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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

Content warning: if you have Stephen A. Smith and/or LeBron James fatigue, feel free to skip to the last bullet of this section.

🏀 Stephen A. evokes Kobe. After accusing LeBron James of lying, the First Take host fostered a lie himself by claiming the NBA superstar didn’t attend Kobe Bryant’s memorial service during a rambling 15 minute monologue to open his show Thursday morning. Smith would later have to correct himself in the show’s second hour after reports surfaced that James did, in fact, attend Bryant’s memorial, though details around that are still being disputed.

🏀 Adam Silver weighs in. Somehow, Stephen A. transcends the very leagues he covers. Even the NBA’s commissioner feels the need to comment on the drama. Silver’s remarks were pretty neutral, to put it kindly. “We’re a particular sport in which that kind of debate seems to be part of the DNA of this league,” the commissioner said before adding, “I sure wish it would never become personal.” Don’t go too far out on that limb, Adam!

🐃 A Buffalo Christmas. One year after the network famous for its holiday movies released the popular Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, The Hallmark Channel is running it back with A Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story. Unfortunately, Bills quarterback Josh Allen and future wife Hailee Steinfeld will not be participants in the film. Bills Mafia can only hope that, in this case, the sequel is better than the original.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Could Opening Day have gone any worse?

Major League Baseball began its season yesterday, but if you were one of the many people trying to watch the action on MLB.tv, you were met with a frustrating error message. The problems seemed to have persisted for at least 30 minutes or so right as the season was getting started.

To state the obvious, this left a poor taste in the mouths of many, and served as a microcosm of the league’s issues more broadly.

See, it’s already difficult enough for many fans to watch baseball. And when they pay for a service that should allow them to access all of the games, and that service doesn’t work, it’s only natural that people were pissed.

MLB already struggles to make its games accessible. Between blackouts based on archaic territorial boundaries and regional sports networks that continue to get bumped up to more premium, expensive cable tiers, it’s more difficult than ever to be a baseball fan.

Of course, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is well aware of this friction, and went on a media tour before Opening Day to outline some changes he’d like to implement when it comes to the league’s media strategy.

The first step, Manfred says, is placing more games on broadcast television. “Number one, we want our reach to be better. As the cable bundle and the RSNs decline, we have a lot of people that don’t have access to baseball and we need to improve that. We need more broadcast television where people can get at games. We’d like to be on broadcast TV more than once a week.”

Next, it’s about ending blackouts. “Secondly, we need to make the fan experience easier. I’d love to get to a situation in which we have a digital product available. The fan can go in and buy whatever they want to buy, what game, without market blackouts. And if the game isn’t available in that digital product, there’s only one or two other places, probably a broadcast location, where the game can be found.”

These are both nice concepts in theory, but whether the league can implement them in practice remains to be seen. With Manfred taking ESPN’s current package of games to market for next season, finding another broadcast window should be easy enough. Fox and NBC have already expressed interest in the inventory, but at what price is the question.

The digital platform and ending blackouts will be a heavier lift. Regional sports networks aren’t going away just yet, and their business models are predicated on the very existence of the blackout. And until teams can trust that their media revenue won’t fall through the floor without an RSN deal, it’ll be difficult to make good on that promise, at least in the near-term.

But right now, the difficulty baseball fans face when trying to watch their team all serves to build an image of incompetence at the league’s highest level. When you consider other headlines around the sport’s management, or more accurately, the sport’s mismanagement, it’s easy to understand why.

Not long ago, the commissioner publicly discussed the virtues of a lockout come 2026 That won’t exactly put you in the good graces of fans. Then, there’s the clear opportunities that baseball is leaving on the table, like moving Opening Day forward a day or two to avoid the Sweet 16.

This is the type of low-hanging fruit that can help build trust and confidence in the fans. Don’t talk about lockouts as if they’re a good thing, especially almost two years before one could happen. Move Opening Day, one of the most important dates on MLB’s regular season calendar, to a day where it’s actually the most important event on the sports calendar.

And maybe the simplest thing of all, make sure your damn streaming service is going to work when the first pitches of the season are thrown.

