Welcome to the sports media podcast.

I'm your host Richard Dyche.

My producer is Patrick Antonetti.

This is a roundtable.

We've been trying to do these on Saturdays.

Feedback's been really good.

Quite frankly, the downloads have been pretty good are up, much more than I expect it on

a Saturday, so we're going to keep trying to do this.

Two guests, one regular, one person who's been on this podcast before, but it's been a bit.

John Lewis is the editor and founder of sports media watch.

Ben Strauss, formerly of the Washington Post and many other publications.

If you read the Washington Post, obviously you read Ben's work.

One of the great people in the business who can find an issue and turn it into a feature that sings.

So happy to catch up with him, even though the situation with the Post and Ben and Ben's colleagues absolutely sucks, but

very good of him to come on. Welcome, John. Welcome, Ben. Hey, thanks for having us. It's a pleasure

to be back, Rich. Thanks for having me. You got it. All right. I'm going to start here,

and we're going to start. I thought about, like, do I want to talk about Super Bowl viewership,

and it already feels old, quite frankly. So here's where I want to start. And Ben, I'm going to give you first up here. I'm going to start with you. I am absolutely fascinated by ESPN's all year Super Bowl promotion that has already started, right? So it's sort of twofold for me. One, I feel like it's so mockable, and I will

absolutely mock this for the entire year because it is ESPN's sort of ego writ large in

terms of promoting everything. That said, as a business play, Ben, I think it's also incredibly

smart of them to try to make this the biggest Super Bowl ever in terms of

cross-collaboration, in terms of using Disney's characters, in terms of all the alternate

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