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🏈 Opening act. The NFL announced Cowboys-Giants will open NBC's Sunday Night Football season on Sept. 13 at 8:20 p.m. ET, the first of many schedule leaks timed to Upfront week, when networks sell their NFL ad inventory to advertisers. NBC will also broadcast the NFL Kickoff game on Thursday of Week 1, featuring the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, though that matchup hasn't been announced yet.

📺 More Fox, less tension. Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch confirmed on an earnings call Monday that the network is acquiring two additional regular-season NFL games this season: A week 10 international game from Munich, Germany, that will create the first-ever tripleheader in broadcast television history, and a Week 15 Saturday game. Both come from inventory ESPN gave up as part of its NFL Media acquisition. These games were originally shopped to Netflix and YouTube before YouTube reportedly balked at splitting the package. Murdoch also told investors that the network has had "no substantive discussion" with the NFL about a new long-term media rights deal, echoing comments Disney made last week.

📅 NBC's extra point. NBC announced it secured an extra game during Week 17, branding it an "NFL Holiday Special" on Saturday, Jan 2 at 4:30 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock. A second game will stream exclusively on Peacock at 8 p.m. that same night — the fourth consecutive season Peacock has aired an exclusive regular-season game. Combined with Sunday Night Football the following day, NBC will produce three games in one weekend during Week 17.

🕊️ The hiatus is on hiatus. Six months after the two schools announced a hiatus to their 78-year rivalry series, USC and Notre Dame are back in negotiations, per the Los Angeles Times. Notre Dame is now willing to discuss moving the game earlier in the season, the primary sticking point USC had been pushing throughout months of failed talks last year that ended when Notre Dame announced a two-year BYU series within hours of rejecting USC's final offer. No deal is in place, and existing scheduling commitments mean the earliest the teams could realistically play again is 2030.

🎙️ Flagrant 2, Tirico 1. When Victor Wembanyama drilled Naz Reid in the throat early in Game 4, NBC's four-minute flagrant-2 review could have been dead air. Instead, Tirico narrated every angle, explained the criteria, and told viewers an ejection was possible before anyone else got there. Wemby got tossed — his first career ejection — and Tirico made the best case yet for why NBC's NBA rebuild is working.

🔥 A roast within a roast. Netflix's Roast of Kevin Hart featured a parade of shots at Draymond Green alongside the main event. Jeff Ross opened with a line about Steph Curry carrying Green to the event. Tom Brady joked Green would probably get thrown out in 10 minutes. Shane Gillis said Green was the first player to make four All-Star teams for just setting picks. Pete Davidson and The Rock both took turns as well. Green has also been publicly feuding with Charles Barkley in recent weeks following a dustup on Inside the NBA.

Read more of today’s top stories at Awful Announcing.

The NFL's media rights negotiations produced a flurry of news over the past week or so, and most of it centered on which teams were getting which games. The more interesting story, though, might be who isn't.

YouTube entered negotiations as a reported frontrunner. It leaves one potentially empty-handed. And the speed of that reversal says something important about the NFL's long-term leverage — or lack thereof — with the big tech companies it has been counting on to drive up future rights fees.

Here's what happened. When ESPN absorbed NFL Network earlier this year, the league got back the four Monday Night Football doubleheaders it had been running with ABC and ESPN since 2021. Those games were always a mess — the overlapping broadcasts consistently split audiences, one ESPN+ exclusive last year drew fewer than two million viewers, and everyone involved quietly acknowledged the experiment had failed. ESPN was happy to return them. Combined with the Week 1 game in Australia, the NFL had five games to sell, and the plan was to move them to a streamer as a standalone package.

YouTube was the obvious first call. Google has been paying roughly $2 billion a year for NFL Sunday Ticket since 2023, subscriptions are at their highest level in five years, and last season, YouTube aired its first exclusive primetime NFL game — the Chargers-Chiefs opener from Brazil — to 18.5 million American viewers. By February, Sports Business Journal had YouTube as the early leader for the package. By April, the two sides were deep enough in talks that a long-form contract review was underway. That's the stage where deals happen.

Then the NFL decided to get clever. Instead of selling YouTube a clean five-game standalone package, the league tried to get Netflix involved. Netflix wanted three games to pair with its Christmas Day doubleheader: the Week 1 Australia game and two of the games ESPN returned earlier this year. So the league conjured up a plan to split the inventory. Netflix would get its package (Christmas, Australia, and two ex-ESPN games), while YouTube would get the two leftover ex-ESPN games for itself. As Puck’s John Ourand put it, YouTube "balked at the strategy," and within 48 hours, Fox had announced it was picking up two games — a Week 10 International Series game from Munich and a Week 15 Saturday — while NBC grabbed a Week 17 Saturday game with a Peacock exclusive to follow. The two leftover ex-ESPN games were among those sold to Fox and NBC, and YouTube came away with nothing.

So some of the NFL's available inventory — long assumed to be headed to a streamer — ended up going to Fox and NBC. Did the NFL’s greed get in the way? Believing it could have its cake and eat it too with both YouTube and Netflix? Perhaps. Was it appeasement of ongoing federal probes scrutinizing the NFL’s move towards streaming? Also possible. But either way, how the YouTube-NFL negotiations played out shows one thing very clearly: the big tech companies buying NFL games are very selective.

