Tag: Opinion

Tony Romo praising Tom Brady joining NFL announcing is like a dinosaur hyping up comets

Tony Romo doesn’t seem to realize he’s staring a comet right in the face.

I don’t know where Tony Romo got the idea that he’s this respected NFL announcing ambassador, but he needs to stop. Immediately. No one in their right mind is looking at CBS’s lead color commentator as this shining beacon of broadcasting light in 2024. These days, I’d venture to guess that very few view him as a leading example to follow.

In fact, from talking over Super Bowl-winning touchdowns to aimless live rambling that is often barely coherent, most pro football fans now probably (and rightfully) think the exact opposite of Romo in the booth.

Yet, here he is, opining about the legendary Tom Brady taking over as Fox’s top color analyst this fall. A morsel of self-awareness, please!

If you listen closely to the way Romo talks about Brady in a recent interview on CBS Mornings, you’d almost get the sense he doesn’t think the 7-time Super Bowl champion quarterback could supplant him as the most beloved modern NFL broadcaster.

It’s Romo’s not paying much of any attention to Brady’s debut and likely announcing ascendance.

More from CBS Mornings:

“We all know Tom [Brady] well,” Romo said. “You gotta remember, Jim’s [Nantz] done the most Tom Brady football of anyone (in broadcasting) — literally over 100 games. I think it’s great. I think it’s great for the industry that people want to go into this position and these roles. I think you find that the NFL has that grab. This [quarterbacks becoming announcers] was not always that, but Troy Aikman, I felt like really started this.

“Now, it’s part of possibly an arc in your career. But Tom’s gonna do great. He’s working as hard as anybody.”

I understand Romo is trying to be classy here. I know he’s making a point about quarterbacks becoming more comfortable talking to fans every Sunday. That is a welcome development! And I know this is him mostly being magnanimous toward a future “competitor” like Brady. The nature of NFL broadcasting on CBS (which focuses on AFC matchups) and Fox (which centers on NFC duels) doesn’t really make Brady a rival to Romo, even if their networks are fighting over the same afternoon time slots on Sundays. The generally equal conference split makes this more of an apples-and-oranges comparison than we’d like to admit.

At the same time, Romo does understand he’s lost his mantel as The Guy Who Correctly Predicts Plays Before They Happen, right? Surely, he knows that his work announcing games has become rote at best and grating at worst? Right?

Someone like Brady might not technically be a competitor, but that’s definitely not how NFL fans will view this dynamic in the long run. Everyone reading this is old enough to remember the direct Greg Olsen comparisons. It’ll be the same line of thinking for Brady.

If Brady’s awesome at the job for Fox — unfortunately, as much as it pains me to admit out loud in public, he probably will be — then he will be propped up by the football media landscape more than Romo ever was. It won’t be close. Because of Brady’s well-established, built-in playing resume, he can be so good at announcing that he might almost make the days of Romo offering insightful, worthwhile analysis seem like they never happened. And to be candid, that feels so long ago that I’m not sure it happened anymore myself.

Romo talking about how Brady working for Fox is excellent for the broadcast industry is him missing the mark on his own place in football. For cinephiles, it’s like Blockbuster praising Netflix for how it will revolutionize the DVD market. For you work-from-home 9-5ers, it’s like Skype giving Zoom some public shine for jumping into the video call space. For you history buffs out there,  it’s like Napoleon Bonaparte telling British naval commander Horatio Nelson, “good job” for hamstringing his navy.

You get the idea.

Kudos to Romo for giving Brady some advice and helping him ease into a new, demanding job. I’m certain not many other people would’ve been nearly as kind in his position, and that’s the point.

NBC will use A.I. Al Michaels for Olympic recaps and the video example is, as he said, ‘frightening’

Al Michaels is still alive! What is NBC doing?

Have you ever wondered what the “Miracle on Ice” would’ve felt like with the cheap, wooden imitation of a legendary broadcaster? What if a soulless automaton had been on the call for Malcolm Butler’s stunning goal-line interception in Super Bowl 49?

No? Really? Clearly, you don’t want to embrace the glorious future.

Well, too bad because NBC is bringing light, depressing dystopia to your sports anyway!

In next month’s Summer Olympics, the colorful peacock network plans to have Al Michaels recap each day’s most important events. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s misleading. It won’t be the Al Michaels we all know and love from decades of calling some of the most famous moments in sports history. It’ll be an A.I. version of him trained to his voice to make it sound like one of the most iconic American broadcasters ever is blasting right into your living room or headphones.

