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💰 Opt-out overdrive. The opt-out clause in the NFL’s current media deals comes up in 2029, but according to Puck’s John Ourand, the league wants those deals renegotiated and started by the start of the 2026 season. Paramount Skydance and CBS Sports, you’re on the clock.

🏈 Schefter v. Florio. The public feud between ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter and NBC’s Mike Florio over Schefter’s strange reporting around Carnell Tate’s 40 time entered Day 4 on Thursday, with the ESPN reporter throwing shots at Florio on The Pat McAfee Show and the Pro Football Talk editor responding in kind.

🏀 Hoops hub. According to a report by Tom Friend in Sports Business Journal on Thursday, the NBA is reportedly “in talks” with YouTube TV, Amazon, ESPN, and DAZN to serve as an aggregated hub of local game broadcasts for in-market viewing as early as next season. Puck’s John Ourand first reported similar talks last month.

🚩 Flag pickup. The Fanatics Flag Football Classic was originally scheduled for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 21, but amid mounting global tensions and rising regional war in the area, a move to the United States is increasingly likely, according to Front Office Sports.

🎥 CBS’s ESPN affinity. After reports surfaced earlier this week that Bari Weiss had “repeatedly” discussed hiring former SportsCenter anchor Sage Steele as a co-host on CBS Mornings, it looks like Weiss is more seriously considering a different former ESPN anchor. According to a report by Natalie Korach in Status, there is “serious interest” in hiring Josh Elliott as a possible third host for the show alongside Gayle King and Nate Burleson, both of whom will seemingly stay with the network.

⚽ FIFull of it. Soccer prides itself on a continuous flow of action over the course of 90 minutes. However, that will come to a screeching halt during this summer’s FIFA World Cup throughout North America. FIFA has now given broadcasters the green light to use three-minute hydration breaks midway through each half as space to sell commercials.

As I navigate my mid-to-late 40s, I am by all accounts a man of a certain age. Not so old that the world has passed me by, but old enough to know I’m not the target audience anymore.

As such, I’ve been noticing a morbid trend recently where people who were seminal bedrocks of the world as I’ve always known it have been dying. Most of this has been occurring in the world of pop culture, where the familiar faces who set the benchmark for what I learned were how comedy, drama, storytelling, and entertainment worked, have been moving on with what feels like an alarming regularity.

Catherine O’Hara’s passing was a tough blow. Raised on ‘SCTV’ reruns and a diehard fan of Christopher Guest mockumentaries (Waiting for Guffman has long been one of my favorites), she was a comedy icon.

Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman, two rock-solid cinematic presences so ingrained in my understanding of cinema that it was as if the artform hadn’t existed before them.

As a child of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, you could make the case that Rob Reiner's movies were a constant throughline, and have remained so.

Val Kilmer headlines some of the films I’ve watched most in my lifetime (Real Genius, Tombstone, Heat).

Diane Keaton and Robert Redford were not my generation’s Hollywood icons, but I understood them to be timeless and eternal.

Even iconic “that guy” actors like Graham Greene, George Wendt, Harris Yulin, Joe Don Baker, Udo Kier, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the kind of faces you depended on to show up in any movie from the 1980s through today and remind you you’re in good hands, left us. In their place are character actors whose cadences and presences don’t match or tell quite the same stories.

I imagine that those older than me are smiling to themselves as they read this, thinking, ‘Get used to it, bud.’ And I’m getting more used to it with each breaking news where I find out someone like that has died, leaving me to ponder my own mortality as I barrel towards it. And every time the fog lifts and I can step back into life to live it, I seem to get pulled right back in.

Lou Holtz’s death pulled me right back in.

Holtz passed away at the age of 89 on Wednesday. As he’d entered hospice care in late January, the news itself is not shocking. But as I sat there thinking about his place in my life, and more specifically, his place in my understanding of how the sports world worked, I reflected on how there was a time when I could not consider the possibility of a world without him in.

Hell, there was a time as a child when I couldn’t conceive of him not being the head coach of the Notre Dame football team, let alone passing on. I’d caught the affliction of being a Notre Dame fan from my father, and the universe had timed things well on that front. I started paying attention to college football around 1987, right before Holtz led the Fighting Irish to their first national title in over a decade (and the last since). I loved baseball, soccer, and the NFL, but college football, specifically Notre Dame football, was my first love. And Lou Holtz was the cornerstone of that experience.

It’s funny to learn Holtz was 5’10” because he always seemed like a slight, diminutive man to me, dwarfed by the 290-pound 20-year-olds who played for him. I was aware that he wasn’t perfect, having tried and failed with the New York Jets, but he seemed fully omniscient to 11-year-old me.

How else do you explain that he not only coached the Irish to victory in 1993’s Game of the Century (the first and only game I ever watched at Notre Dame Stadium) and said, with all sincerity afterward, that he was worried about Boston College the following week (he was right to be so)? With a dry wit and unquenched tenacity, he was what I understood a head coach to be. He was Notre Dame and Notre Dame was him, as far as I was concerned.

