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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

💵 Deal or no deal? Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount all officially submitted bids for Warner Bros. Discovery on Thursday. Paramount remains the only company interested in buying the whole of WBD, while Netflix and Comcast submitted bids for just the streaming and studios assets. The future of TNT Sports will be determined by which buyer (if any) the WBD board ultimately settles on. The company has self-imposed a Christmas deadline to decide.

🏀 Lobo up! ESPN has re-signed lead women’s basketball analyst Rebecca Lobo to a multiyear deal, the network announced on Thursday. Lobo will continue to call ESPN’s top WNBA and women’s college basketball games alongside play-by-play partner Ryan Ruocco.

🥊 Atlas out. ESPN combat sports analyst Teddy Atlas is saying goodbye to the Worldwide Leader after nearly three decades. The legendary broadcaster took to social media after UFC 322 to announce the news. This year, ESPN lost rights to Top Rank Boxing and UFC, the two properties Atlas primarily appeared on.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

NBC looks to cash out of Big Ten title game

Trouble could be brewing in Big Ten paradise. At least, some signs of discontent are creeping their way to the surface.

Last night, Puck sports correspondent John Ourand reported that NBC is looking to sublicense rights to the Big Ten Championship game next year, the one and only season during the peacock network’s seven-year deal in which it will have the honor. NBC has apparently courted both Netflix and Amazon for the game, but interest so far has been muted.

Why, you might ask, would NBC pass up its only opportunity to air the Big Ten title game on its network? After all, the game regularly attracts eight-figure audiences and usually features blue chip programs like Ohio State and Oregon.

Well, there’s a few potential reasons. For one, NBC has done a lot of buying recently. The network is paying $2.5 billion per year for its NBA deal, which began last month. Earlier this week, the network agreed to outlay another $200 million per year for the Sunday Night Baseball package. In March, NBC agreed to extend its Olympics deal, which adds another $1.5 billion per two-year cycle. Not to mention, Sunday Night Football is already running NBC over $2 billion per year, with a potential renegotiation with the NFL right around the corner.

So in its sole Big Ten Championship game, NBC sees opportunity. Netflix loves to “eventize,” and what better way to burst onto the college football scene than a P-2 conference title game? Amazon always seems interested in tier one sports properties itself, so why not kick the tires?

For NBC, owning one singular Big Ten Championship game doesn’t do much for its bottom line. It’s not something the network can point towards while in negotiations with distributors to command a higher fee. Selling commercial inventory would be lucrative, sure. But it’s not as if those advertisers are going to be return customers.

We’ve seen the going rate for a one-off NFL game is somewhere around $100 million. Let’s conservatively say the Big Ten title game can get half of that on the open market. Boom. That’s a $50 million discount during the first year of its new baseball deal. It’s not overly significant to the overall picture, but for one game that’s a pretty sizeable number.

An interesting wrinkle in this case, however, is the Fox component. Fox owns a majority stake in Big Ten Network, the cable channel dedicated to covering the conference. In a unique setup, Big Ten Network, rather than the conference itself, controls the media rights for the league. So when NBC negotiated its seven-year deal with the Big Ten, the network negotiated not only with conference executives, but directly with Fox executives as well.

Thus, Ourand posits, any sort of sublicense would have to get Fox’s blessing, and the network could “bristle at the idea that one of their network partners would try to cherry-pick a game to sell elsewhere,” especially to a competitor like Netflix or Amazon.

Right now, it seems more likely than not that NBC will hold onto the game. Or, at the very least, the network could sell it back to Fox instead of a streamer.

But the fact that NBC is even exploring this as an option in the first place says some things about the level of satisfaction the network has in its Big Ten deal. NBC, like CBS, is stuck with the conference’s leftovers in terms of game quality. The ratings almost certainly do not justify the amount the network is paying. (The Big Ten earns $1.15 billion per year from its TV deals, but exactly how much each network pays is not public.) To try and sell the best game it’ll get throughout its entire seven-year contract reeks of damage control.

Given the circumstances, can anyone blame them?

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

With MLB officially announcing its new short-term media rights deals with ESPN, NBC, and Netflix earlier this week, it’s time to play the parlor game of guessing who will lead NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball coverage next season. Our Sam Neumann explores some of the most likely candidates.

Jason Benetti

The Tigers’ television voice brings everything NBC should want in a national baseball announcer. Benetti’s work calling college football and basketball for Fox has elevated his national profile, and his Tigers broadcasts jumped from 30th to 10th in Awful Announcing’s annual rankings after just one season. He’s clever without being gimmicky, knowledgeable without being pedantic, and has proven he can connect with audiences beyond a regional fanbase. His cerebral palsy has made him an inspiration without that becoming his defining characteristic, which speaks to how good he is at the actual job of calling games. NBC could do far worse than putting Benetti in the chair.

Boog Sciambi

There’s an argument that ESPN made a colossal mistake by not making Sciambi the television voice of Sunday Night Baseball when it had the chance. Instead, Karl Ravech got that role while Sciambi became the radio voice, which is a fine job, but not the showcase role. Sciambi has spent years studying the greats — the voices that made baseball sound like poetry — and you can hear it in his work without him ever trying to be them. His work on the Cubs’ Marquee Sports Network has been universally praised. If there’s any broadcaster whose talent exceeds his current platform, it’s Sciambi.

Kevin Brown

The Orioles’ lead television voice on MASN has quietly become one of the best in the business, and his rise coincided with Baltimore’s resurgence as a playoff contender. Brown’s worked his way up through ESPN’s college sports coverage — football, basketball, softball — while establishing himself as Baltimore’s primary voice, and he’s got the versatility NBC would love, moving seamlessly between sports and handling big moments without flinching.

