Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and honors, and argue over which players are worthy of induction.
Assessing the Impact of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s New Selection Process
On Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the biggest change to its selection process since the introduction of the semifinalist stage in 2004 – if not longer.
Last year’s selection process saw some head-scratching moves at each stage of the process. The list of preliminary nominees, once numbering fewer than 100, ballooned to 173, yet still saw some head-scratching omissions, with Eric Berry, a member of the All-Decade Team of the 2010s, probably being the most glaring. The list of semifinalists wasn’t too bad, but then the finalists saw the inclusion of the highly marginal resumes of Fred Taylor and Rodney Harrison, seemingly putting them in line for almost certain induction. What attracted the most attention, though, wasn’t anything to do with the modern-era selections, but the selection committee rejecting the senior-candidate bid of Art Powell – the first time a senior candidate had been rejected in 12 years – as well as coach/contributor finalist Buddy Parker. Some of the changes the Hall made should address the odd list of nominees we saw last year, but the changes later in the process aren’t necessarily related – and might make the actual issues the Hall faces worse.
Diagnosing Democracy, Part II: How the Democrats’ Crisis Explains Democracy’s Crisis
Note: Despite the title of this post, I’m probably not going to continue with this series; I originally intended for Part II to involve the ongoing back-and-forth over the latest flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but when I sat down to prepare to write it I realized I was too far removed from some of the minutia of the debate from October and November. I now intend to rework some of what I originally intended to say into a larger project that might not see the light of day until closer to when it’s completed. This post will partly cover some of the same ground as Part I, but not so much so as to keep from justifying making it part of the series. Also note that this post was mostly written by Saturday morning/afternoon, before the shooting at the Trump rally.
Since Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance at last month’s debate, the Democrats have been in a state of simultaneous panic and paralysis. Initially, what few Democrats were willing to go on the record stood by Biden as the party’s candidate, but a steady drumbeat of anonymously sourced stories casting doubt on Biden’s ability to serve as President now, let alone the next four years, culminated last week in actor George Clooney writing an op-ed explaining his experience with Biden at a fundraiser and making the case to replace him. Despite Biden proclaiming that he’s not going anywhere, elected Democrats up to and including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have intimated that he still has a decision to make. More and more Democrats are convinced that Biden cannot possibly defeat Donald Trump in November if he’s the nominee, and are becoming desperate to nudge him out of the race.
But it’s not clear that they have any better alternatives. Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be both the most natural, straightforward choice to replace Biden and the one least likely to alienate the party’s key constituencies of Blacks, women, and Black women, is deeply unpopular in her own right, tremendously disappointed in her attempt at a presidential run in 2020 to the point of dropping out before any contests were held, and before the debate, was one of the loudest defenders of Biden’s mental acuity, raising concerns that nominating her would simply shift the nexus of controversy from “Biden isn’t mentally fit for the job” to “Harris tried to sell the American public on someone not mentally fit for the job”. (Indeed, if it weren’t for Harris’ baggage renominating Biden might not be so fraught – though by the same token, neither would replacing him with her.) Most other candidates that have been floated – Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer – are fairly milquetoast white-bread Democrats whose national appeal is relatively untested and that might not be able to overcome the extent to which their selection would alienate Blacks, and might still have to answer for the Democrats’ initially sticking with Biden. Any of them would have to overcome the fact that they weren’t selected in a traditional open primary process, regardless of what schemes the Democrats come up with to simulate one.
An attitude I’ve seen on Twitter is that Democratic politicians and celebrities like Clooney and Jon Stewart, and donors like Abigail Disney, are privileged enough to be relatively fine in a second Trump reign, so can afford to take the risk of replacing Biden, but ordinary people can’t. But there is no risk-free option here. Replacing Biden would expose the Democratic Party as weak and present a nominee that doesn’t necessarily have the confidence of the base, but not replacing Biden would not only mean sticking with a candidate that was already an underdog before the debate in large part because of people’s concerns about his age and mental acuity (concerns that now might not be completely surmountable no matter how well Biden does the rest of the way given what’s been reported and where he might be in four years), and hoping against hope that he doesn’t have any more “senior moments” between now and the election that would underscore those concerns (or even devolve to the point that they’d have to invoke the 25th Amendment and effectively run Harris anyway), but send the message that the Democratic Party doesn’t care what the people whose votes they need think about their nominee, that they will take what the party gives them and like it. Sometimes doing nothing is the riskiest path of all.
