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A month after I summoned a very smart sports business reporter to help us all get a better understanding of whatever the hell is going on with Bally Sports Southwest, we have some long-awaited clarity. Sort of.

This morning, Diamond Sports Group, BSSW’s very bankrupt parent company, announced a restructuring. You can read the statement if you want the nitty gritty on who gets paid what, but the part that matters most to us normal folk is Diamond’s new minority investor: Amazon, whose stake will see the media giant stream games—including pre- and post-game shows—on Prime Video.

That is a very big deal! With significant caveats. We do not know, among other things, whether a bankruptcy-court judge will approve this deal, when it would go into effect, the pricing structure, blackout restrictions, and so on.

We’re not even sure which North Texas teams will take part in it. As The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov, the aforementioned very smart sports business reporter, reminded us in December, Diamond Sports has agreements with the NBA and NHL to continue broadcasting for the 26 combined teams on Bally Sports regional networks through their current seasons (and, it seems, likely beyond).

Diamond has not, however, hammered out a full agreement with MLB. So presuming this deal goes into effect sometime in the near future—Amazon will want to maximize its return on investment—we should expect to see the Mavericks and Stars on Prime sooner than later. If you are a fan of either or both who has been unable to watch the teams, your moment of relief is near.

In my capacity as a professional sports degenerate for D Magazine, I am asked all manner of questions pertaining to the games we all watch. Among the most frequent question concerns how we watch those games. Namely, what the hell is going on with Bally Sports Southwest?

For a while, that question was rhetorical. What the hell is going on with Bally Sports Southwest and its parent company, Diamond Sports, which holds the broadcast rights to three of the biggest local teams—the Mavericks, Stars, and Rangers—yet cannot be accessed by millions of people because the channel is carried only on two cable networks and one streaming service?

But since Diamond declared bankruptcy in March, the question has evolved into a real inquiry. In the months that followed, teams such as the Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, and San Diego Padres have begun divesting themselves from regional sports networks (RSNs), which are becoming a relic of a dying media landscape. Diamond Sports is the biggest dinosaur of all. At its peak, the company controlled 19 Bally Sports networks around the country that held the media rights of 42 NBA, MLB, and NHL teams.

None of that chaos, however, has stopped the three North Texas franchises from continuing to broadcast unabated on Bally Sports Southwest—even as the network is teetering on the brink of financial collapse, to the point that The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov and Evan Drellich reported last month that Diamond may terminate its agreement with the Rangers due to financial insolvency. (The uncertainty alone already looms over Texas’ free agency decisions in its World Series defense.)

So, again: what the hell is going on with Bally Sports Southwest?

I have no idea. What I do have is Vorkunov’s phone number. We’ve been pals for years, and I edited his writing during part of my own time at The Athletic. So I dialed him up to ask a lot of the questions people ask me, so we can all get some answers on the state of this ramshackle sports network, what the immediate future might look like, what you should hope for as a consumer, and, most important, when will it suck a whole lot less for everyone to watch their favorite sports teams?

Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

I’m always curious to see the B-roll footage used during Cowboys home games. You don’t get many shots of Arlington. I wonder why. Sometimes you’ll get some Cowtown. Mostly, though, it’s downtown Dallas, for obvious reasons. The Margarets spent millions on those Calatrava bridges.

Yesterday’s CBS broadcast brought a curious shot I’d never seen. As the boys were returning from commercial break in the second half, Jim Nantz intoned over the image you see here: “Ah, the Chase Tower Rotunda. The most beautiful rotunda in all the land. A rotunda unlike any other.”

Kidding. I made most of that up. Nantz said only: “The Chase Tower Rotunda.”

But what the heck? Who cares about the Chase Tower Rotunda? Put simply: it’s not a thing. When it is rarely used, it hosts business receptions and the like. I drive past it nearly every day and never give it a second thought, except when Zac Crain is in my car and invariably points out that the rotunda stood in as a fancy car dealership in his favorite movie of all time, 1988’s It Takes Two. (You can see it in the trailer here.) So yeah. It looks like the floor room of a Lamborghini dealership.

