The Press Box - Is the Streaming Era Heaven or Hell for Sports Fans? Plus, Amazon’s First Thursday NFL Broadcast.

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Bryan and David weigh in on Alex Kirshner’s story in The Atlantic that discusses the in-between sports fans are faced with when choosing how and where to watch their favorite teams (8:01). Later, they highlight Amazon’s first Thursday NFL broadcast that featured an interesting pre-show, graphics, and a new broadcasting team (27:35), before wrapping things up by discussing what’s next for the PGA Tour (37:36). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Talk the Thrones. The Ringers Instant Reaction show for all things, Ice and Fire is back. Now as a pod. To cover the new Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon. Every Sunday night, the Ringerverse, Chris Ryan, that's B. Joanna Robinson and I, Mallory Rubin, will be breaking down the latest episode.

Sharing our thoughts on all the schemes and plots. Skems and plots are the same thing. Dragons. And incest. Hey, it's a Game of Thrones show. So boot up your favorite podcast player and head to the Dragon Pit. because fire and pods will rain. David?

Yes. The Wall Street Journal's Joe Flynn had a big scoop last week. NBC, or what's left of NBC, is thinking about abandoning the 10 p.m. hour of prime time. So instead of NBC giving local affiliates three hours worth of shows, they're going to give them two hours worth of shows.

Now, I don't know about you. I'm not sure I'm going to miss the show that NBC would be providing during that time slot because I don't watch Dick Wolf shows about cops or firemen. Why do you have a television then? But if this happens, kind of brings to an end, doesn't it? The historic sequence of things on network television. A couple of comedies, a couple more comedies maybe, and then boom, the hammer.

The dramatic series at 10 o'clock. Yeah, I think you'd have to let me know what shows we'd actually be saying goodbye to. Although it does seem like, yeah, I mean, why not hang on to it? They rolled it back at one point for Leno, right? Didn't they get rid of, didn't they toss some of that hour in the can?

Yeah, they were still doing it, though. That was still the network. Now they're just going to say, run your Big Bang Theory reruns or local news that last, an hour and then it's followed by another awkward 30 minutes of local news it's all going to pass to the affiliates now there's plenty of stuff you could be streaming elsewhere I mean that's a weird thing right it seems like it's sort of pushing people away from

terrestrial television yeah to the extent they haven't already gone running for the hills on their own I think mostly this is a nostalgia thing and it's funny to look back when we have have things that we'll have to explain to our kids someday, but we'll have to explain to them that networks thought it was the right thing to do was to make you laugh for an hour and then make you laugh again. And then it was make you cry. So it was not just that we were getting a little more adult as the evening was going on and kids were going to bed, but it was they were putting your emotions in a certain sequence. You're going to laugh. You're going to cry. And then, you know, late night television comes on. You laugh again.

Yeah, it's right. Very rarely did you ever have one unified kind of ethos on a night of television on one channel, right? I mean, I guess the exceptions would have been the early days of Fox when they didn't have the 10 o'clock hour there either, right? Still don't. Even during the heyday of NBC's Thursday night lineup, it was always for four half-hour comedies and then ER rolling in for the hammer. Suddenly, Susan, to ER. Well, suddenly Susan wasn't exactly one of the icons of that period, but sure. I'm more of a Caroline in the city guy.

There you, there you go. Is it Caroline in the city? Yeah. It was. She was the artist. Yeah. The other funny part about this story is the whole idea of affiliates. Now in this age where if I want an HBO show, I go to my magic screen and watch the show on HBO,

but it used to be that you had affiliates that the network was giving the show to. That's how you watch television. Yeah, like franchises, yeah. Yeah, you were watching NBC, but really you were watching Channel 5 or Channel 4 where you were. And the affiliate had a certain, you know,

I think some of it was contractual, but occasionally they'd be like, we don't want your show. Oh, yeah. Do you remember the NYPD Blue thing in Dallas-Fort Worth when we were in high school? Oh, they refused to show it because it was so blue. It was too blue for the Metro Plus.

