MIAMI — Apple TV+ series “Severance” is midway through its second season and has already become the most viewed series on the platform. With 589 million minutes viewed in the United States, the show surpassed “Ted Lasso,’ the company disclosed to Deadline Hollywood this week.

Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show broke last year’s record with 133.5 million viewers, the company said shortly after the big game. 

Lionel Messi’s first MLS playoff game was Apple TV’s most watched sporting event, the company announced last December without releasing any viewership figures. 

Apple has generally shied away from disclosing its viewership data, so we don’t know exactly how many people are watching soccer games. But, put it this way: If people were watching MLS games like they were watching Ted Lasso or Severance or Kendrick Lamar, they’d be sharing it with the world.

Soccer continues to fight its way in the American sports landscape among the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and a host of women’s sports leagues. But interest is at an all-time high ahead of the World Cup in 2026. Apple is working to capitalize on that with its biggest MLS push to date for the 2025 season, which begins Saturday.

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‘We have the best player in the world playing in the United States, playing in MLS. We’ve had games where millions of people have watched — that had never happened before in MLS. You have the World Cup coming. You have the Olympics (in Los Angeles in 2028). There’s so much momentum right now,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, told USA TODAY Sports. 

MLS commissioner Don Garber has also floated the “millions” number when discussing the league’s viewers last December. Garber said MLS has seen “over a million viewers” for Saturday night games collectively and “more than that watch our playoff games.” The figure includes viewers internationally, not just the U.S.

This year, MLS and Apple have partnered with several companies so fans can readily access MLS games. DirecTV and Xfinity users can buy MLS Season Pass through their providers. T-Mobile customers can receive complimentary access to MLS Season Pass for the season. Android users can find MLS Season Pass in the Google Play Store. MLS games have also been available on Apple TV+ via Amazon Prime Video since last October. Simply put, you don’t need to have an Apple device to access MLS games. 

‘We’re breaking glass with this Apple partnership,’ Garber told USA TODAY Sports. ‘The media business with sports goes through its transformations over time, whether it’s broadcast television televising sports, or the advent of cable or satellite, and now it’s the digital era. We wanted to have a global partnership that was without blackouts, where somebody in Madrid or Buenos Aires or Miami or Kansas City can watch a game on their devices, whatever those devices are — an Apple device, an Android device, they’re streaming television — and it could be basically accessible to anybody. And that was important to us.

Added Garber: “I think we’re early, and MLS has been an innovative leader from the very beginning. I’m proud of that moniker, and I think like everything else with us, … we’re learning as we go along.”

FOX analyst and former U.S. men’s national team standout Alexi Lalas shared concerns about the MLS-Apple partnership. While Lalas considered the 2024 MLS Cup final between the Los Angeles Galaxy and New York Red Bulls a dream matchup because of the two major markets involved, he felt the buildup to the final lacked some luster and visibility — especially after Messi and Inter Miami were eliminated from the playoffs in the first round. The final was available to stream on Apple, and it drew an average of 468,000 total viewers on linear TV across Fox and Fox Deportes. Before the Apple deal, national MLS games were on ESPN, ABC, FOX Sports and briefly on NBC Sports Network.

“When you are behind this subscription and this paywall and you’re tasked with going through multiple steps in order to get to MLS, you want to make it as turnkey as possible and accessible as possible,” Lalas told USA TODAY Sports. “And I think that’s a bigger conversation that has to happen right now when it comes to what Major League Soccer is. Are they sacrificing exposure, which is something that they value? And let’s be honest, they need the money that Apple is giving them. Is that a smart business? Maybe they’re seeing down the future, and maybe this is a long term type of plan, and I can certainly respect and understand that. But I don’t feel MLS the way that I have felt it in the past.” 

Along with the partnerships to attract more viewers, MLS will debut “Sunday Night Soccer” — a showcase to engage and retain fans with the league’s most compelling game of the week. The Galaxy will host the league’s newest club, San Diego FC, in the first Sunday night game of the season this Sunday at 7 p.m. ET.

Another push MLS and Apple have made is “Onside: Major League Soccer” — an eight-part documentary series produced by Box 2 Box Films, the company behind Netflix’s popular “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” series, which attracted fans outside the F1 ecosystem and has the potential to do the same for soccer. But it has to happen organically. 

Major events from last season will be showcased in the series, which premieres Friday. Some of those key moments include Messi, 15-year-old Cavan Sullivan’s pro debut with the Philadelphia Union, the exciting FC Cincinnati-Columbus Crew rivalry in Ohio, and Atlanta United’s push to eliminate Inter Miami in the playoffs.

Paul Martin, executive producer for ‘Drive to Survive’ and ‘Onside’ told USA TODAY Sports the F1 phenomenon after the docuseries was not planned, and that’s why it worked.

‘It wasn’t something that we were like, ‘Hey, we’re going to radically change people’s perception of a sport,” Martin said. ‘We just set out to make a good show, and we did. And it found an audience and people really reacted to it. And as a result, have really wanted to find out more about that sport. Hopefully (Onside is) something that resonates with fans — already fans of soccer, but maybe new fans that never thought about watching MLS or following any of the teams.

‘I think the best strategy is always just, we’re going to find the best characters, and we’re going to try and tell the best stories that we can that represent as much of the league as we can.”

MLS executive vice president of media Seth Bacon said last month he is bullish on the league’s partnership with Apple because of the growth they’ve seen in audiences and subscriptions. MLS Season Pass surpassed 2 million subscribers at the end of the 2023 season, Sports Business Journal reported last year.