The preview of Fake Al Michaels — who, mind you, is still very much alive at age 79 and could’ve easily done these personalized recaps himself — is as saddening as it sounds:

Personally, I love having a de facto sports Siri that sounds like it was prerecorded without any emotion or authenticity. Again, I remind you all that we live in the future.

You just can’t put a lid on human beings’ ambition!

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Michaels revealed that he gave NBC his blessing to use his voice in these A.I. Olympics recaps. While his concerns were alleviated, he still didn’t sound too enthused — and understandably so.

More from Vanity Fair:

Michaels was “very skeptical” of the proposal—until he heard the A.I. for himself. “Frankly, it was astonishing. It was amazing,” he told me in a phone interview last weekend. “And it was a little bit frightening.” Michaels was left in awe of the nuance—the way it captured his intonations and verbal subtleties. “It was not only close, it was almost 2 percent off perfect,” he said. “I’m thinking, Whoa.”

I understand Michaels’ fears. Any time a broadcast company decides to use a voice you might find in a video game like Madden, it can make a person’s stomach queasy.

Still, that’s not the main takeaway I have from this whole fiasco.

It’s dispiriting that NBC is content to imitate one of the biggest sports voices it has ever had, especially since he is still alive and kicking. Michaels does a pro football game every week on a streaming service during the NFL season. He couldn’t have come back to NBC to record a few lines for a worldwide sports event? I find that hard to believe.

It’s troublesome that these kinds of decisions might soon define our sports-watching and sports-consuming future, which is only a microcosm of a greater collective. When the human element is even excised from the broadcast booth — the one place where a fan should always reasonably expect dependability and energy — then nothing is off limits.

Most of all, watching companies like NBC willingly hop into bed with these sorts of services without even a second thought is infuriating. And it doesn’t matter why they have decided to do so, either. Be it to cut costs or to invest in a hollow foundation devoid of any real exciting spark, it all comes from the same place of desperation and motivation. It’s all borne of the same brand of business cowardice to “get ahead or get left behind” without ever thinking about potential long-term consequences.

Having A.I. Al Michaels recap the Olympics is a sign of overzealousness, of NBC trying to jump onto a fad no one on the outside looking in wants a part of. I sure hope this doesn’t balloon into something much more expansive down the line. Otherwise, I’ll likely soon be inclined to agree with Michaels’ initial thoughts about his fear.

Do you believe in miracles? Well, this wouldn’t qualify.

Caitlin Clark’s Olympics snub depends on what Team USA is supposed to represent

Team USA’s decision-makers shot an airball when it came to Caitlin Clark and the Olympic roster.

It’s another Saturday in the WNBA season, and once again the collective discourse has been swallowed up by Caitlin Clark and things that mostly have nothing to do with actual basketball being played.

News broke early Saturday morning that Clark was left off Team USA’s women’s basketball squad for the Olympics this summer in Paris. Debate ensued on social media and the commentary will surely carry into Monday when the talking heads at ESPN get back in their chairs to embrace debate. All we can hope for is that the rhetoric isn’t as exhausting as it was a week ago, when highly-paid men with big platforms lost their collective minds over Clark being fouled hard.

This is far from the most outrageous snub in the history of USA women’s basketball. Look up what happened to Candace Parker in 2016.

There are arguments good and bad to be made for whether Clark should or shouldn’t be on the Olympic team. Ultimately, all of them come down to what you believe is the purpose of Team USA.

Is it for the Americans to show off their dominance in an arena of competition and win every game by as many points possible?

Or is it to grow the game of women’s basketball?

If the goal of Team USA is to bulldoze their way to an eighth consecutive gold medal and obliterate every opponent in their path, then no, Clark should not be on this roster for the Paris Olympics.

With all due respect to the Indiana Fever rookie phenom, she is not currently one of the 12 best Americans playing in the WNBA.

Is it close? Sure. If Team USA carried a roster of 20 players, if this was all just based on skill, stats and merit, Clark would be going to the Olympics. She’s 13th in the league in scoring, fourth in assists and fourth in 3-pointers made per game.

Alas, Olympic rosters for women’s basketball are limited to 12 players. And so, Clark is out.

However, if Team USA set out to assemble the best basketball-playing roster to take to France, there’s a bigger snub that fans should be upset about.

Somehow, Arike Ogunbowale isn’t on this roster.

The Notre Dame product is now in her sixth season in the WNBA. In all five of those previous seasons, she’s finished the year ranked in the top five of scoring average. This year is no different, as Ogunbowale is scoring a career-high 26.6 points per game, second in the WNBA to only MVP-frontrunner A’ja Wilson. The Dallas Wings guard is also first in the league in free throws made per game (6.6), third in free throw percentage (95.2), first in steals (3.1), and 10th in assists with five dimes per game. It’s easy to make the case that Ogunbowale is playing her best basketball right now at this very moment.