Manfred can complain all he wants about baseball being neglected on a national stage, ESPN not giving the sport enough attention, etc., but he should really get his house in order before throwing stones.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

👀AROUND AA📰

Pat McAfee makes news, while Stephen A. Smith makes noise

If you read just one piece about the ongoing drama between Stephen A. Smith and LeBron James, make it Matt Yoder’s column about how Pat McAfee’s one-hour interview with the Lakers superstar proved more valuable for ESPN than the hours of endless yapping we hear from the First Take host on a daily basis.

📈💰INDUSTRY INSIGHTS🧐

• In addition to moving its late night SportsCenter out of Los Angeles, ESPN may also move its NBA studio shows out of L.A. after the 2025 season concludes. Former ESPN columnist Arash Markazi reported that, with Inside the NBA slated to become the network’s premier NBA studio show next season, the network could very well move NBA Countdown and NBA Today out of L.A. “A source inside ESPN told me their commitment to having NBA shows emanate from L.A. Live extends only through this postseason but no decision has been made yet about next season,” Markazi writes. ESPN told Sports Business Journal on Wednesday that “The Los Angeles Production Center will continue to host ESPN’s NBA studio productions and provide office space to additional L.A.-based employees,” though no indication was given as to whether that arrangement was permanent.

• The NBA could add an international flare to its All-Star Game festivities in 2026. Adam Silver told reporters Thursday that the league is considering adopting a national team format similar to the NHL’s wildly successful 4 Nations Face-Off earlier this year. A country vs. country competition would make extra sense next year, as the All-Star Game is set to coincide with the Winter Olympics. Both events will be broadcast on NBC, allowing for some tasty lead-in and lead-out possibilities for the network.

• Netflix is reportedly still a possible bidder for NFL Draft rights, which become available in 2026, according to Austin Karp and Mollie Cahillane of Sports Business Journal, contradicting an earlier report from Front Office Sports that the streamer would not be submitting a bid for the event. On paper, the NFL Draft makes sense as a property for Netflix. The streamer has made clear its preference for one-off tentpole events such as the NFL’s Christmas Day games or the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight. The NFL Draft fits perfectly into that mold as a three-day production. ESPN, which has aired the event since 1980, has already submitted a bid, as have Fox and Google.

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

TGL has figured something out

The first season of TGL has come and gone quicker than many golf fans hoped.

Just as the tech-infused simulator golf league truly began to hit its stride, its abbreviated season, which starts in January and ends in March, was over. But TGL's playoffs, especially its Finals series between Atlanta Drive GC and New York Golf Club earlier this week, delivered exactly what the league needed to prove that this thing has legs as a television product: the feeling that who won mattered.

Look at this reaction from Atlanta Drive’s Billy Horschel as he nailed his longest putt of the season to clinch a championship for his team.

That type of emotion is a far cry from the "exhibition golf" being played on a certain other tour. TGL is beginning to have the makings of a competition people care about. And that starts with the players.

See, when LIV Golf launched in 2021, it wasn't about making golf a more exciting viewership product so much as it was about getting players paid more. They succeeded at that, but failed to create a compelling television show. At the end of the day, it's a worse version of the PGA Tour. No tradition, worse courses, weaker fields, a shotgun start format that lends itself to confusing and disjointed finishes, and horrible television time slots.

TGL, on the other hand, was different. It wasn't trying to be the PGA Tour; it was created to be additive to the PGA Tour.

The differentiation is key. TGL knows what it is: a competition that looks and feels completely different than green grass golf. Something that can tidily fit into a two hour television window on nights of the week when nothing else is going on. A broadcast that can attract an entirely different audience than a weekend PGA Tour round.

And in making something profoundly different than normal golf, the players were able to embrace it for what it was, and actually buy in.

Fans seem to have bought in as well, at least to a point.

Atlanta’s clinching match on Tuesday averaged 557,000 viewers on ESPN, which clocked in as the fifth most-watched TGL match of the season. It was down substantially from the comparable window last year (1.03 million viewers for an NIT quarterfinal), but the singular poor data point shouldn’t sour the fact that TGL has put together something in its first year that may have a real shelf life.

Putting aside the quality of the television product and the size of its audience, TGL has already accomplished one of its primary objectives for Year 1: making sure the players actually gave a shit. If the players care about winning a TGL Finals match, fans will too. And if they continue to care as much as Horschel and Co. did on Tuesday night, TGL is in good hands for Year 2.