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🏒 Tortorella’s ‘flagrant violation.’ The NHL took away a second-round draft pick from the Las Vegas Golden Knights and fined head coach John Tortorella $100,000 after he refused to address the media after clinching a spot in the Western Conference Finals and the team did not open its dressing room to reporters postgame.

🏀 Prime hammers Ant. Minnesota star Anthony Edwards made the strange choice to congratulate Spurs players less than halfway through the fourth quarter of Friday night’s deciding Game 6, and the NBA on Prime broadcast crushed him for it. “I would not show that weakness,” said Udonis Haslem.

👊 Paul vs. White. After UFC CEO Dana White tried to upstage the first MVP MMA broadcast on Netflix, announcing the return of Connor McGregor at the same time that Francis Ngannou was walking out for his fight, MVP cofounder Jake Paul mocked McGregor as a “cokehead” and said the move showed how “pressed” the UFC is.

🏈 Rams tie record. The Los Angeles Rams have tied the ‘23 Bills and ‘25 Chiefs with a whopping seven scheduled primetime games during the coming NFL season, including Week 1 in Australia as well as games on “Thanksgiving Eve” and Christmas.

📺 Harris leaves ND. Ryan Harris, a Notre Dame alum and Super Bowl 50 champion with the Broncos, is leaving the Fighting Irish radio booth to pursue television opportunities. Harris also contributed to Westwood One and Altitude while pursuing a law degree in recent years.

The WNBA is all-in on national television.

This season, the league has seven national broadcast partners, including four free broadcast networks. Games will also appear on massive streaming services like Prime Video, Paramount+ and Peacock.

After the first week of the WNBA season, it is clear the league will blanket the sports slate day to day. The WNBA has games Monday on Peacock, Wednesday on USA Network, Thursday on Prime Video, Friday on Ion, Saturday on CBS and ABC, and Sunday on NBC. Later in the year, ESPN will take over Sundays and some weekdays.

A record 216 (out of 330) games will air on national platforms, and the league will have a national presence nearly every day of the week. The WNBA has, in some cases, accelerated as a national brand more quickly than its teams. This trend, plus the clear interest from across the market, likely pushed the league to go big on the national slate and effectively try to make Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever a national brand.

The exposure this season is a far cry from when WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert took over, as she recently reminded reporters in Toronto.

While the commissioner attributed the league’s uptick in national exposure to the insane demand for live sports right now, she also said “the challenge is making sure fans can find our games when they want to,” adding, “I’m not running one of those media companies so I can’t fix the cost thing.”

Whether with cord-cutters stacking two new subscriptions to Prime Video and Peacock or cord-nevers trying to get access to USA Network, the cost is up if you want catch every single national WNBA game this season. But many of these are games that wouldn’t have been accessible previously.

As Engelbert also noted, the league had only a dozen or two truly nationally televised games when she took over in 2019, and no network had a dedicated studio show for its programming. Now, not only will the league air a record number of national broadcasts, it is also benefitting from added storytelling across all its partners.

This was also evident during opening week. NBC and Prime Video used their usual NBA studios and familiar talent. USA poached Elle Duncan and brought in veteran game analyst Sarah Kustok to top its package. The Disney networks now have multiple go-to studio and announce teams.

Standout moments like NBC’s Sue Bird-Azzi Fudd interview, Prime Video’s 30th anniversary essay narrated by Cynthia Cooper, and USA’s Kate Scott going to bat over Caitlin Clark’s turnovers show a level of sophistication and breadth in WNBA coverage that would have been unthinkable when Engelbert took over — not to mention a clear upgrade in sportscaster star power.

For a league that for so long simply wanted a chance to prove it could engage an audience, the exposure comes not a moment too soon. Same for the money. This season, all of the WNBA’s distribution deals add up to around $281 million, more than six-times last year’s fees.

Questions around whether the league was truly better off negotiating alongside the WNBA with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon and how best to expand the season and the league over time remain. But for now, the WNBA is inescapable for sports fans. A different network takes over just about each day of the week to put out a high-level broadcast.

So far, WNBA viewership has seen a slight dip compared with last year but remains quite strong. The highs are still enormous: ABC’s broadcast of Indiana at Dallas last weekend averaged nearly 2.5 million viewers.

The WNBA has been building to this point all decade: a wall-to-wall schedule of games, marquee stars in multiple markets, and money pouring in. The test case for how popular it can become starts now.

The NCAA basketball tournaments just added eight teams and there is momentum to double the size of the College Football Playoff.

In the case of March Madness, expansion was so unpopular that even the tournament’s broadcast partners needed the sweetener of new sponsorship verticals in order to agree. Few changes have been less popular or more roundly panned than the proposed CFP expansion.

Awful Announcing managing editor Sean Keeley joined The Play-By-Play to discuss how we got here.

Watch the episode on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify.

Mauro Ranallo was all over Ronda Rousey’s win in her final MMA match, despite the shockingly quick result

ESPN may have known something that NBA fans did not…

Shout out to The Pod Father!

Before drone shots entered the fray in sports broadcasting, we may never have seen Anthony Edwards’ bizarre mid-game dap line with the Spurs!

A cool tribute to Cheryl Miller from her brother, Reggie, as she returns to broadcasting alongside him at NBC

“We don’t draft our way into primetime. We play our way into primetime.” - NFL VP of broadcasting planning Mike North, explaining why the Las Vegas Raiders did not get scheduled for a single evening game this season.

“Look at Denver’s schedule, they’re punishing them. That’s the toughest six-game schedule I have ever seen in my entire life…” - Colin Cowherd, theorizing that the NFL’s distaste for Denver head coach Sean Payton is what led to a difficult, front-loaded schedule for the Broncos.

“It seems like he’s there because it’s fun to be on the show, but it doesn’t seem like he follows basketball at a high enough level anymore.” - Bill Simmons, calling out Shaquille O’Neal as the primary culprit for a poor debut season for Inside the NBA on ESPN.

“I think all of the players … have wanted more critique. We understand that’s a part of sports. It’s a part of conversation.” - NBC’s Sue Bird, giving her two cents on how critical WNBA commentators should be as the league grows.

“If there’s one thing that the decision-makers hate, it’s their face being on a topic and a movement this unpopular.” - Josh Pate, urging his audience to keep voicing their disapproval of the proposed 24-team College Football Playoff.

“The top of the zone is three inches shorter than what umpires were calling last year.” - Fox’s Joe Davis, during a discussion with John Smoltz over whether MLB should change the ABS strike zone to adjust for data showing it is much smaller than the umpire-enforced zone of 2025.

“…we didn’t have a schedule-release show for the first time in years. I don’t know if that’s an indication.” - Rich Eisen, wondering aloud whether last week was the the first sign of larger changes at NFL Network.

An analysis of the NFL TV schedule since 2016 shows that the NFL has steadily shifted inventory away from the traditional Sunday regional windows on CBS and Fox and into standalone packages.

An Awful Announcing analysis of the schedule data found that, this year, the NFL is scheduled to air 197 Sunday-afternoon games. That’s down from 198 in 2025 and from 211 in 2021, the first year of the NFL’s expanded 18-week schedule.

The 2026 total is also one less than the number of Sunday afternoon games in 2016, when the NFL had one fewer week in the regular season.

Read the full column from Awful Announcing’s Manny Soloway, who breaks down how and why the NFL has chipped away at the Sunday slate.