Ogunbowale is certainly – right now, in the year of 2024 – a better player than Diana Taurasi, who turns 42 years old on Tuesday. And yet, Taurasi is on the Olympics team for the sixth straight time. And, objectively, Taurasi is simply no longer one of the 12 best Americans playing in the WNBA.

This is the conundrum that Team USA finds itself in. Because clearly, the selection committee was not thinking about just pure basketball when assembling this team. If they were, they would have thanked Taurasi for her time served and given one of those coveted guard spots to a player at the top of their game like Ogunbowale.

What is Taurasi on this team for? Surely not her passing as she’s averaging a career-low 1.1 assists per game this season. There are certainly better shooters in the WNBA than her – Ogunbowale chief among them. So, is she there for leadership? For chemistry? For camaraderie? Is she the team ambassador? It’s unclear.

Either the Team USA selection committee didn’t have the Jurgen Klinsmann-like guts required to cut a beloved, yet aging face of the game like Taurasi, or they are admitting that this about much more than the scoring margin as they try to capture another gold medal.

Which brings us to the second viewpoint: If you believe the purpose of Team USA is to be evangelical for the sport of women’s basketball on the world stage, then shouldn’t Caitlin Clark be on this roster?

There’s no denying that women’s basketball has experienced, and is experiencing, a tremendous amount of growth over the past year and Clark is a big reason why. The past two Final Fours and national championship games, as well as the 2024 WNBA Draft, all shattered previous viewership records. The commonality between all of them? Clark was there. Just Friday night, when Clark’s Fever played in Washington, D.C., a record-setting crowd of 20,333 fans showed up, making it the highest-attended WNBA regular-season game since 2007.

Does Clark deserve all of the credit for all of the new fans and attention that women’s basketball has garnered? No, of course not. She – along with Angel Reese, Juju Watkins, Paige Bueckers and Kamilla Cardoso – stands on the shoulders of A’Ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, who came through doors broken down by Maya Moore and Candace Parker, who had a path paved for them by the likes of Sheryl Swoopes and Cheryl Miller, and on and on and on.

But there’s no denying the impact that Clark has had on women’s basketball. More people tuned in for her pro debut than an NHL playoff game on the same night. By mid-May, the sales of Clark’s Fever jersey trailed only three NBA players. Simply put, Clark continues to reset the expectations for the audience that women’s basketball can draw.

That the decision-makers with Team USA don’t see that is a real shame. And that they aren’t going to put this generational talent on a world stage because they are reportedly concerned about the reaction Clark’s fans might have when they see her sitting on the bench is cowardice.

Team USA should be wanting to garner new fans – not coddling the ones they already have. Leaving Clark in Indiana while this squad goes to Paris accomplishes neither.

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A letter to LSU baseball freshman Jake Brown

The moral of the story is that nobody is perfect.

On Monday night, LSU took on North Carolina in a winner-take-all Game 7 for a shot at hosting a super regional against West Virginia. With two outs in the top of the tenth inning, Johnny Castagnozzi hit a fly ball to right field to [autotag]Jake Brown[/autotag].

Brown retreated towards the wall and tracked the ball while fighting the lights glaring in his eyes. He put his glove up to catch the ball… and the ball went right over his glove.

After that, North Carolina would hit an RBI single to take a 4-3 lead and never look back. After the game ended, many Tiger “fans” took to Twitter to berate Brown and say nasty things about him and his family. With the way people were talking about Brown, you would have thought he missed the ball on purpose. Obviously, he didn’t.

Coming out of Sulphur High School in Louisiana, Brown was rated as the No. 1 player in the state of Louisiana and the No. 18 left-handed pitcher in the country. He starred as a pitcher and as a center fielder for the Sulphur Golden Tors. Brown played in 56 games as a freshman for LSU this season and was listed as a left-handed pitcher/first baseman/outfielder on the Tigers roster.

In those 56 games, Brown had 48 total chances to make a play on defense. He finished the season with 46 putouts, one assist and only one error. The man missed one ball all year long and now people want to crucify him for it.

For those of you who are uneducated, playing outfield is hard. It is even harder when you are on the road. At home, you are familiar with the layout of your ballpark and you know every nook and cranny of that field. When you are on the road, you are not as aware of the dimensions of the ballpark, and on a ball hit near the wall, you have to reach a hand out to try to find out where the wall is.

You are also fighting the lights. It was mentioned a few times during the broadcast that it is hard for right fielders to see the ball at “The Bosh” no matter what team you were playing on. With all of those things in play, it is a recipe for disaster for anyone. Jake made one mistake all year and everyone blames him for that loss.

