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⚖️ Goodell addresses Epstein files. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the league will investigate Giants owner Steve Tisch's appearance in newly released Jeffrey Epstein documents, which revealed exchanges where Epstein scouted women for Tisch in 2013.

🤐 Iger dodges NFL questions. Disney CEO Bob Iger refused to discuss ESPN's future relationship with the NFL following news that the league's 10% equity stake in the network closed over the weekend.

💰 $47M on announcer bets. Kalshi traders staked more than $47 million on NFL announcer mention markets this season, betting on everything from whether Mike Tirico will say "Taylor Swift" to injury-related terminology, with Super Bowl markets potentially hitting eight figures.

📺 Main Street exodus continues. Six more MLB teams departed Main Street Sports as the RSN operator faces potential Chapter 7 bankruptcy, bringing the total to nine teams abandoning ship, with the Brewers, Marlins, Rays, Royals, Cardinals, and Reds taking their rights in-house with MLB.

✂️ ALLCITY cuts again. ALLCITY Network eliminated all newsletters and reduced baseball coverage in its second round of layoffs since December, hitting Philadelphia, Dallas, and Chicago particularly hard, just 13 months after CEO Brandon Spano said shows needed to be profitable within 18 months.

⚾ Braves going solo. Atlanta is expected to launch its own network following the Rangers Sports Network model after leaving Main Street Sports, though spring training starting in a month creates a tight timeline for negotiating carriage deals and setting up production infrastructure.

📺 Guthrie out for Olympics. Today anchor Savannah Guthrie pulled out of NBC's Winter Olympics coverage after her mother was reported missing near Tucson over the weekend. Guthrie was scheduled to co-host Friday's Opening Ceremony for the fourth time in her career and host Today on location in Milan-Cortina.

Every year, people lose their minds over the Super Bowl halftime show. Every year, people treat 15 minutes on a Sunday evening in early February as if it were something it isn't. A moral statement. A cultural referendum. A celebration of specific values. A representation of what America should be.

It's none of those things. It never has been. And treating it as it should be misses the entire point of halftime shows.

The Super Bowl halftime show exists for one reason: to prevent people from changing the channel during a break in the action. That's it. Performers might incorporate their identity or make statements through their art, but the sweeping cultural and moral panic people attach to it goes far beyond anything the NFL or the performers are actually trying to convey.

What looks like a culture war is really just trying to keep people from switching to Netflix during commercial breaks. The halftime show is a practical solution to a practical problem. Football games have mandatory breaks. During those breaks, people get up, use the bathroom, get food, and flip to other channels. The longer the break, the more likely people are to find something else to watch and not come back. The NFL needs to keep viewers engaged during a 12- to 25-minute intermission when nothing football-related is happening.

So they book the biggest possible star who can put on a compelling spectacle. The calculation is simple: Is this person famous enough and talented enough to keep 120 million people watching? Bad Bunny — Spotify's most-streamed artist in 2025 with nearly 20 billion streams, the first Spanish-language artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys, someone who already performed at a Super Bowl halftime show in 2020 — absolutely is.

The complaints about Bad Bunny's "character and morality" would be ridiculous in any context, but they're especially ridiculous coming from an anonymous player in a league that spent decades covering up sexual assault allegations, downplaying domestic violence arrests, fighting concussion research, and generally protecting its business interests over player safety or moral accountability.

But even setting aside the source, the complaint itself reveals that the general public truly has no idea what halftime performers are being hired to do. They're not being hired to model good behavior or represent American values. They're being hired to sing songs people know while millions of people eat chicken wings and wait for the second half to start. Evaluating Bad Bunny on "character and morality" makes as much sense as evaluating Gatorade on whether it promotes family values. That's not what it's for.

There are many bad-faith actors who treat the halftime show as if it's meant to teach or represent something beyond entertainment. It's not. Bad Bunny isn't going to tell kids what to believe. He's going to perform "Un x100to" and "Monaco" for 15 minutes while grown adults in football jerseys argue on social media about whether Puerto Ricans singing in Spanish constitutes an attack on American culture.

Take Kendrick Lamar's performance at Super Bowl LIX, which drew 125 FCC complaints. People were outraged about racial commentary, gang references, and Lamar performing his Drake diss track "Not Like Us." One person filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission claiming Lamar made "fake, false, and scandalous claims" by suggesting Drake was a pedophile "in front of millions of ppl." An adult human filed that complaint with enough wherewithal to navigate federal government websites but not enough to understand that Kendrick Lamar's job at the Super Bowl was to perform popular songs, not serve as a moral arbiter for children.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection tracked water usage during Lamar's performance and found 558,594 fewer toilet flushes than during the first half of the game. People stayed in their seats. They watched. That's what the halftime show is supposed to accomplish. Everything else — the complaints about content, the outrage about messaging, the hand-wringing about impressionable children — is noise generated by people who refuse to accept that entertainment doesn't always have to be for them.