What did they show instead? It was a, I looked this up today. It was an hour-long local newscast, which sounds like what we're back to now. Well, that's the problem with this plan, though, right? It's like, it's not like the local affiliates are going to be like, like, here's some brilliant new programming strategy. They're just going to give you more of what they're already equipped to have, right? And at least in the early days, when we were little, little kids, probably mostly, before we were born. If there was ever a local affiliate that opted out of whatever the network

sent him, it was probably because they had a better idea that had been working in the local audience, right? Our weird weekly, like, studio game show is still doing really well, or the local sports thing that's an institution here. You know, we trust you that some people in this country like Seinfeld, but we're going to go with what we got. It's been working for a long time, right? But now there's nothing really left to put on, it feels like. Maybe. Maybe. they'll figure it out. There's reruns. I mean, I think that's where you go if you're them. You buy cheap reruns and throw it up there. Yeah, but that's sort of so begs the question. Like, why would NBC not be trying to produce just like some cheap sitcom that they could eventually

have on their own, just, you know, they have all these peacock originals out there. Like, why would they not be just putting those on TV? It's the same answer, Sesame Street, HBO, save money. Yeah, I guess so. We want to save money. Do you remember, that first illicit episode of NYPD Blue, first of all, totally unwatchable in 1993 for us in Dallas, Fort Worth. There was not a way to go watch it unless somebody recorded it for you in New York and sent you a VHS tape. Right. And my mom and I were friends with a guy I worked at the Fort Worth Star Telegram, now a big author, Jeff Gwynn. And he invited us to attend a focus group at the newspaper that was going to sit around a table and watch the first episode of NYPD Blue.

You and your mom? Me and my mom. Did you have to watch it together? Like, you see we're side by side? Yes. I would go against everything that NYPD Blue is about, but go ahead. Yeah, because I was 15. And again, we don't know much about this episode.

Just know, ooh, it's a little pushing the boundaries of network television. And we get there, and it's us and a whole bunch of adults. I think I was the lone child representative on this panel sitting around a conference table. And if I remember correctly, a television was wheeled in. And we watched this episode of NYPD Blue, which featured some partial nudity, a lot of, or some bare butts or something. I just remember sitting there being like, I'm so excited I'm getting to watch this. And I'm so disappointed I'm having to watch this with my mom and all these other random adults.

Oh, yeah. Talk about uncomfortable. Folks, that was network television in the 90s. Coming up on today's uncensored press box, people who like to watch sports these days find themselves paying not only for cable, but for streaming services. Are we in sports watching heaven or sports watching hell?

We have some weekend TV notes on Amazon's first Thursday night game since it got the exclusive rights. Plus, is the future of golf going to be happening on Monday nights and will Tiger Woods be it showrunner? All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer.

Podcast Network. Hello, media consumer, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantes here. Story that got my attention last week was a piece by Alex Kirchner in the Atlantic. On the strange and somewhat annoying place that sports fans find themselves in these days, we're between the TV cable era of sports

and the streaming era of sports. and we're paying for both of them at the same time. So for example, if Notre Dame fans want to watch all the Irish games this year, they need NBC, they need ABC, they may need ESPN for a game against Navy in November, and they definitely need a subscription to Peacock to get a UNLV game on October 22nd. Kershner writes, the present is about paying more and more money to maintain what you had while being occasionally flummoxed about where to find it.

Yeah. How do you feel about the can I actually watch this game era of sports fandom? Well, we should stipulate that it's not an entirely new thing, right? I mean, we grew up, I mean, until it still exists in an era where local games are sometimes throttled by the team. if there's not enough people who are in attendance at the game in various sports or certain what you would consider local broadcasts that don't always play the team. Or maybe your favorite team isn't playing because the local broadcast is taking precedence

on regular broadcast TV. Now, there's always been ways around this, right? I mean, you could buy your Sunday ticket for the NFL. You could have your satellite dish, whatever. But there is sort of, this does kind of echo our conversation about HBO and Sesame Street and whatever else they're taking off the platform. And there was a sort of expectation that these streaming platforms

would allow us a sort of like, you know, universal satellite dish, right? That like one way or another, we'd be able to get everything we wanted if you just push the right button. And certainly, I guess you can here, but you just have to, like, pay for a bunch of different stuff. Get everything you wanted for a price

that was way cheaper than the old cable era. That's what the promise was. Right. And I don't know if this, promise was ever written down anywhere. It seemed to be more like a cosmic promise to people. And as Kershner points out, it's safe to say that that promise to the extent that it was ever made to anybody is not true. No, it's definitely not true. And I think, well, I mean, I think for a long time there's been the expectation that, well, I don't think that promise was ever meant,

it was ever intended to be kept. I'll say that. But I think, you know, intelligent people would say that, that the future of streaming platforms looked something like, you know, there was all this expansion. Everybody has their own platform. And then I think a lot of people think at some point it's going to, they're going to kind of be, they're going to consolidate, right? Companies swallowing other companies are just general, you know, joining forces in the platform wars. And instead of having 17 different things, when you actually have to choose between these things, and maybe you'll have, maybe there'll be like three to five big ones, you know,

and a bunch of little ancillary things that you can choose if you're, you know, a horror movie, fan or a fan of black and white films, you could buy this other little attachment. And it would end up being basically like cable again. We will have reassembled the cable bundle. And that's not, that shouldn't be shocking based on the history of, the modern history of the world, that, you know, that the giant monopolistic forces would regain power. But weirdly the thing that's standing in the way of even that now is sports, is the thing that a lot of people hope that would be a problem

that a lot of people had that they hope would be solved in the streaming wars. Right now I can see whatever I want. I don't have to have Sunday ticket. I don't have to, or at least don't have to have to have specific service. I don't have to go to the bar to watch it. I don't have to have to have a satellite dish. I can have it just sort of brought to me on my iPad or my laptop or my TV, whatever.

