📰🏟️ Football broadcast battle

Good morning. A sneak preview of the NBA and NHL conference finals, which both begin today.

In the NBA: The Knicks, Thunder, Timberwolves, and Pacers will be doing battle. New York, back in the conference finals for the first time since 2000, is the only remaining team that has won a championship. This means that for the first time in NBA history, there will be seven different champions in seven years, putting the the league in what Gen Z would call its parity era. In the 70 years prior to 2019, the same seven franchises won 77% of the championships, per Sportradar's Todd Whitehead.

NHL: Three Canadian teams made the second round of the NHL playoffs for the first time since 2004—but the Oilers remain the only team from the Great White North still standing. Though they are the betting favorites to win the title, followed by the Panthers, Stars, and Hurricanes. See a full preview here.

—Peter & Kyle

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📺 MEDIA

The NFL and college football are locked in an escalating broadcast battle

The full 2025 NFL slate was unveiled last week. And, besides flooding FYP pages with sometimes unhinged schedule-release videos, it sets up multiple broadcast conflicts with college football—continuing a trend that threatens to upend a decades-long balance kept in place by a law established when JFK was working out of the Oval Office.

Sundays are for the NFL, Saturdays are for the boys and college football

After the NFL’s first attempt to sell its television rights en masse to CBS in the early 1960s was blocked by the courts as an antitrust violation, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle went to Congress to get an exemption, arguing that the league needed to pool its rights for smaller-market franchises like the Green Bay Packers to survive.

At the same time, college sports leaders, concerned about losing their long-established Saturday broadcast dominance, lobbied Congress for protections.

This owners-lawmakers-leaders back-and-forth ultimately resulted in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 (SBA), which laid out scheduling rules for the football season. Between the second Saturday in September and the second Saturday in December, the NFL is effectively barred from scheduling games:

• Later than 6pm on Fridays
• Between noon and midnight on Saturdays

Peep this year’s conflicts: The NFL and college football are going head-to-head on the first Friday in September, Black Friday (November), and in late December—all arranged around this carved-out window. The NFL's Black Friday game is slated to start at 3pm, so it’ll be largely over by the time the 6pm cap kicks in.

Probably a good thing for college football…which in head-to-head matchups have been easily beat up on like a younger brother. Last December, two regular season NFL games were played on the same day as the first round of the College Football Playoff—and each of the regular season NFL games handily outdrew the CFP broadcasts.

Looking ahead: The SBA may be revisited in upcoming years to a) establish new guidelines in the face of NFL expansion and/or b) grant college sports a similar antitrust exemption (something a college super league would need to negotiate a media rights deal). Plus, another behemoth head-to-head broadcast matchup is brewing: the NFL has decided to go all-out on Christmas, a day historically reserved for the NBA.

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📰 Catch Up Quick

Headlines

⚽ Americans say “not real football”: FIFA is struggling to fill US stadiums = one of the takeaways from last week’s contentious 75th FIFA Congress ($) that saw the Council’s eight UEFA members walk out midway.

🥍 Men’s Lacrosse Final Four set: The Northeast-heavy semifinal (surprise!) features Maryland, Syracuse, Cornell, and Penn State. It also follows a quarterfinal round with record attendance and games so electric they could’ve inspired Thomas Edison to invent the lightbulb.

💰 From Mr. Irrelevant to nine-figure relevance: QB Brock Purdy agreed to a five-year, $265M extension with the 49ers ($53M/year)—a bit of a step up from the $934k/year he was previously making.

🥎 Give me Liberty, you’ll get death: Liberty topped Texas A&M twice over the weekend, making the Aggies the first NCAA softball #1-national seed to be eliminated in regionals since seeding began in 2005.

🤝 Private equity <3 sports: The Chargers have reportedly requested approval to sell an 8% stake to an investment firm. It comes as the 49ers are selling a 6% stake at an $8.5B valuation, the most any sports franchise has ever been valued at in a transaction.

