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Pat McAfee: I Don’t Have 45 Minutes To Read ESPN’s Andrew Luck Story

“I am happy I have smart people that are going to do it.”

Jordan Bondurant

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Pat McAfee

Details about the reasons former Colts quarterback Andrew Luck decided to retire in 2019 are laid out in an ESPN+ article by Seth Wickersham that went live online on Tuesday.

It will take you a little while to get through the full piece, which is broken into 16 sections, but Luck’s former teammate Pat McAfee knows he isn’t going to make it through the whole thing.

Talking to another one of his former Colts teammates, Darius Butler, on Wednesday, McAfee said he didn’t have the time or the attention span to sit down and read the piece in its entirety.

“It was like a 45-minute read or something like that. A lot of words,” McAfee said. “I mean there’s a lot of gymnastics that you had to do. Super smart people talking to each other in Seth Wickersham and Andrew Luck, very smart people.”

He asked Butler if he too had read it, and Darius admitted he hadn’t yet. McAfee said he hopes Butler will so he can get his reaction.

“I will be excited to pick your brain about what you took in, because for me, it took (show contributor Ty Schmidt) – that guy got into Harvard – took him 35 minutes to read it. And when I asked Ty is that what it’s all like, he’s like ‘It’s all convoluted and this is his writing style.'”

Pat added that the way in which the profile is written based on what Ty and others in the Pat McAfee Show office told him is that it’s designed for more experienced readers. McAfee said Wickersham’s style just isn’t suitable for his reading ability.

“I don’t think I’m a good enough reader for the guy,” McAfee said. “I am happy I have smart people that are going to do it.”

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Sports Media Reacts to Joe Castiglione Winning 2024 Frick Award

Castiglione’s colleagues and contemporaries were more than complementary when finding out he took home the award.

Jordan Bondurant

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A photo of Joe Castiglione
(Photo: Getty Images)

Longtime Boston Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione was announced Wednesday as the 2024 Ford C. Frick Award winner given by the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The 76-year-old Castiglione has been the voice of the Red Sox since 1983, calling all four of the team’s modern-era World Series victories.

Several across sports media offered their reactions and congratulations to an MLB broadcasting legend.

Even University of Oklahoma Director of Athletics Joe Castiglione had to make sure he congratulated his good friend with the same name.

Joe will be honored during Hall of Fame induction weekend in Cooperstown in July.

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All The Smoke Productions, Meadowlark Media Agree to Content Partnership

“We feel pretty strongly that it was not a totally maximized property when it was under the Showtime banner.”

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All The Smoke
Courtesy: All The Smoke Productions

The basketball program All The Smoke and its portfolio of shows is joining Meadowlark Media and DraftKings Network in January 2024. Program hosts and former NBA champions Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson will join the company’s lineup of shows and talent, which includes The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, Pablo Torre Finds Out and Oddball with Amin Elhassan & Charlotte Wilder among others. As part of the partnership, DraftKings will distribute and sell available advertising inventory. Moreover, fans will be able to watch highlights and full episodes on a new YouTube page, titled “Certified Smoke,” to ensure viewers do not miss a moment of the program.

All The Smoke formerly aired on Showtime Sports, which will be shuttering its operations by the year’s end due to the network’s transition towards offering “Paramount+ with Showtime” as part of a bundle. Other programs associated with “All The Smoke Productions,” which includes programs hosted by Rachel Nichols, DeMarcus Cousins, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, are also set to join the platform. A new lineup of shows is set to be announced sometime in the next few weeks, according to a report by Bloomberg.

“We know the asset,” Bimal Kapadia, Meadowlark Media chief operating officer, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “We feel pretty strongly that it was not a totally maximized property when it was under the Showtime banner.”

Although the complete breadth of future plans for Showtime sports-related properties still remains unknown, Paramount Global made the decision to have the network focus on original programming for series such as Billions and Yellowjackets. The company has CBS Sports within its portfolio, which is set to broadcast Super Bowl LVIII, part of March Madness and The Masters ahead of the retirement of Chairman Sean McManus. Additionally, the sports property has several podcast offerings of its own within a crowded media landscape pertaining to football, golf and sports betting along with other topics.