No one wants to talk about how LSU only had one hit after the third inning ([autotag]Hayden Travinski[/autotag] singled in the bottom of the ninth). One of LSU’s five hits was a solo homer from [autotag]Jake Brown[/autotag]. If it wasn’t for him, the game would not have had the lead at all.

The moral of the story is that nobody is perfect. I am sure no one is beating themselves up more about the play than Jake because all he wants to do is make a play for his team. He is a Louisiana man who bleeds purple and gold. This is just one setback on the road to possibly being one of the LSU greats. Keep your head up, Jake. You’ll bounce back stronger next year.

For all of you, keyboard warriors who are downing Cheetos and whining about how you could make that catch with your eyes closed, use that energy to do something productive instead of bashing someone online.

Contact/Follow us @LSUTigersWire on Twitter, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Louisiana State news, notes, and opinions.

Pat McAfee would do well by just saying sorry and shutting up about Caitlin Clark and his WNBA hot takes

Pat McAfee just needs to say sorry and shut up about Caitlin Clark and his WNBA hot takes.

On Tuesday, ESPN broadcast personality Pat McAfee turned his on-air apology for calling Indiana Fever rookie guard Caitlin Clark a “white [expletive]” into a confusing stammer where he tried to say he was being complimentary … and how it’s possible he was being racist towards a white person because he’s a part Italian.

McAfee’s ramble of a response immediately reminds you a quote given by the great Michael Scott: “Sometimes, I’ll start a sentence, and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way like an improv conversation. An improversation.”

It’s hard not to think about one of the more cringy episodes of The Office when watching McAfee’s perplexing apology, one where the former NFL punter looks visibly uncomfortable to the point of sweating bullets and speeds through any number of conflicting ideas like a dog with the zoomies.

He says he reached out to Clark via the Fever and that the two are A-OK, but he also refuses to acknowledge that maybe the hot takes that surrounded the expletive might’ve been a bit misinformed and irresponsible.

This comes the night after McAfee used roughly the same ugly phrase he got in trouble for while calling a professional wrestling match and the afternoon after he tweeted an apology that read more like a Dril tweet than something crafted by a crisis PR firm.

Rather than just say, “my bad, I really didn’t mean it, let me educate myself and do better,” McAfee seems both willing and unwilling to humble himself to an embarrassing mistake and just move on. It’s a confusing paradox.

It’s a bit more amicable than Stephen A. Smith’s utter refusal to cop to the reasonable idea that First Take might not have been fully interested in covering the WNBA in the past, but it still feels hesitant to fully own the totality of the mistake and anxious to get on with the rest of the “progrum.”

McAfee is trapped, like us all, in a constant feedback loop that requires the loudest voices in the “Embrace Debate” sports media room to chirp in on whatever is going viral in the world because that’s what drives viewership, listenership, clicks, shares, all that fun.

As one of ESPN’s flagship talents, he’s basically stuck puffing out his chest and bellowing out whatever he’s capable of opining in the most sensational fashion because that’s what his audience expects.

Like many people who are just now tuning in to the WNBA, McAfee stumbled into the discourse, wholly unprepared to deal with the difficult conversation about Clark’s arrival and her run-in with Chicago Sky veteran Chennedy Carter.

ESPN’s Monday featured discussions on the Clark/Carter hard foul featured the best and worst that comes with discussing sensitive topics like this, with the best of it coming from people who have a firm grasp on the nuances of the WNBA and a level-headed approach to how those nuances interact with each other. McAfee found himself looking like the court jester.

McAfee’s Monday blindfolded belly flop into the Clark discourse did speak to an unsubtle truth about what happened over the weekend on the hard foul. Most people found Carter’s move unnecessary, but McAfee cracked open the ugly angle to this that white audiences feel Clark is being treated unfairly because she’s white, and the rest of the WNBA should just be grateful she’s there and bringing in all the money and eyeballs. It’s icky and unhelpful.

Very thoughtful, emotionally honest responses from ESPN talents like Monica McNutt, Elle Duncan, Chiney Ogwumike and Rebecca Lobo did a much, much, much better job actually dealing with the nuances of the situation than McAfee’s ill-informed grievance politics.

There was an earnest influx of perspectives between those four women, ranging from an acknowledgement of Clark’s justified popularity and the vital need for other women in the WNBA to be respected in how they’ve propped up the league. They were able to grapple with how Carter’s move was unnecessary, but also not the end of the world, not all that uncommon with the WNBA’s past or indicative of how the rest of the league operates.

