Sports in 2024: What we learned from a year of change

Times always change. For the world of sports, change in 2024 was on 3x speed.

College sports realigned and entered a turbocharged world of pay-for play. The NFL moved more of its luggage into the streaming world. The Olympics reverted back to its old meaningful ways. Even boxing found a firm foothold … in Saudi Arabia.

Here is a look at what we learned in the world of sports in 2024:

Boxing

What we learned in 2024: The Saudis are here to fix boxing

The biggest problem across all of recent boxing history has been the abundance of great fights we either never saw or saw too late because of the artificial partitions forever erected between the sweet science’s most influential power brokers. Heck, that was long Dana White’s best pitch for the UFC product: We make the fights the fans want to see — ya know, unlike boxing.

But things began changing overnight in late 2023 when Turki Alalshikh and Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority wafted into the game on a 24-carat golden parachute and started torching stacks of cash like he was The Joker circa 2008. Tyson Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk? Done. Artur Beterbiev vs. Dmitry Bivol? Easy. Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom vs. Frank Warren’s Queensberry Promotions? Sorry fellas, I know you haven’t worked together in ages, but we’re actually building an entire event framed around squashing your beef.

As we arrive one year into boxing’s Turki era, everyone in the hurt business is suddenly the very best of friends. Case in point: At least six different promoters are collaborating on February’s Goliath Riyadh Season show. That’s unheard of! And considering the absurdly good fight slate we just witnessed in 2024, boxing fans are happy to reap the rewards for as long as they last. All it took was a preposterously lavish level of spending. Isn’t it funny how that works?

— Shaheen Al-Shatti

Men’s College Basketball

What we learned in 2024: Savvy veterans > One-and-dones

The most valuable players aren’t the prized freshmen who are gifted enough to make the leap to the NBA as teenagers. Top teams are increasingly relying on older, more experienced players who have proven themselves at the college level.

The quartet of teams who made the 2023 Final Four didn’t feature a single true freshman starter or former McDonald’s All-American. UConn’s Stephon Castle was the lone freshman starter at the 2024 Final Four. Thirteen of last season’s 20 Final Four starters were finishing their fourth or fifth year of college basketball. Twelve had transferred schools at least once.

The byproduct was an offseason spending spree as deep-pocketed programs sunk millions of dollars into landing the top available transfers. Great Osobor reportedly received $2 million in NIL money to follow coach Danny Sprinkle from Utah State to Washington. Coleman Hawkins then raked in slightly more than that in return for pulling out of the NBA Draft and transferring to Kansas State.

The lesson is that men’s college basketball programs don’t have to land blue-chip freshmen to compete for national titles. It’s easier to contend with a group of savvy veterans than it is to find McDonald’s All-Americans who are ready to lead right away.

— Jeff Eisenberg

Women’s College Basketball

What we learned in 2024: The year of Caitlin Clark

The 2024 calendar began with a 40-point performance and buzzer-beating 3-pointer from the logo to defeat Michigan State on Jan. 2, swiftly followed by back-to-back triple-doubles. Clark’s record chase morphed from the NCAA Division I women’s scoring record, to the overall NCAA and AIAW major scoring one to the revered all-time NCAA mark held by Pete Maravich.

She crushed them all with aplomb en route to a historic national championship game. No moment was too massive for Clark, a true midwestern kid who stayed home and reminded us to embrace joy over statistics. It’s why, in her own estimation, a growing legion of fans are tuning into the sport she loves.

— Cassandra Negley

It remains to be seen if 2024 is an outlier or a sign of things to come, but the first year of the 12-team playoff has been filled with flawed teams at the top. As players have the freedom to move between schools and will start getting paid directly by their universities, we’ll see if talent continues to get more spread out among power conference schools.

— Nick Bromberg

Golf

What we learned in 2024: A fractured game is bad for the sport

The forces that tore apart the men’s game two years ago remained on opposite shores in 2024. The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which bankrolls LIV Golf, made little public progress toward any kind of agreement that would bring the game’s best back together. The result: fewer people are watching.

Depending on the metric, weekend viewership for non-majors was down between 15 and 20% year over year. Contrast that with the thrilling, Bryson DeChambeau vs. Rory McIlroy final round of the U.S. Open, which drew its highest rating since 2013, and it’s evident that people want to watch golf … when all the golfers are playing together.

— Jay Busbee

MLB

What we learned in 2024: The Dodgers vs. Everyone Else

Baseball in the year 2024 was all about the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It wasn’t just about the franchise capturing its first full-season World Series title since 1988 — though that certainly helps the narrative. It was also how the Dodgers went about it. Their march to the top began last offseason, when the club reeled in two-way dynamo Shohei Ohtani, the game’s biggest and most marketable star, on a relatively manageable, deferral-heavy contract.

