Mike Tunison

In the five years since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law banning sports gambling in most states, the sports landscape, at least in terms of the way events are covered, has been radically altered, and in many ways, changes are yet to come. Seemingly every week, a new sportsbook app arrives on the market. Broadcasts of sports are now inundated with updates about odds, point spreads and proposed parlays from analysts that fans are invited to wager on. Prior to the Supreme Court decision, gambling was the dirty little secret of the sports establishment. Of course gambling happened, and in places like Las Vegas it was legit, but it was considered tawdry among the more buttoned-down members of the sports mainstream.

Over the past few years, the NFL, a professional sports behemoth built largely on the backs of broadcasting deals with the major TV networks, has thrown its lot in with Big Tech to grow its game. In 2022, it was Amazon securing the broadcasting rights to Thursday Night Football. Now, in 2023, it's YouTube TV — and parent company Google — getting in on the pigskin profits. YouTube TV has just landed one of the juiciest plums of all: NFL Sunday Ticket.  From its debut in 1994 until this past year, Sunday Ticket was the domain of satellite cable provider DirecTV. The service was a way for NFL fans to watch every game on the Sunday slate, as opposed to just the two or three offered by the networks in local markets.

One of the few culture war tropes that has actually dimmed during the Biden era is the controversy over the championship sports team White House visit. This is in large part because the sensibilities of the big leagues, their corporate partners and the media that covers them skews left — meaning a pressure campaign to condemn visiting Joe Biden, for example, just won’t register in those circles. So it was kind of by accident that the women’s college basketball national championship game between Iowa and LSU became a tempest in a teapot.

March Madness markets itself on the chaos, the unpredictability, and the Cinderella stories that make the NCAA basketball tournament one of the most beloved sporting events in America. Most years, the really shocking upsets are usually out of the way by the end of the first weekend. By the time the tournament reaches its most critical rounds, fans are fortunate if there is a single Cinderella still dancing. Over the last thirty tournaments — I would say years but the 2020 tourney was canceled due to Covid — only two national champions have started the tournament as lower than a three seed. In that same span, only two Final Fours did not feature a one seed, while thirteen Final Fours over the past three decades have contained multiple one seeded teams.

Somehow an off-season for Aaron Rodgers that began with a multiday stop in a darkness retreat isolation chamber to decide his next career move has only gotten weirder now that Rodgers has announced his intention to be traded to the New York Jets. Immediately, Rodgers's decision to go to Gang Green triggered a big storyline: that he's following in the footsteps of his legendary Green Bay quarterback predecessor, Brett Favre, whose departure from the Packers to the Jets following the 2007 season was similarly fraught. Favre lasted only one tumultuous year in New York, during which he made headlines for texting dick pics to broadcaster Jenn Sterger. The Jets that year started 9-5 only to lose their final two games and miss the playoffs.

The early months of the NFL off-season are typically flush with intentionally misleading and openly manipulative media reports about how teams, free agents and draft prospects regard one another. This year, with an embattled franchise owner weighing his options about a potential sale, it's the billionaires, and also the millionaires, who are having their plans and motivations guessed at. Since November, Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder has been making moves indicating that he's trying to unload the team he's owned for nearly twenty-five years. For many, the logical buyer is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

America's appetite for football is seemingly never satisfied. A couple leagues are still working to crack the code on maintaining a professional alternative to the NFL. Even with the NFL adding a seventeenth regular season game in 2021, the league's off-season is significantly longer than the other major team sports. Whereas there is typically a four-month layover from the end of the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final and the beginning of the next basketball and hockey seasons respectively, and Major League Baseball has about five months off from the close of the World Series to Opening Day, the NFL is dormant for nearly seven months. And college football's off-season is roughly a month longer. That's a lot of blank space for a sport that routinely draws huge interest.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee have introduced a bill that, if passed, would make the day after the Super Bowl a statewide holiday. The initial version of the bill also proposed removing Columbus Day as a holiday. With Republicans dominating the state legislature, two Democrats offering a popular, seemingly apolitical holiday in exchange for eliminating a more controversial, clearly politicized one was unlikely to fly. So it's unsurprising they've dropped that stipulation. The idea of a holiday the day after the Super Bowl has been a pipe dream for NFL fans for almost as long as the Super Bowl has existed, and the subject comes up just about every year around this time.

In Sunday's AFC Championship game, the refs played a role in the outcome, as they sometimes do in the NFL. Most glaringly, at least according to some fans, the officials in the fourth quarter gave the Chiefs an additional attempt at a third down when they ruled they'd whistled the action dead before a failed Kansas City play, citing the fact that the game clock had begun to tick again despite the Chiefs' second-down play being an incomplete pass. On the Chiefs' next attempt at third down, quarterback Patrick Mahomes was sacked. However, Cincinnati cornerback Eli Apple was called for defensive holding, extending the drive. Kansas City ended up winning the game 23-20 to advance to Super Bowl LVII.

Few things whip American sports fans into a frenzy more than a downtrodden franchise finally about to get off the schneid. Baseball especially in recent decades has gloried in this, first with the Boston Red Sox ending their eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004 and then the Chicago Cubs breaking the Curse of the Billy Goat that had lasted over a century. That the NFL has its own version of this flies in the face of the league's gushing about its parity of talent. If several teams have gone the entire modern era without sniffing the promised land, surely that parity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nevertheless, there are a small handful of teams that NFL fans recognize as especially tortured, and few would deny the Buffalo Bills their place as a top woebegone franchise.

At long last, Father Time and the Dallas Cowboys have caught up to Tom Brady. When the seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback retired for 40 days in early 2022, there were ample reasons to believe it would be short-lived. Brady, like any athlete thought to be the GOAT in their particular sport, is a hypercompetitive freak. What's more, he was coming off a season in which he led the defending champion Buccaneers to a 13-4 record, topped the NFL in passing yards and touchdowns, and was only narrowly eliminated by the team that ended up winning it all that year — all at the age of 44. It would be nigh impossible to look at Tom Brady's football résumé and think he has unfinished business.

There was a time, not long ago, when any NFL franchise with a coaching vacancy was desperately searching for the next Sean McVay. This was explicitly spelled out: we want the next McVay, a literal clone if possible. Now, only six years into his head coaching career and following his first losing season, Sean McVay isn't entirely sure he wants to be Sean McVay anymore; at least not Sean McVay the football coach, at least not for a while. That McVay spent years representing the mold that coaches aspired to had something to do with the cult of the wunderkind. Every few years, there's a new hotshot coordinator or ascendant college coach who is said to be taking the NFL by storm.