Again, soccer’s momentum is key to MLS and Apple’s potential success. So the partners are not just capitalizing on the natural momentum happening, they’re creating some of their own — such as the MLS Season Pass ad featuring Messi, which was released immediately after the Super Bowl. Messi’s attendance at the Super Bowl drew millions of eyeballs, even two social media posts featuring him just walking into the game.

Inter Miami and the Seattle Sounders will be the only MLS teams competing in this summer’s Club World Cup alongside soccer giants like Real Madrid, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Milan — bringing another opportunity for MLS exposure during its 30th season.

“We have so much wind in our sails right now between everything that’s happened, with the way the league has been growing, with investment from our ownership groups, the strategic direction from the commissioner, the arrival of Messi,’ Bacon told USA TODAY Sports. ‘You’ve got Club World Cup. You’ve got World Cup. Even Olympics down the road. There is going to be a lot of focus on this sport, and we are the premium domestic brand for the sport of soccer in the United States and Canada. And that is a huge opportunity for us. We are doing everything we can to make sure that we capitalize on that.’

Maybe the most remarkable thing about Sonny Vaccaro is that after thousands of interviews, a documentary and a feature film about his one-of-a-kind basketball life and decades worth of news stories that connect him to some of the biggest milestones in American sports, he still has plenty of new stories to tell.

“There’s enough (material) for another one!” Vaccaro told me in a phone conversation this week, shortly before his new book, “Legends and Soles: The Memoir of An American Original” is officially released by HarperOne publishing company. “I hope God gives me the time.”

But if this book is the last official account of how the now 85-year-old Vaccaro became the Godfather of summer basketball, the marketing executive who convinced Nike to bet everything on Michael Jordan and the man who took down the NCAA in federal court, it’s more than enough to tell the story of how an immigrant’s kid from a small mill town outside of Pittsburgh changed American sports forever. 

‘If it’s the last thing I did, other than being with my wife all these years, it’s the best story I could have left — there’s no question about it,” Vaccaro said. 

Though a typical conversation with Vaccaro is a high-speed, meandering journey of tangents and anecdotes that are often incomplete, his book is a straightforward, easily digestible series of key points in his life that explain exactly how he went from aspiring football player who thought he was headed to Kentucky on scholarship to basketball camp impresario to Nike, where he sold company executives on a plan to take over college hoops by paying coaches to outfit their teams. 

“The deal is this,” Vaccaro writes in the book, recalling his pitch to UNLV’s Jerry Tarkanian in 1978. “I give you $10,000, and a lot of Nike merchandise — shoes, T-shirts, sweat suits, bags — and you do your part: Suggest to the kids that they wear Nikes. Practices, games, tournaments. That’s it.”

“That’s it?” Tarkanian replies. “And all I gotta do is suggest that the kids wear free brand-new basketball shoes?” 

“That’s it,” said Vaccaro, who made the deal and wrote Tarkanian a $2,500 check out of his personal account — money he didn’t have at the time. But that was Vaccaro’s deal with Nike in those early days: Once he got the handshake from the coach, only then would the company wire him the reimbursement. 

Some of these stories have been well-known for decades in the world of basketball and sports marketing. But they became more mainstream after Vaccaro was the subject of an ESPN “30 for 30” titled “Sole Man” and then again in 2023 with the Ben Affleck-directed movie “Air,” which covers the 1984 pursuit of Jordan by Vaccaro (played by Matt Damon) and Nike, which at the time was nothing like the international behemoth it is now. 

But many of the “Legends and Soles” anecdotes within those major events have never been written about before, Vaccaro said. 

Perhaps the most prominent involves a meeting at the 1984 Olympics that Vaccaro had arranged between Nike founder Phil Knight and Billy Packer, who was the most prominent college basketball analyst of his time. 

According to the book, Knight was still waffling on whether to put a massive deal in front of Jordan, who was originally more inclined to sign with Adidas. Keep in mind, Jordan was the No. 3 NBA draft pick coming out of North Carolina — not exactly a slam dunk to be the best player of his generation, much less all time — even though Vaccaro was convinced he was the guy Nike had to sign. 

So Vaccaro asked Packer to come to Nike’s post-Olympic party and sit down with Knight — not knowing exactly what he’d say about Jordan. But by the end of the meeting, Knight was convinced. 

‘That was the coup de gras,” Vaccaro told me.

Why?

“Because (Packer) was neutral,” Vaccaro said. “Knight wanted someone not involved.”

This is important because, over the decades, Knight and even Jordan have disputed the genesis of the most important and lucrative deal in the history of sports marketing, downplaying Vaccaro’s involvement. 

But as Vaccaro started the process of writing his memoir several years ago, he reached out to some of the people involved in these stories and asked for their recollection to see if it matched his own. 

One of them was Packer, who remembered it just as Vaccaro did. 

“I said, ‘Billy, would you mind writing this down so I have it? Because no one will believe it if something happens to me,’ ‘ Vaccaro told me. “So he wrote me a letter, and it got lost so he wrote me a second one.’ 

Packer died in 2023, by which point Vaccaro had gotten serious again about putting his life  story on paper — something his sister-in-law Mary Jo Monakee had encouraged and helped with until she passed away four years ago. 

At that point, Vaccaro had 150,000 words and 20 hours of tape-recorded monologue that needed to be molded into a readable book. That’s when Vaccaro and his wife, Pam, brought in noted journalist and author Armen Keteyian to put it all together — covering his bitter exit from Nike, his ill-fated pursuit of LeBron James on behalf of Adidas, the AAU sneaker wars and ultimately his role in convincing former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon to be the lead plaintiff in an antitrust case against the NCAA. 

