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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 The NFL Today hits the road. CBS’s NFL pregame show announced it will be traveling on-site to select games throughout the season. The show will start its season live from Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin during the Packers’ Week 1 rivalry game against the Detroit Lions.

🎾 Kyrgios out. Australian tennis star Nick Kyrgios reportedly will not return to ESPN’s coverage of Wimbledon this summer. The outspoken Aussie contributed to the event last year, but his off-court controversies might’ve been too much to stomach for ESPN to bring him back.

💻 On3 and Rivals take big step. The two leading college athletics recruiting outlets, which announced they’d be combining forces earlier this year, have officially merged their recruiting databases. The combined database will now be known as the Rivals300.

️‍🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

A World Cup Warmup

Yesterday marked one year until the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off on North American soil. Fox Sports soccer analyst Alexi Lalas is calling it “possibly the biggest event in human history.” And, considering the circumstances, that statement might not be all that hyperbolic.

The World Cup has not come to the United States since 1994. In the three intervening decades, the sport of soccer has exploded in the country. Add to that a vibrant immigrant population and an ease of travel that didn’t exist 32 years ago, and the world’s most popular sporting event coming back stateside may well be one of human history’s biggest events. It’ll at least be a seminal moment for sports in the United States.

Fox is sure to lean all-in on that narrative. The network is set to air its third consecutive men’s World Cup next year, and if any television network loves to embrace “big,” it’s Fox.

That’s not a knock. Quite the opposite, actually. No network produces a big feel better than Fox. And considering the circumstances; a 250th anniversary of the country’s independence, a (supposed) golden generation of players, literally the “biggest” World Cup ever with a brand-new 48-country format, this event will have the network’s full attention.

It’s a little early to talk about Fox’s coverage, but if the last two World Cups are any indication, it’ll be divisive. Soccer diehards tend to pan the network’s strategy, suggesting they cater too much to the casual fan. Others contend, well, the World Cup is for the casual fan, at least in the United States.

But the one thing fans can be sure about when it comes to Fox’s soccer coverage is there will be a sharp focus on the U.S. Men’s National Team. And right now, the network’s top talents are not biting their tongues when it comes to criticizing the team’s performance and, maybe more importantly, its want-to.

On Tuesday, the USMNT lost its fourth consecutive game for the first time since 2007, a 4-0 shellacking at the hands of Switzerland. The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio called it “arguably the lowest feeling around the program since the U.S. lost to Trinidad & Tobago in 2017 and failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup,” if you needed some context on just how bad things have gotten.

As such, Fox’s soccer stars are piling on. Lead match analyst Stu Holden called the performance “embarrassing” on social media. Lalas went on First Things First and said, “It’s a pity that we’re at this point where there are people out there that are saying, ‘I don’t know if this team cares.’”

But perhaps the most damning comment came from fellow Fox Sports analyst and USMNT legend Landon Donovan before Tuesday’s game even happened. Donovan took issue with a number of current USMNT players skipping the Summer slate of matches saying, “I can’t help but think about our guys on vacation, not wanting to play in the Gold Cup. It’s pissing me off.”

To me, this is what has always been admirable about Fox’s soccer coverage. They’re all willing to call a spade a spade. They aren’t afraid to be critical of the national team just because they’re wearing the stars and stripes. Remember how Carli Lloyd took enormous criticism for going after the USWNT during the 2023 World Cup on Fox? Well, she ended up being vindicated after an unceremonious exit in the Round of 16.

If the USMNT continues to put up results like Tuesday’s, expect Fox’s soccer analysts to have a very short leash on the team come this time next year. None of them want to do it. They’re all former USMNT players, after all. But that makes them some of the most qualified to say what they’re saying. And if the team doesn’t turn things around very quickly, the Fox soccer studio might not have quite the celebratory feel some might have hoped for the “biggest event in human history.”

🗣️THE PLAY-BY-PLAY🗣️

On the latest episode, Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner joins Brendon Kleen and Ben Axelrod to discuss:

• The latest reporting regarding Doris Burke’s future at ESPN

• The smallest-market NBA Finals ever

• Warner Bros. Discovery’s big split into to separate companies

The Play-By-Play is available wherever you find your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon.

