Good morning, all! It’s Friday!!!
Two days away from the NFL conference finals. Will the weather impact the games? Brad Field, former chief meteorologist at NBC Connecticut, provides the forecast for the playoff venues in Denver and Seattle, plus Brad and I make our predictions for the games in the above video.
By the way, as many readers of this newsletter know, Brad has a weather podcast, on which I am proud to serve as co-host. A segment of this video is from that podcast. Weather is going to be a huge factor this weekend in something like 36 states. Here is a link to the podcast. You can also listen to it by asking Siri or Alexa to play “The Brad Field Weather podcast.”
Here are some other Friday thoughts:
The Baltimore Ravens have hired Jesse Minter as their next coach. Think about this for a moment. Minter was the defensive coordinator for the Los Angeles Chargers under head coach Jim Harbaugh, whose brother John was fired by the Ravens and has now been coronated as the coach of the New York Giants. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft says the NFL is pushing to add another game to the regular season. He says the goal is to reduce the preseason to two games, have an 18-game regular season and make each team play one game per season in another country. Guess what? It is going to happen. There is too much money to be made for the NFL, which is manufacturing wads of money right now. Look for the NFL to sweeten the pot financially, to convince a reluctant players association to accept this framework.
Ratings are going through the roof for football this season. The CFP national championship game, won by Indiana over Miami, attracted 30.1M viewers across the ESPN platform, the most since 2014, when Ohio St.-Oregon garnered 34.1M viewers in 2014-15, the first year of the CFP.
Viewership for the NFL Divisional Round games on NBC, ABC/ESPN, Fox and CBS was also up five percent, averaging 39.2M per game. That is just shy of the all-time record set two years ago. Say what you want. Football is America’s National Pastime.
That is going to do it for today’s newsletter. Thank you for subscribing and have a terrific day. Just another reminder. Do not forget that bread, milk and eggs.
DAN
