Will Streaming Wars Make Watching Sports Better for Everyone and How Would You Feel if the NCAA’s Football Kings Split From the League
Steph Curry gets his own brand, but can it challenge the Jump Man? NBA borrows money to cover expenses while Universal Tennis announces a global league. Amazon is now serving your favorite game while you order paper towels and some say the NCAA needs to split up...all this and more on this week’s episode with the Pod On Point crew.
We open the show with a few quick wins and losses. In this week’s wins column we put Steph Curry’s new Under Armour sub-brand. It’s an interesting move for the company and the athlete. We also look at how and why the NBA just borrowed $900 million from the financial markets, what it means for the league and will it be a challenge to repay it. Finally, we salute Universal Tennis’ new pro league and an interesting platform that ranks players across age, geography, skill, etc. Our loss this week is Tom Brady’s company TB12 getting a $1 million PPP loan.
Our main stories focus on how sports is slowly drifting toward streaming platforms, why these platforms are doing it (to sell us more stuff and increase our engagement) and does it help us, the fans, in the final analysis. We also look at the Knight Commission recommendation that the football conferences break away from the NCAA and form their own, more perfect union. The NCAA doesn’t like the idea, but we think the shift is already under way.
Wrapping the show with our weekly C’mon man segment, Anand wonders how did breakdancing become an Olympic sport…