ATLANTA — Texas is the betting favorite to win the SEC this season, and there’s serious momentum around the Longhorns not only taking over the conference between the lines—but off the field, too.

“The popularity of the Texas Longhorns is at an all-time high,” coach Steve Sarkisian said Tuesday at SEC media days, quickly pointing out metrics like eight million average TV viewers per game last season, average home attendance of 102,000 fans, and selling out season tickets for a fourth straight year.

Last season, Texas lost to Georgia in the SEC championship game, but it was the last team standing from the conference in the College Football Playoff, losing to eventual champion Ohio State in the semifinals.

This season, the Longhorns will have one of the most expensive rosters in college football, thanks to lucrative NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals signed before a July 1 shift in regulating said contracts—on top of the athletic department planning to pay football players roughly 75% of its $20.5 million revenue-sharing budget. The total sum, including revenue-sharing and NIL (name, image, and likeness), could reach $40 million, the Houston Chronicle previously reported.

Additionally, Texas’s five road games this season—at Ohio State, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi State, and Georgia—will see the Longhorns travel over 9,000 miles, more than any other team in the SEC.  

Manning Mania

The most important player for Texas (and almost certainly the highest-paid) will be quarterback Arch Manning, who has taken over the starting job after Quinn Ewers was drafted by the Dolphins. 

Manning said he’s excited to compete in “a big-time conference” in the SEC, but he is blocking out the intense media interest around his debut season. “I’m here to play ball,” he said in front of dozens of reporters Tuesday. “This is very much so secondary.”

Sarkisian is confident Manning, who comes from one of the most famous families in football, is ready for the moment. “He grew up in this era of seeing high-level football,” Sarkisan said. “He’s watched Super Bowls. He’s watched gold jackets getting put on.”

Cash Flow

Sarkisian echoed thoughts from many other coaches in expressing uncertainty about how the newly created College Sports Commission will regulate revenue-sharing and NIL deals.

“Honestly, I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t know. We’re in such the beginning stages of this thing. I think that everybody is operating differently. Everybody is trying to navigate this differently, and what are exactly the rules and are they going to be enforced? Nobody really knows.”

When it comes to paying players, Sarkisian believes Texas takes a different approach than many other schools. “When kids come on our campus, we don’t talk about NIL or revenue-sharing or publicity rights until the very end,” he said. “And that may hurt us on some kids, but if a kid is coming to Texas for that reason, we don’t want him anyway.”

Sarkisan added, “If you’re coming for the other reason, he’s probably going to be the guy in 18 months that’s back in the portal going somewhere else where they’re going to offer him more money.”

ATLANTA — History was made late Tuesday at Truist Park as the National League prevailed in the MLB All-Star Game, thanks to the first-time use of a little-known home run tiebreaker. 

The game was settled with a home-run swing-off instead of extra innings, with the tiebreaker format created by MLB and the MLB Players Association in 2022 as part of the labor deal struck that year, but not needed until now. 

Three players per team each had three swings to amass as many homers as possible—with the unique structure designed to avoid player injury and overuse and aid in each manager’s roster deployment during the All-Star Game.

The American League’s trio of hitters—Brent Rooker of the Athletics, and Randy Arozarena and Jonathan Aranda of the Rays—amassed a total of three home runs. The NL crew of the Marlins’ Kyle Sowers, Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber, and Mets’ Pete Alonso countered with four.

Schwarber in particular provided the key heroics, homering in all three of his swings en route to winning Most Valuable Player honors for the All-Star Game.

The late drama to the game, in which the AL rebounded from a 6–0 deficit to tie the game and then the unprecedented swing-off, could be a boon for viewership of the Fox Sports broadcast. The swing-off, however, did not start until after 11:30 p.m. ET. 

The swing-off tiebreaker for the All-Star Game will remain at least through the current collective bargaining agreement between the league and union, expiring in December 2026. 