Throughout the book, Vaccaro notes how a series of coincidences and chance meetings defined his path. And while many former basketball players he knew from his camp agreed that the NCAA’s monopoly over name, image and likeness rights needed to be challenged in court, none wanted the burden of being the lead plaintiff and all the publicity that would come from taking on amateurism. 

But just a few days before Vaccaro called on him, one of O’Bannon’s colleagues at the car dealership where they worked told him about a video game his son was playing as O’Bannon from UCLA’s 1995 championship team. It was O’Bannon’s number, his shaved head and even his left hand — and he was getting nothing. 

Though it has taken many years, multiple court cases and been messy in implementation, Vaccaro’s role in correcting that economic wrong is undisputed. 

What could be a better tribute to a man whose career started at the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic back in Pittsburgh with a simple principle: If you get the best high school talent to play the best high school talent, people will watch. And care. And eventually, everyone will make money. 

Despite all the controversies and “sneaker pimp” accusations over his influence in college sports and youth basketball, Vaccaro was always right about that. And in “Legends and Soles,” it’s his turn to tell us exactly how it happened. 

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Lionel Messi’s trip to Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans was a family affair as he watched the game with longtime friends Luis Suarez, Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba, and their children earlier this month.

One former Messi teammate, however, was noticeably missing.

Javier Mascherano, who played with all four stars at Barcelona and with Messi on the Argentine national team before their World Cup win in 2022, was unable to join his old pals for the biggest event in American football.

“I’m not a player anymore. I had to work,” Mascherano, the first-year Inter Miami coach, told USA TODAY Sports.

It’s not hard to notice the elephant in the room as Inter Miami begins the 2025 MLS season Saturday against New York City FC (7:30 p.m., ET).

Messi, Suarez, Busquets and Alba will be coached by their former teammate. A first-time coach, at that, outside of some recent experience with Argentina’s youth national teams.

Suarez admitted “it’s weird” having Mascherano as coach during MLS media day last month, but said the former Barcelona standouts must view him as “someone who’s makes the decisions for the guys that still play on this side of the ball.”

“Now, he’s the boss,” Inter Miami midfielder David Ruiz lightheartedly said earlier this preseason. “I see the relationship and just thinking about it, it’s different. Imagine your boy being your boss.”

Mascherano, 40, must learn on the fly in his attempt to lead Inter Miami to new heights. The club will compete on a world stage during this summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, and likely contend for the MLS title again.

He must also help the club rebound from an upset loss in the first round of the MLS Cup playoffs last December, despite setting the best regular-season record in league history and winning the MLS Supporters’ Shield under former coach Tata Martino.

Time isn’t on Inter Miami’s side, either. Messi will be 38 years old in June. Busquets will be 37 in July. Suarez turned 38 last month. Alba turns 36 next month.

Anything short of raising trophies in the twilights of their careers – especially Messi’s – will be a failure, like last season’s premature playoff exit.

“I’m not under pressure. I’m here, trying to do my best, trying to help the players to have success,” Mascherano said during Inter Miami’s preseason, which featured four wins and a draw. “We are happy because we are doing the right things. We see on the pitch that we are working (well). It’s important going forward, keeping the same mentality we have now.”

This isn’t the first time Messi will be coached by a former teammate. Inter Miami can only hope Mascherano’s hire turns out like it did for the Argentine national team. Along with the Qatar World Cup in 2022, Argentina also has won the last two Copa America tournaments with Lionel Scaloni calling the shots.

Of course, the one thing in common is Messi. The reigning MLS MVP led the league with 36 goal contributions (20 goals, 16 assists) while playing in just 19 of 34 MLS games last year due to an ankle injury he suffered during last summer’s Copa America run.

Messi scored the only goal in Inter Miami’s 1-0 win against Sporting Kansas City in the Concacaf Champions Cup on Wednesday, marking Mascherano’s first official victory as coach. Messi also scored two goals during the preseason.  

Inter Miami beat reigning Mexican champions Club America in Las Vegas on Jan. 18 and Peru’s back-to-back champions Universitario on Jan. 29 on penalty kicks. They beat Panama’s Sporting San Miguelito 3-1 in Panama City on Feb. 2. They toppled Honduran giants Club Olimpia Deportivo 5-0 in Honduras on Feb. 8. And they played to a 2-2 draw with their MLS rival Orlando City on Feb. 14.

Mascherano already is off to a good start, and his players have fallen in line.

Along with rekindling his friendships, Mascherano has placed an emphasis on getting to know other players on the team while trying to implement his style of play during his first few months on the job.

“He’s very passionate when it comes down to soccer. He’s a center back and they always have that emotion in every duel, in everything,” Ruiz said. “He’s a great person. He tries to get along with young players, especially. That’s something great for us and we’re happy that he’s here and we’re learning every day.”

Inter Miami will compete for as many as five titles ‒ from the MLS regular season and postseason to the Champions Cup, Club World Cup and Leagues Cup tournament.

And there’s even more pressure after last season’s playoff collapse. As much as Mascherano will feel it, the burden still falls on Inter Miami’s stars and slew of young talent.

At least Mascherano knows he has some old friends he can count on.

“I can’t predict the future. Whether I tell you now that we will win or lose, I don’t know. What I do know is that we’re going to compete, we’re going to try to do our best. And well, hopefully we’ll win some titles,” Alba said Friday. “I understand the excitement around us, but as I’ve always said, we have to prove ourselves on the pitch and try to do things right there.”