McNutt’s comments hit particularly hard, arguing that Clark’s arrival may well cause some jealousy and frustration, if only because people are human and the women who have built the league up for the past few decades might feel a little understandable resentment to the gobs of endorsement deals and fawning that Clark received before even stepping on an WNBA court.

All of them gave Clark her very deserved flowers while discussing all the complicated variables in this situation with class and grace and treating all of its players fairly and with proper context.

Our sports media atmosphere, of which McAfee has skyrocketed to the summit, is not built for these types of conversations, if only because they’re typically dominated by uninformed men parroting the same, tired ideas because that’s what their general audience is used to hearing.

ESPN would be wise to continue to amplify women, women with WNBA experience in particular, to discuss Clark, particularly because they’re much more capable of nuance, empathy and brutal honesty than the folks who started watching WNBA social media clips a month ago.

However, we’re stuck with McAfee, and he’s stuck talking about things he doesn’t fully understand. We don’t need his show cancelled and his career ended when he screws up; we just need him to understand the gravity of his platform and do a much better job.

For McAfee, apologizing means listening and actually growing past your mistake. Trying to villainize him doesn’t help; he’s clearly at least somewhat remorseful for what happened and clearly worried about the pushback from his jughead broadcast flub.

If he’s genuinely remorseful for what happened, he needs to just say he’s sorry and let smarter people than him educate him on how to do better in the future. For once, the loudest guy in the room would do well by just saying sorry and shutting up.

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The WNBA predictably fumbled everything about its charter flight rollout

The WNBA failed loudly.

The more updates about the WNBA’s full-time charter flight program are released, the worse the league looks.

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s reported explanation for why only two teams had charter flights to start the 2024 season is nonsensical, and deserves some scrutiny.

With tremendous investment flowing in, and record-breaking viewership numbers to see the WNBA’s best, the league had a chance to do something special by announcing a full-time charter flight program. Instead, the rollout has been predictably flawed.

Per Annie Costabile of the Chicago Sun-Times, after reports surfaced that only the Indiana Fever and Minnesota Lynx would receive charter flights to open the season, Engelbert held a town hall with players to address questions and concerns. She reportedly revealed that some teams received flights because they had special considerations, like time zones or travel that typically requires multiple flights:

“Flights that are across the country like [the Lynx] going to Seattle, crossing multiple time zones, or flights that usually require a connection, those were the priorities,” Sky center Elizabeth Williams told the Sun-Times. “That’s why New York didn’t go to D.C. with a charter, but Minny goes to Seattle.”

All of this would make sense except that the Atlanta Dream — who traveled multiple time zones and potentially needed a connecting flight to get to their season opener in Los Angeles — were left out of the equation.

The math does not add up to anything except the WNBA underestimating the impact of this patchwork rollout.

Imagine if instead of blurting out the news at a conference for sports editors and reporters, Engelbert and its airline partners held a formal press conference with all the bells and whistles, including a tour of the planes teams would be flying in. It could have been planned for exposure and positive press once the details were all ironed out.

Even a social media campaign capitalizing on top players’ excitement and reactions would have been great. Imagine A’ja Wilson walking off a charter flight saying that was “top-tier!” or Cameron Brink saying she was so thankful to have room to stretch out. The tremendous content from the campaign could have been utilized to help support the announcement.

On the internal side, communications could have been deployed to general managers, staff members and players with an estimated timeline that properly sets expectations and includes a frequently asked questions reference sheet in addition to the town hall. Regular touchpoints could have also been planned to update the entire league if anything had changed or if any feedback had been implemented.

Instead, this feels like a jigsaw rollout that reeks of caving to pressure to get this program out the door sooner. It’s so bad that multiple players — including the WNBA’s 2023 MVP, Breanna Stewart — have already shared how they wish everyone could simultaneously participate in the charter flight program.

Frankly, the program shouldn’t have been announced if it wasn’t possible for the whole league. It’s hazardous to the WNBA’s brand to unveil a program at a fraction of capacity because charter flights were already an issue that needed to be resolved sooner. It has to be enacted with precision. There is no other choice.

It’s embarrassing for a league with so much good to offer the world to have this happening while its top-notch athletes finally get the flowers they deserve from the public.

For goodness’ sake, WNBA, pull it together. Your players deserve that.

The NFL is giving primetime audiences a front row seat to the end of Aaron Rodgers

Good or bad, the Jets are a cash cow to the NFL.

The NFL thought it struck gold last year when Aaron Rodgers signed with the New York Jets. Then his season lasted just four total snaps because of an Achilles tear. In the aftermath, the league was left holding the bag, having built a primetime schedule around the future Hall of Famer playing in Gang Green’s uniform.