ATLANTA — As the 2025 MLB All-Star Game at Truist Park is now history, with the National League winning in unprecedented fashion, the focus in baseball now turns to the second half of the season, and there is no shortage of major storylines and pressing issues. Among them:

• What’s next for Cal Raleigh? The Mariners catcher is baseball’s man of the moment, dominating the sport like few before him and winning the MLB Home Run Derby on Monday. Several records are quite reachable for him, including the single-season home run mark for a switch-hitter, the most by a catcher, and the Mariners’ single-season record. More importantly, the Mariners are also looking for just their second playoff berth since 2001.
• How much will attendance and viewership grow? Entering the All-Star break, the league was essentially flat in attendance after a prior gain of 2% earlier in the season. The league, however, remains on track to post its best year-end total since 2017, and perhaps earlier. Each of the league’s national-rights holders, meanwhile, is posting even stronger seasons, and MLB streaming is setting numerous records on local and national levels. ESPN, particularly, is in the midst of a renaissance with Sunday Night Baseball viewership, up 11% and also at its best level in eight years, despite the network’s intent to leave the package after the season. 
• What happens with MLB’s national media rights? The league is still looking to resell the national rights being abandoned by ESPN. A prior hope of completing new deals by the All-Star Game, however, has passed. The pacts will be a bridge to 2028, when a much larger reconstruction of MLB’s media rights is planned. 
• Can there be any improvement in MLB’s worsening labor situation? With 17 months to go before the expiration of the current labor pact, the situation already looks grim, and the prospect of the first missed games due to labor since 1995 is growing. The MLB Players Association is accusing the league of pursuing a salary cap long hated by the union, and it says it would disrupt the sport’s current run of growth. The league, conversely, is heightening its call for systemic change to baseball’s economics. 
• Will the Dodgers repeat as World Series champions? Early on, Los Angeles looked like a juggernaut in its title defense, winning its first 8 games and 21 of the first 31. The Dodgers, however, are just 5–7 this month, and despite a $406 million luxury-tax payroll that is a league record, have been much more beatable over the last two months as injuries have mounted. Amid heightened competition across the National League, a return to the Fall Classic is far from assured. Aiding the Dodgers, however, is Shohei Ohtani’s continued return to pitching.  
• Will there be baseball joy in New York? The Yankees are trying to win their first World Series in 16 years, and the Mets are seeking their first title in 39 years. Both teams are spending aggressively, posting the No. 2 and No. 3 luxury-tax payrolls in the league, and both are drawing well at the gate, helping to make the Big Apple one of the sport’s epicenters. Each club, however, has battled midseason swoons and is looking up at rivals leading their divisions. 
• Does anybody beat The Miz? Brewers rookie phenom Jacob Misiorowski, who gained an All-Star nod after just five starts, continues to electrify the sport, even as his appearance in Atlanta drew rebukes in some corners. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, however, came to his defense.

“Do I understand five starts is short? Yeah, I do. And do I want to make that the norm? No, I don’t,” Manfred said. “But I think it was the right decision given where we were.”

ATLANTA — The 2025 MLB Home Run Derby came down to less than an inch at one point of Cal Raleigh’s march to victory. The event’s viewership, however, had a clearer margin of growth. 

ESPN said its coverage of the Derby averaged 5.73 million viewers, spanning its primary coverage on ESPN itself and an alternate, Statcast-driven presentation on ESPN2. The figure is up 5% from the average of 5.45 million last year.

The network had a cleaner window in which to operate compared to last year, when the Derby competed for viewers with the 2024 Republican National Convention. 

Even as the network is opting out of its rights deal with MLB after this season, absent a renegotiation, the network sought to pull out all the stops on its presentation. It brought in top on-air personality Pat McAfee to do a live episode of his show from The Battery and introduce the eight competitors at Truist Park. ESPN also deployed drone cameras, similar to what is used in golf coverage, to help track ball flight. 

“Got a chance to do something new with a different sport,” McAfee said in a social media post. “I really enjoyed it and think it went exactly how all parties envisioned it.”

ESPN’s broadcast, however, still generated some complaints from fans. Most at issue was a split-screen presentation showing the contact batters made with pitches and where balls ultimately landed, but in some cases, it omitted the action in between.

The traditional presentation of the Derby on ESPN averaged 5.23 million viewers, while the alternate Statcast feed averaged 499,000.

Sunday’s coverage of the start of the MLB draft, meanwhile, averaged 776,000 viewers across ESPN and MLB Network, down 10% from a year ago, but still slightly above marks from 2023.