The internet is killing sports

Plus AI predictions and the New York City I can't miss

Happy New Year! 2026 is finally here!

I have to say that on many levels, the year in politics felt like a nightmarish fever dream. Donald Trump deciding to illegally rename the Kennedy Center after himself is not the worst thing that any president has ever done — it’s not even close — but on a level of sheer batshit insanity, it’s off the charts.

In a halfway functioning political system, I don’t even know what would happen if a president did that — because it just wouldn’t happen! Members of the president’s party would not put up with pure Mad King behavior. It’s not consequential, of course, in the way that cutting tons of people off from Medicaid is consequential. But then he also started a little war with Venezuela and launched some kind of Christmas bombing campaign in Nigeria, while also being so committed to world peace that he’s decided to just take Vladimir Putin’s word for it on Russian war aims. Also, FIFA believes that the president is seven years old, so they made up a fake peace prize to bestow on him, and he proudly accepted it.

Something I worry about a lot is that as Trump wears his ridiculousness and egomania on his sleeve, he invites people to believe that he is shallow and easily manipulated when he’s actually been ruthlessly successful across multiple fields of endeavor.

JD Vance seems a lot more put-together in a lot of ways, but he was also placed on the ticket specifically because Trump was disappointed that Mike Pence wouldn’t violate the constitution to help him steal an election, and Trump apparently feels that Vance is more reliable in this regard.

I try to maintain an action-oriented posture rather than indulging in dooming and stress and anxiety. But we succeeded in getting non-politics questions this week, so I just wanted to open by assuring everyone that I actually feel pretty stressed about the political situation and will continue to feel stressed as long as Republicans remain odds-on favorites to hold the Senate.

Now, your questions.

---

John E: If you could take any older show and update it with AI to make it look better (graphics/CGI/etc.), but keep everything else the same, what would it be?

My initial thought was Babylon 5 or something like that, but curious if you have any ideas that jump out at you?

The original Star Trek. It’s not even so much that the visual effects look bad (I believe they actually made a version with upgraded CGI that was released on Blu-ray), it’s that the makeup and costume stuff for the aliens is so crude and absurd. The Klingons as guys with Trump’s spray tan and weird beards is hard to watch. The Gorn as depicted in “The Arena” is absurd.

Andy: I’ll repeat my question about what changes you’d make to the NFL in terms of structure, rules, etc.

If football isn’t your thing, then as an alternative, expand the question to your thoughts about the general state of pro sports, whether you think pro sports are in a good or bad place, and what changes you might make if you were Ultimate Overlord of pro sports.

The NFL seems like they’re doing great, objectively, and don’t really need my advice. The main question facing the league is how aggressively to expand and whether to try really ambitious strategies like setting up a four-team division in Europe. From my personal standpoint, it was really exciting to watch the Commanders on their run last year and really disheartening to see things turn to shit this year — and it’s especially disheartening because the trajectory matches the RGIII boom and bust so closely.

Beyond football, though, my main observation about sports is that they are all being buffeted by the internet and the ubiquity of content in interesting ways.

When I first moved to DC, I made a clear choice to adopt the Wizards as my favorite basketball team. The Knicks were bad at the time and the Wizards, while not great, were decent and fun in the Gilbert Arenas Era. But beyond that, I just really liked basketball. A very large share of the games that were available to watch on television were Wizards games, so I watched a lot of Wizards games, and it’s more fun to watch a game if you have a rooting interest in it, so it’s fun to adopt your hometown team. Now, if we’d somehow had a Wizards-Knicks Eastern Conference Finals, would my loyalties have reverted? Maybe, but it didn’t come up.

Flash forward to 2025 and the Wizards are awful, the Knicks are good, and it’s also incredibly easy to watch Knicks games on streaming. So I’m following the Knicks very closely, which is great. And my son is also watching some Knicks games with me these past two seasons, which is delightful and a ton of fun. But this is a pattern that I see repeating in a lot of local families — dads maintaining their hometown sports allegiances and passing them on to their sons because it’s so easy to watch out of town games.

And this delocalization seems like a bit of a threat to the long-term model of sports.