Slant Pattern Mailbag

It's time for another edition of the Slant Pattern mailbag. As always, I get no letters myself, so I poach them from other sports media.

We will start with this question from Sports Illustrated's NFL mailbag, run by Albert Breer:

From Pete's Pythons (@Petes_Pythons): Do you think the NFL is pricing everyday fans out of the market with all the streaming services one would need to be able to watch their out of market games?

Short answer, no. Longer answer: you say "out of market games," but all of the different streaming services (ESPN+, Netflix, Peacock, on and on) carry national games, not out-of-market games. The only way to watch out-of-market games is to get NFL Sunday Ticket, which is only available on one streaming service, YouTube TV.

But I'm going to assume you didn't really mean out-of-market, you meant all the national TV games and the price associated with being able to watch the many different streaming services that have exclusive rights to at least one of them.

But I still think the answer is no. Part of this is "in my day" thinking, by which I mean, "In my day, we had two Sunday games, a Monday night game, and that was it except for around the holidays!" Now we have two more weekly games (Sunday night and Thursday nights) and only the Thursday Night ones require a streaming service, and even that doesn't apply if one of the TNF teams is a local team; when that happens, a local station gets to carry the game as well as Amazon Prime.

The rest, like Peacock, ESPN+, and Netflix, only have a very small number of games. You can sign up for them for a full month for under 20 bucks apiece, and cancel when the game is over. Or, you can go to your friendly neighborhood tavern and watch all these games for the price of a couple beers. Westwood One radio has radio rights for pretty much every primetime, Saturday, and holiday game, and closing your eyes and listening on the radio is a sublime experience.

In short, you have affordable options. Plenty of them. You're just feeling entitled, and like it or not the NFL is allowed to chase every last dollar by foisting this current media landscape upon us.

Staying with Sports Illustrated by shifting to Jon Wertheim's tennis mailbag, here's a question (more of an opinion) that makes me mad, and I want to break down bit by bit. In my day, we called that fisking!

The context is Naomi Osaka's press conference after losing her French Open 1st round match. Osaka was tearful and self-flagellating in the press conference. She said, among other things, "I hate disappointing people. Even with Patrick [Mouratoglou, who was Serena Williams's coach for many years], I was thinking just now-he goes from working with like the greatest player ever to like, what the f--- this is." and "I think as time goes on I feel like I should be doing better."

This attitude won her no favors with Anthony of Melrose, Massachusetts, who wrote:

"[Naomi] Osaka's presser and description of her emotions during her match are objectively different than the person's who was just enshrined with a footprint on that court. I will say that I have never been (to the extent the pros are) "the person in the arena", but I will say that as a tennis fan watching from the outside that her mentality is distasteful. She is not doing herself favors with a majority of fans with such a "woe is me" outlook."

I don't know how you can take "woe is me" out of her press conference. She clearly feels like she is letting the people close to her down, as well as herself. Are you able to understand that people can be upset at their own performance, even tearfully so, without out it being "woe is me?"

"Thousands of pro tennis players have been in the arena. All but one have been able to say "yeah, I lost" at the end of their match without playing victim."

Even if you weren't mischaracterizing Osaka so grossly, you'd be still be wrong here, as obviously plenty of tennis players have lost un-gracefully in myriad and excuse-laden ways.

"I would rather cheer for the journey-person that fights the good fight rather than someone that seems to search for excuses. How can you expect people to cheer for that mentality?"

What the hell are you talking about? "I think as time goes on I feel like I should be doing better" is quite literally the opposite of an excuse. Excuses would be "the umpire sucked, my elbow was bothering me, the wind wreaked havoc on play," etc.

And I would rather root eight days a week for someone who is willing to be openly vulnerable than a robot who gives canned responses and slinks away after press conferences. You're a relic of the past, when people were told to stifle any sign of "weakness," and if you think you really hard about it, you may come up with some good reasons why society doesn't demand a stoic countenance from us all anymore. You must hate Simone Biles.

Oof. Okay, onto a pair of college football questions. The first is run by CBS Sports columnist Brandon Marcello, who is new to me. ppjccu2011 on Bluesky wrote: What's the over/under number of years before Sacramento State makes a bowl game?

I'm going to say two years. In face you haven't heard, or forgot, Sacramento State somehow has truckloads of NIL money ($50 million), and while Marcello questions whether that figure can actually be believed, they sure have been successful in getting big names involved with their hoops program. Mike Bibby is their new head coach and Shaquille O'Neal (!!) is their new "general manager of basketball operations."

That sort of high-profile name recognition is going to help all sports, no doubt. Sacramento State has a couple other things going for it, too: as an independent, they will be able to give themselves easier schedules than they might in a conference. And even without all of this NIL money, they have been to the summit of the Big Sky mountain, which is one of the best FCS conferences and may be not much worse than the Mountain West.

We close with a question for Stewart Mandel's college football column in The Athletic. Melissa B. asks, "Does Belichick coach a game for UNC? And if he does, will his private life be permanently forgotten the instant the game against TCU kicks off?"

To the first part of your question: yes. The idea that Belichick will get the boot before the seasons starts qualifies as a hot take. I think Deion Sanders is a good coach, so this comment isn't meant to denigrate his coaching ability, but his tenure at Colorado is proving a sideshow atmosphere is not necessarily a bad thing and could be quite good, in an "all publicity is good publicity" kind of way. Granted, you absolutely can get fired for bringing any number of different types of bad publicity on a college football program, but Belichick hasn't come close to doing that (Sanders, either).

The second part, whether the Jordon Hudson saga will be forgotten once the games start: yes. It's just like how the networks do not care about Taylor Swift in the slightest during Chiefs games.

Ha ha ha, of course not! What planet do you live on? Belichick is going to be asked about Hudson every time he steps in front of a mic as long as he is with her, doesn't matter if he goes 1,000-0 at UNC. Everyone from rival fans to mainstream journalists will pore over every Hudson Instagram post, looking for an angle, a story, some tea, while Belichick has a job with any football program, college or pro.

And I'm here for it!