No matter what the Democrats do, they are staring at the prospect of, more likely than not, losing the election to Donald Trump, possibly even in the popular vote, allowing him to entrench his imperial, fascistic vision of the presidency and the GOP to enact their Project 2025 and Agenda 47 plans, potentially resulting in the last competitive presidential election for the United States as we know it. No matter where you are within the Democratic coalition, so long as you’re in it this is an unfathomable outcome. Democrats have loudly complained that the media is spending too much time on Biden’s age and not enough on Trump’s own mental deficiencies and destructive agenda. The idea that the American people would seemingly vote for fascism over democracy because democracy’s defender is too old seems outrageous.
But if it were to happen, it wouldn’t be because of Biden’s age and mental acuity alone. Rather, those things, and the way the Democrats have handled them, have ultimately underscored what it is that has made Trump so consistently popular in the first place.
Diagnosing Democracy, Part I: The (Real) Problem with Jon Stewart
Note: This post was almost entirely written by March 6 and only touched up today, so parts of it may be out of date.
In February, Jon Stewart made his triumphant return to The Daily Show after nine years away, effectively skipping the bulk of the Trump era and leaving most of that time to his successor Trevor Noah while working on other projects, to host Mondays through the election. What transpired reminded many fans of Stewart’s Daily Show of, perhaps, why his original departure may have been well-timed.
For his first show back, Stewart discussed the report from special counsel Robert Hur that cleared Joe Biden of mishandling classified documents upon leaving the vice presidency but characterized him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who struggled to remember facts under questioning, re-igniting concerns over whether Biden is too old to serve four more years as president. Stewart played clips of Donald Trump and his associates claiming not to remember things at their own depositions over the years, but spent the bulk of the segment seemingly reinforcing the concerns over Biden’s age, picking apart a press conference Biden gave where he forcefully responded to the special counsel’s assertions but seemed to struggle afterwards, and responding to Democratic surrogates playing up his “sharpness” and “engagement” in official meetings on talk shows over the weekend by suggesting that, if he’s so sharp in those settings, perhaps they should be captured on camera. By contrast, Trump only received one or two shots on relatively trivial matters over the course of the segment, with no mention of the most concerning development to come from his side over the weekend, his seemingly blackmailing NATO allies with a Russian invasion. Stewart was excoriated by various figures on the left, including Keith Olbermann and even Trump’s estranged niece Mary, for focusing on concerns over Biden’s age instead of the far more existential threat posed by Trump’s return to the White House. Responding to those concerns on his second show back, Stewart twisted the Washington Post‘s Trump-era slogan into “democracy dies in discussion” and spent the rest of the segment facetiously studying Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia and interview with Vladimir Putin to learn how to speak “of course” to power.
Assessing the 2024 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective
At first glance, you might think the NFL deserves credit for scheduling more games between good teams for featured windows. Only one game I identified as a Tier 1 game isn’t scheduled for a featured window – though it feels like an insult to the drawing power of Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow that the two games between them are slated for the early doubleheader (with a Tier 2 game in the same window) and Thursday Night Football, the least of the league’s three primetime packages. This success, though, is tempered by the fact that the Jaguars had a high enough win total to qualify for Tier 1 status last year, and of the three Tier 1 games on last year’s Games That Should Be Nationally Televised But Aren’t, two were Jags games and the third was Ravens-Bengals again. So the league scheduled its best games in virtually the same way, they just had one fewer ratings poison team expected to be among the top handful in the league. And when you take a closer look at how they scheduled games in the flex scheduling period, you can tell they learned nothing from last year’s flexing paralysis.