But the sports are just too valuable. They're going to make it all impossible. If there is ever an opportunity for this stuff to be manageable. It's going to mean that one of these major companies decides to leave money on the table, right? I mean, is it the only way that you're going to get

all of the NFL games that you want is if somebody like Amazon just buys the rights to broadcast all of them and then says, you know, and maybe we don't have exclusive rights, but we have the rights to broadcast all of them alongside other people. but we're going to lower the price of the Amazon football package to $2.99 a month just to swallow up all the audience or something. Right? I mean, that's like the best way forward. And that's not even taking to account the next phase, which would be, you know, Amazon signing us all up and then proceeding to take over the world by some nefarious means. Well, in that fantasy Amazon scenario, you know what would happen the first week. Somebody would say, okay, this is great about all these NFL games. But where's the college game?

that I want to watch on Amazon. Right. Oh, you mean you don't have the rights to every single college football game? Mm-hmm. Oh, wait a second. You mean, I have to order another service for that? And that's what's funny about this is,

from a certain point of view, this is the golden age of being able to watch sports. Mm-hmm. So much more that is viable. And let's not discount the fact that you can watch it on the, magic phone you are holding in your hand while lying in bed or run around or do whatever you're doing. So like, you know, if you go, if you just date this back 10, 20 years and you told me,

like, this is the future, it's going to cost a lot of money. You'd be like, this is awesome. This is so much easier for me to watch sports than it ever has been. But I wonder, and I wonder if what's happening is like on sports Twitter and you and I are these guys as well so let's lump us in there are people on sports Twitter who are like I want to watch all the sports

if there's a good game on today a game that gets unexpectedly good I want to watch that right now and it turns out if you want to watch all the sports everything it is expensive you have to have a cable package or something like a cable package

then you have to have these little sub packages, and then you have to have Peacocks, you can get that one Notre Dame game, and then you got to have this. And like that, that is, and it is clunky and expensive. But like, I think that's probably a smallish number of people that truly want everything. And the, you know what, the reason they want everything is, David, because we can get everything now. That's it. Yeah, I mean, prior, prior to, you know, streaming television, we lived in a fairly, like, I don't want to say low stakes consumer. version of of consumership.

But like, there were a lot of times where I really wanted to watch a game. And it wasn't on the way that I thought it would be on. Maybe it was on a channel. Like, I didn't know it was on. I never ended up finding it. And you're just like flabbergasted for about five, ten minutes. And then you say, oh, maybe I'll just watch this Friends rerun instead. And you're kind of okay with that, right?

Because you're not used to having everything that you could possibly have. And you don't have people. on Twitter telling you what's happening in the game, you can kind of just forget that it exists, right? You can put it out of you, you could just put it aside. That's not the case anymore, you know? Not only will you be aware that people are watching it and you're not, you'll be, there'll be a course

of people screaming about how they're not watching it and it'll become, you know, and you can join that army. And yeah, I mean, you'll figure out how to get it, you'll have to pay a bunch more money and hope that there's a, you know, free trial week or whatever. I mean, it's just gonna be bonkers. I wonder if there's going to be bonkers. if there would ever be a version of it of streaming like a like you know like a like a book of the

month club type thing where it's like we take pieces of every publisher's list and we give it to you or like you know like Columbia house CDs or whatever it's like if you listen there's not going to be one multimedia broad you know corporation that's going to have the rights to all the NFL games it's never going to happen but David and Brian Inc we will go negotiate for block fees for just the Thursday night football game from Amazon, for just that what all the games from around the world. You'll have to download, you'll have to

download the apps or whatever, but it only works for this window, or maybe we have a special window, and for slightly less than you would spend, to buy all of these apps separately, we bring you just the football stuff. Yeah, or how about it, let's go full book of the month club and say, we'll give you

the big NFL games, a couple big college games, we'll give you that UFC fight, that you were going to a regret not paying for when it has a crazy upset. We give you that golf tournament that Rory McElroy comes back from six strokes to win. You're like, oh, okay, you know? Yeah. I got a nice little buffet here. It's true. As things that won't happen go, I love this idea. Well, there's also, I mean, that's a great note to end this bit on, but like, but also, I mean, the problem with streaming, or the issue is streaming, and I'm sure what all of these big