Meanwhile, in the background of that CBS shot stands the Cathedral Guadalupe, one of the oldest, most significant structures in Dallas. I don’t get it. As someone said on Twitter yesterday when I pointed this out, “I literally busted out laughing when this happened. I genuinely need an oral history from the production team on how this came to be.”

After August 26, you won’t be seeing Tim Ryan when you turn on Fox 4 in the mornings. He’s been in that spot for 27 years, at one point broadcasting from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., which required that he wake up at 1:30. Lately, though, he’s been sleeping in. Fox 4’s Good Day goes from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. (He’s been with the station for 33 years in all.)

The hours nearly killed him. Ryan has had two heart surgeries to fix an atrial fibrillation that made his ticker do drum solos as he lay in bed. He’s better now, or at least better enough to knock out 40 to 45 miles on his bike on Saturdays and another 20 to 25 on Sundays. (The longest he’s ever gone is 108 miles, for Bike MS, which he tries to do every year.)

Retirement looks a lot like that. More time cycling in more places. More time with his wife, Beth. More time with his kids and his new granddaughter, Lucy. It’ll take him a week to get back to a normal sleeping schedule, which seems ambitious to me, but I haven’t woken up before 6 a.m. in years, so I’ll trust him.

This morning, the station announced that it is promoting Brandon Todd to the co-anchor seat alongside Lauren Przybyl, Evan Andrews, Chip Waggoner, and Hanna Battah. He’s been with the station for 24 years and already has a few years of anchoring experience on Good Day. “The strength of the show, and of the station, is consistency,” Ryan told us on the podcast, which seems right in line with Todd’s promotion.

Ryan joined us at the Old Monk to talk about his career and what comes next. First, though: “I threw away all the makeup except for what I need through August 26.”

Listen after the jump or with your favorite podcatcher.

There’s a reason I am a magazine editor and not a TV news anchor.

Exhibit A: I am currently sitting at my desk with two-day-old hair rolled into a claw clip at the base of my neck. My jeans are freshly laundered, but my black t-shirt is slightly wrinkled and could probably use a lint brush. I have makeup on, but, if Tim Rogers weren’t working from home, he would probably gesture vaguely to the side of my face at some point during the day and note, “You, um, missed some blending or something there.”

So when WFAA graciously offered to have me on last Friday morning to introduce some of our Best of Big D winners, I outright panicked.

If you’re reading this, odds are you probably aren’t able to watch most Mavericks games—or Stars games, or Rangers games—in your home. That’s because Bally Sports Southwest, the teams’ broadcast rights holder, has been dropped by myriad cable providers and all but one streaming service (DirecTV Stream) over the past two-plus years, leaving plenty of fans—including you, probably—to scrounge for various semi- or not-at-all legal ways to watch whichever games don’t get broadcast nationally. It’s the worst, and it shows little sign of abating.

The playoffs were supposed to be a reprieve, a time when everyone can watch their local team no matter which cable company or streaming service overcharges them. Alas, that will not be the case with the Mavericks in their first-round series against Utah:

Last night, after the Mavs lost a dumb game in overtime to the Thunder, largely because Luka fell asleep on his defensive assignment at the end of regulation, I switched over to ABC Channel 8, WFAA, whatever you want to call it. Snow was on the way. I needed some Delkus.

And what the holy hell did I see? A guy named Scoop Jefferson was on TV, reporting from Denton. And he was wearing a ushanka.

Maybe I’m old school. But I have a hard time taking a reporter seriously who calls himself Scoop. Brett Shipp didn’t run around calling himself Scoop Shipp. David Schechter doesn’t call himself Schoop Schechter. And doing a standup in the sleet is one thing, but how’s that chyron going to look when Scoop Jefferson is reporting from the grisly scene of a mass casualty event, like if a polar bear eats an entire Frisco kindergarten class on a field trip?

There are only two acceptable reasons for Jefferson to call himself Scoop. 1) He’s had the nickname since he was 6 years old. Or 2) he lost a bet.

