Let’s begin by getting two facts out of the way. First, Shohei Ohtani is the greatest thing baseball has to offer right now and maybe ever. Second, Peacock has MLB broadcast rights but only does Sunday games. NBC gets one of those games every year and surely would be one of the regularly scheduled games.
That being the case, the chances of NBC breaking away from any Notre Dame game for baseball, particularly the game against Ohio State, are virtually nonexistent. But that’s not stopping PointsBet Sportsbook from posing a scenario that defies all logic:
Picture this: It is September 23rd, 2023 and Ohio State is playing at Notre Dame. Ohio State has the ball with 3 minutes left down by 1 when all of a sudden the broadcast shifts to watch a Shohei Ohtani at-bat while he has 59 home runs…
How would this make you feel? pic.twitter.com/IBxOi1hKKL
— PointsBet Sportsbook (@PointsBetUSA) July 18, 2023
I don’t care how exciting a player Ohtani is or what’s on the line for him. No broadcast network in its right mind is going to cut away from college football to cover something for another sport. Is watching it on MLB Network not enough? If people are watching college football, chances are they don’t care about anything else at the moment.
On top of that, Aaron Judge already broke the American League single-season home run record last year. There’s nothing at stake in this scenario except for Ohtani joining the 60-homer club. If this happens for Ohtani, this has to happen for all players on this precipice going forward. Somehow, I doubt that will happen because it’s not Ohtani.
Yes, there are exceptions to the rule of not cutting away from an Irish home game. The most notable example was NBC temporarily transferring the feed of the 2020 classic against Clemson to USA Network so it could broadcast Joe Biden’s victory speech for the presidential election that was called earlier that day. But an Ohtani at-bat is not on the same scale as a speech from the new soon-to-be leader of the free world.
I’m all for a nice debate on Twitter, but this is the wrong one to start. Not only does it not make any sense, but it’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence. NBC will not cut into an Irish-Buckeyes game for a sport that it barely has any rights to. Hopefully, everyone who saw this tweet figured that out quickly.
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Follow Geoffrey on Twitter: @gfclark89