Then Ohtani, who didn’t pitch in 2024 while recovering from elbow surgery, won the National League MVP by delivering the first 50-steal, 50-homer season in MLB history. It all culminated in a showdown for the ages against the Yankees and Aaron Judge in the World Series, a battle in which the Dodgers gave their cross-coast rivals a big, fat swirly. Yankees fans will be seeing their club’s fateful fifth inning of Game 5 on repeat in their darkest nightmares for a long, long time.

Less than a month after their long-awaited parade, the Dodgers flexed their financial muscles once more, signing highly touted free-agent pitcher Blake Snell to a massive, five-year, $182 million contract and extending utility man Tommy Edman on a five-year, $75 million deal. They will surely strike at least once more this winter to refurbish their outfield.

— Jake Mintz

MMA

What we learned in 2024: The UFC simply cannot lose

Imagine if, this past January, we called up the TKO offices and told Ari Emanuel: 1) pretty much every major UFC event you plan is about to be torn asunder by injuries; 2) UFC’s ultimate cash cow, Conor McGregor, is about to become persona non grata after being found liable for sexual assault; 3) UFC’s chief rivals, PFL and Bellator, are about to push their collective chips all-in with their merger; 4) UFC’s single biggest boogeyman over the past decade, the antitrust lawsuit, is finally about to hit the courts. At the very least, the combat overlords would’ve braced themselves for a bumpy road, no? If ever there was a year for the MMA leader to take a backward step, it was 2024.

And yet …

When the calendar turns over, 2024 will go down as UFC’s most profitable year ever, just as 2023 and 2022 did before it. The rash of injuries and lack of McGregor led only to the rise of Alex Pereira as a surprise megastar. The PFL-Bellator partnership implausibly sunk both brands and carries the stench of a total disaster more and more by the day. Even the antitrust suit, which long loomed as the final bullet left in MMA’s chamber that could derail the UFC machine, proved to be little more than a tax write-off for the TKO offices. No, if 2024 showcased one fact beyond any shadow of a doubt, it’s that UFC is Logan Roy and everyone else is a bunch of nosy pedestrians.

— Shaheen Al-Shatti

NASCAR

What we learned in 2024: You don’t have to be great during the regular season to win a Cup title

Joey Logano took home his third championship with a win at Phoenix in the final race of the regular season. Logano entered the playoffs as the No. 15 seed with just one win and four top fives during the first 26 races. He went on to win three playoff races on his way to the title and got a huge helping hand in the second round thanks to Alex Bowman’s Charlotte DQ. Logano finished the season with an average finish of 17.1. It was his lowest average finish in 12 seasons and the lowest average finish for a Cup Series champion in NASCAR history. But he did everything he needed to under NASCAR’s playoff format to win the title.

— Nick Bromberg

NBA

What we learned in 2024: Everyone can do everything

In a sport that increasingly counts floor spacing and the ability to play multiple positions as its core principles, what if a coach could construct entire lineups from players who deliver on both promises?

It seems obvious every NBA team should try to do this — is trying to do this — though for whatever reason (salary-cap constraints, player development shortcomings, front office ineptitude, etc.) they could not. There would always be a big who could not shoot, a shooter who could not defend, a defender who could not handle the ball, a ball-handler who could not stand up to a big, and the circle was never closed.

Until we met the 2023-24 Boston Celtics. They fielded basketball’s best roster, because Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, Kristaps Porziņģis and Al Horford could shoot, dribble, pass and defend. Everyone could do everything, so much so that when they lost Porziņģis, a 7-foot-2 unicorn, they still steamrolled the competition, clocking the greatest offense the game has ever seen on the way.

For all the talk about how homogenous the 3-pointer has made the NBA, the game now demands a degree of skill from everybody that was once only required for some, and that is worth celebrating.

— Ben Rohrbach

NFL

What we learned in 2024: Streaming, streaming, and more streaming

Part of the equation for NFL fans in 2024 wasn’t just figuring out what time their favorite team played and who the opponent is. It was also figuring out if you had a subscription to the streaming app the game was on. The NFL’s popularity was pushed by the availability of games on traditional network television. NFL Sunday Ticket filled in the gaps for the most dedicated fans. While there are still plenty of NFL games on traditional network television, one of the big stories of this year was the NFL continuing its trend of farming out games to streaming services that some fans might not have known existed.

What is Peacock, anyway?

In Week 1, there was a Packers-Eagles game exclusively on Peacock. ESPN+ had a Monday night game between the Chargers and Cardinals. Amazon Prime Video had Thursday night games for the second straight season. Netflix entered the picture this season, with two Christmas games. There will be a wild-card playoff game exclusively on Amazon Prime Video.

The league has shown it will continue to change the viewing experience, mostly because streaming apps are another revenue source. Netflix, for example, paid a reported $150 million for just two games this season.

The league has said it’s a “long way off” from a streaming-only Super Bowl, but it wasn’t completely ruled out in the future. Before we get to that point, expect more of the NFL’s inventory of games to find its way to non-traditional viewing services.

