NBC Sports adds prominent college football writer for Big Ten coverage

Auerbach has been writing about college football and basketball since 2011. 

While she's been a known commodity for some time, it was in 2020 when her profile truly shined after breaking multiple stories about attempts by college football conferences to play as the coronavirus pandemic raged around the United States and many states had enacted limitations and shutdowns of wide-scale public gatherings. 

She has also been covering many of the discussions around this latest round of conference realignment and media rights.

For NBC, adding Auerbach is a smart addition because she's already embedded with Big Ten coverage as a contributor to the Big Ten Network. The network will begin broadcasting Big Ten games as part of the seven-year deal it signed with the conference last August. NBC will have a Saturday primetime window as well as exclusive broadcast to its streaming service Peacock.

The Athletic itself has been going through quite a few changes. Last month, its corporate owner, The New York Times, jettisoned its sports desk in favor of the site, which it purchased for $550M in January 2022.

Earlier this year, The Athletic reorganized some of its market-specific coverage, pulling away from some of the local verticals it developed to compete with or overtake traditional newspaper outlets in multiple regions across North America. In doing that, around 20 staffers — 4% of its workforce at the time — were laid off.