Executive Summary

• Coverage of sports wagering has hardened into a governance expectation rather than a cycle of scandal reaction. Restrictive framing of betting is holding at elevated density while the pro-expansion argument has nearly disappeared from published text, producing the widest paired divergence in the professional sports set. Reporting treats the Beasley plea negotiations, the NBA's prop-bet restrictions, and prediction-market disputes as market-structure and regulatory problems rather than as indictments of player character.
• The one place where the betting story could turn personal is the athlete-status cluster. Language arguing that society places excessive importance on sports figures posted the largest increase in that group, even though signatures tracking poor athlete conduct and athletes-as-role-models stayed subdued. Sentencing coverage would be the likely vector for that turn.
• Commercial optimism and demand-side caution are rising together. Media coverage of private equity entering leagues strengthened sharply around the 32 Equity–General Atlantic venture, the Arctos stake in the Falcons, and the Yankees–Apollo financing, and language asserting rising media rights values climbed alongside FIFA's 2030 World Cup tender. Yet plateau framing held steady, viewership-growth language softened while its fading counterpart rose, and warnings about competitive imbalance and work stoppages both advanced in the same month rights values set records.
• The civic case for franchises is being contested on empirical rather than moral grounds. Language asserting positive economic impact for cities remains strong but recorded the largest decline among elevated signatures, while taxpayer-exploitation framing stayed flat near neutral. Testimony on stadium subsidies and conditional op-eds demanding measurable returns suggest that the pushback is migrating toward performance accountability instead of outright opposition.
• The same capital logic reshaping professional leagues is forcing a re-pricing of college athletics, and the critique has settled in rather than peaked. NIL-is-ruining-the-game language sits at the top of the college cluster while its counterweights erode, coaching-pay justification fell without matching overpay criticism, and warnings about eliminating non-revenue sports advanced toward their norm. Transfer-destabilization language moderated in a manner plausibly tied to the NCAA's narrowed portal window, and the bowl-irrelevance signature rose sharply off a low base, pointing toward a reopened postseason debate before December.