How to watch Inter Miami vs. New York City FC

The match begins at 7:30 p.m. ET (8:30 p.m. in Argentina), and will be streamed on MLS Season Pass via Apple TV.

Inter Miami announces UNICEF partnership

On Friday, Inter Miami CF Foundation and UNICEF announced a three-year global partnership to support education programs for children in Argentina, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Mexico.

Fans at Inter Miami’s Chase Stadium can round up on their purchases as donations to IMCF Foundation. Additional fundraising efforts will be announced.

Messi has been an UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for over 15 years, while Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham has been an UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for more than 20 years.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – As Interstate 275 touches down off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and snakes north toward this scenic downtown, sports aficionados are naturally inclined to crane their necks.

And whether you’re a sucker for roadside stadia or not, Tropicana Field is impossible to miss.

Its tilted roof, retro space age appearance and outdated font screams instant obsolescence, but since opening in 1990 it has seen a Final Four, NHL playoffs, a World Series and the enduring success of the Tampa Bay Rays, who for nearly 20 years have overcome market size and traffic-choked barriers to become consistent contenders in baseball’s toughest division.

Now, however, a glance at the Trop serves not as the picture of a climate-controlled baseball haven, but rather a grim reminder of a devastating natural disaster, leaving the club homeless and casting what appeared to be a secure future in Tampa Bay very much in doubt.

On Oct. 9, Hurricane Milton made landfall in Sarasota County, roaring off the gulf coast at maximum wind speeds of 120 mph. It was still moving at 102 mph when it rolled through St. Petersburg, ostensibly not quite strong enough to threaten a stadium roof designed to withstand gusts of up to 115 mph.

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But the stadium and its Teflon-coated fiberglass roof were no match for Milton. By night’s end, the shredded roof was one of the dominant images illustrating the power of the Category 3 storm.

More than four months later, it is baseball season again, but not in St. Pete. The Rays will play their 2025 home schedule at Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field, thanks to the New York Yankees graciously bequeathing their freshly renovated spring training home to the club for this season.

Milton destroyed 446 Pinellas County homes, and between Milton and Hurricane Helene 10 days earlier, 714 were lost and more than 40,000 damaged. Yet no destruction is as publicly palpable as the Trop’s, its infrastructure bare to the elements, its insides exposed.

“It was heavy. You walk in and the offices are washed out and ceilings are washed out,” says Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander. “You’re looking out on the field and pieces of the roof and the fabric are all up there and the catwalk is just hanging and flapping in the wind. Just a big mess.

“It’s difficult seeing it like that. But again, you find that perspective. You go back to the fact that we have staff where their homes were that way.”

Friday, the Rays will begin a most unusual season in an appropriately strange fashion: They’ll play their Grapefruit League opener in Tampa against the Yankees, in a stadium where they’ll occupy the home clubhouse and dugout for 81 games.

On this day, they’ll be visitors, and after this season, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch tells USA TODAY Sports, he is confident the team will return to a repaired Tropicana Field in 2026. Engineers’ repair estimates have stayed in the original $56 million range and the city, as it is contractually obligated, will foot the bill; Welch says payments from insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency will cover “the vast majority” of repairs.

Yet for the Rays and the city they call home, the timing of the hurricane was particularly cruel. A two-decade quest to find a permanent, modern home had reached the endgame: A $1.3 billion dollar mixed-use project, the “public-private partnership” that Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred often touts, only needed October approval from the Pinellas County Commission.

Then Milton hit, a franchise’s short- and long-term future suddenly was in doubt, and a historically disadvantaged neighborhood was faced with starting over again.

“I really think it’s providential,” says Welch, a third-generation St. Petersburg resident. “Because in that community I grew up in as a boy, adapting to challenges is nothing new.”

A public-private fracture

The Rays’ stadium saga has been an endless, meandering journey through two municipalities divided by multiple bodies of water, all leading to one question: Tampa or St. Petersburg?

When owner Stuart Sternberg purchased controlling interest in the Rays in October 2005, a new stadium soon was front of mind. Tropicana Field was immediately antiquated in the 1990s ballpark boom, and while MLB saw fit to place an expansion team there in 1998, the Rays remain the only franchise to never host an All-Star Game and reap the benefits inherent to that jewel event.

It figured the Midsummer Classic would have to wait until the region had a ballpark to match, and the club probably leads the league in stadium renderings since. A dearth of corporate support in Tampa Bay relative to other markets, and the Rays’ perpetual lower-revenue status complicated matters, as did their hopes of finding a suitable location in Tampa, where a larger population could be tapped without having to cross bridges to St. Petersburg.

Last July, though, the club, the city of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County finally settled on a site, and a plan, and a vision: A 30,000-seat indoor stadium in the city’s Historic Gas Plant District, with an amphitheater, 5,400 residences, a hotel and museums and green space. Hines, the developers behind the Atlanta Braves’ Battery district, would spearhead the project.

Good-faith nods to lower-income housing are in the deal, along with “significant features that honor the neighborhood’s history and its descendants,” namely a predominantly Black population displaced when the area was razed in the 1980s to make way for interstate traffic and so-called economic development, which became Tropicana Field.

Those restorative elements and the ballpark would be a near 50-50 proposition: The Rays would front $700 million and St. Petersburg and Pinellas County $600 million, plus $130 million for infrastructure. The ballclub would be responsible for the cost overruns before it opened in time for the 2028 season.

And then the hurricanes hit.