💬 AROUND AA 💬

ESPN did right by Dan Orlovsky

ESPN takes a lot of criticism for the talent it doesn’t retain, so it’s nice to give the Worldwide Leader some credit when they do pay up to keep someone that regularly contributes quality content. Awful Announcing’s Sam Neumann contends that ESPN retaining Dan Orlovsky was a coup for the network’s NFL coverage.

📈DATA DUMP📺

• ABC averaged just 8.76 million viewers for Game 2 of the NBA Finals on Sunday night, the least-watched Game 2 since the “bubble” or, if excluding the pandemic-riddled postseason, the least-watched Game 2 since 2007, when Cavs-Spurs competed head-to-head with the series finale of The Sopranos.

• TNT Sports had a strong showing in Year 1 of its French Open coverage. The men’s singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner on Sunday averaged 1.76 million viewers, up 8% versus last year’s Alcaraz-Zverev final on NBC. Coco Gauff’s win in the women’s singles final on Saturday averaged 1.47 million viewers, up 94% versus Świątek-Paolini last year and the most-watched women’s final since Serena Williams fell to Garbine Muguruza in 2016. Overall, the French Open averaged 399,000 viewers across the entire tournament, up 25% year-over-year.

• The Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is delivering the goods for both Fox and ESPN. Fox drew 3.05 million viewers for the showdown on Saturday night, the most-watched regular season baseball game on any network since 2022. The next night, ESPN averaged 1.9 million viewers for the rivalry and announced they’re on track for the most-watched season of Sunday Night Baseball in eight years. Great timing!

• Betting-related harassment of college athletes took an encouraging drop during this year’s March Madness tournament. Per a study conducted by the Signify Group, gambling-related abuse against players dropped by 23% this year. Coaches, on the other hand, weren’t so lucky. They saw social media abuse surge by 140%.

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

What’s next for TNT Sports?

As readers of this newsletter well know, the industry’s newest spinoff was announced this week as Warner Bros. Discovery revealed it would be separating its cable networks from the company’s streaming platform and film studio.

Soon, TNT Sports will be separated from its parent company, cast off with other declining legacy media assets like Food Channel and Investigation Discovery. No one knows exactly how it will shake out. Where will sports fans be able to access TNT properties once the split happens? Will pay TV distributors continue to carry the networks after the expiration of current carriage deals? What streaming service, if any, will house TNT’s live games after an interim period on [HBO] Max?

The best answer to those questions that I’ve seen so far came from Rich Greenfield of the media analysis firm LightShed Partners. In an appearance on John Ourand’s The Varsity podcast, Greenfield laid out what he sees as TNT Sports’ go-forward strategy. Let’s just say, it’s pretty bleak.

“If I’m sitting at [WBD spinoff] Global Networks, I have one job,” Greenfield said. “I’m no longer thinking about how I use linear networks to drive Max … so I’m not thinking about how I am the fuel driving streaming. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to go out and get more sports rights because I want to add sports rights over to my streaming service.’ … If you’re sitting there at TNT and you’re running a math equation, you only want the sports rights to have just enough to survive and keep carriage. …Can they get enough sports to basically not lose carriage?

“I think that is [future CEO] Gunnar [Wiedenfel]’s only job. But the one thing I don’t think anyone is talking about … is that, after the next 12 months, while this split is happening, I don’t think you’re going to see Warner Brothers do anything. Like, I think they’ll figure out this one extra CFP game that was already part of the option, but I would be shocked to see them as a bidder for UFC, Formula One, Major League Baseball, the WWE PLEs. Like, I think Warner’s going to be in a, ‘Hey, we got enough. We’ve gotten our carriage deals recently done. We are not going to do anything to depress the cash flows of the linear networks anymore than they already are challenged right now. So I think you have a bidder coming out of the sports rights bidding process over the course of the next 12 months. I think this transaction overhanging them, they’re out.”

If Greenfield is right, as he usually is, that’s a pretty grim future for TNT Sports. Any prospect of long-term growth, or even survival, seem to have gone out the window. Post-split, the company will simply do the bare minimum to maintain carriage fees before their premium live sports rights inevitably expire.

Maybe the most telling thing about all of this is that Warner Bros. Discovery hasn’t even offered much of a vision for the new company. At least Comcast has offered up some ideas about how its spinoff, Versant, might actually be able to grow and sustain itself. The Warner split? Not so much. A former CFO with no sports experience will extract as much revenue from its cable assets as possible before the networks become truly worthless.

We’re finally seeing the beginning of the end for cable networks.