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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏀 CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery unveiled their announcing teams for the 2025 NCAA Tournament with the big news being the addition of Jalen Rose to the broadcast crew. And those network executives also spoke about potential tournament expansion and don’t seem too enthused about the prospect.

🤔 Stephen A. Smith is offering as many explanations for his confrontation with LeBron James as he is opinions on running for president.

💰 In what is simultaneously the weirdest and yet most totally believable story that we’ve seen in some time, Dave Portnoy says Donald Trump offered him a government position in the Commerce Department. But it never came to pass.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Is golf stymied?

When it comes to the years-long quagmire that is professional golf, Tuesday was one of the most fascinating days that we’ve seen in some time. It started with optimism when PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan definitively stated that he and the tour were working towards reunification with LIV Golf during a press conference at the Players Championship. After a lengthy stalemate, fans are ready to put golf’s great chasm behind them and this seemed like a note that signaled real progress… or at least hope for progress.

“While we’ve removed some hurdles, others remain. But like our fans, we still share the same sense of urgency to get to a resolution. Our team is fully committed to reunification,” Monahan said.

Then the other shoe dropped.

Former Masters champion Adam Scott, who has helped to lead the diplomatic envoy from the PGA Tour side struck a much different tone at a press conference of his own, saying a deal may never happen.

“The Tour’s being very careful and respectful of everyone and wanting to give everyone, the golf fans and the media and the players, the product that they want. But we’re starting from two different sides of this, so I think it’s hard to find the balance that’s acceptable for everybody. And it also may not be ultimately possible,” Scott said.

If you have a long memory, you may recall that the PGA Tour and Saudi Public Investment Fund originally announced a merger to reunite professional golf all the way back in June 2023. Unfortunately for fans hoping to finally see golf’s biggest names back together, that deal has been the Caddyshack II of mergers. Maybe that’s offensive to Caddyshack II, at least that made it to theaters.

The PGA Tour has all of the marketshare, but knows that the product is missing many of its top stars. Nevertheless, they’ve used the pressure from LIV to move forward in pledging to be more innovative, more fan friendly, and certainly more player friendly by drastically increasing purse sizes and establishing signature events. They’re simultaneously signaling they want a deal, but are also ready to dig in. After frets about declining ratings and interest, those numbers have bounced back this year.

On the other hand, LIV Golf has several hundred more billion dollars to burn on talent while they still remain an afterthought on the national sports scene. Their ratings or business success is truly irrelevant in their overall endeavor. They’ve succeeded in poaching top stars, built a worldwide league from the ground up, and shown the world that sportswashing works. The PGA Tour will never be able to fully squeeze them out.

They say the worst miss in golf is the two-way miss. You can play for a draw, you can play for a cut, but you can’t play for both. And that may best describe where we are at in professional golf. The two sides have gone in such different directions that the LIV-PGA Tour divide may just be too wide to cross.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Whatever you do, don’t talk to Tiki Barber about tanking. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even consider thinking about it. Don’t even ponder the notion of considering thinking about it.

How many times has Shannon Sharpe tried to kiss a girl through a screen door to come up with this analogy live on national television when talking about Mike Tomlin?

Forgive us for thinking that this is a bit over the top. Signing Juan Soto was a big deal. But the Mets could have saved a lot of time and energy putting a whole documentary together about it that hypes it up like it’s The Dark Knight and just shown a slide that says $765,000,000.

🔦 IN THE SPOTLIGHT ☀️

It’s a brand new era for WWE and Netflix when Monday Night Raw airs next week live from Belgium at 3 p.m. ET start time. While a start time adjustment for one weekly show might not seem like a big deal, it’s actually a huge sign of the new era of entertainment. A Monday afternoon start time is something that never could have happened on linear television and plays to WWE’s global audience all at the same time. And the good news for WWE fans stateside is it’ll be there on demand the rest of the day so they won’t even have to set their DVRs.

🏄 CHANNEL SURFING 🌊 

✍️ Former ESPN exec and current Endeavor president Mark Shapiro talked to Front Office Sports about the launch and original vision of Around the Horn.

🗣️ Rich Paul appeared on The Pat McAfee Show and opened up on the current state of the NBA from the face of the league discussion to the confrontation between business partner LeBron James and Stephen A. Smith.

🎙️ Dan Wetzel said goodbye to his Yahoo colleagues on the College Football Enquirer podcast ahead of his high profile move to ESPN.

📺 DATA DUMP 📺 

🏀 The NBA scored its most watched regular season game in seven years (outside of Christmas Day) for the Lakers-Celtics primetime game last Saturday on ABC at 4.61 million viewers.

🏀 Not to be outdone on the college side, ESPN posted its most watched Saturday of college hoops in three years, headlined by Duke-UNC at 3 million viewers. And the women’s game drew strong Championship Week ratings of their own.

🏎️ Christopher Bell’s third straight NASCAR win was Fox’s most watched race on FS1 since 2021 at 2.8 million viewers.

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Goodbye Tiger?

The other big news that happened on Tuesday in the golf world was another devastating injury for Tiger Woods.

Woods posted on his social media platforms that while getting in shape for the 2025 major season, he tore his achilles tendon, and has already undergone surgery. While Tiger did not share any timetable for his recovery, we know how challenging achilles injuries are across sports. And given how much trauma his body has been through already, it’s worth asking if the end of his professional golfing career is here.

Woods undoubtedly will miss out on the four majors this year and likely not play a competitive PGA Tour event in 2025. And while it will place a serious cloud over the PGA Tour season, especially the major championships, the truth is that Woods has not been a contender since his stunning 2019 Masters victory. In the years since, he has missed the cut seven times, withdrawn twice, and has zero Top 20 finishes in majors. Since his 2021 car accident, he has played in 10 tournaments with his best finish being a T45.

His focus now surely will be getting ready for the 2026 TGL season next winter. While Woods and his team were just 1-4 and missed the playoffs, it was the only way to watch arguably the greatest ever to play the sport. And that may sadly be true moving forward. TGL has been a great success story in its first campaign, and if it’s the only place to see Tiger Woods play golf for the foreseeable future, then it will certainly have a long-term selling point.

But on a day in which golf’s future appears to be cloudier than ever, the sport also has to grapple with the very real possibility that we may never see its greatest superstar compete at a top level ever again. And it will only increase the pressure on the powers that be in professional golf to figure out their future sooner rather than later.