In the past I’ve rolled my eyes at people attempting to assess flex scheduling prospects before the season even begins. After all, the whole point of flex scheduling is that we don’t know how teams will actually do, and while we have some data to work with to figure out how plausible a flex is in the latter two-thirds of the season, we have none whatsoever in May. But I was stunned to see last year that one of the Games That Should Be Nationally Televised had a very real chance to be in line for a flex even if the teams involved in both that game and the Sunday night game played exactly as expected – and then when the time came, and Dolphins-Ravens was set to determine the #1 seed in the AFC, it couldn’t be flexed because CBS didn’t have to protect its late doubleheader game of Chiefs-Bengals. It was surprising to see the league create this sort of situation to begin with, where teams performing exactly as expected would create a situation where the league would want to pull a flex, but to set things up so you’d want to pull the flex but can’t should have been completely unacceptable. My takeaway from last season was that the league needed to take a lot more care in the construction of the schedule to set themselves up for success – to ensure that, even if the games in featured windows aren’t necessarily the best ones on the slate, if you want to flex games in they can be flexed in. There are always unforeseeable scenarios where the league gets screwed and a marquee game ends up underdistributed, but there shouldn’t be scenarios that are entirely foreseeable that end up screwing the league over.
With this post, I’m going to take a look at each week in the main flex period and see how well the league has set itself up for success – whether it’s created any scenarios where it would want to pull the flex if the teams involved perform exactly as expected, and if so, whether or not they can actually do so. But first, I’ll present the list of each team’s primetime appearances as well as the teams restricted from being flexed in to Thursday Night Football because they either already have two short-week games (including those teams playing on Saturday and again on Christmas Wednesday, but not the Black Friday game or anything else involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.
What the 2024 NFL Schedule Should Look Like
The 2024 NFL schedule is slated to be released tonight at 8 PM ET – not ideal as it falls in the middle of network upfront week, as opposed to past years when it was released before upfronts so networks could promote the games on their schedule, with the most likely culprit for the delay being ongoing negotiations with Netflix and Amazon for the slate of Christmas Day games that were unexpectedly added.
Last year, I published a list of the games that should have been given featured windows on the 2023 schedule but weren’t. As the year went along, however, I became increasingly convinced that the protections given to CBS and Fox in the new TV contracts had the effect of severely constricting the league’s schedule flexibility. If CBS and Fox no longer needed to protect divisional matchups if the other half had already been scheduled for another network, or if they no longer needed to protect games involving the biggest brands – the Cowboys and Chiefs – at all if they had the minimum eight games involving them, it suddenly became a lot more difficult to flex any games at all. The idea of “playing your way into primetime” had long been a joke, but now it had been rendered an outright lie. To the extent they ever wanted to, the league can no longer rely on flexible scheduling to deliver the best matchups to the biggest audiences. This became most apparent in Week 17, when a Dolphins-Ravens game to determine the #1 seed in the AFC was stuck in the early doubleheader window while CBS’ late window remained focused on a game between the Bengals, whose playoff chances without Joe Burrow were hanging by a thread, and the Chiefs, virtually locked into the 3 seed at that point, and while the Sunday night game involved two teams in the Packers and Vikings that, at the time, were on the outside looking in on the playoff picture. As it happened, I’d identified Dolphins-Ravens as one of the games that should have been given a featured window but wasn’t, and even suggested that if things played out exactly as expected, it would be a potential candidate to be flexed in for Packers-Vikings.
In short, the increased difficulty of flex scheduling means that the schedule that’s announced in May should set the league up for success as much as possible. At least down the stretch of the season, if the three main featured windows (the late doubleheader, Sunday night, and Monday night) don’t contain the three best games of the week, any game that is among the three best but is buried as an undercard should not be set up to be protected. In other words, they can’t be the most desirable game on the singleheader network, and if they’re on the doubleheader network then the main late game can’t be a divisional game where the other matchup is on another network, or a game involving the Cowboys or Chiefs – and such situations should generally be avoided during the main flex period in general, or at least avoiding having games with teams with significantly worse expected records hogging spots while games between teams expected to be .500 or above can’t or won’t be flexed in. Creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex if teams perform exactly as expected is already something of a failure of schedule construction, as flexible scheduling should only come in if teams don’t perform as expected; creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex but can’t should be completely unacceptable.