Suddenly, Tropicana Field – where the Rays’ lease expires after 2027 – was inoperable. The field has no drainage system, and the shredded roof was just the beginning of damages.

Meanwhile, the region was devastated: A recent estimate pegged the damages to Tampa’s Hillsborough and Pinellas counties at $5 billion.

Yet the Rays stadium deal had reached third base, and unlocking the funds only needed approval from the Pinellas County Commisson. But with the region ravaged by storms, the commission opted to delay an Oct. 29 vote to approve the bonds, drawing the Rays’ ire.

The commission eventually approved the county’s $312.5 million share in December. But a copacetic partnership between public and private had soured.

The Rays said the delay in funding would push the ballpark’s opening from 2028 to ’29. And anticipated cost overruns for which the club is responsible suddenly jeopardized their calculus for the project.

Sternberg faces a March 31 deadline to commit his $700 million to the project. He has remained non-committal.

“Having the money and putting it in are two different things,” Sternberg told the Tampa Bay Times in his most recent public comments.

“We can get ahold of the money — does it make any sense to do it? That’s really it.’

Should the Gas Plant District project fall through, the franchise returns to a familiar, uncomfortable interchange: Try again, sell the team to a local buyer, or move the franchise.

It’s far from the direst development of a hurricane that was described as a once-a-century event. Yet given the longstanding efforts to ensure a franchise’s viability, it is cruel in its own fashion.

“The deal’s taken 15 years to get to this point,” says Jake Ferguson, who along with his father Mark owns and operates Ferg’s Sports Bar, a sprawling indoor-outdoor venue in the shadow of Tropicana Field. “This was never on our radar. The shock factor of something we never thought would happen – we haven’t had a storm hit us like this in 100 years – and at this time when we’re about to get this deal done…

“We just hope they go forward.”

A season in the elements

There’s some upside to the Rays’ playing home games this season in Tampa. A portion of the fanbase accustomed to an hour-ish commute to ballgames will suddenly find its home team reachable via surface streets.

Yet despite the Rays’ famously poor attendance, it leaves a void in St. Petersburg.

Ferg’s opened in 1992, converting an old Sunoco station to a watering hole. At the time, says Ferguson, St. Pete’s Edge District had just 35 business.

Now, there are 135, he says, not all of them dependent on baseball but certainly benefiting from the slow drip of six months of ballgames.

“We’re going to miss out on 81 home games,” says Ferguson, who says the post-COVID population influx has diversified the bar’s sports makeup. “We’ll be fine, but it’s affecting St. Pete as a whole.”

While Tropicana Field won’t make anyone’s top 10 list of most aesthetically pleasing ballparks, that shredded roof provided certainty in a stormy, humid region.

“I tell you what I did like about the Trop,” says Baltimore Orioles manager Brandon Hyde, whose Sarasota County home suffered flooding in both hurricanes. “If a game was scheduled for 7:05, it was at 7:05.”

Not so in Tampa, where the “hot season” runs for five months from early May to early October. July is its rainiest month, averaging 5.7 inches; the relative humidity reaches 72% while the average temperature hits 90 degrees.

“I’ll be very interested to see how that turns out, just with all the rain and heat,” says Yankees right-hander Clarke Schmidt, who played for the club’s Class A Tampa team in 2019. “Day games are really, really brutal. Hopefully, it goes smoothly.

“And the ball flies here.”

The Rays are remaining sanguine, with $50 million in renovations to Steinbrenner Field to make it championship season-ready, along with the Yankees’ own improvements at their 11,026-seat spring home. Players and staff will spend the majority of time there on the stadium’s bottom floor, where the experience will be like most of their workdays.

“As a player, on the underbelly of the stadium, it’s going to be really, really nice,” says Rays right-hander Zack Littell, who resides in Tampa during the season. “We’re going to deal with the heat. We’re going to deal with the weather, smaller crowds.

 “But we’re going to have really good crowds; the capacity’s just going to be smaller.”

And Littell, who played Class AAA ball in the San Francisco Giants’ organization, says the Rays will have it better than the Oakland Athletics, who are spending at least three seasons in Sacramento until their Las Vegas stadium is possibly constructed: “It’ll be a lot better than Sacramento, I can tell you that. Hot, not a great stadium. It could be worse.”

Neander says the temporary home factored into his roster construction this season, for a Rays team that stayed in wild-card contention well into September and returns a healthier, deeper pitching staff.

“Look, it’s baseball.  We have an opportunity to stay local and play our games local,” he says. “Different venue, but I think for our players – and we’re very mindful of the group we’re bringing in – we wanted to make sure we had the right group to galvanize around these circumstances that exist and to lead into it.

“And to make it an enjoyable year and make sure, again, we’re focused on the part we can control and make a lot of other people proud.”

Day of reckoning?

Friday morning, the Rays will depart their spring training facility in Port Charlotte and bus to Tampa to kick off the exhibition season. Should they opt for the westward fork around the bay, they’ll pass right by their damaged stadium.

“Driving by the Trop, it’s sad and disappointing,” says the Orioles’ Hyde. “That was another reminder of what we all went through. This whole area was like a war zone for a while. Until everything got cleaned up and picked up, there were piles in the streets and everywhere. Boats in yards and streets.

“I know people who had three feet of sand in their living room, personal property destroyed.”

The stadium itself has been a virtual laboratory for executive brilliance in baseball, with three former Rays executives now at the wheel for other franchises. They’ve reached the playoffs eight times in the past 15 years.

“That’s been our place of work. And we’ve poured so much into that building, and have so many memories there,” say Neander. “We have to get it back together.