Amazon got Thursday Night Football in 2021, but on its terms, meaning a clean, fully packaged, prime-time-branded product with a real, standalone identity. Amazon didn't take scraps. Netflix spent years circling the NFL before finally landing the Christmas doubleheader, then expanded carefully and deliberately. Hence, it now looks like it's closing in on five total games for next season. Every step Netflix took was at a price and structure it was comfortable with. Apple hasn't entered serious NFL discussions at all. And now YouTube — the company Ourand describes as having "more capital than anyone else" and a "deep relationship" with Roger Goodell — decided that two leftover Monday Night Football games in a split deal with Netflix wasn't worth their time.

The consistent thing across all of these situations isn't that tech companies don't want NFL games. It's that they want the NFL games they want, structured the way they want them, at a price they've decided is appropriate. They are not going to bail the league out by absorbing less attractive inventory at inflated prices. They don't have to. They have the balance sheets and the patience to wait.

The broadcast networks — Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC — are not going to be the ones driving the NFL's media rights revenue from $10 billion to $20 billion. They're fighting cord-cutting, shrinking linear audiences, and deteriorating business models.

The NFL needs Google, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix to write dramatically bigger checks when the current deals expire in 2033. That's the only math that gets them where Goodell wants to go. And right now, every major tech company is running some version of the same play: stay patient, be selective, buy what you actually want, and let the traditional television ecosystem continue its inexorable decline. The longer broadcast networks weaken, the less leverage the NFL has, because the networks that once competed fiercely for rights are now just trying to hold on to what they have.

YouTube leaving the table over a structuring dispute might look like a drop in the bucket by the end of the week. The schedule drops Thursday, the narrative moves on, and nobody spends much time on the deals that didn't happen. But a company with more money than anyone else in the negotiation, with an existing $2 billion annual relationship with the league, decided a package of two football games wasn't worth taking on those terms.

For now, that’s fine. The question is what happens when fine isn’t enough anymore. The league's current contracts were built on genuine competition between legacy media and new money. That competition drove fees up in a way that benefited the NFL enormously. Getting back there requires big tech to want NFL inventory badly enough to fight over it. Right now, the evidence suggests they might not. YouTube's quiet exit from this week's negotiations is a small thing in isolation. As part of a broader pattern, it's something the league should be taking seriously.

Kirk Herbstreit, Charles Barkley, Al Michaels, and more are nearing the end of the road as sports media transitions into a digital-first era. Sam Neumann and Brendon Kleen break down who — and what — takes over for each of them in the next decade.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

"We're hoping it's going to be a one-stop shop for whatever level of fandom you approach it with." - The Athletic's Laura Williamson, editor-in-chief of global soccer coverage, on the outlet's plan to have reporters at all 104 World Cup games across 16 host cities when the tournament kicks off June 11.

"He's using his son as a human shield for criticism. It's hard for the reporters to ask the hard-hitting questions when you have that ball of cuteness sitting in Joel Embiid's lap." - ESPN Radio's Chris Canty on Unsportsmanlike, after Embiid held his five-year-old son on his lap during his postgame press conference following the Sixers getting swept out of the playoffs by the Knicks, 144-114, in Game 4.

"If we can get him back, I want him back, I ain't apologizing for that to nobody. He was great for me. He was great to me, and I'm not gonna forget that." - Stephen A. Smith on the Out The Mud podcast, saying he has already told ESPN he wants Shannon Sharpe back on First Take after reuniting with Skip Bayless.

"People act like First Take became such a big deal because nobody liked it. Just because your friends didn't like it, you think that nobody liked it." - Bomani Jones on his podcast, defending First Take and its audience in the wake of Skip Bayless's return, arguing that criticism of the show often doubles as a dismissal of the people who watch it.

"You're nobody, and you've never done anything ever. Nobody's ever depended on you for a paycheck. Who are you to criticize anybody?" - Dana White, in an interview with David Senra, explaining his longstanding contempt for MMA media. White conflated journalists with internet commenters, argued that reporters can't criticize businesses they've never run, and somehow managed to do so while being covered by journalists.

"So they're on free TV, yeah, but you ain't getting 87% of them. I'm not getting 87 — nobody's getting 87% of the games for free." - NBC's Mike Florio on PFT Live, dismantling the NFL's talking point that 87% of games are available on free over-the-air TV, pointing out that most of those games are clustered into Sunday windows where any individual fan only receives a fraction of them.

"You've never worked with anyone like me, and you're probably never going to again." - Barry Melrose to Doc Emrick, before they ever called a game together on ABC's NHL coverage in the late 1990s. Emrick confirmed on the Awful Announcing Podcast that Melrose was right, naming him the least predictable broadcast partner of his nearly 50-year career.

Here is a useful way to think about the Alabama football brand: It doesn't need you to like it. It doesn't particularly need you to root for it. It just needs you to watch — and, on that front, it has never had a problem.

For decades, Alabama's grip on the national consciousness was maintained almost entirely through winning, a self-reinforcing loop so efficient it barely required tending. Nick Saban recruited better than everyone else, won more than everyone else, and the attention followed automatically.

Walt Brock, Alabama's Director of Football Creative and Production, is trying to figure out what comes next.

"We want to develop them from a brand standpoint and from a content standpoint the same way that we develop them in the weight room or on the field."

Read the full piece here.