Today’s Estimated Reading Time: 4 Minutes and 55 Seconds

Happy Wednesday, This is the Daily Breakroom. We’re here to catch you up on sports in just a few minutes.

Here’s what we got today:

• Adidas Gets Hip Checked

• Roger Goodell Extension

• Dell Match Play

• Morant’s Return

• A Chance for the Scoring Record

Let’s do it.

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Adidas Is Out

Fanatics has hip checked Adidas out of the role as the NHL’s on-ice uniform provider. Fanatics will start providing the unis and jerseys for the league in 2024. We don’t have the financials yet but we do know it’s 10 year deal. This is the first time Fanatics branding will be on an official player uniform in any professional sport.

It’s being reported that Adidas is actually the one who didn’t want to renew their rights after the 2023-2024 season. In 2017, Adidas took over the rights and have been paying the NHL $70 million annually, which is more than double what Reebok was paying for the rights when they had them the decade before.

Fanatics has had quite the blow up in the last 5 years. I’ll look to do a sports+business update on them and their founder, Michael Rubin, on a slow day. I’m just glad they’ve improved their return process 😁 

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Roger Goodell Always Wins

Speaking of renewing contracts, it looks like NFL Commish Roger Goodell is going to get another extension. This will be his fourth extension after taking over in 2006. His current 5 year, $200 million contract expires in March of 2024 and the extension would give him an extra few years before he retires.

Anyone can give some good reasons as to why Goodell should get an extension. Teams are worth billions and they are selling for billions, which wasn’t the case before Goodell took over in 2006. He’s negotiated billions of dollars in TV deals, got Nike to do uniforms, and he lead the NFL during the pandemic in which they didn’t miss a single game.

There’s also lots of reasons to not grant a massively high priced extension. He rebranded the Washington Commanders and that makes some people very upset. He’s botched many harassment/abuse investigations and suspensions. And heck, almost anyone could grow the NFL at the rate it’s been going. It’s been the most popular and wealthiest league in the world for a long time. There’s really no reason to spend all the $$ on him because this would be a very hard job to mess up. But there is one thing that the owners like to pay him for… He takes the heat and the hate from fans and the media and diverts it away from the team owners and bears that on himself.

We’ll keep you updated on extension details when we get them.

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The Last of the Dell Match Play

While we’re all getting hyped for the Masters in a few weeks, the PGA Tour extends us a little treat to help get us through the waiting period.

This week brings us a change in format and it’s one the pros really enjoy. This is the only Match Play event on the PGA Tour and if you’re not sure what that means, we’ll explain. Normally, golfers count up all the strokes it took them to get the ball into the hole for 18 holes and whoever took the least amount of strokes out of all the golfers, would win. That’s simply called “stroke play”. In match play, players are matched up 1 vs 1 and they play each hole against each other. If you score lower than your opponent on that hole, you would win the hole. The goal is to obviously win more holes than your opponent over the 18 hole competition. If you win the 18 hole competition you would get 1 point, if you tie you would get .5 points, and if you lose you get NOTHING!

This week at Austin Country Club, we have a 64 golfer field. They split up into a bracket with 16 groups of 4 golfers each. Each golfer play the other 3 golfers in their group over the first 3 days. On Saturday, the golfer with the most points ( remember 1 point for a win, .5 or a tie, etc.) from each group will advance to the round of 16 and then the quarterfinals. If you make it to Sunday you will play in semifinals and hopefully have the opportunity to play in the Championship in the afternoon.

It’s a lot of golf for the golfers, but it’s even more fun for the spectators. Over the next 3 days, you can watch on the Golf Channel from 1-7pm. We’ll keep you updated on the groups and will let you know who’s advancing to the round of 16.

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Morant’s Return

After Ja Morant was suspended by the NBA and Memphis Grizzlies for flashing a gun on a livestream from a nightclub, he took some additional time off to go to counseling for stress management. Morant is expected to make his return to the court tonight when the Grizz take on the Houston Rockets at 8:00pm.

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A Chance for the Scoring Record…..

AND IT’S REJECTED! [Insert NBA JAM voice]

Detroit Mercy guard Antoine Davis was four points shy of breaking Pete Maravich’s all time NCAA basketball scoring record. Detroit wasn’t getting a bid to the NCAA Tournament or even the NIT. It looked like they could possibly get an invite to the lesser known College Basketball Invitational (The CBI) and that also didn’t happen. Davis felt discouraged but then was hoping his team would get an invite for the inaugural College Hoops Postseason 8. This ultimately did not happen either.

The weird part of this story is that people sent emails to these tournament commissioners asking them not to invite Detroit because they didn’t want Maravich’s scoring record broken. It’s weird but I kind of get it also.

Ultimately, if you want to play in the post season for basketball, your team probably shouldn’t be 14-19.

Davis will go down 2nd all time in scoring, which I’d say is pretty good.

That’s all for today.

Have a great day!

-The Daily Breakroom Team