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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺️ New Shannon Sharpe audio released. For the second time in as many days, the woman accusing Shannon Sharpe of assault, sexual assault, battery, and sexual battery has released audio of her interactions with the Hall of Fame tight end. In the new audio obtained by TMZ, the ESPN star can allegedly be heard telling the woman, “I might choke you in public.” ESPN has yet to publicly respond to the accusations against Sharpe, who was on First Take as recently as Tuesday.

💻️ ESPN fires editor after HR investigation. More than two months after it was revealed that ESPN had placed executive editor Cristina Daglas on administrative leave, the network officially fired her following an HR investigation, according to Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports. No details have been made available regarding the complaints against Daglas, who had been at ESPN since 2016.

🎙️ ESPN pursued Colin Cowherd. In what’s beginning to feel like an annual tradition, ESPN pursued Colin Cowherd for a return to the Worldwide Leader, according to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand. It’s unclear what Cowherd’s role at ESPN would have been as a deal never came to fruition, with the longtime radio star ultimately opting to re-sign with Fox Sports on a three-year contract.

🌹 Ex-NFL player to serve as Golden Bachelor. The next season of ABC’s The Golden Bachelor will have some sports flavor to it, with former Los Angeles Rams linebacker Mel Owens having been cast as the dating show’s main character. The 66-year-old Owens divorced from his wife in 2020 and is hoping to find “companionship” on the popular series.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Is the pick in?

The 2025 NFL Draft will kick off in Green Bay on Thursday night, and, as has been the case for every year since 1980, it will air on ESPN.

And all indications are that won’t be changing anytime soon.

While the NFL Draft’s media rights are set to expire after this year’s event, all signs point to ESPN keeping the league’s biggest offseason event of the year. Earlier this week, a report from Mollie Cahillane of Sports Business Journal stated that ESPN is “optimistic” that it will retain rights to the NFL Draft past this year. At the same time, The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand seemed more certain that the draft will remain with the Bristol-based broadcaster.

The idea that the draft would remain with ESPN was seemingly backed up by another report on Wednesday, with David Rumsey and Michael McCarthy of Front Office Sports revealing that the NFL Network is expected to retain its NFL Draft rights beyond this year. The league-owned network has broadcast the draft alongside ESPN since 2006, with the two sides having been linked to each other in recent months as a part of a potential equity deal.

ESPN doing what it takes to keep the draft is hardly a surprise, as everything the network does appears to be geared toward hosting its first Super Bowl in 2027 and the impending launch of its upcoming direct-to-consumer streaming service. Retaining the draft would check both boxes, giving the network deeper ties to the league and programming for the OTT platform.

Speaking of which, Front Office Sports also reports that YouTube is in “pole position” to land the NFL Draft’s international rights. While it’s unclear whether the Google-owned platform will also stream in the United States, one would imagine that ESPN would want the draft to have exclusivity on its upcoming over-the-top streaming service.

However, while it appears the draft rights are almost assuredly staying put at ESPN and the NFL Network, with YouTube providing the global reach, none of these have been finalized as of Thursday morning. It’s likely not a coincidence that these reports came out when they did. As such, it will be interesting to see whether other reported candidates such as Netflix or Fox make another — and perhaps final — push.

Ultimately, however, it doesn’t appear that Mike Greenberg will have to worry about having his heart broken any time soon.

🗣️ The Play-By-Play 🗣️ 

On the latest episode of The Play-By-Play, Ben Axelrod and Brendon Kleen discuss WrestleMania 41, Lee Corso’s retirement and sports media’s reaction to Nico Iamaleava’s transfer from Tennessee.

The Play-By-Play is available anywhere podcasts can be found, including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, as well as in video form on the Awful Announcing YouTube page.

📣 NOTABLE QUOTABLES 🗣️ 

• “Your source is incorrect” - George Kittle in response to The Athletic’s Dianna Russini following her report that the San Francisco 49ers star wants to be the NFL’s highest-paid tight end.

• “This might be the biggest move since getting the full season of the NFL” - Disney CEO Bob Iger on the impending launch of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer streaming service, per Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp.

• “They said no” - ESPN’s Molly Qerim, preventing Chris “Mad Dog” Russo from ranting about Bill Belichick and his girlfriend on Wednesday’s episode of First Take.

• “…In Mr. Sharpe’s case as in the case of virtually all other similar subjects of blackmail, the reason [was] primarily to avoid public embarrassment for himself and his family and other adverse consequences to his life and reputation.” - Shannon Sharpe’s lawyer, Lanny J. Davis, to Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, denying that his client’s previous $10 million settlement offer to his accuser was an admission of wrongdoing.

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥 

If ya smellllllll…

Days later and I’m still trying to make sense of the main event to Night 2 of WrestleMania 41.

For the uninitiated, WWE’s biggest show of the year ended with rapper Travis Scott helping John Cena beat Cody Rhodes for the WWE championship. While Scott’s presence was expected, so was The Rock’s. But the “People’s Champ” never made an appearance, resulting in an underwhelming finish to the show.

The confusion regarding The Rock’s role — or lack thereof — in the WrestleMania main event was only amplified by his appearance on Tuesday’s episode of The Pat McAfee Show. There, The Rock — or more appropriately, Dwayne Johnson — told his side of the story, indicating that he was brought in for the Elimination Chamber event in March (where Cena famously turned heel) to help sell tickets and that he never planned on being at this year’s WrestleMania. Never mind that he said he made himself available to WWE — an offer they presumably would have taken him up on — or that last year’s WrestleMania led many to believe that a Rock vs. Rhodes match would be this year’s main event.

Ultimately, it’s hard to view this as anything but a convoluted mess, and no, I’m not buying the idea that disappointing fans during the biggest show of the year was a 4D chess storyline. While The Rock was never explicitly advertised for WrestleMania 41, there were enough hints that he’d be there that it was reasonable for the fans to expect as much and leave disappointed when he ultimately didn’t do so.

Perhaps the most interesting angle to all of this is that Johnson threw WWE’s creative under the bus on the McAfee Show, admitting that there were some things that he would have done differently in the build to the Rhodes vs. Cena match. That’s especially notable considering that WWE’s creative is run by chief content officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque — Johnson’s former on-screen rival-turned-colleague at TKO.

For now, WWE fans seem satisfied with the Raw after WrestleMania and general direction of the company’s booking. However, it will certainly be worth monitoring how similar situations involving Johnson and Levesque unfold in the future.