Welcome to The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter where you’ll always find the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis.

Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up for free to make sure you never miss it.

🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🦊 Joy Taylor gets benched. The Speak host has reportedly been “sidelined” by FS1, according to Front Office Sports. Taylor is, of course, named as a defendant in the bombshell FS1 workplace misconduct lawsuit where she is accused of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, as well as using sexual relationships with Fox Sports executive Charlie Dixon and co-host Emmanuel Acho to further her career. Taylor hasn’t appeared on her daily show at all this week, though she continued to host Speak in the immediate aftermath of the lawsuit becoming public.

☕ Grounds for dismissal. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has gotten their licks in about the Starbucks kerfuffle between NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport and Fox NFL insider Jordan Schultz. Even the Inside the NBA guys had to weigh in during their show on Thursday. In case you were wondering, Chuck was team Rap Sheet, while Shaq was team Schultz.

📰 Blackistone bashes Bezos. Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos sent an internal memo to his newspaper staff on Wednesday outlining some…interesting changes to the paper’s opinion section. WaPo sports writer and frequent Around the Horn panelist Kevin Blackistone left no doubts about where he stood on Bezos’ decision during Thursday’s edition of the show.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

‘We don’t need any more sports’

If Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has made one thing clear during his tenure heading the media conglomerate, it’s that sports are taking a back seat.

Just a couple short years after his now infamous “we don’t have to have the NBA” comments, Zaz is, well, staying consistent. WBD held its quarterly earnings call on Thursday, and the head man made some very similar comments to investors. “We don’t need any more sports anywhere in the world in order to support our business,” the WBD CEO said.

The comment is a bit rich not even a year removed from his company filing a lawsuit against the NBA in an effort to regain the rights it lost to Amazon and NBC. That lawsuit, at least on paper, would seem to suggest that WBD did, in fact, value sports rights not so long ago. But if the legal proceedings aren’t convincing enough, maybe the company’s scramble to pickup anything and everything available in the immediate aftermath of losing the NBA — the French Open, Mountain West football, a College Football Playoff sublicense — tells a different story.

No matter how Zaz and WBD really felt, they’ve charted their path now. And the CEO actually brings up some good points.

“Some regional players are becoming more and more dependent on sports and rental sports,” Zaslav said. “And the ability to really build a long term platform on short term sports rights has not been a good story in the past, and it’s unlikely to be a good story in the future.

“So when I see a real push to pay a lot more for sports to get effective, guaranteed audiences, or an audience that you could really model versus building it on great IP like Batman or the Penguin I think that’s a good thing for us.”

It’s a dramatic pivot for WBD, but perhaps a wise one. For quite some time, WBD’s global strategy has been inextricably linked with live sports; it’s TNT Sports properties domestically and its Eurosport brand abroad.

But in an environment where the price of live sports continues to climb, despite ever-declining cable revenues, scaling back on expensive sports inventory might be a shrewd business decision, especially if you’re able to use that money to develop more sustainable, IP-driven content. Not to mention, WBD is but a minnow compared to the large tech companies that are becoming increasingly interested in gobbling up sports rights.

Who knows whether Zaz’s new narrative is one driven by a well thought out strategy or by necessity. Either way, he’s made his bet. Let’s see if it pays off.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Did I mention that literally everybody had to say something about the Rapoport-Schultz beef?

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

🏈 UFL hold out. All 24 quarterbacks in the UFL, the Fox Corporation-owned spring football league, are reportedly holding out after receiving a “negligible” salary bump. “The proposal our Players Association received on Thursday was unacceptable and insulting,” the quarterbacks said in a message to UFL President Russ Brandon. The season is scheduled to start just one month from today.

📡 MySports adds ESPN+. The DirecTV MySports skinny bundle is bulking up a bit, adding ESPN+ as part of its offering. The service will still run subscribers $69.99 per month, but the addition of ESPN+, which is currently priced at $12 per month on its own, definitely makes MySports a more attractive option for consumers.

📺 SportsCenter on Disney+. In other streaming news, Disney+ is getting its own version of SportsCenter. Starting March 3rd, Gary Striewski and Randy Scott will host SC+ at 9 a.m. ET, exclusively on Disney+. Hannah Storm and Jay Harris will anchor weekend editions of the show.

🏄‍♂️ CHANNEL SURFING 🏄‍♂️

• David Rumsey of Front Office Sports on how Amazon utilized altcasts to notch a ratings increase for Thursday Night Football while other networks declined.

• Jeff Agrest of the Chicago Sun-Times explains that Comcast will likely move Marquee Sports Network to a higher tier rather than dropping the channel.

• Matt Slater of The Athletic details how rampant piracy in the UK is threatening the broadcast industry.

• Jacob Feldman of Sportico asks whether sports doc fatigue is setting in.

• John Ourand of Puck interviews Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks about the network’s IndyCar strategy,

️‍🔥The Closer🔥

Who is jealous of 4-26?

Anyone remember that Instacart ad from a couple years back?

I’m at the football game! I’m at the grocery store! I’m at the combination football game and grocery store!

Here’s a quick reminder in case you forgot.

themusicplayground

View more on Instagram

If there were a commercial for Doug Gottlieb’s life these past few months, it’d probably go a little something like this.

I’m at the basketball game! I’m at Radio Row in New Orleans! I’m at the combination basketball game and Radio Row?

Wait. How is that possible? Let me answer that one for you: it’s not. That is, unless you’re Doug Gottlieb and believe you have superhuman capabilities.

The head coach of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Phoenix and full-time Fox Sports radio host has had quite the year. From publicly bickering with LeBron James over his son’s basketball capabilities, to, well, publicly bickering with Adam Schefter over his reporting about the Sacramento State football head coaching job (yes, you read that correctly), our friend Gottlieb hasn’t shied away from the media during his first year as a D-1 head coach.

And now, he’s invited a CBS Sports college basketball writer to Green Bay for an exclusive look at how he manages life with two separate full-time gigs. Let’s just say, self-awareness might not be one of Gottlieb’s strengths.

The lengthy piece published by Kyle Boone on Thursday highlighted some of the hubris of Gottlieb, who has continued his three-hour daily radio show en route to a 4-26 record with the Phoenix; a record that improved by one game with a win over Detroit on Thursday evening.

As one could imagine, Gottlieb has been subjected to immense criticism for his decision to continue the radio show, even traveling to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, as he leads his basketball team to one of the worst records in D-1. Those critics, Gottlieb believes, are simply “jealous.”

“Jealousy is really hard for people to process,” Gottlieb told CBS Sports. “I’ve been given great — not good, great — opportunities, despite being a very good, not great, player, at a very good, not great, not connected school. So people become inherently jealous and they can’t process [it].”

That’s it, coach. You nailed it.