Bleacher Report

Sports voice · Verified

Sports news, highlights, and animated shows from one of the biggest sports media brands.

#70Hub rank

4.3MYouTube followers

About Bleacher Report

Bleacher Report is the sports internet’s cartoon studio — and its animation arm might be the funniest thing in sports media. The B/R Cartoons operation turned league storylines into appointment-viewing comedy: Game of Zones, the Game of Thrones-meets-NBA epic from creators Adam and Craig Malamut, ran long enough to become a genuine cultural artifact — dragons, betrayals, and basketball’s biggest egos, all in glorious animation.

Gridiron Heights took the same medicine to the NFL: ten seasons, 150 million-plus views, and caricatures so sharp that players started quoting their own cartoon selves. Then The Champions conquered soccer — roughly 4 million views per episode, making it B/R’s most-watched original series. The formula is bulletproof: take the week’s real storylines, filter them through animation, and let the jokes land harder than any highlight package.

The dedicated B/R Cartoons channel — launched around the World Cup — gave the operation its own home: a full animation studio inside a sports media company, producing at a pace traditional TV could never match. When the sports world gives you material daily, the turnaround has to be daily too.

What makes it work is the writing. These aren’t cheap parodies; they’re smart — jokes that require actually following the sport, characters built from real locker-room reporting, and a willingness to roast sacred cows. Athletes love it because being cartooned means you matter.

The binge format is the genius move: a full season of Game of Zones plays like a real prestige drama that happens to be about basketball — story arcs, betrayals, payoffs. It rewards the deep-cut fan and converts the casual one in the same sitting.

But the cartoons are only the funniest chapter of a much bigger story. Bleacher Report was founded in 2006 by four friends — Bryan Goldberg, Dave Finocchio, Dave Nemetz and Zander Freund — on a radical-for-its-time idea: sports coverage written by fans, for fans, at internet scale. The early site was scrappy and user-generated, powered by slideshow galleries and an army of contributing writers. It got mocked — the slideshows were a punchline — but it grew anyway, because the instinct was right: the sports internet wanted volume, personality and speed that traditional outlets weren’t giving it.

The second act began in 2010, when B/R hired Jim Grey — a seasoned operator from Yahoo Sports and Fox Sports Interactive — as CEO. Grey professionalized the place: editorial standards went up, experienced talent came in, top-tier advertisers followed, and a $22 million funding round fueled a UK operation. Then came the deal that changed everything: on August 6, 2012, Turner Broadcasting acquired Bleacher Report for a reported $175 million (estimates ran to $200 million). Overnight, the scrappy fan site was the digital arm of one of the biggest sports-rights portfolios in television.

Grey stayed on to run the transition, then stepped down in October 2013; Finocchio — one of the four founders — took the CEO chair, with Rory Brown promoted to president in 2016 to drive the social-first strategy. That strategy was the masterstroke. While legacy outlets treated social as distribution, B/R treated it as the product: a voice built for the feed, engineered for shareability, aimed squarely at millennial and Gen Z fans who consume sports in clips, memes and conversations rather than articles.

The acquisitions wrote the playbook for that pivot. In 2015, B/R bought House of Highlights, the sports-themed Instagram phenomenon, and turned a highlight page into a multimedia social network — the single savviest media purchase of the social-video era. The Team Stream app aggregated sports content around the teams and players you actually follow. A London office opened in 2016. In March 2018, Turner and B/R launched B/R Live, a subscription streaming service carrying live sports — discontinued in 2021 and folded into the app, but the experiment proved how far the brand could stretch beyond the written word.

That’s the frame the cartoons sit inside: an animation studio as one pillar of a sports-culture machine. Game of Zones (May 2014) — the Game of Thrones-meets-NBA epic from creators Adam and Craig Malamut — ran long enough to become a genuine cultural artifact. Gridiron Heights took the same medicine to the NFL in October 2016: ten seasons, 150 million-plus views, caricatures so sharp players started quoting their own cartoon selves. The Champions conquered soccer at roughly 4 million views per episode, B/R’s most-watched original series. And the dedicated B/R Cartoons channel, launched around the World Cup, gave the whole operation its own home — a full animation studio inside a sports media company, producing at a pace traditional TV could never match, on turnaround the daily news cycle demands.

Today Bleacher Report sits under the TNT Sports umbrella as the digital engine of a portfolio that spans the NBA, MLB, the NCAA tournament and more — a fan-written startup, fully grown, now the social voice of mainstream sports. The arc is the lesson: start with the fans, meet them where they scroll, and never apologize for being fun. The sports internet grew up with B/R. Half the jokes it tells, it learned here.

Why people watch: because sports are funniest when they’re animated. B/R Cartoons turned the news cycle into a sitcom — and the episodes age like comedy classics, not content.