There are no “sure things” in gambling, but bettors probably thought the WBC baseball game between Italy and Team USA was a “gimme”.
- Team USA was 5.5 run favorite in the game. I will not pretend to check the spreads on every major league game, but I do not ever recall such a line on a real MLB game.
- On the Money Line, Team USA was the outrageous favorite at minus-1450
Naturally, Italy not only covered the spread; Italy won the game straight up by a score of 8-6. In fact, the score was 8-0 before Team USA crossed home plate.
The WBC is concluding pool play and with that loss, Team USA might be eliminated from the tournament before the knock-out round. Italy will play Mexico in the final game of that pool:
- If Italy wins, Team USA will advance to the knock-out round.
- If Mexico wins, then Mexico, Team USA and Italy will all finish with records of 3-1 in pool play and the tiebreaker is more complicated that I want to try to explain here. Suffice it to say, one of the three teams will be eliminated and there are possibilities where Team USA would be that eliminated squad.
Moving on … I read a report that said the act of releasing Tua Tagovailoa will impose a dead-money charge for the Dolphins of $99.2M for the 2026 season. Without going down the rabbit hole of NFL Salary Cap conventions, what that means is that the Dolphins will have that amount of cap space taken up by a player who will not play for them in 2026. And that staggering amount of dead-money sent me to look at NFL salary cap figures.
In 2026, for the first time, the NFL salary cap will be north of $300M; teams can field a squad that counts as $301.2M in cap-calculated earnings. That figure represents a little less than half of the so-called national revenues taken in by the league last year; most of that comes from networks paying to air NFL games. So doing a rough calculation, the NFL’s national revenues last year were in the neighborhood of $19.3B and that figure does not include any of the local revenues for the teams such as ticket sales or parking or concessions or “team merch” or local media deals.
I went looking for the history of the NFL salary cap and found several interesting tidbits:
- The salary cap came into being in 1994 and it was $34.6M. There are probably close to a dozen players today who are going to make more than that figure in a single season.
- Between 2005 and 2006, the cap made a large percentage jump. It went from $85.5M to $102M, which is almost a 20% rise in a single year and 2006 was the first time the cap exceeded $100M.
- It took until 2022 for the cap to cross the $200M mark. The cap jumped from $182.5M to $208.2M then.
- And now, just four years after crossing the $200M level, the cap stands at $301.2M.
In case you were wondering why someone would want to pay multiple billions of dollars to buy into the NFL money making machine …
Switching gears … The Washington Wizards are the basketball equivalent of a tire fire at the moment. The team is so obviously tanking that it is embarrassing for anyone to be identified as a Wizards fan. Combine that with the stark fact that the players they put on the floor need not “dog it” in order to lose; there is a dearth of talent there too.
Last night, the Wizards lost to the Heat in Miami by a score of 150-129. Even an average NBA team should expect to win a game where it scores 129 points; the Wiz lost by 21 points; that is shameful – – but there is more.
In this game, Heat big man, Bam Adebayo scored 83 points; here is the breakdown:
- He played 41 minutes.
- He was 20 of 43 from the field and 7 of 22 on three-point attempts.
- He was 36 of 43 from the free throw line.
Let me just say that the Wiz left their defense in their baggage at the hotel for this game. Adebayo now stands second in NBA history for “points in a game”; last night he passed Kobe Bryant who had 81 in a game for the Lakers, and he trails only Wilt Chamberlain whose 100-point output still holds as the NBA high water mark.
Finally, this from P. J. O’Rourke:
“Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports ………