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📺 Cut-aways to war coverage. Both ABC and NBC cut away from live sports coverage (ABC from an NHL game, NBC from golf) to air special reports once it was confirmed that American strikes on Iran had killed the country’s Supreme Leader. The breaks lasted between 8 and 10 minutes each, with each network’s top news anchor delivering the reports.

🏀 Malone’s debut. Longtime Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone made his debut as a game analyst for NBA on ESPN after spending most of his first season in media doing studio commentary. Malone called Cavs-Pistons in Detroit on Friday, then Spurs-Knicks in Manhattan on Sunday afternoon.

🏈 Dales dazzles. The star of NFL Network’s coverage of the Scouting Combine last week was reporter Stacey Dales. The vet received praise from across the industry for humanizing what can be an impersonal, awkward event for some athletes.

📺 Sanchez updates. The criminal trial for former Fox Sports analyst Mark Sanchez has been moved back to April 9, the second delay given to Sanchez by an Indiana judge since he allegedly stabbed a man last fall. The news comes after the Daily Mail reported that the civil suit plaintiff’s attorneys have produced evidence that Sanchez used multiple illegal drugs the night of the violent altercation.

Early in the bidding process for Warner Bros. Discovery as Paramount first began to bid on the company, WBD valued its own cable assets at around $3 per share.

These include CNN, TNT, TBS, and the Discovery Channel, as well as a few reality and animation networks. All will be folded into Paramount Skydance after the company’s successful pursuit of WBD. Throughout the process, Paramount has valued them closer to $1 per share.

While Paramount’s inclusion of the cable networks in its acquisition could merely have been a bargaining chip, it now owns these assets. Under the Netflix bid, WBD’s cable assets would have beem spun off into their own company and shopped separately. Paramount figures to have a plan for the cable side of the business.

As with any cable network these days, the value largely lies in WBD’s sports rights.

In the short term, the sale solves a couple of problems. TNT Sports broadcasts figure to have a streaming home on Paramount+. And the network can seemingly stop cutting costs.

For several years (and especially since losing the NBA), TNT Sports has been geared toward managing losses. The company drew a hard line on NBA talks, but assembled a strange pile of other rights in its stead: the Big 12, the French Open, and sub-licensed College Football Playoff games. As it tried to keep its stock price out of the gutter and explored a sale, WBD could not afford to let TNT Sports waste away. The network still generates substantial revenue from advertising and cable carriage rights.

Over the next several years, many of these deals will expire. TBS will lose the baseball postseason in three years. TNT will lose the NHL in two years. The NCAA tournament deal is up in 2032.

But since acquiring Paramount last year, new Skydance management has not demonstrated a strong vision for the cable business. Hollywood is shifting toward digital video and streaming. So Paramount could invest more money to bolster TNT Sports as a standalone business and milk it for its last drops of revenue. Or, it could wind down the brand and move toward a future in which CBS Sports and Paramount+ are the lone sports platforms in the portfolio. With a broadcast network and a large streaming service (set to get even bigger after buying HBO Max as part of this deal), Paramount is well-situated for the future of sports distribution.

Even as rumors suggest Paramount is intrigued by the chance to put its imprint on CNN, the new owners’ plans for the cable business could also just be to wait out its death. Paramount fancies itself the media company of the future, as evidenced by the Ellisons’ role in the consortium that now owns U.S. operations of TikTok — and, again, the fact that it has not made moves with the Paramount suite of cable networks.

But in propping itself up as a live sports player while WBD tried to sell itself, TNT Sports has also made itself into an asset that Paramount cannot easily unwind. With a lot of debt piled on after the two acquisitions, Paramount could also likely use the $4.79 billion in distribution revenue that WBD generated last fiscal year, even though this number is declining each year.

How the new ownership chooses to manage TNT Sports will be a key indicator of what kind of company the new mega-corporation will be.

TGL, the tech-infused simulator golf league launched by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy alongside TMRW Sports in 2025, is one of many nascent pro sports leagues popping up to meet the insatiable appetite of sports-watching fans. UFL, Unrivaled, LOVB, PWHL, and many others have debuted in recent years to try and capture a sliver of attention from the sports-obsessed among us, and cash in on the media rights deals and ad dollars that follow.

There’s reason to believe, however, that TGL is a step ahead of its peers in this regard. In Year 2, TGL has avoided the sophomore slump that many new leagues fall victim to. Instead, despite some less advantageous television windows and a Tiger Woods injury that has kept the superstar founder sidelined for the entire season thus far, TGL viewership has remained steady.

Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner visited TGL’s arena in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, to speak with ESPN personalities Matt Barrie and Marty Smith about the league in Year 2.

“I think what they found out is having Donald Trump on our college football podcast is not a lot, a sizable, a growing number of college football fans’ favorite thing.” - The Ringer’s Van Lathan, sizing up the lessons college football media should take from Josh Pate’s shortsighted decision to interview Donald Trump.

”I think the number one thing we’ve got to do is let the fans know when the games are on.” - Charles Barkley, arguing that sorting out the broadcast schedule should be at the top of the NBA’s to-do list.

“If I was a betting man, does it have over or under 10 years as currently constructed? I don’t know.” - The Volume’s John Middlekauff, predicting that the NFL Scouting Combine will go away much sooner than fans might expect.

“Every single non-premium right in the U.S. is going to struggle.” - Univision global sports president Olek Loewenstein, predicting that the NFL broadcast rights package will box other sports out from top distributors.

We’re in a new era of men’s college basketball, with new coaches at nearly every Blue Blood program and structural changes to the sport leading to massive roster upheaval every offseason.

But on the men’s basketball edition of ESPN’s College GameDay, the faces are mostly the same. Benefitting from a strong college hoops season with significant parity, the show’s ratings are up 14 percent over last season.

Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner visited the set to hear from the crew:

Davis and Bilas have been with the show since its inception. Williams is in his second stint, having joined the show from 2015 to 2019 before rejoining in 2024. Greenberg just passed a decade with the program, having debuted in 2015. And Carter proves to be the only “new” addition to the show, having just entered her third season.

It’s a level of continuity that isn’t entirely common in the world of sports studio shows. As other studio properties on ESPN and other networks closely resemble a revolving door, College GameDay (basketball version) has been remarkably stable.

So what’s the secret sauce? A healthy dose of bickering.

Read the full column here.