📸 Snapped

Pics from the weekend

🏎️ F1’s Yuki Tsunoda walked away from a major crash thanks to his Halo. During the qualifying round for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, Tsunoda lost control of his Red Bull car and crashed into the barrier at near-top speed (video). But he popped out of the car unhurt, largely thanks to his Halo device—an initially controversial titanium bracket surrounding the cockpit that weighs ~15 lbs, but can withstand the weight of two African elephants (~26k lbs). Tsunoda finished 10th in the Grand Prix a day later, as Red Bull teammate Max Verstappen earned his second win this season.

🏌️ Roadblock: Multiple drivers were banned at the PGA Championship. World #1 Scottie Scheffler, who won the tournament by five shots to claim his third major championship (and a ~$3.4M purse), confirmed afterwards that he used a backup driver after his original failed pre-tournament testing—a common infraction that’s a reality of golf equipment, rather than an attempt to cheat. But while Scottie excelled with his backup club, the same can’t be said for world #2 Rory McIlroy, who was also reportedly forced to use a backup driver due to a failed test. Rory struggled to find fairways and finished tied for 47th in his first major since winning The Masters.

🏀 The Caitlin Clark-Angel Reese rivalry kicked up another notch. Clark’s Indiana Fever faced Reese’s Chicago Sky to open the WNBA season on Saturday. During the third quarter, Clark received a flagrant foul for bodying Reese and slapping her arm on an offensive rebound, prompting a mini-scuffle between both teams (video). Aside from that incident—which both players later referred to as a basketball play—Clark was the star of the show, securing a triple-double* as the Fever cruised to a 93-58 win. One day later, the WNBA said it’s investigating “alleged hateful fan comments” targeted at Reese during the game in Indianapolis.

*Clark is now tied with Candace Parker for third-most triple-doubles in WNBA history (3). She’s played 41 games in her career.

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🔢 Facts & Figures

By the numbers

Here are five stats from this past week that made our team say “whoa.” Hopefully you will, too.

• 💰 The Big 12 was the lowest-earning Power 5 conference in 2023-24 ($494M), earning ~$73M less than the now-defunct Pac-12 and roughly half as much as the Big Ten.
• ⚽ Barcelona clinched their 28th La Liga title last week, a figure second only to Real Madrid's 36; no other La Liga team has more than 11 titles.
• ⚾ The LA Angels swept their crosstown rival, the Dodgers, in a three-game series this weekend for the first time since 2010.
• 🏒 Florida Panthers F Brad Marchand became the first player in NHL history to win five Game 7s against the same team (Toronto Maple Leafs).
• 👀 The MLB will test an automated challenge system for check-swings, where a 45° angle to home plate is considered the line for a swing; MLB umps currently call that line at just 18°.

👀 Must See

Top plays

⚾ Good luck hitting that: 97 MPH sinker with 19(!) inches of run

⚽ Julián Alvarez’s long-range free kick finds the upper 90

🏀 Jokic stuns OKC crowd—and his own bench—with crazy three

🥅 Sidney Crosby scores off no-look feed from Macklin Celebrini

🎹 The Knicks organist’s view for Game 6 clincher

+Bonus: A’s backup catcher strikes out Shohei Ohtani

🤔 Trivia

When the juice isn't loose

Major League Baseball suspended Phillies closer Jose Alvarado for 80 games without pay for PED use, making him one of 45 players suspended for at least 80 games for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drugs policy.

Double the trouble: There are only six players in history to have been suspended 162 games for PED use (the equivalent of a full season). Can you name two of them?

🌐 Web Gems

Cool things to click

🐻 Rumor mill: An upcoming book by ESPN’s Seth Wickersham alleges Caleb Williams and his father wanted to avoid Williams being drafted by the Chicago Bears—”where quarterbacks go to die.”

⚾ Good question: How can you not be romantic about baseball?

🎾…or about an Italian winning the Italian Open for the first time in 40 years, a saga centered around arguably the most romantic country in the world?

⚽ Okay let’s get Real: CNBC released its official 2025 list of global soccer team valuations, topped by Real Madrid. Explore it here.

📖 Read: Aaron Judge is hitting like Barry Bonds, so where are all the intentional walks?

🤔 Answers

A-Rod, Marlon Byrd, Robinson Canó, Jenrry Mejia, Francis Martes, J.C. Mejía

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