Diagnosing Democracy, Part III: The Party’s Over, Now Let’s Get It Right This Time

A year ago I read an article in the Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch celebrating that Joe Biden being forced out of the Democratic nomination represented the reassertion of the principle that “nominations belong to parties, not to candidates”. Rauch argued that “for most of U.S. history…Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life”, nurturing and directing politicians and ultimately controlling who ran for office on their ticket, from President all the way down to dog catcher, from the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”.

Contrary to popular belief, the decision-makers did not and could not override or ignore public opinion; they wanted to win, after all. What they could and did do was blend public opinion with other considerations, such as who could unify the party, govern after the election, and advance the party’s interests…And here’s something else they did: choose qualified candidates…Although the machines of yore could be insular and corrupt – traits no one wants to go back to – they reliably screened out circus acts, incompetents, rogues, and sociopaths.

By 2016, however, in a process started when the Democrats put more weight on the primary process following the contentious 1968 nomination fight – which initially resulted in George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, leading to party insiders clawing back influence in the “invisible primary” – “the public saw the parties as vehicles for candidates at best, and as useless and corrupt intermediaries at worst”. In Rauch’s telling, the revelation in the hacked DNC e-mails of the party putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders would, in times past, have gotten a shrug: “Of course the Democratic Party favors the candidate who is actually a Democrat. That’s why it exists!” While the Republican Party has effectively become a cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump, the Democrats continue to exert influence over the nomination, lining up behind Biden in 2020 and forcing him off the ticket in ’24, showing that “both man and party” can “put the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work.”

Rauch argues that the weakening of the role of party professionals has fueled our present-day dysfunction, creating bitter divisions between factions that put furthering their ideology ahead of the national interest. Americans may “have lost their memory of parties that behave like institutions, not just platforms or brands”, but the demonstration that “a political party can act independently and wisely to serve the national interest at a crucial juncture” can point the way forward. Our democracy, in Rauch’s telling, worked because party bosses had the perspective to ignore the screeching of ideologues and choose the candidate that could best appeal to the broadest cross-section of the electorate, that could actually win an election.

You know, like when they stopped Sanders from dooming the party to certain defeat and chose Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, as the best choice to win the election, as opposed to the Republicans who fell victim to the Trump insurgency that would surely doom them in November.

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Wither the Linear Cable Network?

On Monday, three years after WarnerMedia was spun off from AT&T and merged with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery, the company announced that it was splitting back apart. WBD will split into a “Streaming and Studios” company consisting of the various studios, mostly Warner Bros-branded but also including DC Studios, as well as HBO and the streaming service about to be re-renamed back to HBO Max, and a “Global Networks” company with all of the current WBD’s non-HBO linear networks as well as the discovery+ streaming service.

This comes on the heels of Comcast announcing its plans to split off most of its linear cable networks (except Bravo) to a new company to be called Versant, and it might seem like WBD is playing follow-the-leader, splitting off everything that’s not actively contributing to its streaming business to get its fading linear cable businesses off the books. But there are some key differences. Most of the networks Comcast is spinning off don’t really provide much value on their own; USA airs sports content but most of it was purchased by NBCUniversal, usually with NBCSN being the originally intended cable outlet, and will now effectively be sublicensed out to Versant, and NBCU’s most recent major sports rights deals with the Big Ten and NBA have left out USA entirely in favor of signing rights for the NBC broadcast network and Peacock alone. Very few Versant outlets air much in the way of truly original programming, at least outside cheap true crime documentaries; the main outlets producing real value on their own would probably be CNBC and MSNBC.

That is not the case with the WBD split. While Comcast is keeping all of NBC Universal’s sports rights, the sports rights WBD holds under the TNT and Eurosport banners will be going with the “Global Networks” division, which I’ll be referring to as “Turner Discovery” for the rest of this post while referring to “Streaming and Studios” as “Warner Bros.” CNN is still a going concern and arguably still a stronger news brand than MSNBC, plus there’s all the documentary and reality programming from the Discovery networks and kids’ and other animated programming on Cartoon Network. (In fact, there’s an open question as to whether or not Cartoon Network will really be separated from the studio that effectively produces all of its programming – and it’s an especially pressing question at Adult Swim, which effectively is Williams Street, the studio that not only produces all of its original programming but runs the network/block.) All of this would be valuable content for any streaming service; indeed, Turner Discovery will not only be coming with an existing streaming service in discovery+, but is working on a new one for CNN.