“It served as some sort of symbol for the effects of these storms and the area and the damage they did.”

The Rays will play their Tampa opener March 28 against Colorado, but the more significant date will likely come three days later, Sternberg’s deadline to commit his $700 milllion to the stadium cause.

For a franchise that’s had an uncertain future almost since its inception, a daunting deadline is nothing particularly new. Nor is adversity for its home city.

The very interstates – I-275 and I-175 – that connect the world to Tropicana Field were also a part of the “urban renewal” projects a half-century ago that razed neighborhoods and displaced residents – mostly from predominantly Black communities – only for the promised economic development to never appear.

Welch learned to chop wood at his grandfather’s woodyard in the Historic Gas Plant District, but the business was not the same after it moved. The district was declared blighted by the city council in 1978 and targeted for development – not specifically for a stadium, though that was the outcome.

“In subsequent years, though, none of that development happened,” says Welch. “You had Tropicana Field and acres of asphalt. None of the economic development happened.”

Fulfilling promises broken more than 40 years ago, says Welch, is a big reason the city sees fit to sell the land for the stadium project at a below-market rate. The workforce development, jobs, affordable housing, minority business access and $10 million toward a new Woodson African American Museum of Florida are key components for the deal.

And should the Rays find the deal untenable, the high hopes remain for the district.

“It was a vibrant area, it was a neighborhood way before baseball,” says Welch. “My preference is clearly to have baseball. That’s why we have those agreements.

“But even if we don’t, I do believe we’ll have a vibrant area for people in downtown St. Pete as it expands.”

Hanging in that balance is a fan base hoping for a long-term reason to buy in – and an area that will thrive either way, yet prefers that its most significant neighbor stick around.

“We’re optimistic,” says Ferguson, leaning against his bar as a lunchtime crowd populates his establishment. “We hope that the city and the owners can come to a meeting point and go forward with it.

“It’s not just a stadium with baseball players in it. It affects a lot of lives.”

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The big winner of the 4 Nations Face-Off was … the 4 Nations Face-Off.

The NHL and NHL Players’ Association put together a highly competitive tournament that didn’t seem to want to end as the USA-Canada final went to overtime and produced another Canadian international win.

Games were tight — even a 6-1 U.S. win over Finland was 2-1 heading into the third period — and intense. Three games went to overtime, and the NHL’s top player, three-time MVP Connor McDavid, picked up the winner against the USA.

There were fights, big hits, bigger saves and playoff-level intensity as NHL players suited up in national team jerseys in the first best-on-best tournament since 2016.

‘I think it was much more popular than even we would have imagined,’ tournament MVP Nathan MacKinnon told ESPN. ‘It was getting so much attention from our whole continent.’

Here are the winners and losers from the 4 Nations Face-Off:

Winners

Canada

Canada is the undisputed leader in best-on-best tournaments. It overcame a 3-1 loss to the USA in the round robin to prevail. Canada came up short at the 2006 Olympics but won the 2002 and 2010 Olympics (beating the USA in the final each time), the 2014 Olympics, the 2004 and 2016 World Cup of Hockey and this tournament.

Canada goalie Jordan Binnington

Remember when Canada was supposed to have the weakest goaltending of the tournament? Coach Jon Cooper rode Binnington the whole way. While he did give up a few weak goals in the round robin, he was solid in the final (ask Auston Matthews and Jake Guentzel). He picked up his second big win at Boston’s TD Garden after leading the St. Louis Blues to victory in Game 7 of the 2019 Stanley Cup Final.

Matthew and Brady Tkachuk

The USA brothers dominated the headlines. They each scored twice against Finland and orchestrated the opening fights in the first USA-Canada game. Though Matthew missed the Sweden game with an injury and Brady left that game, they both started in the final. Brady scored a goal and threw some big hits. Matthew, though, wasn’t able to finish the game and had to watch from the bench starting late in the second period.

“He’s all heart,’ USA coach Mike Sullivan said of Matthew Tkachuk, according to The Athletic. ‘He’s a heart-and-soul guy. So is his brother (Brady Tkachuk). I think these guys were such a huge part of the leadership group. They’re just high-character people. They have an insatiable appetite to win, and it’s contagious.’

The overtime rule

Expanding the overtime to 10 minutes, rather than five, in the 4 Nations Face-Off round robin led to an exciting finish in the Canada-Sweden game – and more important, no shootout. If the league and players adopt this for future regular seasons, it could cut down on the number of shootouts. Perhaps 10 minutes is too long. Maybe eight would be better. The extra minutes of play (assuming someone scores during that time) would be shorter than the amount of time needed to conduct a five-minute OT and shootout.

The 2026 Olympics

The 4 Nations Face-Off was designed as an appetizer for the NHL’s return to the Olympics in Italy in 2026. This tournament showed what level of play can be expected there.

Washington Capitals

No one from the Eastern Conference-leading Capitals was selected to play, so the team will be rested going into the stretch run.

Losers

Boston Bruins

NHL teams worry about players being hurt in these tournaments, and the Bruins had a big loss. Defenseman Charlie McAvoy hurt his shoulder in the opening Finland game and then played against Canada on Saturday. He was in increasing pain when the series shifted to Boston and went to the hospital for tests, where it was discovered he had an infection in his right shoulder and a significant injury to his AC joint.

He couldn’t play in the final, though he did go to the dressing room to announce the starting lineups. The Bruins, who are one point out of a playoff spot, can’t afford to lose McAvoy. Matthew Tkachuk and Vegas’ Shea Theodore were also hurt in the tournament.