companies are weighing against is just, you know, they have a lot of competition with each other. They have a lot of, you know, demands for subscriber numbers from their shareholders and everything else, but they're still always fighting against piracy, right? And at some point, I mean, what they always have to guard against is if the easier option is watching it for free on some illicit website, there's still going to be a bunch of people doing that, right? I mean, at some point, you have to sort of balance against that. So, I mean, maybe at some point that'll come into play. Obviously, it's been less and less an issue because the ease of being able to push a button on your phone and having a show appear really, you know, really distorts that balance. But I don't know.

It is. It's really, it's a real pain. It's a real pain. And if you have, like, my extended family does, like, three different means of watching television in streaming, you know, like three different, like, between our house and my mom's house, we literally have three different streaming, like, next. network, you know, whatever, like the version of the old cable box, but it's on the streaming box. It just is so perplexing. And the lovey shows that don't, they don't carry it on some of them, and there's channels that don't make it through. And it's like you need a Sherpa to guide you to where the football game you need to watch is. Remember the one a couple years ago when

Oprah was interviewing Harry and Megan? And everybody who thought, who thought they were going to be able to watch it on Paramount Streaming Service, that was aligned with, CBS and then it wasn't on there because Oprah had the streaming rights. There were all these people like, I don't have CBS, which is the funniest thing you could ever say if you came of age in a certain time. Like, you don't have CBS? What? No, it's crazy.

One of the major over the top streamers is it sling? It might be sling. I'm going to get in trouble to this. I think it's sling doesn't have the network TV, at least not here in New Jersey. They're just like, we give you all the other channels. and if you want network TV, here we'll give you, here's a link to how you can like install an antenna on your TV.

Which is crazy because you used to, you used to be able to do that, right? I mean, you used to be able to just turn on the TV and get four channels, but now it's not really, I don't, are smart TV's made for that?

I don't even know. I love the points you make about your friends on Twitter taunting you with sporting events that you're not watching. Yeah. Kersner mentions an example of this in his Atlantic story. He talks about a game last year where Notre Dame was playing Toledo.

And this spoke to me because I remember this game. This was not a game that most people who weren't Notre Dame or Toledo fans were interested in. Apologies to college football Twitter, which seems to want to watch every single game and be interested in everything. But let's just call mainstream sports fan was not super into this game. But then Toledo played really well and came really close to upsetting Notre Dame. So of course, all those friends on Twitter start going, look at this. Upset alert.

Toledo might beat Notre Dame. And I remember this moment because we went scrambling for it. And it was on peacock. It was like, uh-oh. And I have a peacock subscription now and I know I have a peacock subscription now, but I didn't know if I had a peacock subscription when this game was happening last year. Mm-hmm. And I just remember this crazy, crazy scramble.

But again, we're in a pretty good period where it's Notre Dame and Toledo. We get interested in it only when Toledo has a chance to win. The barrier to entry at that point is $4.99, according to Kirchner. And then we can push a button and watch it. Yeah. So again, annoying, certainly weird, sort of caught between two. worlds, I totally get it, but also from a certain point of view, a pretty cool age when you can just do that. It is, unless you're watching it, like, you know, in the passenger seat of a car and you can't

download the app in question because you don't have Wi-Fi service or something like that. I mean, there's a lot of variables that come into this. And frankly, when you're talking about watching following a game on Twitter, yes, there's, like I said before, the annoyance of other people taunting you with it. But this kind of goes to what I was saying about pirating. It doesn't just have to be front-row sports. It's dot EU or whatever when you're trying to watch your illicit thing. If you can get enough of it from people just posting clips on Twitter, and I know I say

this with some trepidation because people, because that's what everybody's trying to, all these major sports leagues are fighting against, you know, people who are just having, you know, well-intentioned clips for review purposes on Twitter. But it doesn't even matter if they're going to take it down eventually. If in the moment you can see that crazy touchdown, you can see the play that led to the play, you can see all that stuff. Well, then are you going to spend $4.99? Totally.

Totally, totally. Especially when there's, like you said, even a slight barrier for entry. There's not even a way to figure out what channels things are on anymore. I mean, I know this is a very old man yells at clouds thing because I still sometimes find myself like going to the ESP and home page to try to figure out what channel various sporting events are on. What channel is this on? Yeah.

