🤖 Jim Nantz Just Lost His Job

I bought a random baseball for $40 from a September 28, 2022 Twins game that was used in a four-pitch walk.

The video I made about it got 1.6 million views and hundreds of people reached out saying they wanted the ball.

The internet is a weird place.

Here’s what’s on tap:

🗞 The Big Story: Broadcaster’s Battle with AI

📉 Biggest Loser: NFL Lies About Throwbacks

🏆 Winner’s Circle: From GoFundMe to the World Cup

New episodes every Thursday on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Episode 12: AI Sports Broadcasting, Pac-12’s Challenges, and Jeron Smith on Athletes & Tech

🗞 The Big Story

Hello, friends (I hope you read that in a Jim Nantz voice).

One of sport’s most iconic broadcasters just got placed on the hot seat.

And not because he pulled a Tom Brennaman (full context at the end), or because he retired like he did from college basketball.

No, Jim Nantz might lose his job calling the Masters because of AI.

Now, it’s important to first build some context around this seemingly outrageous claim, and we should start with the fact that the Master’s is known for having one of the best apps in sports.

That’s because the week of the tournament fans get:

• Full TV broadcast

• Live leaderboards

• Tracking of players on the course

• Predictive fantasy integrations

• “Every Shot, Every Hole” feature for each participant

All for completely free. You don’t even need to log in with your cable provider.

And while this is starting to sound like an ad for the Master’s app (it’s not, but it could be for the right price), it is worth pointing out that starting next year they’re about to step their game up even more.

This is coming in the form of a partnership with IBM in which their AI, Watson, will be used to provide commentary to every video feed in the app.

Yes, that includes the feature that shows every shot from every hole from every golfer.

This large language model, which reports equate to a glorified ChatGPT, has been trained to use terms like “greenside bunker” instead of “sand trap” and “patrons” over “fans.”

And, according to Golf Digest, it will deliver an “announcer quality broadcast for any video feed” on the app, but I’ll let you be the judge of that:

Now, it’s clear that AI won’t be taking Nantz’s job this year but apparently, it will be able to impressively curate each person’s specific broadcast by “varying up sentence structure and factoids” based on what’s already been said, all in an attempt to keep viewers engaged.

But what I find even more useful is the fact that this AI is also going to be able to clip highlights of every player in real-time by using data points such as player fist-pumps, waves to the crowd, or crowd response.

And on top of that, IBM’s AI will be able to project hole-by-hole results for each player by using more than 30 data points from each shot.

And with the data that this model has collected over the past 6 years, which totals nearly 120,000 shots, it’s now able to correctly predict a player's score within two or three shots about 70% of the time while also taking into account things like momentum.

And remember, this is the worst the AI is ever going to be.

So the final verdict?

Big-time play-by-play guys like Jim Nantz and Joe Buck are safe for now, but if you’re an up-and-coming broadcaster you might want to refresh your resume.

📉 Biggest Loser

I love the NFL more than most things (exceptions include my 9-month-old golden retriever, Sven, and my girlfriend) but they keep trying to get one over on us fans.

And I won’t let them.

The basic premise is this:

1. Something cool happens in the NFL

2. The NFL (No Fun League) bans it

3. Five years later the NFL unbans that same thing and gets to parade around talking about how great and progressive they are

We’ve seen this, most notably, with touchdown celebrations but the same pattern just played about again with the rollout of all these throwback uniforms.

You see, back in the early 2010’s the NFL was in hot water over its handling of concussions and CTE with its players.

This controversy culminated with a $765M settlement that the league paid 18,000 former players before the 2013 season.

Which was clearly a bad look for a sport that was already considered to be the most violent in the entire country, and so Goodell and the NFL had to go on a PR tour to show that they were taking the problem of concussions ~very seriously.~

This included banning hits with the crown of the helmet and placing emphasis on late hits.

But a lesser talked about rule at the time was the fact that players were now limited to wearing just one helmet per season.

This was so players didn’t have to constantly get refit for helmets throughout the year, thereby reducing the risk that they might be wearing an ill-fitting helmet that did less to protect them against head injuries.

And, on the surface, this rule made sense - a player really only needs one helmet for the whole season.

Until you consider the fact that only being allowed one helmet means you're limited in the colors your team can wear.

So now for teams like the Packers, Buccaneers, Eagles, and many more, it was basically impossible to wear any kind of throwbacks if you wanted to have a normal color helmet for the rest of the season.

And this change launched one of the worst uniform eras in the NFL in which teams were limited to designing combinations around their standard helmet colors which meant we got a bunch of crap pushed down our throats.

Luckily for us, however, the NFL finally changed the one-helmet rule back in 2021 but in their infinite wisdom, they did it too late in the off-season for teams to roll out any cool uniforms the next season.

I mean, don’t get me wrong we still got some good ones like the White Bengal and the Falcon’s classic dirty bird helmet but now teams have had a whole offseason to cook.

This year is going to be one of the best uniform seasons we’ve seen in decades…

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This is a story about Women’s soccer… wait! Don’t scroll past, I promise this is worth it.

The Women’s World Cup consistently has better storylines than the men’s tournament. I mean, just this week No. 72-ranked Morrocco became the lowest-ranked team ever to reach the knockout round in their DEBUT APPEARANCE.

Also, three of the top ten teams in the world (No. 2 Germany, No. 7 Canada, and No. 8 Brazil) didn’t advance past the group stage.

But no story, for me, has been more compelling than that of the Reggae Girlz (No. 43 Jamaica).

That’s because as of 2008, they didn’t even have a women’s team and it was only resurrected because Cedella Marley (yes, daughter of that Marley) helped fundraise with her two brothers to get the team back on the field.

Only for it to be disbanded again by the Jamaican Football Federation (JFF) once again in 2016.

Thankfully, Cedella helped advocate for change in governance in the JFF, and the Reggae Girlz finally qualify for a World Cup in 2019 - marking the first time any Caribbean women’s national team had qualified for the event.

But after losing all three matches, team Jamaica was sent home and never even received the $500,000 they were owed for qualifying from the JFF.

This meant that once 2023 rolled around, the mother of one of the players on the team had to start a literal GoFundMe page to send the team to Australia for the World Cup.

This, along with another fundraiser by the Reggae Girlz Foundation raised a total of $96,000.

And, top of that, the Bob and Rita Marley Foundation stepped in again to help with pre-World Cup training in Amsterdam.

All of this led to the Reggae Girlz playing France in the opening match, the No. 5 ranked team in the world, and drawing 0-0. They followed that up with a 1-0 win against Panama, their first-ever victory in a World Cup.

This meant that they needed a draw with Brazil to move on to the knockout round, but Brazil beat them 3-0 in 2019.

However, this time Jamaica ended with a 0-0 draw to move on - all made possible by crowdfunding.

Fortunately, the Women’s World Cup saw the prize purse increase from $30 million total in 2019 to $110 million this year. That means team Jamaica earned $1.56 million just for qualifying and an additional $1.87 million for reaching the knockout round.

Each player is also receiving a base pay of $30,000.

That brings the women’s total compensation to 25% of what the men earn.

Let’s just hope the Jamaican Women’s team actually gets the money this time…

⏱ In Other News

• Wimbledon also used AI broadcasters, didn’t you notice?

• The Major League Cricket Finals Highlights already have 2.5M views on YouTube in just 3 days.

• Slamball is back, but is it here to stay?

• Never forget, Thom Brennaman is a homophobe.

👋 Fair warning, once the NFL is back it will consume a majority of my time and attention but I’m always open to new ideas so if you have a topic you think could be interesting to cover here or on TikTok, DM me on Instagram!