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, but Scheffler has been fairly blunt in some of his comments about blaming 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 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.

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 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 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 over the weekend after Coyotes GM Bill Armstrong’s chat with players Friday about the pending relocation leaked.  

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 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 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 there are plans to potentially move the AHL franchise to Mullett Arena.

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 made an opening day roster in 2023, and just 17 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 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 to prepare for Clark’s arrival. The timing couldn’t be better, as the WNBA is negotiating 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.

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 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 and Texans 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.