Complicated injury-replacement rule

The tournament’s injury-replacement rule was complicated and it led to strange optics. When Canada’s Theodore was hurt in the opening game, the team brought in Thomas Harley, but he couldn’t practice unless another Canadian defenseman went out. He watched practice and then jumped on when Cale Makar (illness) skated off. Certainly, the league and players’ association will make some tweaks. Maybe they bring back a taxi squad used in previous Olympics.

NHL All-Star games

How can the low-competition All-Star Game compare to the high-intensity 4 Nations Face-Off? The league keeps trying to revamp the format, and the last one was slightly better, but it doesn’t come close to matching this tournament. Fortunately, the NHL is bringing back the World Cup of Hockey in 2028 with the goal of having the Olympics and World Cup cycle two years apart. That means fewer All-Star Games.

Vancouver’s Elias Pettersson

After a tough season in Vancouver, Pettersson could have used a strong 4 Nations Face-Off to reboot him for the stretch run. But he had no points and two shots in three games and played fewer than 10 minutes in Monday’s game.

Finland’s defense

Finland often wins Olympic medals because it brings in players from the Finnish league. But this was an NHL-only tournament and the already-thin blue line lost Miro Heiskanen, Jani Hakanpaa and Rasmus Ristolainen before the tournament began. Finland ended up using five forwards on its power play and the lack of defensive depth eventually cost the team a chance to advance.

This story was updated with new information.

After all of this change, all of what once was morphing into something we barely recognize, Nebraska still doesn’t get it. 

It’s about the product on the field. 

College football is now about the best games, between the best teams, in the best environments. To grow the game, and more critically in the now era of where athletes are going to be paid by schools for their name, image and likeness, the revenue-producing future of the sport. 

So what does Nebraska do? It cancels a home-and-home series with Tennessee in 2026 and 2027, a sweet spot of new scheduling ideals if there ever was one in the new college football landscape.

Why, you ask? If you listen to Nebraska officials, it’s because Memorial Stadium renovations will reduce capacity in 2027, when the Huskers were set to travel to Tennessee. The extra home game eliminates that problem.

It also creates a much larger public relations pothole.

Make no mistake: Nebraska isn’t running scared from Tennessee as much as it’s running toward the Indiana model of taking the College Football Playoff path of least resistance. Neither is a good look ― nor productive in the Big Ten’s grand scheduling plan.

The Big Ten and SEC have spent four years completely dismantling college football in a quasi-arms race, focusing on generating bigger games to sell to media rights partners to make up for millions in lost revenue from the expected system of sharing money with players in a ‘pay-for-play’ system under the guise of NIL.

And the Nebraska administration comes swooping in, in one quick move on a sleepy, post-football sports world Friday, and drops a bomb. 

Nebraska vs. Tennessee is exactly what the Big Ten and SEC are trying to sell, the very game(s) ESPN and Fox will pay more for in future rights negotiations. If you’re listing potential high-value games between the two leagues, Nebraska vs. Tennessee is high on the list.

FINAL PIECE: SEC moving to nine conference games drives CFP expansion

STACKING DECK: SEC, Big Ten trying to rig playoff spots is pathetic

So is Nebraska vs. Georgia, or Florida, or LSU or Alabama. The unique campus games rarely (in some cases, never) played that the Big Ten and SEC are selling not only to media partners, but fans. 

Because the last thing – the very last thing – fans want to see when they’re shelling out big dollars for their fall Saturdays is Ball State on the other sideline.

If you want a passionate and loyal fanbase – there is none better than those in Lincoln – to buy into seismic change that has eliminated almost every norm of the game they adore, you can’t announce that Bowling Green will replace Tennessee on the 2026 home schedule and then play Miami (Ohio) at home in 2027 instead of the Volunteers in Knoxville because you’re going to lose a few million during stadium renovations.

Think, for a moment, what Nebraska is selling its fanbase. The program is a shadow of its former championship self, desperately trying to fight out of a lost decade of futility.

It took two seasons, but coach Matt Rhule finally got the Huskers back to the postseason, winning the Pinstripe Bowl. Baby steps, everyone. 

The Huskers have a rising star in quarterback Dylan Raiola, and the expansion of the College Football Playoff has reignited championship hope. And the next thing you know, the Huskers are running from Tennessee. 

How else can your fans look at it?

According to its most recent financial statement, Nebraska made $24.2 million in ticket revenue from seven games in 2023, or $3.46 million per game. Renovations to the south side of Memorial Stadium, which will cost an estimated $450 million, will temporarily eliminate 23,000 seats from the capacity of 85,458.

That 27 percent reduction would eliminate approximately $934,200 from the average take-home in tickets sales.

So for approximately $1 million in ticket revenue and associated revenue from game day, Nebraska has decided to torpedo a game its fans want to see, and a significant game of need for the Big Ten and SEC to dangle during future media rights negotiations. There’s also the matters of Nebraska having to pay $1 million to Tennessee to get out of the two-game contract and also pay guarantees to Bowling Green and Miami (Ohio) that likely would exceed $1 million each.

I’m not buying it. 

This is more about Indiana than it is Tennessee. 

This is about manufacturing the easiest path possible to the CFP, and then sneaking under the tent behind the guise of playing a schedule 30-40 FBS teams would’ve dominated, too. Then declaring, “all we can do is play the teams on the schedule.”

So when the CFP moves to 14 or 16 teams in 2026 – would you look at that, the same year Nebraska was to play host to Tennessee – the Huskers have the best possible opportunity to return to the elite of college football.