But it's not like, you know, you could just scroll through the three usual suspects. Like it would have been, you know, with, with, with, um, with, um, with, um, but, but it's not like, you know, you could just scroll through the, the NFL back in the day. There's a lot of stuff, man, especially when it's the playoffs or something exciting, something interesting is happening, or it's a sporting event you don't normally watch, you know? It feels really hopeless to go into Google

and just be like, what channel is the Kentucky Derby on or, you know, whatever, just to try to figure out how to do that. I know that's very Web 1.0, but it still happens. And, you know, the way that all these smart TVs and smart whatever things are built now, you're just young and to avoid, you know, You can't just, you could just push the microphone button and say turn on the NFL, but it's not thinking, your computer's not thinking the same thing you're thinking all the time. So it's tough.

We can in here. For fun, I went back to my freshman year at the University of Texas and looked into how I would have watched every Texas game that year had I not been going to most of the home games or all the home games. Sure. So there were 13 games including the bowl game. This is how it broke down. Seven were on over-the-air television. Five were on cable, ESPN and the old Fox Sports Networks. And one, a New Mexico State home game was on pay-per-view.

It costs 1999 to watch Texas versus New Mexico State. We had a home game meeting. It's in Austin? It's in Austin. But to watch this, you had to buy the pay-per-view, which if you adjust for inflation is about $38 today. So if you wanted to complete your Texas schedule, and again, there were no Twitter clips going up to give you all the Texas touchdowns in tidy form, $38.

And you'll remember this, David. In those days, you probably were either making a phone call or actually going to the cable company to order that pay-per-view. Yeah. It was not a magic button to push at home. on most televisions. Maybe I'm misremembering, but I don't remember

a lot of magic button pushing going on at that time. It wasn't too long after that. I think you could kind of affirmatively push a button on your remote control, but the phone number was still listed on the screen.

You called for most of that stuff. I called from a place of needing to feel secure rather than just push the button. You could push the button and what if nothing happened? Then do you, you know? Right.

And the cable company might not answer when I wanted to hear a human being say, yes, you got this. David, you are confirmed for WrestleMania. I'm looking at my screen right here. I just want to say, before we get out of here, that you made this point earlier, we are in between two eras, right? We should be firmly ensconced in the new era by now. We're not. I do feel confidently that in 10 years, all of this is going to look like, just is going to seem

sort of ridiculous, right? I mean, at a bare minimum, they will trick us by dint of some, you know, organizational system or search platform to make us think that we're at a much more strict streamlined place. It's going to seem like we're explaining very archaic technology. I just want to say for all the younger generation of people that we work with, I'm just happy that they get to live through this chaos because sometimes it feels like we're the only ones with just inexplicable consumer habits in our lives. Yeah.

Enjoy it, kids. Anyway, check out Alex Kirshner's story. Sports streaming makes losers of us all in the Atlantic. Coming up, did Amazon get it across the goal line in its first NFL broadcast under the new Thursday night deal. But first, David, let us do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media at Twitter made it at exactly the same time, send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

This week's winner comes from listener Andrew Grainning. Last week, the affidavit was released in the matter of the search for and seizure of documents It's a Donald Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago. Many people posted the pages of the affidavit that were almost completely blocked out. Always a good visual gag. I love it. I love it. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write,

me when my editor asked me to elaborate on a pitch, we would have also accepted when my editor asked for a story draft. If you're thinking like a journalist who is very, very close to a draft, Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, let me tell you, David, when the whole streaming sports frustration thing will come to a boil, when the chickens will come home to roost, it's going to be September 15th, 2022. There's going to be a Thursday night football game. It's Chargers Chiefs. So it's a really good game.

And it is going to be airing on Amazon Prime. And there are a lot of people, including people I am related to and very close to, who are going to be texting me that night going, where can I see the football game? Because they are not going to understand where to find it. Oh, of course, yeah. Well, Amazon gave its new Thursday night game a test drive last week, with a 49ers Texans preseason game.

There was some amazing narration before the game started, including this proclamation. The evolution of this historic game continues right now with the 49ers and the Texans. Wow. Seems like a lot to put on a 49ers Texans preseason game. It was a little strange to see Al Michaels and Kirk Herb Street sitting next to each other.

I know, yeah. Not only for the like the network split screen, like we didn't understand how these people would ever work together, but also the pro football college football. Yeah. Which is a firmer divide than you would think. Yeah, it feels like a sports, like a like a movie like basketball or something where it's like just they

hire two well-known sports personalities to stand next to each other. And it's not really like who's worked in a booth together. It's totally odd. There was no Collinsworth slide for students of television history. We just got a static shot and heard. Herbie was sitting next to Al Michaels. Collinsor said on this podcast, he would not mind. It was not intellectual

property of the U.S.C. And also said the reason for this is that Al begins broadcasts alone, which I knew, but I'd sort of forgotten. Like he's on, this is Al Michaels, da, da, da, da, and then you bring in the analyst. But they just sort of did it at two shot.

