo Show away from YouTube and onto Netflix beginning next month. Audio episodes stay put on Spotify and Apple Podcasts at no cost to listeners. Front Office Sports reported some new info yesterday that the deal is worth “in the eight figures” annually.

• Grandpa Philip Rivers delivered the most-watched Colts game on CBS in the Indianapolis market in the last five years, according to CBS Sports. He’s slated to start again this week against the 49ers on Monday Night Football.

🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎙️

Awful Announcing’s Sam Neumann joined The Play-By-Play crew on Thursday to draft college football announcers. Check out the latest episode above!

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

The War on Cinderella

Some of college football’s most prominent voices have been on a crusade against Cinderella schools like Tulane and James Madison being afforded spots in the College Football Playoff.

Sam Neumann take a look at what Fox’s Joel Klatt and ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit have been saying as we prepare to begin the first round tonight. Read the full column here!

James Madison and Tulane play their College Football Playoff games this weekend, and if you’ve been paying attention to the discourse around these teams, you’d think they committed some kind of crime by winning their conferences.

Nobody’s talking about the games themselves. Nobody’s building storylines around the players or coaches. All anyone wants to discuss is whether JMU and Tulane deserve to be there in the first place. And that leads us to the prevailing sentiment among the sport’s biggest voices — Kirk Herbstreit and Joel Klatt — that JMU and Tulane don’t belong, that nobody wants to see them play, and that their presence in the playoff is solely to avoid antitrust litigation.

“We’re not looking for a Cinderella,” Klatt said on The Next Round podcast. “Nobody cares in football about James Madison, or the equivalent of George Mason going to the Final Four. Nobody cares in football about that. We don’t want Cinderellas. We want the best teams playing each other at the end.”

Klatt and Herbstreit constantly position themselves as voices of the fans, speaking up for what people actually want to see. But fans love underdogs. Fans love Cinderella stories. Fans love watching the scrappy team shock the powerhouse. Klatt and Herbstreit are siding with Coca-Cola over the mom-and-pop soda shop, then acting confused when people point out they’re carrying water for the biggest brands in the sport.

Herbstreit has been particularly vocal about this. This week on his Nonstop show with Joey Galloway, he called automatic qualifiers “a bunch of bullsh*t” and said, “I don’t think we need to make sure everybody gets a trophy, and make sure everybody is included.” Additionally, he recently told TMZ Sports that Group of Five teams should have to reach a certain ranking to qualify for the playoff, which is also a thinly veiled way of saying they shouldn’t be allowed in at all.

“The other thing is, I think the Group of 5, while it’s great to have them involved, I feel like they have to get to a certain ranking to be able to qualify to be able to get in,” Herbstreit said. “Nothing against those stories. We all love the Cinderella story, but I just think when you leave Texas, when you leave Notre Dame, when you leave Vandy, when you leave BYU out, the goal was to get the best teams, in my opinion, into the tournament, not try to make everyone happy.”

Herbstreit says, “We all love the Cinderella story,” but in the same breath, he argues for eliminating automatic bids for conference champions. You can’t love Cinderella stories and also want to make sure Cinderella never gets invited to the ball.

Klatt’s even more direct about it. He called March Madness “the dumbest tournament and the least fair tournament in all of sports,” specifically because it allows teams like Saint Peter’s to dance their way into the Elite Eight. His solution to Blue Bloods being upset in the first round is to hold group stages at higher-seeded arenas, which would make upsets nearly impossible. He looked at the most popular postseason tournament in American sports and decided the problem is that the wrong teams sometimes win.

“We go, and we put teams at odd times on neutral sites in a one-game affair. That doesn’t crown a true champion,” Klatt said. “We’re not doing anything that tells us who’s the best team over the course of the entire season.”

That might be true if sports were about crowning the “best” team through statistical optimization. But people don’t watch for that. They watch for UMBC beating Virginia, for Appalachian State beating Michigan, and for Boise State’s Statue of Liberty play against Oklahoma.

What makes the anti-Cinderella stance from the faces of college football media particularly galling is that they’ve spent years helping build the narrative that Group of Five teams can’t compete. Herbstreit was one of the loudest voices against UCF’s inclusion when they went undefeated in 2017 and 2018. He argued they hadn’t played good enough opponents to be considered, which is the classic Catch-22 for non-power conference teams. They get punished for their schedule, but they have no control over their schedule.