- Shams Charania formally dropped the news today that he's joined ESPN as the company's senior NBA insider, succeeding Adrian Wojnarowski. But was ESPN MLB insider Jeff Passan ever a legit candidate to take over the NBA role? My colleague Austin Karp had this from ESPN President of Content Burke Magnus: "We explored a number of options, both conventional and unconventional, for our NBA insider coverage. Credit Jeff, who is at the top of his profession, for being open to even consider the possibility. Ultimately, with Jeff on MLB, Shams on NBA, Adam [Schefter] on NFL and Pete [Thamel] on college football, we have the best of all worlds."
- Ahead of the longest NFL day in history, ESPN’s Rece Davis pulled off a legendary 22-hour shift. Davis showed up for “College GameDay” at 1am, and last-minute was asked to call Cal-Miami at 8pm after scheduled play-by-play voice Dave Fleming needed to step aside due to a personal matter. My colleague Ben Portnoy will have more tomorrow.
- My boss Abe Madkour this week in his Forum writes about the "slow build" for the FIFA Club World Cup next year in North America: "There are also plenty of questions about the Club World Cup’s commercial viability, as FIFA’s inability to land a media partner has been well documented; it was close to a deal with Apple, but the company sensed there wasn’t a vibrant market for the rights and backed off, and now it’s uncertain where the event will land."
- College Sports Tomorrow, a contingent of thought leaders in and around the college sports industry, unveiled a plan last week for the creation of what it’s dubbed the “College Student Football League” (CSFL), which would be a 72-school league that falls largely along Power Five lines, along with a second tier of 64 programs concentrated on the current Group of Five. Media rights would obviously be a key component. TurnkeyZRG's Len Perna, one of the execs behind the CSFL, told SBJ's Portnoy that a “very conservative” pro forma around media rights projected $2 billion in incremental revenue by 2032 that would continue to grow.
- There were many big player storylines on the PGA Tour in 2024, but along with those came a less-than-positive one: the tour’s TV numbers, writes SBJ's Josh Carpenter.
- Telecasts in the third quarter surrounding the Olympics and a presidential election season made big inroads among the year’s 75 most-watched telecasts (English language), reports Karp.
- Minor League Baseball in 2024 began experimenting with putting games on MLB.TV, and the result was a total of 1.5 million people tuning into MiLB games on the platform, with more than 170 million minutes of live game consumption, reports Irving Mejia-Hilario.