I tell you when this became real for me, not a streaming product, not a interesting marriage of Al Michaels and Kirk Karp Street. It's when they went to the shot of downtown Houston. And you heard that Al Michael's voice go downtown Houston on this last Thursday in August. I was like, oh, man, that sounds like football. Yeah. Why is the nighttime downtown shot such a romantic image to see before a football game?

I don't know. That's a, they need, they got to have something. They need filler. downtown wherever you are is about as emblematic of most towns as you can get. It wouldn't be as romantic, though, if it was daytime downtown Houston. Well, no. No, the downtown... No offense to our friends in Houston.

Not because Houston in the daytime is particularly unattractive. I just don't think a daytime downtown shot is exciting. It doesn't have that you are there feel. They should just do like a 45-minute slow pan over all of the Houston exerbs, right? Do you really want to get an idea of what Houston's like? Look, there's a leaf. There's flower mount.

Is a flower mount at Houston? I think that's up where we're from, not Houston. That should be the alternate telecast, I think. Alan Herbie doing the game, but the shot, that's like a drone shot of the Houston suburbs. A couple of things that were interesting. Did you notice the little Amazon Arrow, next to the down and distance that was on the field.

Yeah, that was, I saw, yeah, I saw that. It was nice, nice touch. I'm not in favor of product placement, but man, that was some Slake product placement. Mm-hmm. Because it wasn't annoying. The broadcast just looked amazing. No surprise given Freddie Gedelli,

who's a producer, is the guy who produced Sunny High Football for its entire run. It looked awesome. There was no moment where you thought, I'm watching something in a weird way. Yeah. or something that is different than football, pro football that I'm used to.

This is very much the Fox 94 playbook. It's like, you know what the game should look like a football game that you're familiar with? Yeah. That's why the evolution of the sport thing is so strange though, right? Because it seems like their goal,

they're implicit or explicit goal. And I think I agree with it is to make people feel like this is as unweird as possible. Oh, absolutely. Look, I think their idea is we don't want anybody watching this. Let's say, let's say my relatives figure out how to turn on Amazon Prime. We don't want a person like that who does not watch a ton of stuff in streaming to look at this and be like, I don't recognize what this is. But this just looks like the football game on my TV.

And by the way, a very high end version of the football games on my TV. Sunday night football level football game on my TV. If we're going to be different, it's going to be in the pregame. just like Fox was way back when and in the alternate streams where we can give you dude perfect doing the game and all these apparent

alt stream options to be named later that we'll see later in the year. Sure. For like four weeks or six weeks, whatever they decide. We'll give you that. And that will be what is Amazoni about this. Okay.

So did your uncles figure out how to watch this game? See, I was saying, relatives. And I think you just went right to uncles. Well, no, I mean, two people who would be committed to watching. They did not text to me, so I'm going to say that's a no on that one. In their defense, Amazon signed a deal with direct TV to provide this in bars. Oh, I was going to ask us. Bars aren't wired for this stuff for streaming.

Mm-hmm. So if you're, you can go, you will be able to go to a bar and watch Thursday Night Football on Television. What bars aren't wired for streaming? You'd think that would be something that would have happened by now, but it said in the stories about it said Buffalo Wild Wings was not wired for streaming. Like you could definitely go like laptop to TV, but I guess you can't go on all the TVs maybe if it's not networked in some way.

Yeah, and you're talking about wiring a lot of locations for chains like that. Which, you know, with places you, with buildings you may not own, all those kinds of things. Wi-Fi you may be getting from, you know, a landlord, something like that. So that's, interesting. But so they will be able to go to their favorite watering hole and watch the game. Because Amazon subcontracted it out to direct TV. Yeah, because you're Amazon, like, your first year thing is like, number one, produce a great game. That's awesome. Number two, figure out how to get people to watch it. Well, yeah, I wonder if it's going to be, you know, there's talk, there was

this year in the past couple months about Netflix finally cracking down on people sharing passwords and stuff like that. I don't know what the talk is from other platforms. But one would imagine there'd be some logic for Amazon being very liberal about it for the first season, right? Just get, you want to, O'Brien's going to share his Amazon password with all of his family and, you know, who might be difficult to hook up, who might be difficult to acquire his customers on their own. Well, that's okay for now. And then we'll crack down later on once they're used to it. Once they already have the app downloaded, once they've already get the interface figured out. We'll take anybody we can get in your one. You can be in a bar,

you can have stolen a password, you can have a shared password, anything you want. We want you to watch. And it doesn't, again, we, you know, we sit here as like, guy who wants to watch all the games and is streaming everything and can't wait to watch the end of Toledo Notre Dame. There are a lot of people, this is going to be a big mountain to climb in the world. And the reason it is is because the audience for the NFL is everybody, everybody, young, old, and everything. I mean, this is the last gigantic, regular audience in television. Yeah. And getting them to watch this is going to be such an interesting experiment.

