CLEVELAND, OHIO (TheOBR.com) - Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
THE DAILY BLOVIATION
The NFL is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think that Buffalo Wild Wings is a big corporation, but that's just peanuts to the NFL.
Sorry. Just channeling my inner Douglas Adams.
But the NFL is really, really big. Honest. And it's getting bigger all the time.
Just look at last night's Kelce Brothers podcast, New Heights. Chiefs tight end Travis brought his girlfriend on, and then broke the internet. The NFL is big enough to make two brothers from the Cleveland area famous and helped one meet the world's most famous pop singer. It's big, folks.
The NFL is so big that even a franchise with one of the worst records in the league has appreciated by nearly half a billion dollars a year since Jimmy Haslam bought it, and helped lead it to, at one point, a 1-31 record over two years. The record doesn't matter. If you own an NFL team, (anyone out there?), especially one in a rabid market like Cleveland, there's little you can do to stop it from making you richer and richer.
Still, the NFL isn't satisfied, not by a long shot. It's eyeing international expansion and playing footsie with a safer version, flag football. It has now exchanged its media properties or employed various financial maneuvers to wind up with partial ownership in both ESPN and Paramount/Skydance.
NFL logo football
Whose name is on this? (Photo: Getty)
That means that the OBR, a site that was born in and helped foment fans' rights issues in the mid-1990s, is now partnering directly with a property partially owned by the NFL. (Gulp!). (I'm sure they will ask me for a consult.) I'm not sure either one of us saw this coming, but I am damn sure that the NFL didn't care about the OBR's partnership with Paramount, as huge financial machinations were ongoing. We're just along for the ride.
As a paranoid freak, I recall how ABC shut down coverage of the Browns fan protests in Pittsburgh one Monday night in 1995. My mind is pondering whether the media will continue to serve as a valuable check on the league's overreach. I have personal experience running digital outlets with the NFL and other partnerships, and can attest that there is a freezing effect on what is reported. Or not reported.
With the NFL remaining a minority owner in these businesses, it's easy to shrug one's shoulders and hope that networks like ESPN do not decide not to report on NFL-unfriendly stories. Goodell swears that the league will not interfere.
Oh, but the temptation to curve coverage in a direction the league prefers will be intense at times. Resisting that temptation is crucial for both the NFL and the media partners the league now partially owns. If fans believe that they're not getting the truth from the outlets, they'll look elsewhere for it. There's no shortage of outlets eager to provide coverage of their team. If the NFL becomes bland and shiny, it will lose some of its appeal.
Surely, the NFL knows that the drama around the league and teams helps sell it. Turning their media partners into propaganda networks would lessen the interest in both the media outlets and the sport itself.
As a member of the media ecosystem, I'll be watching closely. The NFL should allow its partners to decide how to cover the league, for the benefit of both parties. I'm hopeful that the NFL is savvy enough to realize this.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
Newswire Bloviation Archive
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UPDATED: Browns Shedeur Sanders Suffers Oblique Injury in Practice with Eagles; Unlikely to Play on Saturday - Fred
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THE LIFT
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond...
AI helps astronomers make a potentially major find — an exploding star being attacked by a black hole - (space.com)
Space is not only big, as the Douglas Adams link above attests. It's also violent.
As a curious species, we humans like to see what happens when, for instance, a black hole is consuming a star just as the star is exploding. This has to be the scientific equivalent of attending a demolition derby —a chance to view from afar the turbulent space outside our little corner in the universe. It turns out that AI, our newest addition to the toolbox, helps scientists find these situations much faster than searching the universe (which, as stated above, is big) by hand.
So, when the Terminator robots come to your door and prepare to use liquid metal to impale you while you're drinking milk, make sure to thank them first for all the cool stuff we were able to see because of their driving technology.
WRAPPING UP
*When not being friendly with relentless death cyborgs, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled. *
CONTACT Barry to sponsor the OBR. We have plans for nearly any budget!
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