Congrats to the Carolina Hurricanes on winning their second Stanley Cup in 20 years. The off-season adventures of the Cup are always fun to follow.
The demise of the FanDuel Sports Network, which carried Canes regular season games, after the first round of the NHL playoffs leads to the next question. What’s next? Meanwhile, Channel 50 on Spectrum Cable says, “Programming on this network (FanDuel) is no longer available.”
I assume the Canes will develop some kind of alternative means for fans to watch the team play this fall. They’ve been simulcasting games on radio/TV.
After two years the N.C. General Assembly adopted a state budget (600 pages) heavy with sports issues. One measure allows taxpayers who have gambling winnings to deduct losses from their income as allowed by federal tax law. Sports gambling companies face higher taxes, 23 percent, up from 18. UNC and N.C. State were added to the list of N.C. schools receiving annual gambling proceeds, $5-7M annually.
Political leaders couldn’t reach agreement on incentives for luring a MLB team to N.C so there’s no baseball money.
Funding for trails and greenways was increased to $15M/ year.
The budget has 700 earmarks or individual pork barrel projects for local governments and organizations, some good like Miracle League Network ($300,000) and others not so good.
Time magazine did a big spread on 100 most influential people in sports headed by LeBron James, described and exaggerated as athlete of the century. It read like an obit, but the list was interesting with plenty of folks I’ve never heard of.
The day before the World Cup started FIFA issued updated team rankings: 1 Argentina, 2 Spain, 3 France, 4 England, 5 Portugal, 6 Brazil, 7, Morocco, 8 Netherlands, 9 Belgium, 10 Germany, Mexico 14, USA 17, Canada 30.
Of their first ten only Brazil and Germany didn’t make the round of eight.
The World Cup has been wonderful, exciting games, goals and occasionally surprising results. Fox Sports has been pretty good. The broadcasts were fine, with informed announcers and analysts. Yes, the number one team, John Stone/Stu Holden talks too much, Ian Darke/Landon Donovan, the #2 team, deserved better games. Derek Rae and others were fine.
The TV audience numbers were off the charts. Don’t like ads during game breaks but that’s not a big deal. Mostly they divide the game into four quarters which I don’t like at all.
Was particularly happy most games were on broadcast TV (Fox) and not cable (FS1). Telemundo broadcasts were fun even if I don’t understand Spanish. I tried to ignore most pre-game studio and postgame shows. For the U.S. games these programs were treated like pep rallies), but saw studio host Rebecca Lowe and analyst Thierry Henry do some good stuff on occasion; not so much for Alexi Lalas and Zalatan Ibrahimovic. Surprised Zalatan even had a mic, he said so little to say.
As usual Fox ignored or downplayed off-field soccer issues like suspension of X’s red card, White House intervention/ phone call to FIFA and gave little time to questionable VAR decisions. But when there was a long weather delay before England/Mexico they provided reasonable fill-in stories.
ESPN FC was sharp on analysis, Men in Blazers disappointing, more like a traveling sales caravan than soccer commentary. The athletic.com (NYT Sports) did a strong job on the WC. Looks like Kansas City and Philadelphia did great jobs for soccer fans.
The side stories like Norway (staying at Grandover Resort, Greensboro) bringing their own food, Japanese fans cleaning up stadiums after their games, Tartan Army (Scottish fans) draining all beer kegs in Boston and Miami were the secondary highlights. Hopefully,the Final Four will be as interesting.
I plan to watch the HBO docu “Us against the world: Four years with the USMNT” after the World Cup. Still disappointed with the U.S. performance against Belgium but can’t blame it all on Pulisic.