The pregame halftime stuff was interesting because we got a whole totally new crew. Carissa Thompson was a host, Tote Gonzalez, who's kind of pregame show guy was on there. He's familiar from other jobs. but Richard Sherman was also on there late of the Seahawks 49ers and I guess bucks last year he was really good

he's been a guy that a lot of people said like he's going to be a great broadcaster when he finishes playing football and you know what was also good was Ryan Fitzpatrick oh yeah who had this magnificent beard of course yeah

Ryan Fitzpatrick and Spencer Hall have brought the magnificent beard back to television or streaming in this case and he did a thing at half time. You know how they always do those like highlight packages at half time? And it's the worst highlight package ever. And it's just generic former quarterback talking over the highlights.

He did one of 49ers quarterback Trey Lance that was showing why Trey Lance could not make the throws he needed to make. And offered a pretty good and haunting preview of Trey Lance 2022 is the 49ers starter. And it was not mean. it was very, but it was critical and it was smart and it was tight and short. And I was like, wow, I can't remember the last time I accidentally watched a halftime show and got something out of it. So well done, Ryan Fitzpatrick. All right, Dave, before we go, we got to talk about the future of golf.

All right. We know that the PGA tour is trying to beat back a challenge from the Saudi Back to Live tour. And we know a subtext of that whole PGA live. war is how do we make golf more entertaining? Well, Tiger Woods and Rory McElroy have an idea. I got to admit it sounds a little like the future of golf is holy moly. This is from Jason Gay, our pal in the Wall Street Journal. Woods and McElroy announced their intention to launch a primetime two-hour brand of

golf to be played Monday nights starting in 2024 in a custom-built venue. it'll be part big tech gay rights Woods and McElroy will hit their drives using virtual reality then they'll play a short game on a surface installed on the stadium floor there was a hype video released last week

that showed cheering fans inside an American gladiators style arena it's also going to be two hours long instead of the Sunday version of golf which is forever hours long would you watch Tiger and Rory in Monday night golf? Man.

It's a good question. My first instinct is to say, can we really call it golf? I know it's golf, but it's not golf, golf, right? I'm trying to think of something that would be a little bit more meaningful to me. Like if they had the big three in basketball,

but it was the best players in the NBA and the NBA, like, co-signed it, and they ran it during the summer. A Monday night skills competition or something? Like where they're... No, just like, just like two on two or three-on-three basketball, where it was just like you pick your teams, like the five teams are the best players in the league. All right.

After that injury the other day, we're going to cancel five-on-five pickup basketball. Yeah. But what about, like, LeBron and somebody playing mic'd-up horse on Monday nights? Um, I think you would watch it, but I see. still think, man, like the traditional, the traditional championship trophies, celebrations, whatever, are just so ingrained into us, right? I mean, like, what are we watching for? Entertainment? I guess if you could really have an entertaining product, but are the, I don't mean, they didn't, I don't think they cast holy moly for just strictly skill, right? They always find

people who are going to be like telegenic and silly and ridiculous, you know, just like good subjects to watch. It's reality TV casting. I mean, are the people who are the best at being entertaining at playing horse necessarily the best basketball players? I don't know. I don't know. Well, so let's say the draw of Monday Night Golf is you like you like Tiger Woods. You're really interesting Tiger Woods. Ditto Rory. You want to hear them in a, you want to see them in a casual setting where they are making jokes, having fun and also demonstrating their golf skills, even if it's in a simulator or whatever. Like they're making like, Oh my God, he's going to try to hit this 40 foot putt.

He's going to try to play a putt putt course with a windmill. I have no idea what this is going to be. It's all a little vague. But you can imagine the basketball version of that. Yeah. Like LeBron, you know, Steph Curry is going to challenge. Steph Curry is going to get five half court shots and he's going to have 20 NBA players challenge him. And all their accumulated half court shots, they're going to see if they can hit as many as Steph Curry hits by himself.

I don't know. Something like that. Yeah. I can imagine watching that. I just feel like there's so much momentum built into the established sports that that's what, I mean, we just talked about it with the NFL and Amazon. They want to make it feel like the same thing, right? I mean, part of that is the power of momentum, the power of stability, even on another platform, you know? And I think that we would all get together and watch that one time.

