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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🤠 McAfee closes out ‘GameDay.’ The big question facing ESPN producers after Lee Corso’s retirement last week is how to close out the iconic College GameDay. Some wondered whether Pat McAfee’s kicking contest would become the closer, or a different gimmick entirely. What they appear to have settled on is McAfee reprising his Home Run Derby character to rev up the home team’s fans and make his pick for the game of the week. The jury is out on its effectiveness after the first attempt.

🎾 Trump at the Open. After news broke that President Donald Trump would return to his Queens stomping grounds to attend the U.S. Open final on Sunday, the USTA reportedly requested that broadcasters not show “any disruptions or reactions” when Trump was shown during the pre-match national anthem. ESPN said it would not change its coverage, but a video from ABC’s Olivia Rubin shows the typical mix of cheers and boos when Trump was demonstrated during the anthem at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Later, ESPN’s Chris Fowler acknowledged Trump’s presence.

🏈 Watt’s debut. J.J. Watt made his first appearance as the No. 2 NFL game analyst for CBS this weekend, calling a close shootout between his brother’s Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Jets. The game was also Aaron Rodgers’ first against his former team, and our Sam Neumann wrote that Watt “looked comfortable from the start” and flashed potential to make good on his new, prominent role at CBS.

🔵 Barstool on Fox. It only took a week for Barstool talent to join Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff. With both shows broadcasting from Ames, Iowa, for “El Assico” for the first time since striking a wide-ranging new partnership, Barstool talent invaded the pregame show for a segment. Dave Portnoy, Dan “Big Cat” Katz, and the rest of the cast of The Barstool College Football Show joined Mark Ingram and Urban Meyer to talk about the Week 2 slate, from Michigan to Alabama.

😬 Schrager vs. Clark. The latest beef for ESPN’s Ryan Clark came with his own colleague, Peter Schrager. On Friday’s Get Up, Clark interrupted Schrager’s point about Dallas receiver CeeDee Lamb’s big night, telling Schrager that he could hear the “non-player” coming out. After Schrager told Clark not to “belittle him,” Clark later posted an apology on X, revealing that they also duked it out off-air on Friday. Quickly, Schrager’s former colleagues and much of the sports media came to his defense online.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

YouTube botches its first NFL game

Sometimes, when you sit down to watch the NFL, it can feel like too much. For just one of 17 games, the excesses of one broadcast — the shiny studios, the music, the graphics, the outdoor B-roll footage — are almost overwhelming.

Does Terry Bradshaw really need to be in that cavernous set? Who asked for so many camera angles? Why is there a new scorebug every time I look up?

Then, if you’re like me, you watched YouTube’s maiden voyage airing NFL games and remembered.

With a big, exclusive window in the opening week of the season in Sao Paulo, everything was looking up for YouTube. Friday’s AFC West battle royale provided YouTube with an intense matchup against America’s (new) team, the Kansas City Chiefs. And despite some challenges negotiating with traditional networks, YouTube stocked the broadcast with legit talent and hired NBC to produce the game.

A game on YouTube was exciting, regardless of the spice that Google added to the broadcast. YouTube means free, for everyone, and a unified global experience—an NFL game on the platform where people already spend the most time watching content.

Watching the broadcast, it felt as if the streamer misunderstood its own appeal to the league and its fans. They were there for the football, not the YouTube. Nevertheless, YouTube removed almost all production value from its stateside studio, where Derek Carr and Tyrann Mathieu still managed to impress. In Brazil, YouTube brought on the entertaining Kay Adams and Cam Newton, who catered far too much to the lowest common denominator in the audience. Rather than reported features or sit-downs, YouTube produced segments with creators to fill in the gaps.

Some good ideas were tucked into the underwhelming broadcast. Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee breaking down the play-calling hardware was ideally suited for YouTube: informative, niche, and personal. Other segments, with lifestyle creators or Fantasy Life analyst Peter Overzet, contributed to the feeling that it was a minor-league affair.

Then there was MrBeast. Nothing about YouTube would be complete without a heavy dose of the massively popular host, who makes videos that are part reality TV and part social experiment. MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) shot a fan of the losing team out of a cannon to cap off the broadcast. It felt like the kind of thing he might do as a stunt to steal attention from a game airing elsewhere, but it was obnoxious within an actual postgame show.

You don’t wear sweatpants to the job fair. YouTube seemed to want to integrate YouTube into the NFL viewing experience rather than simply posting a well-produced NFL game on YouTube. There is room for both, but the most important thing is that the game looks great and feels big.

YouTube did not meet that mark. With too much short-form shoulder programming, low production value and green talent, the game felt smaller. Particularly when you factor in that part of YouTube’s recent growth has come as a result of more podcasters, reporters and essayists turning their channels into bona fide production teams, and it makes even less sense why YouTube would go small with its first NFL game.