— Frank Schwab

NHL

What we learned in 2024: A work stoppage isn’t imminent

We have reason for optimism regarding the next Collective Bargaining Agreement.

The NHL and the NHLPA are in the penultimate season of a CBA that was signed in 2020 ahead of the league’s return during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Labor relations between the league and the union have always delivered a bit of a scare into fans after four work stoppages since 1992, including three lockouts and the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season.

While Gary Bettman, who has steered the league since Feb. 1993, remains NHL commissioner, the NHLPA has a new executive director in Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston and ex-U.S. Secretary of Labor. The two have held numerous conversations since Walsh took over in February 2023 and some of the top issues — salary-cap growth, player escrow and the regular-season schedule — may not be hot-button topics that could lead to another work stoppage.

“Myself and Gary Bettman have had very open conversations about how this potentially could be laid out,” Walsh told ESPN’s Emily Kaplan recently. “Going in with an open mind, with open dialogue is how I’ve always approached collective bargaining.”

Bettman said at October’s board of governors meeting that he’d like to start negotiations with the union early in hopes of achieving labor peace without disrupting the NHL schedule.

— Sean Leahy

Olympics

What we learned in 2024: The Olympic Games can be done right

The success of the Paris Olympics wasn’t just about the athletes who delivered astounding performances. (Léon Marchand won four individual gold medals in men’s swimming to invite comparisons to Michael Phelps.) It also was a product of the way that organizers showcased Paris’ iconic architecture and dazzling scenery by seamlessly integrating the Olympic venues into the city’s existing structure.

Beach volleyball players dove across the sand inside a temporary stadium constructed directly beneath the Eiffel Tower. Fencers clashed under the glass atrium roof of the Grand Palais. Equestrian athletes competed essentially in the backyard of the famed Château de Versailles. Skateboarders slid across rails in the same plaza where Louis XVI and his famous wife Marie Antoinette were once beheaded.

Even the open-water swim through the Seine was spectacular with some of Paris’ most famous monuments in the background. Alas, organizers might have bit off more than they could chew trying to get the water quality to a safe level.

It won’t be easy for any other Olympic city to provide a backdrop as spectacular as Paris, but the template is what they all should strive for. Your move, Los Angeles. Hopefully you were taking notes.

— Jeff Eisenberg

Soccer

What we learned in 2024: Demise of U.S. women were exaggerated

If the biggest soccer story of 2023 was the U.S. women’s national team’s World Cup demise, the most important thing we learned in 2024 was that reports of the USWNT’s demise were greatly exaggerated. Emma Hayes arrived as the highest-paid coach in program history, and needed only 10 weeks to lift the Americans to Olympic gold.

Did she fix everything that ailed the USWNT in 2023? Did she mend the youth pipeline? Did she firmly establish the U.S. back atop the women’s game? No, no and no. But she worked wonders, re-instilled a fierce mentality, and restored joy. And her players proved that, with all those things plus health and shrewd management, they can still be the best in the world.

Hayes’ impact was so instant and thorough that it prompted all of us to reassess the value of national team coaches. And it perhaps compelled U.S. Soccer to swing big in search of similar impact on the men’s side. To replace Gregg Berhalter, who was fired after a Copa América flameout, the federation chased and hired Mauricio Pochettino to lead the USMNT.

All of this represents a level of ambition that we haven’t previously seen from U.S. Soccer, which now stands to enter the 2026/27 World Cup cycle with two of the five most accomplished coaches on the international side of the sport.

— Henry Bushnell

Tennis

What we learned in 2024: The Big Three becomes The Big Two(s)

Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz have lapped the field. The No. 1 and 2 players in the world have developed their games to the point that other players will have to change the way they play to keep up, or resign themselves to a career that won’t come close to the top echelon. They are showing that life after the Big Three will be different, but it will still be incredibly entertaining, technical and emotional.

It’s a slightly similar story in women’s tennis. Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek solidified themselves as the top two women’s players after several years of shuffling following Serena Williams’ retirement. But the women’s field continues to be exceptionally strong. Barbora Krejcikova won Wimbledon this year. Jessica Pegula continues to work toward her first Grand Slam trophy. Qinwen Zheng got closer than ever to becoming the first Chinese tennis player since Li Na to become a consistent late-round competitor.

— Liz Roscher

WNBA

What we learned in 2024: The ‘W’ can thrive

Shattered TV viewership numbers. Highest attendance in 22 years. Best merchandise sales in history. There is no doubt the WNBA experienced its breakout season in 2024 when Caitlin Clark entered a league already on the rise. The most important thing we learned wasn’t that Clark would in fact transition well to the pro game, it’s what those around the sport have known for years. With proper investment, value and hype — and, yes, a generational star such as Clark setting the spark — “the W” will thrive.

— Cassandra Negley

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