The problem is, though, it hasn’t added that much value to Max. WBD chair David Zaslav has admitted that sports has not been a major driver of Max sign-ups (unlike with Peacock), and Max’s failure to gain traction in the kids-and-family space has raised questions about the future of Cartoon Network more generally and led them to not only strip Max of most kids’ content in favor of continuing to license to outside streamers, but increasingly, to produce new kids’ series for those streamers as well. The rebrand back to HBO Max is effectively an admission that the one thing that actually has provided value to the service has been the sort of prestige TV and movies that have long been HBO’s bread and butter, and this split is effectively an announcement that WarnerMedia intends to focus the service on those things nigh-exclusively.

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Assessing the 2025 NFL Schedule from a Flex Scheduling Perspective

This year’s NFL schedule seemed to represent a shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy, going bigger in windows where you wouldn’t normally expect them to. Part of that has to do with how many teams the league has that are both good and popular, and how many of those teams play each other, thanks to the NFC East (the most popular, iconic division in football with the defending champions, the reigning Offensive Rookie of the Year, and the single most popular team) being slated to play the NFC North (the next most popular, iconic division in football) and the AFC West (and the always-popular Chiefs plus young star quarterbacks on two other teams). The end result was that almost all the most valuable games to the TV partners were either Tier 1 or involved the Cowboys (who aren’t expected to be very good), with Packers-Steelers (and its potential matchup of Aaron Rodgers against his former team) being the only game outside those categories to be named more than once when I asked the 506sports Discord what the most valuable games were.

Mike North told CBS’ Jonathan Jones that this bounty of high-value games emboldened the league to schedule bigger in its marquee windows, but I never in a million years would have expected the league to schedule Chiefs-Cowboys, probably the two most popular teams in the league right now, on Thanksgiving, when the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game is usually the most popular regular season game of the entire year even when the opponent sucks. Normally you’d expect a game like that to provide a boon to one of the broadcast partners in a regular Sunday afternoon or primetime window, but the league seems to be coming out guns blazing to try and set the record for the most watched regular season game of all time.

Meanwhile, I don’t believe the league has ever scheduled a Tier 1 game for the final week of the regular season when there weren’t three Tier 1-worthy teams in the same division, so I thought for sure they would put the old “Cowboys-Indians” rivalry there despite being the most iconic rivalry involving the league’s most iconic team (after all, it has ended up in the final week before), but no: if form holds the top two teams in the NFC East will have an NFC Championship rematch at the site where that game was played in Week 18, potentially for the division title. (At the other end of the season, though, I wouldn’t put the decision to make the Cowboys Philadelphia’s Opening Night opponent in this category; contrary to popular belief there isn’t really any evidence that the league shies away from marquee games for Opening Night, though I don’t think they’ve gone for the biggest game of the entire year there.)

But this shift in the league’s scheduling philosophy doesn’t seem to have brought with it much of an improvement in how the league schedules the flex-scheduling period to minimize the likelihood that a big game gets stranded with regional distribution. Of course, the whole point of flex scheduling is that we don’t know how teams will actually do, and while we have some data to work with to figure out how plausible a flex is in the latter two-thirds of the season, we have none whatsoever in May. But with the increased protections given to CBS and Fox in the new contract that started in 2023, with each network being guaranteed half of each division rivalry and a minimum number of games for the most desirable teams in their respective conference, and especially in the aftermath of a particularly thorny flexing situation in the first year, I’ve come to realize that the league needed to take a lot more care in the construction of the schedule to set themselves up for success – to ensure that, even if the games in featured windows aren’t necessarily the best ones on the slate, if you want to flex games in they can be flexed in. There are always unforeseeable scenarios where the league gets screwed and a marquee game ends up underdistributed, but there shouldn’t be scenarios that are entirely foreseeable that end up screwing the league over.

