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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

📺️ Joy Taylor returns. After having been “sidelined” at FS1 for the past two weeks, Joy Taylor returned to host Speak on Monday afternoon. The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand was the first to report the news of Taylor’s return. It’s currently unclear whether Taylor’s hiatus is connected to the ongoing Fox Sports workplace misconduct lawsuit or is a separate situation.

⛳️ ESPN re-signs Matt Barrie. A staple of ESPN’s golf and college football coverage will be remaining in Bristol for the foreseeable future with the Worldwide Leader announcing on Monday that it has re-signed Matt Barrie to a multi-year contract. Barrie’s new deal will see him continue in his role hosting the 2 p.m. ET weekday SportsCenter, calling college football games and serving as the play-by-play voice of TGL.

🏈 Craig Wolfley dead at 66. Pittsburgh Steelers fans and the football world are mourning the loss of Craig Wolfley, the team’s radio analyst who passed away at the age of 66 on Monday. A former Steelers guard (1980-89), Wolfley joined the organization’s radio team following his playing career before being named the lead radio analyst in 2022.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

When X goes down

For all of its faults — of which there are many — X remains an incredibly valuable platform for NFL insiders to disseminate news.

And if there’s a day on the calendar in which the app is the most useful to football fans, it may very well be the start of the NFL’s legal tampering period, which marks the semi-official beginning of free agency.

But as the 12 p.m. ET kickoff to legal tampering approached on Monday, X was out of commission. In fact, the Elon Musk-owned platform suffered no fewer than three separate outages from the early morning to the early afternoon, including one that kept the app down throughout most of the 12 p.m. ET hour.

According to Musk, the outages came as the result of a “massive cyberattack.” In any event, X being inactive left fans, insiders and even NFL teams themselves scrambling as they attempted to stay up to date with the latest happenings around the league.

While insiders like The Athletic’s Dianna Russini and the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport turned to Bluesky, ESPN’s Adam Schefter posted on Threads. He also repeatedly pushed the ESPN app’s ability to send his breaking news directly to your phone while appearing on the ESPN2 free agency special.

Although there was something nostalgic about following free agency on TV as if it were the late-1990s, Monday’s X outage provided a massive disruption to the way we’ve become accustomed to consuming such news over the last 15 years. Time will tell whether this proves to be more of a minor blip or inflection point for sports fans’ relationship with the platform formerly known as Twitter. But it was certainly interesting to see the way so many insiders and fans quickly flocked to alternatives like Bluesky and Threads, neither of which existed a mere five years ago.

📱SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 📱 

The Nation’s Dave Zirin on Stephen A. Smith’s new deal

🎤 MEDIA MOMENTS ✍️ 

• Bill Simmons has done his best to avoid discussing Bronny James during his rookie season, but made an exception during the latest episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. And while The Ringer founder mocked Stephen A. Smith’s need to publicly address his viral confrontation with LeBron James last week, he also thinks it’s “pretty nuts” that the 4-time MVP doesn’t expect media members to talk about his son the way they would any other NBA player.

• Speaking of James, Michelle Beadle isn’t a fan of her former employer’s coverage of the Los Angeles Lakers superstar and his team. Echoing criticisms first presented by Charles Barkley during a viral rant on last Thursday’s episode of Inside the NBA, the former SportsNation co-host referred to the Worldwide Leader’s Lakers-centric approach as “mind-numbing bulls**t.”

• One month after requesting a trade from the Cleveland Browns while citing his desire to win a Super Bowl, Myles Garrett agreed to a four-year, $160 million contract extension with the franchise over the weekend. And while Stephen A. Smith is happy for the 2023 NFL Defensive Player of the Year, he also couldn’t help but point out the irony of publicly stating his Super Bowl aspirations before re-upping with a consistently dysfunctional organization coming off a 3-14 season.

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥 

HBO shouldn’t let ‘offseason’ Hard Knocks die because the Giants are inept

My favorite scene in last year’s Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants had nothing to do with Saquon Barkley. Well, at least not explicitly.

While it may have been the scenes involving the Giants’ attempt (or lack thereof) to re-sign the league’s best running back that proved to be the series’ legacy, my favorite scene was a music montage detailing the team’s approach to free agency, top targets and all. Admittedly, the scene was forgettable enough that I can’t even find a clip online — a rarity in the age of the internet. But it also provided the type of access that the standard preseason version of Hard Knocks has lacked while growing stale for the better part of the past decade.

Clearly, the access the Giants provided was too good, as the series seems to be on life support with the NFL now in the heart of its offseason and no team for a second offseason announced. A deal to feature Bill Belichick’s first North Carolina team was initially reported but later rescinded, with creative control seemingly being a sticking point.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Even if the Giants had exercised their creative control to leave their negotiations with Barkley and apparent feelings regarding quarterback Daniel Jones on the cutting room floor, Hard Knocks: Offseason still would have provided unique access for football fans during a time on the NFL calendar they aren’t used to having insight to. It was fun seeing Joe Schoen work out a trade for Brian Burns with his longtime friend/Panthers GM Dan Morgan and exciting to see New York’s free agency board come together while owner John Mara picked the brains of lower level scouts. Heck, even seeing the post-draft party featuring the front office members and their families helped humanize executives who are rarely front and center.

Those are the scenes I would have remembered most had the Giants’ loss of Barkley not taken on a life of its own amid the running back’s record-breaking and Super Bowl-winning season in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, it seems like there’s a good chance such scenes won’t be repeating themselves with another franchise since NFL teams often guard against unnecessary distractions.

And that’s too bad. Hard Knocks: Offseason shouldn’t have to end because the Giants do a poor job running their team and an even worse job of utilizing their final cut privileges.