Breakdowns optimized for speed:

Fedex Cup Playoffs

These playoff tournaments are great, but NBC should go one step further. We don’t need individual title sponsors at each stop. We should call them Round 1, Round 2, etc… Semi-finals, quarterfinals I don’t care. To move from the St. Jude to the BMW loses some of the steam of the Playoffs. More to the point, NBC should add a March Madness element to the players on the cut for next week. They did okay. They showed a ton of bubble player shots and had the running scoreboard. Crank that shit up another level.

College Football Playoffs

Not satisfied with 12 teams, the Big 10 is now proposing a 28 team format. There’s plenty of details to cover, but this is a perfect idea. Are they asking for 28, but willing to settle for 22? Maybe. Either way, college football championship games are obsolete because of the existing playoffs. The winner of the Big 10 championship doesn’t play the winner of the Pac 12 in the Rose Bowl, because the Rose Bowl is a playoff game and the Pac 12 was obliterated. Use the scheduling space of Conference Championship weekend for meaningful College Football Playoff Games.

Rob Manfred joined the ESPN broadcast booth during the Little League Classic and announced the league is looking to add two teams and potentially re-align divisions. Woah dude. Keep it about the kids! The game itself was forgettable so maybe Manfred wanted to stir intrigue amongst KMARKers with juicier news. Neither talking point is New News, and the announcement is far from official, but that hasn’t stopped the baseball world from bickering over it. In reality, three things matter…

Expansion

Manfred made another declaration recently. At the All-Star Game, he seemed very confident in predicting the Twins were about to sell. Between then and now, they traded almost half the roster and pulled the team off the market. Why? No one wants them (at least not at $1.7b). That’s embarrassing for the League. Manfred’s job is to drive valuations of clubs upwards. Adam Silver’s done it in the NBA. Seven franchises have sold in the last couple years for record valuations. Manfred and his boys in MIN can’t get the Twins sold. As Adam Silver pulls away from his expansion goals, Manfred is recommending the opposite. He’s seeing a world where it’s easier to sell new franchise licenses in growth markets than it is to flip teams in shrinking ones. Sell a license to a Nashville group for $1.3b and disseminate the proceeds to the other owners appears to be a more practical path than trying to drum up valuations for the Pirates.

Re-alignment

The League should do this. Full stop. However they draw it up, there’s significant playoff and television opportunities if teams are geographically closer to each other. Specifically, the MLB loses playoff eyeballs if teams from different coasts play each other in the most important games. It’s too much to ask Mets fans to watch playoff games against the Dodgers that start at 9 or 10pm. Similarly, it’s too much to ask Dodger fans to commit to a 2 or 3pm start time so the League can capture east coast eye balls. The NFL doesn’t have this problem because their games are single elimination and confined to one weekend. A seven game series presents way more challenges and the league needs to be split down the middle of the country.

Television

We went Hard In The Paint on ESPN last week and the hits keep coming. ESPN is in a precocious spot. They’ve lost a significant amount of basketball programming to NBC and Amazon. They forfeited ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball and NBC is circling the waters for that package. The NFL awards ESPN Monday Night (and owns 10%) of the network, but Fox/NBC/CBS are the league’s biggest partners. Add on that ESPN lost the UFC to Paramount last week and they’re hemorrhaging content. To watch Manfred sit in ESPN’s booth and discuss expansion was a weird scene. He’s talking about the future of the league with a broadcast partner that wants no part of it. Manfred is reportedly trying to align short-term media deals set to expire one year after a new CBA between the players and owners kicks in. His belief is that labor stability and a blank slate of content windows will create a frothy market amongst streaming and broadcast partners. That’s a bet. Not a guarantee. We’ll circle back in 2028. Something tells me these two parties might be the last one’s w