April 15, 2024

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Congrats to Scottie Scheffler on his second Masters victory, and the $3.6 million winner’s check. … Jazz owner Ryan Smith is closing in on a deal to bring the NHL’s Coyotes to Salt Lake City. … Monday night’s WNBA draft has many more layers than presumptive No. 1 pick Caitlin Clark. … The NFL’s latest helmet design shift is happening amid accelerating changes in safety measures. … And former NFL teammates DeSean Jackson and LeSean McCoy say they are taking a different approach to podcasting.

— David Rumsey [[link removed]], A.J. Perez [[link removed]], Margaret Fleming [[link removed]], and Eric Fisher [[link removed]]

Another Green Jacket and $3.6M: Scottie Scheffler Wins the Masters [[link removed]]

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

Scottie Scheffler won the Masters on Sunday, taking home his second green jacket and the $3.6 million winner’s check. Already ranked No. 1 in the world, the victory—his third in the last four tournaments he’s played—further cements Scheffler atop the golf world, and takes his earnings this season to more than $15 million. The Masters offered a tournament record purse of $20 million this year.

But don’t expect much to change off the course for the soft spoken and even-keeled Scheffler, whose endorsement portfolio is relatively simple compared to many other professional golfers who adorn dozens of different logos on their clothes while repping various brands. Scheffler’s current deals include: Nike (apparel), TaylorMade (clubs), Titleist (ball), Rolex, and NetJets. Even before this latest win at Augusta National, Scheffler has had ample opportunity to expand his sponsorship presence if he wanted to.

Scheffler has been a steady supporter of the PGA Tour ever since the emergence of LIV Golf. He’s not one of the seven players on the 13-member board of directors for the newly established PGA Tour Enterprises venture [[link removed]], but Scheffler has been fairly blunt in some of his comments about blaming [[link removed].] LIV players for the fractured state of the sport.

Up next: Scheffler will be the betting favorite at next month’s PGA Championship, as he looks to win a third major championship, a feat that would put him halfway toward completing the calendar grand slam, and certainly stoke more mainstream interest in golf that often fades after the Masters each spring.

Thanks for the Memories

Legendary broadcaster Verne Lundquist ended his 40-year run calling the Masters on Sunday. Throughout the tournament, his peers at CBS and ESPN showered the 83-year-old with praise for his impact at Augusta National.

“I trust you’ll understand, I’m going to take a deep breath,“ Lundquist said on air as Scheffler’s group began walking toward the 16th green that the broadcaster has made so many famous calls at. As fans gave the eventual Masters winner a standing ovation, lead announcer Jim Nantz said, “Verne, that crowd could just as well be standing for you.”

Beyond golf, Lundquist is of course also famous for his long run calling SEC football games on CBS, which he stopped doing in 2016.

Long Road Ahead

With golf’s first major championship of the year now in the books, PGA Tour and LIV Golf players are set to compete at the same course just three more times in 2024 at the PGA Championship, U.S. Open, and Open Championship. With plenty of questions remaining [[link removed]] about the future of professional golf, it would be a surprise at this point if any major resolution was reached before the PGA Tour’s playoffs conclude in August.

Salt Lake City About to Land NHL’s Coyotes (Minus Their Name) [[link removed]]

Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports

Ryan Smith’s two-year quest to land Salt Lake City an NHL franchise will likely conclude later this week, although it won’t be the expansion team his Smith Entertainment Group lobbied [[link removed]] for publicly in January.

Instead, it will be the Arizona Coyotes—or at least the players, coaches and some other staffers of the franchise that has called the Valley of the Sun home since 1996. Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo, Smith, and the NHL are nearing the end of negotiations of a $1 billion sale of the team that will play under a new name at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center starting next season, sources with knowledge of the transaction tell Front Office Sports.

Meruelo keeps the Coyotes name and will have five years to build an NHL arena with the league’s promise of making the Phoenix market the home of an expansion team, the sources confirmed. SportsNet was the first outlet to report [[link removed]] the setup.

“I understand and empathize with the concerns of our fans, our community, our partners, our players, our front office, and all of our team members,” Meruelo said in a statement [[link removed]] over the weekend after Coyotes GM Bill Armstrong’s chat with players Friday about the pending relocation leaked [[link removed]].

The Coyotes are wrapping up their second season playing in Arizona State’s 5,000-seat Mullett Arena and the team faced at least two more seasons at the facility. That situation, despite upgrades the Coyotes made, proved untenable for the players [[link removed]] and other owners, leading to this conscious uncoupling.