Read the rest of Sam’s list of potential candidates here!

🏈 GRADE THE 2025 COLLEGE FOOTBALL LOCAL RADIO ANNOUNCERS 🎙️

For the first time ever, Awful Announcing is asking its readers to grade local college football radio announcers. Here you’ll find a form containing the radio booths for all 67 Power-4 schools plus Notre Dame. Grade as many or as few as you want, and we’ll compile the results later this season!

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

The Irrelevance Olympics

The Podfather, Bill Simmons, set off quite the debate earlier this week as he dubbed the Columbus Blue Jackets the “most irrelevant franchise in professional sports.” That’s a moniker that no pro sports team would ever want, but makes for some interesting podcast fodder.

Simmons’ criteria was as follows:

To Simmons’ credit, as a voracious consumer of sports media myself, I don’t recall hearing a single conversation about the Columbus Blue Jackets at any point in my life. Disclaimer: I’m not a hockey fan. But I’ve certainly watched enough ESPN to at least rattle off a fact or two about each Original Six team. The Blue Jackets? Not so much.

The conversation got us thinking over here at Awful Announcing, which team is the most “irrelevant” in each of the four major North American sports leagues? It’s actually a challenging exercise, right? The Cleveland Browns and New York Jets have been bad forever, but we talk about them all the time. Which teams are bad, but also never get talked about? That’s true purgatory for a fan.

Myself and Ben Axelrod gave our picks on the most recent episode of The Play-By-Play, and to my surprise, we aligned on the most irrelevant team for each league aside from the NHL.

So without further ado, here’s our definitive selections.

NFL

This was by far the most difficult league to narrow down. Just by nature of being the most popular and talked about league in the country, it’s hard for any single team to take home the title of “irrelevant.” But I do think there’s one team that stands out (or perhaps, stands behind) from the others.

That team would be the Arizona Cardinals. Hear me out. The Cardinals are the team that is perpetually winning between five and eight games it seems. They’ve only been to one Super Bowl in their history (losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2008), and haven’t laid claim to any championship since 1947. They’re on the West Coast, but not in California, making them an afterthought for the main power centers of media.

And here’s the kicker. The Cardinals haven’t had any sort of extended run of meaningful success in their history. Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1966, the Cardinals haven’t made more than two playoff appearances within a single decade. They had two postseason berths in the 1970s, one in the 1980s, one in the 1990s, two in the 2000s, two in the 2010s, and one so far in the 2020s. In other words, they’re only making the postseason about 15% of the time.

Yet, we never really talk about the Cardinals. Certainly not as much as the horrid NFL franchises in New York. Not as much as the Browns. Not as much as the Detroit Lions when they were bad. Even a team like the Jacksonville Jaguars at least have some recent scandal to get people talking. The Cardinals have just been boring bad, and that’s why they’re taking home the title.

NBA

Compared to the NFL, the three other leagues have a few more options to choose from. For the NBA, we settled on the Sacramento Kings. Yes, there’s an argument that they’ve been too bad and dysfunctional to qualify. There were certainly plenty of First Take segments on the Kings during the Boogie Cousins era. But I don’t think their dysfunction has been talked about at a high enough rate.

The Kings have been to one Conference Finals since moving to Sacramento, and that was all the way back in the 2001-02 season. In the last 20 years, the Kings have made just one non-play-in playoff appearance, three seasons ago when they took the Warriors to seven games in the first round.

Again, they’re on the West Coast, which by my criteria is a negative since many of their games begin once everyone on the East Coast is going to bed. But not only that, the Kings are a clear fourth place in relevancy just among teams in their own state of California.

Honorable mention here goes to the Charlotte Hornets. For my money, LaMelo Ball and former owner Michael Jordan kept them relevant enough to avoid the unwanted distinction we’re handing out today.

MLB

In my view, baseball was the tightest race out of all four leagues. It’s not that there are a lot of irrelevant teams in MLB. In fact, there aren’t many I’d place in that category. It’s just that each of the more-irrelevant teams have convincing arguments to not be the most-irrelevant.

After also considering both the Kansas City Royals and Cincinnati Reds, we ultimately settled on the Colorado Rockies. Frankly, it was one statistic that put me over the top.

Until an objectively horrid stretch of baseball the past four seasons, the Rockies have been almost impressively mid. Here’s their winning percentage by decade:

1990s — .478

2000s — .474

2010s — .464

2020s — .417

Until the 2020s, the Rockies were firmly in the 70-80 win range for nearly three decades. That’s the exact range where you’re bad enough to never really make the playoffs, but not bad enough to be talked about as among the worst in baseball. (Again, until recently.)

The team has just one World Series appearance (2007), has never won the NL West in its history, and has only made two playoff appearances since 2010. Miserable.

NHL

Moving onto the only league Ben and I diverged on, the NHL had by far the most options of any league. When’s the last time you’ve ever heard anyone discuss the Minnesota Wild, Winnipeg Jets, Anaheim Ducks, or San Jose Sharks?

Never. The answer is never. But those teams weren’t even the two that won our irrelevancy awards. Ben stuck with the original inspiration of this exercise, choosing the Columbus Blue Jackets, while I strayed in a different direction and chose the Buffalo Sabres.

But honestly, there’s little to distinguish any of the teams listed. They’re all NHL teams that have seen minimal success and don’t play in major markets. The NHL is already the least-discussed major league in the country, so being a bad team in a small market is simply a death sentence in the Relevancy Olympics.

Frankly, any of the aforementioned teams could’ve been picked and no one would bat an eye. But unfortunately for the Blue Jackets, they’ll have to take the brunt of that stink until they turn things around on the ice.