The halftime show has to be big enough to keep 120 million people watching but bland enough not to offend anyone. It has to feature globally relevant stars, but only those who represent "American values," whatever that means. It has to be culturally significant while remaining culturally neutral. These requirements contradict each other, which means someone will always be mad about whoever gets selected.

The NFL knows this. They book massive stars anyway because keeping eyeballs on screens matters more than avoiding complaints from people who are going to watch regardless. Bad Bunny will perform for 120 million people. Kid Rock will perform for however many people bother streaming Turning Point USA's YouTube channel. Both shows will accomplish their actual goals — the NFL will keep viewers from changing channels, and TPUSA will collect donations from people who believe they're fighting cultural decay.

And next year, we'll do this all over again with whoever Jay-Z picks. We’ve been doing it for more than two decades now, anyway.

The Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake "Nipplegate" incident in 2004 became the most-searched news item in internet history. The FCC received hundreds of complaints. CBS was fined $550,000. The fallout changed how the NFL approached halftime shows for years. All of this happened because a fraction of a second of breast was visible during a performance watched by 90 million people. The reaction wasn't proportional to what happened. It was proportional to what people thought the halftime show was supposed to be — family-friendly, wholesome, appropriate for children — and how much the incident violated those expectations.

But the halftime show was never designed to be any of those things. It was designed to keep adults watching television during a football game. The fact that children also watch the Super Bowl doesn't change the halftime showis purpose. It just means people projected expectations onto it that it was never built to fulfill.

Bad Bunny will perform at Super Bowl LX. He'll sing songs in Spanish and English. He'll probably reference Puerto Rican culture. He might mention immigration or ICE, the topics that got him labeled as controversial in the first place. And none of it will be a political statement, a cultural threat, or an attack on American values.

The people who claim they're offended will watch anyway. They'll all watch because the halftime show isn't actually for them or against them. It's just there, filling time between when the teams go to the locker room and when they come back out.

That's all it's ever been. The sooner people understand that, the sooner they can stop being mad about entertainment that was never designed to do anything other than keep them from changing the channel.

On the latest edition of The Play-By-Play, Ben Axelrod and Brendon Kleen go over the storylines that everybody in sports media will be talking about ahead of Super Bowl LX this Sunday, Feb. 8, in Santa Clara, California.

"This was a storyline outside of the building, not inside it." - The Athletic's Dianna Russini dismissing rumors that Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah's 2023 paternity leave contributed to his firing, clarifying Minnesota supported him through the process despite it being "uncommon" in the NFL for executives to take time away for childbirth.

"I shouldn't say that. Erase that." - Tennessee coach Rick Barnes jokingly questioned whether his players are betting on games after they stopped attacking the rim late against Auburn.

"The way he's able to handle the basketball. He makes big shots when the shot clock's running down." - NBC's Reggie Miller comparing Caitlin Clark to Payton Pritchard.

"I don't think we can ever truly have any measure of solution on this until we are more honest on who the issue is." - ESPN's Bomani Jones defending the Rooney Rule on The Right Time, arguing the problem isn't the policy but the owners who refuse to seriously consider minority candidates.

"We still have more work to do. We're reevaluating everything." - NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, addressing an offseason hiring cycle that saw zero Black coaches hired among 10 head coaching vacancies, promising to examine why the Rooney Rule and diversity initiatives failed to produce different outcomes.

"The wonder is, did he not make this team because the coaches didn't vote for him because of the accusations of the improper contract?" - ESPN's Brian Windhorst, suggesting NBA coaches excluded Kawhi Leonard from the All-Star team over the Clippers' ongoing Aspiration Bank contract scandal.

"Um, no!" - ESPN's Seth Wickersham pushing back on former Seahawks QB Brock Huard's claim that the Patriots leaked news of Seattle's impending sale as a "distraction tactic" before the Super Bowl, defending his reporting on ownership plans that have been public knowledge since Paul Allen's death.

Bill Belichick didn't make the Pro Football Hall of Fame on his first ballot. At least one voter chose Robert Kraft instead.

Awful Announcing's Demetri Ravanos argues there's no case for any team owner to be enshrined in any sport's hall of fame, breaking down why sacrifice, impact, and ego make owners fundamentally different from the players and coaches who actually built dynasties:

The job of a team owner is to get out of the team's way. Kraft has been amongst the best at that. He has made enough money so that his four sons never have to work if they don't want to. Their kids don't have to work if they don't want to. That's the reward!

Click to read more on why people who cover the sport should be smarter than to consider billionaires worthy of hall of fame induction.