So when he left Notre Dame after the 1996 season, it was one of those moments in one’s young life when you feel the ground move under your feet. How could Notre Dame football exist without him, and how could he continue on not roaming those sidelines?

That was my freshman year of college, and I was already hardening, putting away childhood. I’d even stopped being a Notre Dame fan at that point (a whole other story), but the end of that era still stung. It put the stake in what remained of my childish understanding of how the world works. It helped me understand that nothing lasts forever and that the time we have is fleeting, so you'd better enjoy it while it’s here.

I followed Holtz’s post-Notre Dame coaching and enjoyed his watched his antics on ESPN. As he traded in sports for politics, my affinity for him dissipated. He and I could not possibly be further apart on that spectrum. So for a while, I expected his eventual passing to have little impact on me.

And yet, that all-too-familiar pang hit me as soon as I saw the news. This foundational human being from my childhood was now gone, as were all the others I mentioned. The difference was that Lou Holtz represented more than just entertainment or even sports.

He represented something I cherished most for a significant part of my life. He represented an appreciation I shared with my father, who also passed away some years ago. He was fundamental and inevitable and would always be so. The world, as I understood it since I was 9-years-old, could not exist with Lou Holtz in it.

I had initially wanted to title this with something Holtz said. His quotes page reads like a mixture between Vince Lombardi and Yogi Berra, full of inspirational can-do-isms and self-deprecating bon mots. In the end, I didn’t find one that perfectly fit and opted for one that matched how his passing made me feel instead.

I think that’s apt, as Holtz was, and remains, an avatar to me. A human monument to the world’s immutable facts, which are anything but.

“I don’t think his administrative assistant was very happy with me. Neither was Jimmy Johnson, for that matter.” - Dan Le Batard recalling the time he put Lo Holtz’s phone number in the Miami student newspaper.

“I cannot say this enough, Magic City, for anyone who’s been to Atlanta, it’s not just a titty bar. I feel like that’s sort of the vibes that maybe people are getting.” - Michelle Beadle reacting to Luke Kornet’s criticism of Hawks’ Magic City Monday promotion.

“His pain threshold is different, his work ethic is different.” - Jay Glazer, making a bold prediction that Patrick Mahomes will return from an ACL tear before Week 1.

“I would rather blame parents than AAU. I think parents today are way too involved in their children’s careers as far as growing up. The parents need to just sit in the stands, enjoy the game, and let the kids develop.” - Rick Pitino on the problem with American-born basketball players.

“Am I rooting for my son to make the NCAA Tournament? Of course I am. Did I help my son get the job? Nepotism? Of course, I did.” - Bruce Pearl, who now admits nepotism is involved in his Miami (Ohio) criticism.

The green flag at the start of the Australian Grand Prix this Saturday (March 7) won’t just mark the beginning of the first Formula 1 race of the 2026 season. It also launches the first official race covered by Apple TV under a five-year deal that makes the streaming service the home of F1 coverage in the U.S., and we can expect a few things to happen as people tune in for that first race.

Viewers are likely to be impressed by the picture quality, at least if past reactions to Apple TV’s baseball and Major League Soccer coverage are anything to go by. Features like multiview will prove popular, and past broadcasts suggest that stats will be plentiful if not always pertinent.

And you can also expect to hear a lot of complaints.

That’s par for the course when any new broadcaster takes over the reins of beaming a sport into people’s homes — something Apple knows all too well. Previous Apple TV forays into sports streaming have been met with criticism, from the quality of the announcers to just how easy it is for fans to find the actual broadcasts.

But F1 fans worried about how Apple will treat their sport over the next five years can take comfort in a recurring pattern for the company — even if F1 on Apple TV stalls at the starting line, Apple has often shown an ability to course-correct. And that goes for more than just its streaming service.

Phillip Michaels has more on how Apple TV’s Formula 1 coverage could be the beginning of the tech giant's larger push into sports.

Lou Holtz passed away on Wednesday at the age of 89, and the sports world paid tribute to one of the most charismatic figures that the coaching world had ever seen. For as much as the sports world will remember him for winning a national championship and his years of success at Notre Dame, he was much more than a football coach, with his vibrant personality and unique ability to inspire others.

It was only natural that, after his coaching career ended, Holtz would transition to television. But in his many years at ESPN, he found a very unique role on a show that would stand the test of time. And even though we may not have fully appreciated it at the time, it had a huge influence on how we consume and think about the sport in the future.

The show was ESPN’s College Football Final, where Holtz was paired with his longtime on-air partner and adversary, Mark May, with Rece Davis as host.

After Holtz’s passing, many college football media members and fans took to social media to remember the show and how it was appointment viewing after a long day of college football.

Click to read more about how maybe now is the time to admit that College Football Final was kinda fun.