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Kevin Kugler Needs to Be Careful When Making Final Call of Duke-North Carolina

“On your [final] call, Kevin, make sure you don’t say that whoever wins just won the championship.”

Derek Futterman

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Kevin Kugler

When people think of college basketball, they often ponder over hypothetical matchups, especially those in the NCAA Tournament. Watching Saint Peter’s run to the Elite Eight round would have likely been enough of a story to signify this year’s tournament, but college basketball fans have now shifted their attention towards a situation that has been looming in the background since the tournament began in 1939.

The Duke Blue Devils will face the North Carolina Tar Heels for the 258th time in history. However, it will be their first-ever tournament meeting, let alone in the Final Four with a trip to the national championship game on the line.

Fans from Durham to Chapel Hill are eagerly anticipating this showdown, set to take place Saturday night from the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. The home stadium of the New Orleans Saints has a basketball capacity of 74,000, and there will unquestionably be no open seats. The excitement extends far beyond North Carolina, though, as fans from all across the United States and the world look forward to the game, set to begin just after 8:45 ET.

One of the broadcasters set to bring the game to listeners is Kevin Kugler, the lead play-by-play announcer for college basketball on Westwood One. This long-awaited game has dominated the sports conversation all week and as a national broadcaster, he knows it is a very big deal to be on the call for the game.

“If you’re someone who’s doing this game on a national level and you can’t say this is a big deal, you probably shouldn’t be doing these games,” Kugler said while being interviewed on The Mac Attack Thursday on WFNZ in Charlotte. “Whether you’re a fan in North Carolina of these, or you’re someone who watches college sports from afar, this is a huge deal.”

The storyline, aside from Duke and North Carolina finally meeting in an NCAA Tournament matchup, is that it could be the final game on the bench for Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski. Kugler knows that the Tar Heels’ fan base would love nothing more than to spoil Duke’s tournament run and end the career of the renowned Coach K after defeating the Blue Devils in their final regular-season home game in early March.

“If you’re a North Carolina fan… you have the chance to end his career with a loss to your team in the Final Four,” said Kugler. “That has to be the lottery ticket for any North Carolina fan, and if you’re a Duke fan, you get the chance to send Coach K out in the National Championship game and, oh, by the way, you get to step on your rival on the way there.”

This year’s Final Four contains seven of the national championship winners since 2008, which happens to be the same year Kugler began calling Final Four games on Westwood One. Sure, the matchups could turn out not to be as competitive or engaging to fans as is being anticipated, but it could also end up being one of the most storied semifinal rounds in tournament history.

“This is the blue blood of the blue blood Final Four, and people can argue ‘Villanova is not a blue blood,’ [but] Villanova’s a blue blood now,” said Kugler. “Maybe [they are] not a blue blood from the standpoint of 1984, although they won the title in 1985, but they’re not a blue blood in the sense of Duke, North Carolina, [and] Kansas. They are a blue blood in the sense of success though, and Jay Wright has…”

And then the interview suddenly stopped. Kugler had been dropped from the show, presumably because of a bad signal or loss of phone battery. (Did he use up the battery calling last week’s Providence-Kansas game via cell phone?) But Chris McClain and Travis “T-Bone” Hancock had other ideas as to why they had just lost their guest.

“Did he get dropped because he started talking [about] Villanova?,” asked McClain. “Was it not allowed? Too much talk about one of the other teams in the Final Four other than Duke or UNC.”

Kugler quickly re-joined the program and said what he supposedly meant to say before being cut off of the program.

“I’m sorry – I should have just said, ‘The only thing that matters in this Final Four is Duke-North Carolina. Then you guys wouldn’t have hung up on me,” he quipped.

The hosts also made it a point to give Kugler a valuable reminder before calling perhaps one of the most anticipated college basketball games in NCAA Tournament history.

“It is going to be a real buzzkill when the winning team fan base realizes they [have] to play one more game in order to win a title,” said McClain.

“On your [final] call, Kevin, make sure you don’t say that whoever wins just won the championship,” said Hancock.

“[I’ve] got to write that down,” said Kugler. “‘Not the championship.’ All right, good. I got that down now. I should be fine.”

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Jay Williams: My ESPN Contract is Up in 3 Months

“It feels like media cannibalizing media right now, and I get how that game is played. But sometimes that game gets boring to me, dawg.”

Jordan Bondurant

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ESPN NBA analyst and ESPN Radio host Jay Williams may not be at The Worldwide Leader for too much longer.

Talking to Chicago Bulls guard Patrick Beverley on his Barstool Sports podcast, Williams revealed how much more time he has on his current deal with the network.

