- Georgia's win over Texas (12.9 million viewers) delivered ABC the best college football audience this season to date, per my colleague Austin Karp, and ESPN networks' best regular-season game since 2016, per fast-national data. ABC also drew CFB's third-best audience of the season with Alabama-Tennessee (10.7 million viewers). Week 8 marked the first time that a single network aired two regular-season CFB games drawing over 10 million viewers in the same day.
- ESPN on Friday night drew 1.7 million million viewers for Game 4 of the N.Y. Liberty-Minnesota Lynx series, marking the best WNBA Finals audience yet for cable TV. That figure is likely to be surpassed by Sunday night's Game 5 on ESPN when viewership figures come out Tuesday morning.
- Warner Bros. Discovery’s media rights package with Unrivaled, the women’s 3-on-3 basketball league that launches in January, is a guaranteed three-year deal with a three-year WBD option that could take the total six-year value to approximately $100 million, sources told SBJ's Tom Friend.
- Twenty years -- and many hurdles and collaborators later -- Howard Bryant’s vision for a documentary series on the 2004 Red Sox has come to fruition with “The Comeback,” set to premiere its three one-hour episodes Wednesday on Netflix, reports SBJ's Mike Mazzeo.
- Lynn Holzman, NCAA VP/women’s basketball, tells my colleague Ben Portnoy that a "great thing" about the new ESPN-NCAA media rights deal is a "guarantee" to have the Women's Basketball Championship game on ABC. "That’s a very significant feature, as well as some other coverage and continued elevation," she said. "But that is demonstrative of delivering, ESPN investing more, and then, therefore, the bar has been raised, and that’s now the new starting point, as they continue to deliver even more."