Given these constraints, it’s not enough for me to point to certain games and say they should have been given more prominent spots; I should be able to put together a schedule that maximizes distribution of the best games and teams and minimizes the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible, while still allowing for some diversity of teams featured, giving networks shots at the most desirable teams, and generally putting something together that looks like what the league might actually put together. That’s what I intend to do in this post: put together the sort of schedule that the league should be constructing. Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.
How the NBA and Comcast Might Be About to Destroy Warner Bros. Discovery
Over the course of just about two weeks, the reporting surrounding the NBA’s negotiations for a new TV deal has been a rollercoaster – and left me alternately supremely confused about the league’s thinking, and that of their potential partners, and worried about what will happen to the league’s longest-running partner.
Unlike the last round of NBA media rights deals, when ESPN and TNT renewed their agreements during their exclusive negotiating window, the league and their partners let the exclusive window lapse this time around – but shortly after the window expired, John Ourand reported in Puck that ESPN had “essentially come to terms” with the NBA on the league’s “A” package, which included continuing to be the exclusive home of the NBA Finals. The next day, Ourand’s former podcast partner Andrew Marchand reported in the Athletic that Amazon had reached a “framework for an agreement” that would give them a package of games as well, giving the NBA games exclusive to a streaming provider for the first time, and also that ESPN would be reducing its package of games from 100 to 80 “in one arrangement” – a surprisingly small reduction that wouldn’t be enough to remove a night of NBA games from ESPN’s schedule for an entire season.
Both of them reported that NBCUniversal remained in the running to fight with TNT over the remaining package, but the combination of the two reports seemed to suggest that NBC was a decided underdog. If ABC was going to retain all of the NBA Finals, that would remove a significant point of interest for any Comcast bid that contained a significant broadcast presence. Any continued presence of Comcast in the bidding would seem to be one that placed a high priority on games on its Peacock streaming service, with any NBC games as an added bonus along the lines of the two games NBC simulcasted with Peacock as part of the service’s “Sunday Leadoff” baseball package over the last two seasons. But now the NBA had reached a deal with Amazon, so its desire for a streaming component to its deals had already been met, and it would be a decided risk to sign a deal for games on another streaming service, one significantly smaller and more unproven than Prime Video, while abandoning a partner of such long vintage in TNT that they’d been airing games since before NBC’s previous stint with the league, one that had long attracted rave reviews for the quality of its coverage, both in-game and with its acclaimed “Inside the NBA” studio crew. Coupled with TNT’s right to match any competing offer, the chances of NBC making its triumphant return to the NBA seemed to have drastically diminished.
ESPN has a bit of a habit of rushing in early in TV negotiations and locking down enough rights to decidedly neuter the desirability of a package for a second partner and ensuring their pre-eminence within the sport. In 2012, it locked up all of their then-three Major League Baseball packages, effectively shutting Fox and NBC out of the packages that might have best boosted their respective sports networks, reducing Fox to giving FS1 Saturday games on crowded sports days with slates not worth airing on the broadcast network and a handful of weeknight games until the postseason. Then there’s ESPN’s current deal with the NHL, where ESPN picked up so much in the way of desirable rights, including ESPN’s choice of conference finals every year (in a league with a nearly two-in-three chance of at least one Canadian team reaching that round), that even with the Winter Classic and three out of seven Stanley Cup Finals still on the table as part of the B package, it was left too undesirable for anyone but TNT to take despite their lack of a broadcast network and existing commitment to AEW on Wednesday nights.