Scoop’s real name, by the way, is Steve. He came to us from Indianapolis, where they had nice things to say about him when he left. Indianapolis is the 25th television market in the United States. Just saying.

If you’re not up to speed on Joshua Ray Walker, son of East Dallas, read this 2019 story, in which Amy McCarthy said he was headed for his big break, and then read this 2021 story, in which Jonny Auping described his Granada album-release show as a victory lap. Then, after you’re up to speed, make plans to stream The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, um, tonight. Walker will perform.

Check back in here on FrontBurner tomorrow. Matt Goodman tells me he plans to write 1,000 words about the performance.

Editor’s note: Richard Patterson is a painter who wrote in the November issue of D Magazine about (among other things) being an expat in Dallas. The article was titled “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Wlodek Malowanczyk.”

I’m pleased to read that King of the Hill is returning. It’s a genius show. It was how I learned Texan. When I first came here, I couldn’t understand a word anyone said or why they drove funny or why they used tractors to mow their lawns or why four men stood around in the street next to a truck for no apparent reason or why housewives in Casa Linda drove 350 Hemi pickups in order to pick up muffins and a pack of 24 hotdog buns from the nearby Albertsons. I guess 24 is quite a lot. I guess you need a pretty powerful truck for that. 

It was only when I thought back to watching King of the Hill from my 31st-floor Barbican apartment in central London in the late ’90s, that I had a eureka moment. Back in London, I thought the whole thing was hyperbole, but once I’d bought a house in East Dallas, I came to realize that King of the Hill is not really a satire; it’s just how people are in Garlington. 

Like any good comedy, Sports and Such’s origin story begins with a joke.

It was April 2013, and Ben Rogers and Jeff Wade, the sports talk radio duo better known as Ben & Skin, were between jobs after leaving 103.3 ESPN in February. Speculation was rampant about where they’d land and when they’d next appear on the air, and Dena Adi wasn’t above wondering herself. But she also couldn’t ignore how serious the whole thing seemed.

So she decided to have a little fun on the Internet.

@SkinWade 97.9 the beat will be so great with the Ben and Skin Show. Can't wait!!

— Dena Adi (@dena_adi) April 30, 2013

Ben & Skin did not, in fact, have plans to join the longstanding hip-hop station. But that didn’t stop the tweet from migrating to a message board as a rumor, where it happened to be seen by Kevin Turner, who was set to join Ben & Skin at their actual new home of 105.3 The Fan as producer. He laughed, then got acquainted with Adi on Twitter.

It would be another seven years before the two would create a YouTube series together and eight until that YouTube series became an actual television show, which premieres Saturday at 2 p.m. on CW33. But on an elemental level, the foundation was cemented that night: one of them said something that made the other laugh, and that laughter was channeled into a course of action.

Adi, a multimedia producer at the University of Texas at Arlington who is now the showrunner of Sports and Such, says she’s “kind of had a version of this show in my mind for a long time,” one that fuses familiar elements into a wildly different sort of sports show. As Turner, the host, puts it, “You’ve seen a monologue before. You’ve seen intimate interviews. You’ve seen man-on-the-street bits. You’ve seen game shows on TV—those have made a resurgence over the last 10 years. But have you seen them all in one package that relates to your local sports teams? Probably not.”

The Longhorn Ballroom experienced an all-too-short-lived revival not long ago, but has again been sitting quiet for the better part of the last couple years. And yet if you’ve driven past the historic venue just south of downtown Dallas recently, you’ve probably noticed the marquee promoting upcoming shows from the Sex Pistols and Merle Haggard.

There’s some sort of film or tv production going on at the Longhorn Ballroom. From what it’s looking like it’s something to do with the Sex Pistols. pic.twitter.com/dk0iUWbMdj

— Pablo Discobar (@pablosdiscobar) August 19, 2021

The marquee hearkens back to 1978, when the Sex Pistols crossed America and prompted this wonderfully incongruous image of the volatile English punk band sharing a sign with country legend Merle Haggard above a giant longhorn sculpture. The entire tour was defined by chaos, as Jeff Gage wrote for us in 2017.