After the league released the 2024 schedule, one thing remains abundantly clear: Come hell or high water, the NFL will still milk Rodgers’ Jets in any way it can.

Three NFL teams currently have six primetime slots in 2024.

The Dallas Cowboys (unsurprising, this will never change). The San Francisco 49ers (they play in the NFC title game every year and are a juggernaut). And the Jets because … of Rodgers.

That’s right. The Jets have more primetime games on their current schedule than the two-time reigning Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, the league’s unofficial trojan horse for some of its worst, more exploitative broadcasting ideas. According to NFL VP of broadcasting Mike North, this was apparently the plan all along. After last season’s disappointment, the league just felt Rodgers and the Jets owed them one.

Uh, sure:

What’s more, the league is open to flexing the Jets into more national television slots in the second half of the season! Gee, what a shocker:

Not only do the Jets have a whopping six primetime games, but those slots all come in the first 11 weeks, largely before networks are really earnest about flex scheduling. Not that anyone would ever flex out of having 40-year-old Rodgers on, who is probably at the end of his NFL career.

That’s precisely why the league has front-loaded the Jets’ schedule while leaving the door open for more. Either Rodgers plays like an MVP-caliber quarterback, dazzling football fans everywhere — something he hasn’t done in three years, and that was when he was healthy — or he looks washed-up. Everyone then gets a front-row seat to watch his inevitable demise as a pro football player.

There’s simply no in-between here.

Now, let me ask you, dearest readers, Which scenario do you think is more likely?

Is it that Rodgers throws 40-plus touchdowns on a contending Jets team coming off one of the worst possible athletic injuries, period, let alone for someone who is 40? Or do we see an older Rodgers get beat up every week on a top-heavy Jets squad that is just crossing its fingers he’ll last the entire season?

There’s probably some mass appeal of tuning in to watch a frustrated Rodgers get pummeled for one more year before he retreats into one of his dark caves.

The NFL, to be clear, doesn’t care either way. Rodgers on the Jets likely equals tons of eyeballs as long as he’s on the field.

The WNBA doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to charter flights

Why should we believe what Cathy Engelbert says when it comes to charter flights and the WNBA?

Charter flights have long been a problem for the WNBA. Specifically, the lack of them and why teams aren’t allowed to use them on a regular basis, like just about every other professional sports league in the U.S.

And that history is part of the reason why the WNBA doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt now, as the league says it will start regularly using charter flights “as soon as [it] can.”

Players repeatedly have shared stories about the inconveniences of flying commercial — from not having enough space in seats as players fold themselves in half to being harassed in airports or being stranded for hours due to flight delays. In 2018, a game between the Las Vegas Aces and Washington Mystics was canceled because of travel woes.

This is something that simply does not happen in the 21st century in the NFL, MLB, NHL or NBA. Most Power Five women’s college basketball programs charter flights for games that are out of their state. When most players leave college for the WNBA, travel often becomes more complicated.

Charter flights became more of a public headache for the WNBA two years ago. Casual fans and folks in the mainstream media took notice in March 2022, when Howard Megdal reported a story for Sports Illustrated about the New York Liberty’s owners providing charters for the team for the second half of the 2021 season. Seen as a competitive advantage for the Liberty, the franchise was fined a league-record $500,000. The WNBA even threatened to take draft picks from the Liberty and terminate the franchise. Seriously.

This tug-of-war between owners who are forward-thinking and willing to spend and those of the old guard became even more complicated during the 2023 playoffs, when it appeared that the league’s promise at the 2023 draft of “charter flights for all postseason games” didn’t totally hold true. Also, during the 2023 season, All-Star Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner was harassed at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport just months after being freed from unlawful detainment in a Russian prison.

Last week, talk of charter flights bubbled up again when the Indiana Fever and stars Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston arrived in Dallas and were met with paparazzi-like attention as people followed them through the airport — by baggage claim and all — snapping photos and taking videos.

This long preamble — a necessary one to understand the excruciating recent history of the saga surrounding charter flights in the 28-year-old women’s professional basketball league — sets up what happened Tuesday, when WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert blurted out to a room of sports editors in New York that charter flights are coming to the WNBA “as soon as we can get the planes in place.”

Sure. Great. Awesome. In my best Anakin-Skywalker-goes-pod-racing voice, “Yippee!”

But what does that mean? The regular season starts in literally one week. What’s the plan?

(A brief aside here: The WNBA continues to have a problem with disseminating meaningful information, from timing to forum to who that news is dispensed through. Why was an announcement like this made at an Associated Press Sports Editors meeting a week before the season starts? Why wasn’t a press release ready to go? Why wasn’t a formal press conference scheduled? Why wasn’t this made into an event? The way it all unfolded reeked of unpreparedness, which is, unfortunately, something people who cover the WNBA can say about it far too often.)