I am one of many who believe YouTube could be a future home of a bigger NFL package. There is certainly room to innovate and modernize the NFL broadcast. To that end, creators are sure to be part of any eventual weekly NFL broadcast on YouTube. The vibe will be more casual and younger.

Elements of YouTube’s first try with the NFL can work. But if it wants to become a fixture of how Americans watch the biggest sport in the country, the streamer needs to reach the high bar established by decades of big, brash, expensive football on TV.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

After all the hoopla, here’s what it looked like when NFL RedZone went to commercial this Sunday:

Kyle Brandt, who formerly cohosted Good Morning Football with Peter Schrager, made a point of taking Schrager’s side after his on-air argument with Ryan Clark on ESPN on Friday morning.

Visual evidence of robots taking jobs:

The final sign-off of TNT broadcasting on NBA TV:

The new CBS booth has great chemistry already, but they match up very poorly when it comes to their physical statures…

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• Clay Travis is coming back to Fox. The Outkick founder and former Lock It In cohost spilled the beans on a forthcoming coproduction between FS1 and Outkick called The Outkick Show. The show will air, per Awful Announcing’s exclusive reporting, weekly at 6 p.m. ET, with the day still to be determined. Travis said the show will be focused on football.

• CBS debuted a new NFL scorebug this weekend. Like its rivals at Fox and the majority of networks these days, CBS’ new graphic is larger and blockier than before. Unlike Fox, it is not a floating, transparent display.

• The fallout from the latest bombshell from Pablo Torre continues, as former foe Bill Simmons lauded Torre’s reporting on potential illicit benefits for Los Angeles Clippers star Kawhi Leonard. Meanwhile, Clippers owner Steve Ballmer sat for an interview with ESPN (rather than Torre), while a follow-up conversation between Torre with former Dallas owner Mark Cuban mostly showed how naive Cuban appears to be, but with no new answers about the Clippers.

• We have your deep-dive breakdown of the alleged drama between WWE commentator Wade Barrett and superstar Nikki Bella. After Barrett toed the line playing heel on the call for Clash In Paris last month and piling on Bella’s participation in the “Diva Era” as a female WWE superstar, it sounds as if he and Bella have spoken and cleared up any hard feelings.

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

Next month, we will be back with the Second Annual Awful Announcing Sports Podcast Power List.

It is our hope to stay on the cutting edge of sports podcasting, as the space blooms from a cottage industry to big business. With that in mind, we are taking nominations for this year’s list!

If you are a host, producer, talent rep, exec or just plain-old fan of the work someone is doing in sports podcasting, let us know right here.

️‍🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Is it time for ESPN to bench Ryan Clark?

For a closer look at the weekend’s strange feud between new ESPN teammates Ryan Clark and Peter Schrager, I will turn the end of today’s newsletter over to Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder, who wrote a strong column on the incident on Friday:

at some point, ESPN has to realize that this version of Ryan Clark is doing more harm than good for the network. And this doesn’t even call into question some of the bizarre takes that he has unleashed recently, like saying the top three statistical quarterbacks in NFL history are somehow not “generational talents,” then not even saying what his own definition of “generational talent” actually is. It’s now a question of what non-football controversy he will launch next.

Perhaps the best course of action for the network at the moment is to do what any NFL team would do when someone becomes enough of a distraction that it outweighs their talent and put Clark on the bench. There are plenty of other football analysts at the network who can take the reps on Get Up, First Take, NFL Live, SportsCenter with SVP, and more without causing this level of disruption.

And if ESPN doesn’t want to ice out Clark completely, let him appear on the morning or afternoon editions of SportsCenter for a while as a cooling-off period. Take him out of the spotlight until he can focus on football and being the highly regarded analyst he once was. At least until the network can be sure he’s not going to call out a colleague on air or start a nuclear-level feud with someone.

Ryan Clark is clearly a thoughtful person and analyst. It’s time for him to take a long look in the mirror and decide if this cycle of controversies and apologies is the career trajectory he wants to continue to take. Or if he wants to get back to being one of the top football analysts and personalities on television.

…at some point, ESPN has to realize that this version of Ryan Clark is doing more harm than good for the network. And this doesn’t even call into question some of the bizarre takes that he has unleashed recently, like saying the top three statistical quarterbacks in NFL history are somehow not “generational talents,” then not even saying what his own definition of “generational talent” actually is. It’s now a question of what non-football controversy he will launch next.

Perhaps the best course of action for the network at the moment is to do what any NFL team would do when someone becomes enough of a distraction that it outweighs their talent and put Clark on the bench. There are plenty of other football analysts at the network who can take the reps on Get Up, First Take, NFL Live, SportsCenter with SVP, and more without causing this level of disruption.

And if ESPN doesn’t want to ice out Clark completely, let him appear on the morning or afternoon editions of SportsCenter for a while as a cooling-off period. Take him out of the spotlight until he can focus on football and being the highly regarded analyst he once was. At least until the network can be sure he’s not going to call out a colleague on air or start a nuclear-level feud with someone.

Read the full column right here.