Meruelo, however, hasn’t given up on the Phoenix market. The Coyotes’ quest to secure a plot of land in north Phoenix that goes up for auction in June will move forward, a plan team execs shifted to after three ballot measures toward an arena development in Tempe were voted down [[link removed]] last May.

As the Coyotes lay dormant, there’s likely to be a push by Meruelo to continue to support area youth hockey, which has produced NHLers Auston Matthews, brothers Matthew and Brady Tkachuk, and former U.S. Women’s National Team player (and current Coyotes broadcaster) Lyndsey Fry. Meruelo will also keep the Tucson Roadrunners and the Associated Press reported [[link removed]] there are plans to potentially move the AHL franchise to Mullett Arena.

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Draft Exposes WNBA’s Tightrope: Lots of Talent, Too Few Roster Spots [[link removed]]

HawkCentral

When LSU bested Iowa in the 2023 national title game, confetti fell on the winning team’s top three scorers: Jasmine Carson, Alexis Morris, and LaDazhia Williams. A week later, Williams and Morris were selected as the 17th and 22nd picks, respectively, in the WNBA draft—Morris was one of 15 players invited to attend in person—while Carson went undrafted and headed to free agency.

By the time the season rolled around, all three had been cut from WNBA rosters. So had Monika Czinano (above, left), Caitlin Clark’s right-hand woman who went 26th in the draft to the Los Angeles Sparks.

There’s a bottleneck at the upper echelon of women’s basketball. Stars like Clark (above, right) and Angel Reese will likely make it onto a WNBA roster after they’re drafted Monday night. But for the teammates who helped them get there, options are much more limited.

The WNBA has 12 teams with 12 roster spots on each, which is 306 fewer openings than in the NBA (excluding two-way contracts and the postseason). The squeeze trickles down to the draft: Of the 36 players selected in the WNBA draft, only 15 [[link removed]] made an opening day roster in 2023, and just 17 [[link removed]] did the year before, according to Just Women’s Sports. Morris went overseas but is now a Harlem Globetrotter. Carson, Williams, and Czinano play abroad.

The league is so cutthroat because it’s been modest in its growth. After quickly expanding from eight to 16 teams in its first four seasons, the league slowed down and has had 12 teams since 2010. The draft tension will slightly ease up next season with a new team headed to the Bay Area.

“I would love to expand our league,” Las Vegas Aces star A’ja Wilson told Front Office Sports [[link removed]] last summer. “But at the same time, I think we need to take care of the ones that are in it right now, before we really start to expand.”

Wilson has a point: Teams still fly commercial for most games, and many players must go abroad during the offseason to supplement their WNBA income, a direct cause of why Brittney Griner was detained in Russia.

The promise of Clarkonomics on the horizon won’t fix all the WNBA’s issues, but it should certainly help. The league is putting 36 out of 40 Indiana Fever games on national broadcasts or streamers, and teams are jacking up ticket prices [[link removed]] to prepare for Clark’s arrival. The timing couldn’t be better, as the WNBA is negotiating [[link removed]] a new set of media rights that could trickle down to higher player salaries, charter flights, and, yes, more roster spots.

Things aren’t yet ideal for the players outside the highest tier of stardom, but Monday’s draft could mark a significant financial turning point for the league. No looking back now.

NFL’s Expanded Helmet Options Come With a Perk: More Merch [[link removed]]

Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports

The NFL’s array of helmet designs is expanding once again, and it is happening as the league and union say they are making further strides in helmet safety.

The league told all 32 teams last week that it is once again expanding its uniform policy, and it will allow teams to add a third helmet design to their overall looks. The four teams already going through a uniform redesign for the 2024 season—the Broncos, Jets, Lions, and Texans—will be able to take advantage of the expanded measure immediately. The rest must wait until ’25, but they must inform the league of their intent to utilize an alternate color helmet by May 1 of this year.

The expansion follows the NFL’s shift in 2022 away from its “one shell” rule after nearly a decade, a policy that previously limited teams to a single helmet. The underlying premise of the prior rule was a belief that a single helmet was better for player safety than multiple ones. But several teams steadily lobbied for a change, and once it took effect, it opened a wave [[link removed]] of popular throwbacks back on the field, such as the Buccaneers’ creamsicle design (above) and the Eagles’ Kelly green look. Expanding that range of alternate and throwback designs even further will almost certainly enlarge the range of merchandising options the NFL and individual teams will be able to offer fans.

