Notre Dame home football games will continue to air on NBC for the next decade and more. The school and the network announced a ten year extension to their current contract, which expired after the 2015 season, that will keep the games on NBC until 2025.

The NFL released its 2013 schedule on Thursday night with a completely over the top presentation on multiple networks and football analysts attempting to provide insights into how the season will play out before anything about the 2013 season can actually be analyzed.  America is truly a football obsessed nation.  If you're anything like me, you've already speculated about how the schedule looks around your team's short week and the stretch of games that look like a sure winning streak.

Below is a week by week guide to the nationally televised games for NBC, NFL Network, CBS, Fox, and ESPN.  National doubleheader windows are included along with the primetime games throughout the week (although those games aren't necessarily set in stone, the networks listed will have the national game in those weeks).  There are Thursday night games from Weeks 1-15, Monday night games in Weeks 1-16, and flexible scheduling begins in Week 11.  Bon appetite!

All Times Eastern

College Baseball
Nebraska at Purdue -- Big Ten Network, 7 p.m.
Kansas at Texas Tech -- Fox College Sports Central, 7:30 p.m.

College Lacrosse
Men's
Harvard at Princeton -- ESPNU, 6 p.m.

Women's
Notre Dame at Syracuse -- CBS Sports Network, 7 p.m.

College Softball
UCLA at Arizona -- ESPNU, 8 p.m.

Formula 1
Bahrain Grand Prix, Sakhir, Bahrain
Practice 1 -- NBC Sports Network, 7 a.m.

Golf
European PGA Tour
Open de España, Valencia, Spain
Second Round -- Golf Channel, 9 a.m.

Champions Tour
Greater Gwinnett Championship, Duluth, GA
First Round -- Golf Channel, 12:30 p.m.

PGA Tour
Heritage Classic, Hilton Head, SC
Second Round -- Golf Channel, 3 p.m.

LPGA Tour
LOTTE Championship, Oahu, Hawaii
Third Round -- Golf Channel, 6:30 p.m.

Mixed Martial Arts
UFC: Henderson vs. Melendez-Weigh-In -- Fuel, 7 p.m.

I've never been the type to beome so angry/disgusted with something or someone that I would write an angry letter to that entity voicing my displeasure.  (Obviously, I'd rather blog about it.)  So it's hard for me to understand the motivation in sending angry letters somewhere or to someone multiple times.  Improbable to imagine that same person going to such extremes as to be arrested for those threats.  Impossible to fathom the same circumstances happening again.

And yet one Atlanta man, Evan Chaggaris, has plead guilty to mailing many threatening letters to ESPN for the second time.  From 2011-2012, he sent dozens of threats to both management and sportscasters in Bristol.  From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

The NBA Playoffs start this weekend as Turner and ESPN share broadcast duties for every NBA postseason game.  In addition to the top broadcast teams, both networks are digging deep into their well for announcers with multiple games on multiple nights of the week for the opening round.  That means one thing - the return of Dick Stockton!  That excitement and much more in your NBA Playoffs Announcing Schedule...

One of the more popular refrains early on in the MLB season is that of "small sample size". That is, the season is so long that drawing conclusions about the entire season from one 15 game stretch is silly. 

Of course, that didn't stop Phillies beat writer David Murphy of the Philadelphia Daily News from saying that D-Day was also a small sample size.

While most media companies' efforts to cover the Boston Marathon bombing have been overshadowed with mistakes and missteps, two media companies have stood out to me in the limited coverage I have consumed.

The first being ESPN, where Jeremy Schaap and Bob Ley outclassed the cable news networks and earned a lot of praise from our followers.

The second is a bit of surprise in Deadspin. Yes, Deadspin of Brett Favre penis sexting and Drew Magary poop stories and Lennay Kekua fame. While they've had almost a dozen of pieces that were helpful in terms of staying up to speed on the happenings in Boston, I particularly found this video extremely enjoyable and impressive. Impressive because you could EASILY mistake it for something you saw on The Daily Show or Colbert Report, perhaps a whole day later. Meanwhile, that feisty little web outfit had yet another viral piece of video that was produced and promoted very quickly.

A rather peculiar question then popped into my head: Could/should Deadspin have it's own television show?

For well over a year, this site has led the drumbeat for those calling to account ESPN's laissez-faire, lackadaisical sourcing policy.  ESPN's liberal use of sources and questionable reporting became such a hot button issue it wasn't a surprise to see competitors accuse Bristol of publicly stealing scoops.  That was apparently happening as current Good Morning America host and former SportsCenter anchor Josh Elliott admitted at Blogs With Balls in 2011 and recorded by our Andrew Bucholtz.

Throughout the last year, ESPN continued to draw scrutiny for much of their reporting because of this uncertainty regarding these sources.  Was ESPN merely copying and pasting from other outlets?  What was there to distinguish ESPN's actual reporting from stolen goods?  Were Chris Broussard's sources actually just tweets from NBA players?  What was happening at the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports?

A turning point seemed to have happened at the turn of the new year when in late December a convoluted series of events led a furious Jay Glazer into a Twitter conversation with an ESPN news editor.  The curtain was pulled back on how ESPN's sourcing sausage was made and incredibly, Glazer was told his work was in fact lumped in with others as ESPN's "sources."  It's astonishing and against all the tenants and ethics of journalism to think a media company worth tens of billions of dollars would brazenly scoop up the reporting of others as if they were all just happily doing ESPN's work for them in their own special way - without a paycheck from Bristol.

In the months since, ESPN has been much more clear about properly crediting outside sources and distinguishing between their own reporting and other outlets.  The phrase "ESPN & Media Reports" has appeared on SportsCenter in the place of sources.  It's more transparent and more importantly - honest.

Now via ESPN's PR site, Front Row, we've learned a bit more about what "ESPN & Media Reports" means and the network's reporting policy moving forward.  The structure of how reports appear on television are split into three groupings - reports from ESPN, reports from outside outlets, and reports where information is gathered from both inside and outside ESPN.  What follows from Front Row is comprehensive and an infinite improvement over the Sources Era...

Only in the NFL can they devote a three-hour live television event to the simple release of a schedule. And when you consider that we've already known the 2013 matchups for three and a half months, you begin to realize how much of a stranglehold the league and its cable network have over us as fans when we still tune in for every minute of their schedule release show.

This year's NFL Network special will take place Thursday at 8 p.m. ET, but at least they've added an intriguing new guest to the lineup this time around. Former NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol will contribute as a guest analyst, according to ProFootballTalk's Mike Florio:

It was an ugly day for broadcast journalists around the country yesterday in the news world.  Several TV networks and print outlets completely botched reports about an arrest made in the Boston Marathon bombing.  The self-proclaimed "most trusted name in news" CNN was once again at the forefront, falling all over themselves with one EXCLUSIVE blunder after another.  Poynter has a great recap of the mass confusion over the arrest reports with the AP, Boston Globe, and Fox News also running with errant reports.

CNN led the charge up the wrong tree with John King's cell phone becoming a black hole of accurate reporting.  For a solid hour yesterday, CNN showed what is possible when a cable news network runs around like a chicken with its head cut off.  Actually, that's an insult to headless chickens, who have their act together compared to CNN.

Enter Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, who delivered the goods with this segment on CNN's foibles Wednesday night...