“My contract is up in three months, man,” Williams said on The Pat Bev Podcast with Rone.

Beverley seemed kind of surprised at how soon Williams could become a free agent. Jay joined ESPN in a full-time capacity in 2008. He’s hosted ESPN Radio’s weekday morning show alongside Keyshawn Johnson and Max Kellerman since 2021. The show featured Zubin Mehenti for a year prior to that.

Williams implied that he’s looking to change things up away from the routine he’s got at the network.

“It feels like media cannibalizing media right now, and I get how that game is played,” Williams said. “But sometimes that game gets boring to me, dawg.”

Jay added that he’s intrigued by the laid-back nature of the podcast that Beverley has going. He said if he could have an ideal situation, that’s what he would strive for.

“Everybody can just be themselves authentically and not feel like you have to give a take on something,” he said. “Not everything requires some kind of polarizing POV.”

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Mike Felger: LIV/PGA Merger ‘Brought Me a Little Bit Back to Golf’

“I’m not here to save the world. I’m just here to watch a little golf.”

Jordan Bondurant

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While many golf fans might be completely turned off to the sport after the announcement of the PGA Tour/DP World Tour/LIV Golf merger on Tuesday, 98.5 The Sports Hub host Mike Felger is going to be more inclined to tune in more regularly.

On Felger & Mazz on Wednesday, Felger felt like bringing unique personalities like PGA Championship winner Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau back into the fray after they defected last year to join LIV will be more of an incentive to watch.

“I’ve got to tell you, this has brought me a little back to golf,” Felger said. “At least there’s something here. And as opposed to these milquetoast, lily white, ‘Iron Byron’ – that’s what I call them, all these country club kids with the exact same swing who never say anything or give me any sort of edge. You know, Jordan Spieth and who’s the latest? Mark Scheffler? What’s his name?”

“Oh, Scottie Scheffler,” co-host Tony Massarotti responded.

“Like one cardboard cutout after the next,” Felger said. “Like, oh, my God. I have found the PGA Tour so flippin boring for so long.”

Koepka, DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson and others have sort of embraced being a heel among PGA Tour fans. Felger said having guys who can show some emotion and personality on the course is refreshing in a sport where a certain spirit of decorum is expected.

“There’s depth to what he is,” Felger said of Koepka. “And maybe he’s a bad guy. Whatever. Golf needs that. Golf needs it. It needs personality. It needs good guys, bad guys. Guys to root for, guys to root against.”

The discussion circled back to the merger having serious financial backing by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which got LIV Golf off the ground and lured some big names away from the PGA Tour with massive signing bonuses.

Felger said he gets that people will have certain feelings towards the Saudi royal family and the government, and those feelings are justified. But at the end of the day if he wants to turn on the TV and catch a golf tournament, he’s going to do that. By being interested in watching this new iteration of professional golf, it’s not an endorsement of the Saudi government’s role in 9/11 or other atrocities.

“I’m not here to save the world,” he said. “I’m just here to watch a little golf.”

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Scott Van Pelt: LIV/PGA Merger ‘Changes Everything From a TV Perspective’

“You need to have a television partner where you have eyeballs. They didn’t have that.”

Jordan Bondurant

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One of the big questions moving forward with the LIV/PGA merger is what will happen with the media coverage and distribution of tournaments. SportsCenter anchor Scott Van Pelt told Dan Patrick that he’s not sure.

SVP was a guest on The Dan Patrick Show on Wednesday, and he told Dan that he thought the announcement of the merger was fake initially. But now that it’s real, and details on the TV rights side are scarce, it’s hard for Van Pelt to speculate on what golf on television will look like a year or two from now.

“I don’t know what I don’t know in terms of the contracts. How long do they run?” he asked. “This changes everything from a TV perspective I would think. If you’re CBS or NBC or whomever has paid for one thing, well now it’s going to be a different entity – which I think this new entity is going to sit down and say, ‘Alright let’s talk about what it’s going to cost to have us on your air.'”

LIV Golf made waves and drew the ire of PGA Tour officials, players and fans with each new announcement of a superstar player signing. Often when a big name got announced as a new addition to the league, details of a signing bonus worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars followed.

SVP said where LIV will benefit is in the potential with a new rights deal.

“You bought players, but on LIV you just didn’t have the distribution where you were being consumed as a product,” he said. “You need to have a television partner where you have eyeballs. They didn’t have that.”

LIV Golf went the entire 2022 season without a TV broadcast partner in the United States. Just ahead of the start of the 2023 season, the league announced an agreement to carry the final two rounds of tournaments live on The CW. And not all CW affiliates across the country even opted to air coverage, thus drastically impacting viewership.

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