ESPN may well have seen securing all the Finals the same way. Ourand would later suggest that the NBA, famous for signing what’s widely considered the first cable-first deal for a major league when it left NBC for ESPN in 2002, now wanted the reach of a broadcast network for its “B” package. At his former employer, SportsBusiness Journal, Tom Friend reported that the NBA wanted to have ABC alternate the Finals with another partner, which ESPN fought tooth and nail until finally agreeing to pay $2.6 billion for a package with all the NBA Finals. ESPN might well have thought that by taking all the Finals, before most contenders other than TNT could even come to the table, they’d defang the one big attraction any package would have to broadcast networks and something that most would consider table stakes for any broadcast-centric package – ensuring that other than giving a handful of games to a streamer, the NBA wouldn’t have much choice but to perpetuate the status quo, helping to keep the price of all three packages down, and wouldn’t have any options other than ABC to provide that increased reach via broadcast television. That may help explain why TNT allowed their exclusive negotiating window to lapse without a deal, confident they could match any offer any other company could bring to the table dollar-for-dollar.
But both companies may have underestimated Comcast’s determination – and the result may well end up being the death warrant for all of Warner Bros. Discovery.
What to Make of the NFL’s Experiment with Putting the Draft on Broadcast, Part 3
The week before the NFL Draft, John Ourand reported in his newsletter for Puck that ESPN’s contract to air the draft only runs through next year. Ourand noted that ESPN is expected to renew, and the implication I’ve gotten (not having read more than Awful Announcing’s write-up) was that he was merely noting that the NFL and ESPN were getting together to work on such a renewal, but I think most people could be forgiven for assuming from the mention of the draft when ESPN announced its most recent comprehensive agreement with the league in 2021 that ESPN had secured rights to the draft for the duration of the deal, and I’m inclined to think that Ourand would not have reported on this if some party didn’t want to influence the negotiations somehow, implying that a renewal might not be a formality, nor do I think the NFL would have awarded ESPN rights to the draft only through 2025 if they didn’t intend on seriously considering shaking up the status quo of the draft.
Prior to signing its most recent deals with its media partners, there was discussion of the notion that the league wanted the draft to be covered like the presidential election, with coverage on every network. Towards that end, the league had Fox, then preparing to start its first season airing Thursday Night Football, simulcast NFL Network’s coverage of the first two days of the 2018 Draft, with ESPN then agreeing to simulcast the third day’s coverage on ABC; from 2019 onwards, ABC has aired a separate production of the first two nights before simulcasting ESPN’s coverage on Day 3. Fox failing to even win the night against entertainment programming on the other broadcast networks seemed to make the notion of “presidential-election-style” coverage seem laughable, especially for CBS, but that might not be the only way to shake up draft coverage.
One approach could be to rotate exclusive, or at least primary, draft coverage across the broadcast networks; ABC/ESPN airing the 2025 draft would fit with rotating the draft on a two-year offset from the Super Bowl rotation, so each network gets either the draft or the Super Bowl every other year. The downside to this, though, is that the experts at ESPN and NFL Network have incentive to cover and assess every year’s slate of prospects to prepare for each year’s draft broadcast; having experts brought in to cover the draft only once every four years skews the incentives and could skew the coverage. On the other hand, having only a single network air the draft means you don’t have to synchronize commercial breaks across two networks and each prospect to take the stage only needs to be interviewed once, meaning you can reduce the lag between a pick coming in and being announced, reducing the opportunity and incentive for pick-tipping. (Also, rumors of the NFL taking a stake in ESPN, and ESPN taking over management of NFL Network, could reduce NFLN’s incentive to offer its own draft coverage, making consolidation on a single network easier.) Shaking up the draft could also be as simple as allowing Amazon to add their own coverage to the proceedings.
Besides that, circumstances in the television industry have changed substantially since 2018, with ratings for non-live primetime programming continuing to decline, accelerated by the change in viewing habits during the pandemic, and with The Big Bang Theory ending and Young Sheldon preparing to do the same, depriving CBS of its most popular Thursday programming. As it increasingly becomes the case that anything on a linear network that’s not a live event is just filler between live events, perhaps the notion of “presidential-election-style” coverage becomes more viable again – or at least, it’s worth the league talking to its partners on whether they want to cover the draft and how. My impression after 2018 and 2019 was that there wasn’t any reason for the league to move away from the status quo in place since then, but has presidential-election-style coverage become more viable, and if the league did decide to offer one network exclusive draft rights, how interested might each network, especially CBS, be?
