O’Donnell: ‘Review of Media ‘25’ bumps up against Bears, Bears, Bears
SPORTS RELEVANCE IS IN THE PSYCHE OF THE CONSUMER, most frequently further defined by geography.
That's why, on the threshold of New Year's Day 2026, the convenient thing to do from a Chicago-area base is ditch the sweeping paint-by-numbers and herald only Bears, Bears, Bears.
In these parts now, nothing matters but their next game, from a midweek point of view.
COULD THERE HAVE BEEN any more dramatic flow milked from their 42-38 loss at San Francisco Sunday night?
Even NBC's Cris Collinsworth and Mike Tirico joked about “the script.”
THE LOSS WAS BRUTAL, save for those lucky speculators who waited until the final 70 minutes before kickoff on select wagering sites and got Chicago +4½.
That flow had no ebb. Except for the faithful who lived and died — and died — with the final drive of Caleb Williams and his visiting armada.
(Classical frog lab dissection: Faced with that goal-to-go concluding snap, Vince Lombardi, Don Shula and Chuck Noll all would have run the football. Lombardi would have resurrected “Ice Bowl Speak” and told Williams: “Just punch the thing in and let's get the hell out of here.”)
Now the specter of as many as two home playoff games at Soldier Field looms.
INTO THE NEW YEAR, that's energizing news for the fan base and an icy chunk of nirvana certain to shiver the assets of Chicago season-ticket holders.
Alas, deadlines and commitments call, so fast-forwarding toward 2025, a sports year that was:
Guiding words and phrases were: “greed,” “leverage,” “saturation,” “media delivery expansion” and the unremitting dominance atop the American sports gold mine by the National Football League.
THE NFL STRANGLEHOLD NOW CONTINUES TO EXTEND from fantasy players to whole state governments. That's quite a compendium.
The first group is as harmless as a neighborhood teen making a few bucks shoveling snow.
The second gaggle is scary. In increasingly hard economic times, the idea that purportedly rational elected officials would divert public money to billion-dollar show business corporations is obscene.
THE LATEST “EXHIBIT SAP” is the state of Kansas. That's the flyover that will be funding the preponderance of the Chiefs' new $3B stadium. It'll be 20 miles across the Missouri state line from Arrowhead Stadium.
The ruling Hunt family — now third-generation silver spooners — were piqued when Missouri voters defeated a referendum last spring to renew a state sales tax to keep the Chiefs and MLB's Royals where they are.
FOR BEARS FANS, THE WARNING SHOT is that if the Chiefs — a part of the Missouri fabric since their move from Dallas in 1963 — would cross a state line for free lucre, why wouldn't the McMonsters?
A critical difference:
Despite its 62-season residency in Missouri, the Hunt family had no abiding spiritual allegiance to the state. If the McCaskeys were to yank the Bears out of northern Illinois, spawning ground of George Halas, they might as well also deface the Papa Bear's grave in Des Plaines as they do so.)
IN TERMS OF MEGA-SPORTS MEDIA ASCENDING IN 2025, flexing newer power players included:
· Amazon Prime Video — “Prime” added a slice of the NBA's new rights package, supplementing its current “Thursday Night Football” … Jeff Bezos and his exchequer would be welcomed by any major American sports organization;
· Paramount+ — Like a U-boat in the north Atlantic, the streamer lurks … It's paying close to $12B for an extended deal with the UFC, a blood sport with an unbelievably desirable target audience — primarily pliable younger males making a lot of lifetime purchasing decisions;
· Netflix — As it showed with two NFL games on Christmas Day, a viewing option that is flashing versatility and aggressiveness with its veer into major live sports … Stacking all of those schticky Adam Sandler comedies apparently had a greater purpose;
· YouTube — Currently only incremental sports add-ons — like the Week 1 Chiefs-Chargers game from Sao Paulo. … But the streaming service's capsulized nightly game highlights are a creative lure and the heist of the 2029 Oscars only hints at where things are headed. … YouTube's ad billings across all genres are already astonishing.
ONE DAY SOON, THE MOST POPULAR SPORTS TEAMS will fill 24/7 streaming with an odd lot of franchise-specific content.
Be it the Los Angeles Dodgers or Manchester United or any team down below, it could range from Shohei Ohtani letting out his dogs at 6 a.m. to a fellow like Cole Kmet going in for an oil change.
Somewhere, most rabid fans will watch and advertisers in search of coalesced fragments will chase.
Sports relevance will remain in the psyche of the consumer.
But as collectives, those niche noggins spell nothing but G-O-L-D.
Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Wednesday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.