About two hours after folks started tweeting about Engelbert claims, the Associated Press published a story that offered some details but left a lot of questions unanswered too.

Let’s break it down.

“We intend to fund a full-time charter for this season,” Engelbert said Tuesday in a meeting with sports editors.

OK. How?

She said the league will launch the program “as soon as we can get planes in places.”

Sure. How long does it take to do that?

Engelbert said the program will cost the league around $25 million per year for the next two seasons.

Alrighty. Who is paying for that? Furthermore, if it’s only $25 million per year — which equates to a bit more $2 million for each owner — why has this taken so long? For most professional sports owners, that’s pocket change.

USA TODAY had more. Here’s Engelbert again:

“We’re going to as soon as we can get it up and running. Maybe it’s a couple weeks, maybe it’s a month … We are really excited for the prospects here.”

A couple weeks? A month? Which is it? What are we doing here?

Charter flights coming to the WNBA is, of course, great news and long overdue, but fans and folks following the league shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate something that seemingly has no implementation plan.

In its history, the WNBA has rarely done the right thing at the right time when it comes to players’ travel. We shouldn’t be giving Engelbert and the league the benefit of the doubt that Clark, A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart will be flying charter regularly within the next month. Simply put, Engelbert and the league have not earned that. Everything the WNBA says around charter flights should be treated with a grain of salt until players are traveling that way on a regular basis.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

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NFL is paywalling the Eagles season opener and a playoff game on streaming because it knows you’ll pay, sucker

The NFL’s calculus shows, when it comes to fan interest, the limit does not exist.

The NFL season will kick off with a rare Friday night game and an even rarer trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Philadelphia Eagles will face a yet-unnamed opponent — rumored to be either the Cleveland Browns, Atlanta Falcons or Green Bay Packers — in the southern hemisphere as the league makes its first official trip below of the equator.

That game won’t be on CBS or Fox, however. In fact, it won’t be broadcast on basic or premium cable anywhere. Like last year’s Wild Card game between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs, that showdown will be exclusively shown on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock.

It’s not the only important game to get paywalled this year.

There is no way around this; this sucks. While Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football broadcasts have added value to the game with clear images, alternate telecasts and advanced stats, Peacock’s live streams are laggy, blurry and generally feel like a pilot program from 2015. January’s Wild Card game was like watching on tape delay, as gamecasts and tweets suggested the stream itself was two to three plays behind the live action at Arrowhead Stadium throughout the evening.

This isn’t just an issue regarding Peacock’s increasingly desperate attempts to gain an audience and correct a product that has hemorrhaged money since its inception. It’s another example of the NFL’s never-ending quest to wring every last drop of cash from its fan base.

A Friday night game is the latest experiment to prove a theory that has perpetually been proven right; fans will consume high quality pro football whenever, wherever and pay for the right to do so. Moving that game overseas allows the league to sidestep any antitrust concerns about competing with high school or college football since, hey, it’s not being held on American soil. Putting it on Peacock, with its penchant for unresponsive playback controls and streaming quality so inconsistent you’ll swear you’re watching on a Super Nintendo, only furthers that.

This moves empowers Prime Video as well. Maybe you felt comfortable skipping out on the traditionally underwhelming Thursday Night Football slate expensively acquired by the e-commerce giant two years ago — local games still get local broadcasts after all. Now you’re now faced with the loss of a playoff game if you don’t sign up. While the NFL won’t see any immediate cash from these newfound subscriptions, they’ll be a massive selling point the next time the league’s broadcast rights go up for sale.

The fact this all happened in the same wave of announcements that included the NFL’s intent to run a Wednesday doubleheader on Christmas day this winter — roughly three months after saying 2023’s Christmas slate was a one-off — was beautiful symmetry. Commissioner Roger Goodell extends his reach every year, waiting for the moment it exceeds his grasp. Every year, he grabs onto whatever goal he’s set and shakes as much cash as he can. Last year’s Peacock-exclusive Wild Card game was the most streamed event in American history and made up an estimated 30 percent of internet traffic that Saturday.

The NFL is forever in the midst of a calculus problem, only to find out the limit does not exist. It can attempt to pry Christmas from the NBA and make you pay to select Jacksonville Jaguars vs. Tennessee Titans from the same menu that includes all seven seasons of Bosch because no one has told the league it can’t. No matter how annoying this all is, it’s football.