The WNBA Is at a Crossroads
Two weeks ago, a whopping 18.7 million viewers watched the NCAA women’s basketball championship between Iowa and South Carolina across ABC and the “Bird and Taurasi Show” on ESPN – not only the most watched basketball game, men’s or women’s, college or pro, since the 2019 men’s national championship (and topping every NBA game since the 2017 Finals), but the most watched sporting event at all, outside football and the Olympics, since the 2019 World Series.
Needless to say, it was the most-watched game in women’s college basketball history, breaking the record set by… the national semifinal between Iowa and UConn two days earlier, which drew 14.2 million viewers across ESPN and ESPN2. That, in turn, broke the mark set by… the regional final the previous Monday between Iowa and LSU, which drew 12.3 million viewers to ESPN alone. An Elite Eight game on cable alone drew a larger audience than last year’s national championship between the same two teams on broadcast, which fell short of ten million, and indeed any previous women’s college basketball game, including when the women’s Final Four regularly aired on CBS in the 80s and 90s.
Obviously a lot of this has to do with the singular, and likely inimitable, phenomenon that is Iowa star Caitlin Clark, but it’s not just her; the most-watched game of the women’s tournament not involving Iowa or having Iowa as a lead-in or lead-out was undefeated South Carolina’s Elite Eight game, which still set the record for the most-watched Elite Eight game ever before Clark and Iowa blew it out of the water the following night. That game aired on ABC, which has only recently started airing women’s tournament games at all (let alone the national championship, which only started last year), but ESPN has aired three national championship games that failed to reach the 3.07 million viewers South Carolina’s win over Oregon State did, and of the 26 national championships that aired on cable alone from 1996 to 2022, only eight drew more than a million more viewers than South Carolina-Oregon State, two of them in the last two years before the title game moved to ABC.
So there’s reason to think that women’s college basketball can maintain some of its momentum and establish a new baseline for popularity. But it’ll have to do it without the forces that brought it to these heights this year. It’s not just that Clark has now left for the WNBA, drafted by the Indiana Fever; so has LSU’s Angel Reese, her nemesis in last year’s national championship game. So has the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso, both selected by the Chicago Sky to set up what could be a juicy Midwestern rivalry for years to come. UConn’s Paige Bueckers elected to return to college for another year, and even once she leaves the college game will be fine with the emergence of new stars such as USC’s freshman phenom Juju Watkins, not to mention all the young girls inspired by Clark and her cohorts that will come along over the next decade or two, but for now, all the biggest stars of this year’s tournament will now be the territory of the WNBA for the foreseeable future.
And therein lies an enormous opportunity… if the WNBA can put itself in position to take advantage of it.
What Would – and Should – 32-Team Divisional Alignments Look Like for the NBA and MLB?
America’s major professional team sports leagues have had a long period of stability since the early part of this century, with three leagues sitting at 30 teams while the NFL went forward with 32, but that may be changing. The NHL has already increased the size of its league to 32, and by most accounts the NBA and MLB may follow suit by the end of this decade.
When it comes to organizing leagues into conferences and divisions, 32, as a power of 2, is close to an ideal number; not for nothing did baseball have two eight-team leagues for decades prior to the advent of expansion in 1961. It gives the flexibility to create either four divisions of eight teams each, as in the NHL, or eight of four, as in the NFL – with the latter being more interesting and allowing more schedule flexibility and a greater emphasis on rivalries.
On Sunday Nate Silver gave his ideal divisional alignment for a 32-team MLB, opting to go with eight divisions of four teams. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while myself, and I need to get a post out by the end of the month while buying myself some time to work on more substantial posts I mostly spent this month putting off, so I decided to piggyback off of his proposal to present my own visions for how to divide 32-team leagues not only in MLB, but in the NBA and even NHL as well.