The four latest new uniform unveilings for the 2024 season are scheduled to happen over the next eight days. Soon after the league announcement last week, the Broncos [[link removed]] and Texans [[link removed]] publicly noted the shift on social media, signaling that a third helmet design is likely part of those forthcoming events.

There are still various stipulations to the expanded league measure, including that the second and third helmets can be worn only with optional uniforms such as alternates, throwbacks, and Color Rush models. Those restrictions differ from the more liberal mixing and matching of helmets and uniforms frequently seen in college football.

Safety Measures

A day before the league’s announcement of the helmet policy shift, the NFL and NFL Players Association said they are introducing 12 new helmet models for the 2024 season, a record total that includes five that “tested better than any helmet ever worn in the league.” Among the new helmets approved for play this year are eight position-specific ones designed for the particular impacts of where they are used.

Six helmets that were previously approved, and had previously been among top-performing models when first introduced, are now prohibited.

“We’re proud to see so many new helmets continue the rapid rate of improvement we’ve seen over the past decade,” said Jeff Miller, NFL executive vice president.

Those shifts arrive as the league has faced a long-running issue around player concussions, which numbered 219 last year, up slightly from the 213 in 2022, blunting prior progress.

FRONT OFFICE SPORTS TODAY Inside DeSean Jackson and LeSean McCoy’s New Media Play

Howard Smith-USA TODAY Sports

After retiring from the NFL, former Eagles star LeSean McCoy (above, left) found himself unsure of what to tell people at parties what he was doing with his life. So he got busy building a post-playing business career. The most recent piece of that, a podcast he cohosts with his friend and Eagles teammate DeSean Jackson (above, right), launched last month called The 25/10 Show. McCoy and Jackson join the podcast to discuss how their show is different from the heap of other athlete-driven projects, what moves they are making away from the mic, and why authenticity matters more than ever.

🎧 Listen and subscribe on Apple [[link removed]], Google [[link removed]], and Spotify [[link removed]].

TIME CAPSULE April 15, 1947 and 1997: Honoring a Trailblazer

Bill Strode/Courier Journal via USA TODAY NETWORK

On this day 77 and 27 years ago: The Brooklyn Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson (above, left) broke MLB’s color line, which was then celebrated league-wide in a commemoration led by then acting league commissioner Bud Selig. Robinson’s courage in being the first to transcend baseball’s long-standing segregation became a defining part of his legacy, and it was ultimately chronicled by Hollywood in the well-received 2013 film 42.

On the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s MLB debut, the league retired his uniform No. 42 across the league—marking the first such honor by any major sports league and preceding by nearly three years a similar number retirement in the NHL for Wayne Gretzky—and each year on April 15, every active MLB player wears that number to honor Robinson. The practice soon grew into a larger Jackie Robinson Day celebration, which remains an annual fixture on the MLB calendar.

MLB’s acknowledgment of the contribution of Black people to the sport continues to expand, as the league in June will hold [[link removed]] a regular-season game between the Giants and Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., a park that opened in 1910 and hosted Negro Leagues games for decades. The Baseball Hall of Fame will supplement [[link removed]] next month that celebration of Black baseball and the Negro Leagues with its Hall of Fame East-West Classic.

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Conversation Starters Kentucky’s Rupp Arena sold out a fan event welcoming new men’s basketball head coach Mark Pope on Sunday. Check out [[link removed]] the scene. The Indiana Fever played in one nationally televised game in 2023. In ’24, that number will jump to 36 games [[link removed]] out of 40 total. Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers has secured a private jet name, image, and likeness deal [[link removed]] with Nicholas Air, joining Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart to receive flight hours for travel, training, and philanthropic endeavors. Editors’ Picks Lawsuit Alleges ‘Fraudulent Coup’ at Former ‘Sports Illustrated’ Publisher [[link removed]]by A.J. Perez [[link removed]]A messy situation just keeps getting messier. Calling the Masters Can Make You—or Break You [[link removed]]by Michael McCarthy [[link removed]]Legends are made at Augusta—as long as they do things Augusta’s way. Everything You Need to Know About the PGA Tour, LIV Golf, and a Potential Merger [[link removed]]by David Rumsey [[link removed]]The two tours remain far apart despite previous efforts to come together. Advertise [[link removed]] Awards [[link removed]] Learning [[link removed]] Video [[link removed]] Podcast [[link removed]] Sports Careers [[link removed]] Written by David Rumsey [[link removed]], A.J. Perez [[link removed]], Margaret Fleming [[link removed]], Eric Fisher [[link removed]] Edited by Matthew Tabeek [[link removed]], Catherine Chen [[link removed]]

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