Bucholtz Sports Media

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers, who you can join here. Now, on to the news... The 33rd Team wraps up multimillion Series B round of funding An image from The 33rd Team's website. The 33rd Team has been an interesting company to track over the years. They started as what was largely a football media company focused on the NFL, using founder and CEO Mike Tannenbaum's connections from his decades in that league to stand out...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers; you can join them here for $5 a month or $50 a year. Now, on to the news... Bears-Packers pays off for Amazon, NFL As regularly discussed here around ratings, important factors in any viewership number include the teams or markets involved and the quality of the game. For the first weekend of this year's NFL playoffs, perhaps the best matchup from a teams/markets standpoint was the NFC...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is an exclusive for our premium subscribers; you can join them here for $5 a month. Now, on to the main event... College Football Playoff Final matchup shows increased room at the top An ESPN/CFP graphic for the 2025-26 College Football Playoff. For much of the history of top-tier NCAA college football, only a very few teams have had any actual hope of claiming a national title even going into the season. This was largely true even in the...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers; you can join them here. Now, on to the news... SI The Party Presented by DraftKings set for Super Bowl LX An image from the 2025 version of SI The Party. (Medium Rare.) Sports Illustrated has undergone a lot of changes since magazine company Meredith's 2018 acquisition of their then-parent company Time Inc. and subsequent 2019 sale of SI to Authentic. Not all of those have been positive;...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers. You can join them here for just $5 a month or $50 for a year. Now, on to the news... Tennis Channel launches first original podcast, "The Big T" World No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz talks with Andrea Petkovic for Tennis Channel's new The Big T Podcast. (Tennis Channel.) There have been a lot of jokes over the last decade-plus about how "everyone has a podcast now." In sports, though, the last few...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This analysis post is an exclusive for our premium subscribers. You can join them here. Now, on to the main discussion... Why framing ratings relative to the NFL is missing part of the story A NFL Christmas Gameday graphic from Netflix. My college degree is in history rather than journalism, as Queen's University didn't have a formal journalism program when I was there. (However, Queen's has an excellent independent school newspaper that has turned out...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers. You can join them here. Now, on to the news... SI's choice of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander stands out amongst award selections SI photos from their pick of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. (Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated.) There are many different publications and organizations that pick a sports figure or figures of the year. While it's incredibly difficult to compare athletes across sports,...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is for our premium subscribers, who you can join here. Five of our top premium posts so far Thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who's been on this fully-independent sports media ride with me so far, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year! In the wake of our September launch, I've picked up quite a few premium subscribers, so to end out this year, I wanted to look back at five of the premium posts I've written thus far. Some of...

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all those who celebrate! This Bucholtz Sports Media post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers, who make this all work. You can join them here. Now, on to today's post! Five sports books to check out As I wrote last month to introduce this occasional book discussion series, I've long been obsessed with books of all sorts. And the sports world alone is filled with fascinating ones. I'm planning to keep highlighting as many as I can, from...

Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is for our premium subscribers; you can join them here for $5 a month. Now, on to the news... Three perspectives on the ESPN/Athletic Director Simulator 4000 controversy Intro pages for Matt Brown's Athletic Director Simulator 4000 (L) and ESPN's athletic director simulator (R). One of the most unusual sports media and business stories of the last while comes from ESPN launching a text-based "athletic director simulator" game on their website...