“It’s hard to get the economics to work in a single-medium basis like audio,” Kapadia told Bloomberg. “You have to have multimedia and an established audience that you can build off of.”

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Yahoo Sports Undergoes Round of Layoffs Including Hannah Keyser, Sam Cooper, Kevin Iole

Zach Crizer and Arun Srinivasan were among the employees who revealed the news that they had been let go by the company.

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Yahoo Sports
Courtesy: Yahoo Sports

Yahoo Sports has engaged in a round of layoffs as part of an effort to eliminate more than 20% of its staff by the end of the year, a figure that was reported earlier in the year by Sara Fischer of Axios. The company is currently owned by Apollo Global, which purchased the entity from Verizon in 2017 along with AOL and other media businesses.

On Friday, mixed martial arts and boxing journalist Kevin Iole announced that he was laid off by the company in a post on X and took the time to thank his co-workers and express his appreciation for his time with the outlet. Within that post, he conveyed how this is not the end for him; rather, he hopes it is the start of a new chapter.

On Monday, several other Yahoo Sports staffers announced their departures from the company as a result of the layoffs. Senior MLB reporter Hannah Keyser lost her job on Friday and shared the privilege it was for her to report on the game through the platform. Keyser also appears on SNY as a contributor on Baseball Night in New York and other programming, and it remains unknown if and how her exit from Yahoo Sports will impact the role.

“Five years ago, I was terrified to accept the job and I’ve been terrified (truly) every day since that I’m bad at it,” Keyser said in a post on X. “But I never worked harder or took more joy in learning.”

MLB writer Zach Crizer was also part of the layoffs on Friday, and divulged that he continues to write about baseball. Although he acknowledged that the ending is not great, he feels that a lot of people with the outlet changed his career for the better and had more belief in his work than he did.

“I learned more about baseball from Zach in five years than I even knew there was to know,” Keyser said on X. “He is more organized than I am, less erratic, and since he actually opens HR emails about our health insurance changing, I can actually say that I wouldn’t have survived without him.”

“No one pushed me harder, or advocated me more forcefully, than Hannah,” Crizer said of Keyser in a post on X. “She is a complete original that the baseball world can’t afford to lose. Whenever you think you have a good answer, I promise she’s going to have a better question.”

Sam Cooper revealed that he was part of the Yahoo Sports layoffs after working with the company over the last 10 years. Cooper had been promoted to a full-time senior editor, a role he served in for the last five years, after starting out as a freelancer. In a series of posts on X, Cooper acknowledged how he does not understand the rationale behind the current direction of Yahoo, but also articulated that it was a great place to work and will miss his colleagues.

“So now I’m a free agent,” Cooper continued. “I’ve written extensively about CFB (+ other sports), helped transform [Yahoo Sports College Football] from an RSS feed into an account with 50k+ followers and had a consistently profitable betting column. I also know the ins and outs of editing in the digital media space.”

Arun Srinivasan worked at Yahoo Sports Canada and was part of the recent round of layoffs as well, posting a statement on Saturday night while covering his final Toronto Maple Leafs game at Scotiabank Arena for the outlet. Within his remarks, he thanked Dan Toman and Mackenzie Liddell for their leadership and for taking a chance on him, along with William Lou for endorsing him after he was looking for work following layoffs from theScore in February 2019.

“…I’m itching to get back to the arena more regularly,” Srinivasan said on X. “How many of us get to do everything we dreamed of as children? Thank you for everything Yahoo, this message is for everyone I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with here.”

Earlier in the year, Yahoo laid off 1,000 positions within its companies and revealed that the remaining layoffs would occur in the second half of 2023. The company is in the midst of a restructuring of its advertising technology unit in an effort for the company to be able to invest more heavily in areas of the company that garner significant profits. Additionally, the company hired Ross Dellenger and Jason Fitz, along with welcoming new president Ryan Spoon in June 2023.

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