It will be Year 4 under Rhule, and Raiola will be a third-year starter with presumably many more pieces around him on offense to change the program.

Nebraska has decided to play the short game by ignoring the longer, more impactful game for the Big Ten as a whole. The same Big Ten that has waited nearly 15 years for its rate of return on inviting the Huskers into the members-only club.

The very least Nebraska could do is join the Big Ten is its goal of becoming more attractive to its media partners — and future new media partners. The only certainty about the fluid media production business is live sports sells. 

Live sports that matter. 

Not another Sun Belt team playing Nebraska for a paycheck.

Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.

The UEFA Champions League bracket is set, with Friday seeing the draw for knockout stages pair some of Europe’s best soccer teams for March’s round of 16

A new format expanded the knockout stage, with Tuesday and Wednesday seeing the debut of a playoff phase that effectively functioned as a round of 32. Friday’s draw set up the path for the rest of the tournament, with a bracket in place all the way through to this season’s final on May 31 in Munich.

Between those results and the group-stage table playing a major factor in seeding for the draw, some massive matchups have emerged despite how far the Champions League is from its one-off championship game. French power Paris Saint-Germain will face Premier League titans Liverpool while Real Madrid has been paired with city rivals Atlético Madrid.

Here’s what to know about the Champions League round of 16 draw, including pairings and schedule:

Champions League draw: Round of 16 pairings, tournament bracket

Friday’s UEFA Champions League draw set up the following matchups in the round of 16:

Round of 16 pairing 1: Paris Saint-Germain vs. Liverpool
Round of 16 pairing 2: Club Brugge vs. Aston Villa
Round of 16 pairing 3: Real Madrid vs. Atlético Madrid
Round of 16 pairing 4: PSV vs. Arsenal
Round of 16 pairing 5: Feyenoord vs. Inter Milan
Round of 16 pairing 6: Bayern Munich vs. Bayer Leverkusen
Round of 16 pairing 7: Borussia Dortmund vs. Lille
Round of 16 pairing 8: Benfica vs. Barcelona

The draw also sets the bracket for the rest of this season’s Champions League, with the path to May 31 final at Allianz Arena in Munich now clear.

Quarterfinal pairings

Quarterfinal 1: Round of 16 pairing 1 winner vs. Round of 16 pairing 2 winner
Quarterfinal 2: Round of 16 pairing 3 winner vs. Round of 16 pairing 4 winner
Quarterfinal 3: Round of 16 pairing 5 winner vs. Round of 16 pairing 6 winner
Quarterfinal 4: Round of 16 pairing 7 winner vs. Round of 16 pairing 8 winner

Semifinal pairings

Semifinal 1: Quarterfinal pairing 1 winner vs. Quarterfinal pairing 2 winner
Semifinal 2: Quarterfinal pairing 3 winner vs. Quarterfinal pairing 4 winner

Champions League 2024-25: Knockout round schedule

Round of 16 first legs: March 4-5
Round of 16 second legs: March 11-12
Quarterfinal first legs: April 8-9
Quarterfinal second legs: April 15-16
Semifinal first legs: April 29-30
Semifinal second legs: May 6-7
Final: May 31

Champions League 2024-25: How to watch knockout matches on TV and streaming

The 2024-25 Champions League round of 16 will air across various CBS platforms, with specific game broadcasts yet to be set.

Games could air on CBS or the CBS Sports Network, while Paramount+ and the CBS Golazo Network are streaming options. Fans can also look to Fubo, who is offering a free trial for new subscribers.

Stream the Champions League knockout rounds on Fubo

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Chantal Kreviazuk, the Grammy-Award winning Canadian singer, revealed she decided in sound check to change the lyrics of ‘O Canada’ during her rendition before Thursday’s 4 Nations Face-Off championship between the United States and Canada.

This became Kreviazuk’s impromptu political statement in response to President Donald Trump’s comments about Canada becoming the 51st state of the United States, she wrote on Instagram in the aftermath of Canada’s dramatic 3-2 overtime win at TD Garden in Boston. Soon after Thursday’s pregame festivities were complete, multiple outlets confirmed Kreviazuk intentionally sang ‘that only us command’ instead of ‘in all of us command’ to protest Trump’s recent statements.

The 50-year-old singer also posted a photo on social media of the new lyrics written on the palm of her hand and explained the how and why behind her lyric choice.

‘I didn’t plan this or plot at all… I was honoured to get the gig!’ Kreviazuk wrote in part. ‘During soundcheck I sang the wrong words “in all thy sons command” out of habit and when I analyzed the new line I thought wow – this could mean something so pertinent to our country in this moment with a change in just two words, three syllables. I didn’t dream that such an effect would be had by deciding to go out there and do it. But it really felt like the right thing to do.’

The national anthems of both the United States and Canada became part of the story during the 4 Nations Face-Off, which intersected with an uptick in political tension between the two countries because of Trump’s threats to implement tariffs on Canadian imports and the 51st state rhetoric since he took office last month.

Canadian fans in Montreal loudly booed the “Star-Spangled Banner’ last Saturday when the United States beat Canada, 3-1, in round-robin action, and the game began with three fights in the opening nine seconds.

She wanted more than just the people inside TD Garden to hear her subtle lyric change.

‘In this very peculiar and potentially consequential moment i truly believe that we must stand up, use our voices and try to protect ourselves,’ Kreviazuk wrote on Instagram. ‘We should express our outrage in the face of any abuses of power. I was raised in part by music that was inspired by brave voices committed to peaceful conflict resolution. Canada, not unlike Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Period.’

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