But I have a hard time imagining that there would be just sort of like, this sort of insistence upon it by episode three. Would we all be live tweeting Rory and Tigers, holy moly? On episode three? I don't know. They'd have to find some way to be pretty like event, I mean pretty like exciting, you know, like for, I think for that to win out. I don't know, maybe, maybe.

I mean, it just seems like if it wins, then that's the future of golf. Like you said, it's the future of golf. But like that, that takes over for the PGA, right? And what is the PGA? Well, yeah, I don't, I don't think we want holy moly, whatever this is, we're placing the PGA. But I guess they see it as like something fun for our pros to do.

And it's a gateway into the PGA. Yeah. So it's always going to be a big lift to try to get somebody to watch five hours of golf on a Sunday. Golf doesn't have big audiences. It has small audiences that by Buick's. So are we going to get younger kids in here to watch this? And then they're like, oh, maybe that's, maybe the answer is that that's more like their need for speed, right? Or they're hard knocks, you know, you get some like a human element in there.

You get to introduce people to the, to the players and hopefully some of the sport. Which Netflix is doing, we should add. They are. No, I know. I know. But to provide an entry point, well, that's, I guess that's, I don't know, it feels a little bit more manageable. I think you're exactly right. I would watch this once.

Kind of like the match that Turner did, you know, when they have Tom Brady once a year and of Tom Brady. If you told me that the match was an ongoing show, that there's been 12 episodes of, I would believe you. Because I wouldn't be shocked to know that I'd never heard. That I heard about it one time and it just fell off the radar. Point being, you wouldn't watch the match every week. Right.

If I told you like, oh, there's Charles Barkley and Tom Brady and, you know. I mean, Stakes. Tiger Roy. Yeah. If Brady can like gamble away the starting quarterback job for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, now I'm interested in this golf game, right? What if I tell you this with golf, we bring in famous non-golf are golfers. So Charles Barclay is going to try to hit the 40-foot putt.

That's great. Or Obama's going to try to hit the 40-foot putt. Or bring into like the happy Gilmores of the world and let them try to win their way under the PGA just by some ridiculous obstacle course format. Like they don't, rather than doing it the right way, let's do it in prime time with really high stakes. and then suddenly, you know, if things get real, Rory Macaroy has to decide whether or not he's going to just cut this guy's head off or just sort of laugh along as he makes his way onto the tour. And potentially beats Rory at the real, in the real tour event next week.

Yeah. See this, I like. Yeah. That's all you need to do, take average Joe's and put him in a position to make the Philadelphia Eagles. You got money, you know? David has just turned this into a Fox reality show. I'm available for all consulting jobs. Just give me a call.

It's watching the Tour Championship this weekend on Sunday. Great tournament. It turned out to be really exciting. But early in the day, they went to the captain of industry interview portion of a golf telecast, in this case with the president and CEO, the outgoing and president and CEO of FedEx, because this is the FedEx Cup, and just interviewed him about his career on television. I'm watching this and I'm thinking if you want to just a cheap fix

to make golf tournaments on TV more exciting get rid of this this stinks who is this for other than the person being interviewed yeah there's just nothing here man there's just nothing like bland pronouncements about his career

and oh golf in the community and whatever it's like this stinks as TV this just absolutely stinks has been going on in golf for as long as I can remember. Let's get rid of it. Sorry, folks. We got a challenge from the live tour. We don't have time to interview the corporate CEO

about what he thinks about the sponsored golf tournament. We're all good. Diver David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last week's headline about Elvis Andrews. Leaving the Oakland A's was Elvis. Elvis has left the Coliseum. Because the A's stink,

listener Jeff Hoffman says the headline should have been Elvis has left the rebuilding. Yeah, that's better. That's a great headline. Aren't you impressed at how often press box listeners are better than the headline pros? Mm-hmm. Much less better than us.

Today's headline, David, comes from Brooks Dubos. It's from the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. I'll reach you the subheadline here. Demolition begins on Maryland Legislative Services Building in Annapolis. New facility expected by 2024. You don't need to know any of those details.

Can you give me a puny and kind of generic they're tearing down a building headline? What was the Capital Gazette's strained pun headline? Wait, I don't need to know any details. I just, it's just like the tumbling down,

falling down end of the foundation, something of the founding, what's it called? What's it called when we tear down a building? What's special word might you use? Raise, raising expectations,

raising, raising the bar, raising raising, I want a raise. I deserve a raise. Yeah. So I get a raise. Getting a raise. Getting a raise.

That's pretty good. Getting a raise. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. I'm back later this week with an interview. And then David and I are back on Tuesday. Monday Labor Day.

You and I are going to be off. But we're back Tuesday to get you set up for NFL season. And with more. lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.