We’ll still set viewership records even when the game is available exclusively through the Words With Friends app. We’ll stare down the television and clandestinely check our fantasy teams from the dining room table on holidays because there’s no one-step untangling of the game from our lives at this point.

So, yes, no one outside of a few select board rooms was asking for more games to be paywalled. And, yes, this stinks for the fans — especially the ones who lack the bandwidth to stream a game beyond the fuzziest of resolutions. But the NFL has no intention of leaving cash on the table, even if it means sacrificing quality along the way. Hell, that’s how we ended up with Fanatics as the league’s official apparel provider.

The NFL won’t stop pressing forward until it finds the limit where frustration overcomes quality. Maybe 2024 will be the boundary. But based on how successful the league’s last two forays into paywalled streaming have been, I doubt it.

The NFL’s response to the players’ union on banning hip-drop tackles shows it’s only pretending to listen

The NFL barely even tries to pretend it cares about players.

The NFL has embarked on a “righteous” crusade to remove “hip-drop tackles” from the professional game. And come hell or high water, league higher-ups will do everything in their power to manifest a ban.

Even ignoring what people most affected are saying.

On Wednesday, the NFL Players Association released a strong statement concerning the league competition committee’s steadfast fervor in excising the hip-drop tackle. While noting that the players appreciate any edicts that seemingly try to improve their safety, the NFLPA maintains they believe a hip-drop tackle ban is too confusing and too broadly-interpreted for themselves, coaches, referees, and fans.

Even for an imperfect union like the NFLPA, you’d have to try really hard to find a loophole in a statement that effectively represents the wishes of players. In fact, you’d probably have to gloss over its language entirely to diminish what it said.

Well, about that:

On Thursday, according to NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo, NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent had thoughts about the NFLPA’s feedback on a proposed hip-drop tackle ban.

To say a league stooge like Vincent was paying thinly-veiled, patronizing lip service to active players would be an understatement. It’d be akin to noting that grass is green, water is wet, and the caffeine in coffee helps jolt people awake in the morning:

I’m aghast, and I don’t even know where to truly begin.

Vincent’s response is what someone sends as a cookie-cutter professional email for the bare minimum necessary to ensure a paycheck is still directly deposited into their bank account. Noting that you “welcome player feedback” and that you’ve spoken to (unnamed and unspecified) legends of the game only to return back to a diatribe about hip-drops being a “style of play” that needs to go is insulting.

It’s essentially Vincent and the league saying, “We see you, we hear you, but we still don’t care.”

It’s hard to pinpoint why the league is hellbent on, once again, baking in a layer of confusion over an issue that doesn’t appear to be that big of a problem. (And, quite honestly, it is most often incidental.)

When it says that the injury rate is 20-25 percent higher on hip-drops compared to other tackles, where is that data coming from? Why is that being cited out of the blue as a data point that is empirical and easily understood? Who conducted the study? How were hip-drop tackles defined? Can you please show me any aspect of your work? We shouldn’t have to ask a multi-billion dollar football empire a common question that a fifth-grade math teacher asks of a 10-year-old child. But here we are.

When the league says that 105 tackles of the 20,000 reviewed over the last two seasons were of a hip-drop variety, that doesn’t demonstrate this being something that must be addressed. For you math majors out there, 105 tackles of 20,000 is just over half a single percentage point. Half … of a single … percentage point. Everyone hold onto your butts. A play that almost never happens must be legislated out of the game!

Again, why is this a grand problem the NFL needs to usher in while plugging in its ears, saying “la-la-la-la-la-la,” and pretending the players aren’t expressing dismay?

I have a good, very educated guess.

Banning the hip drop isn’t about improving player safety at all. It’s about the league finding another avenue to streamline and protect its financial investment in offensive players. Even if that comes at the expense of the quality of the game or what the players themselves actually desire, the NFL wants to eliminate all contingencies to protect its broadcast, fantasy, and betting money — the talented offensive players who light up NFL RedZone every Sunday. I can think of many, much more efficient ways to improve NFL player safety — as much as one feasibly can in a brutal sport like football — before I ever even entertain the subject of hip-drop tackles. That should tell you everything you need to know.

This is virtually the league’s skill-player version of the old rule that bans hits on quarterbacks below the knee. And, if passed, it will be applied in the same byzantine manner. The NFL doesn’t care that defenders will struggle to adjust. You either eat the flag and fine in a situation that often isn’t even in your control, or you simply can’t be part of the fun anymore. Because it’s not about the defense or sanctity of the sport, and it never was.

I vehemently disagree with this clear business decision. But I’d at least have some measure of respect for the NFL if it didn’t pretend that banning the hip-drop tackle was about anything but protecting a fraction of its financial coffers.