(I should note that the division rivalry rule does have some wiggle room, even beyond North’s comments from last year. After all of last year’s Week 18 games were rematches of games slated for the “proper” network, this year Browns-Bengals is scheduled for Week 18 with the game in Cleveland on Fox, and after what happened to Texans-Colts two years ago I’m not going to assume it’s off-limits to a move to NBC or ESPN. More surprisingly, the Cardinals and Seahawks are slated to have one meeting on CBS and the other on a Thursday night, and those are two teams expected to be around .500 so that matchup might be just good enough for Tier 6. But I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that those cases both have one matchup on the other conference’s network, and they aren’t so high-powered that it’s implausible for CBS and Fox to approve of those moves. I don’t think it means the league has the freedom to flex in division-rivalry games or that CBS and Fox have to protect them if they’re rematches of games on another network, given we have firm evidence otherwise. Not that the league can’t flex in such games – see the link above – but it needs to be worth CBS or Fox’s while.)

With this post, I’m going to take a look at each week in the main flex period and see how well the league has set itself up for success – whether it’s created any scenarios where it would want to pull the flex if the teams involved perform exactly as expected, and if so, whether or not they can actually do so. But first, I’ll present the list of each team’s primetime appearances as well as the teams restricted from being flexed in to Thursday Night Football because they either already have two short-week games (including those teams playing on Christmas, but not the Black Friday game or anything else involving more than three days rest) or one short-week game that’s on the road.

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What the 2025 NFL Schedule Should Look Like

The NFL schedule is set to be released on Wednesday, and as I did last year, I’m attempting to put together the sort of schedule the league should be constructing, with the goal of maximizing distribution of the best games and minimizing the likelihood of flexes being desirable but impossible due to CBS and Fox being guaranteed one half of each division rivalry as well as a minimum number of games involving their most desired teams in their respective conferences.

As a review of my philosophy governing this exercise, at least down the stretch of the season, if the three main featured windows (the late doubleheader, Sunday night, and Monday night) don’t contain the three best games of the week, any game that is among the three best but is buried as an undercard should not be set up to be protected. In other words, they can’t be the most desirable game on the singleheader network, and if they’re on the doubleheader network then the main late game can’t be a divisional game where the other matchup is on another network, or a game involving the Cowboys or Chiefs – and such situations should generally be avoided during the main flex period in general, or at least avoiding having games with teams with significantly worse expected records hogging spots while games between teams expected to be .500 or above can’t or won’t be flexed in. Creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex if teams perform exactly as expected is already something of a failure of schedule construction, as flexible scheduling should only come in if teams don’t perform as expected; creating a situation where the league would want to pull a flex but can’t should be completely unacceptable.

Details on how I put this together, as well as the schedule itself, after the jump.

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Where Will the NFL Draft Go Next?

Earlier this year the NFL announced what had been widely expected: the 2026 draft will be held in Pittsburgh, PA. Then on Monday the league announced that the 2027 draft would be held in Washington, DC, on the National Mall. Besides being home to storied franchises with strong fanbases, these sites all have something in common with most post-pandemic draft sites:

Since the pandemic, drafts have been hosted in Cleveland, Las Vegas, Detroit, Kansas City, and Green Bay. Of these, only Las Vegas and Detroit have hosted Super Bowls, and only Las Vegas, which received the 2022 Draft as consolation for losing the 2020 Draft to the pandemic, is likely to host a Super Bowl in the future. Before the pandemic, the 2019 Draft was held in Nashville, and before that, the 2018 Draft was held at Jerryworld in Arlington, whose turn hosting Super Bowl XLV was enough of a disaster to seemingly turn the league off to bringing the Big Game back there. Go back further and you end up at the first three drafts to be held after hitting the road and leaving New York, Chicago twice and Philadelphia once – once again, cities unlikely to hold the Super Bowl anytime soon. Since leaving New York in 2015, no city that has hosted more than two Super Bowls has hosted the Draft.

This greatly clarifies which cities might have a shot at hosting the draft in the future. Cities that are regular Super Bowl hosts are probably very low priorities, but the league will also want to travel to as many different cities as possible before re-using cities. Cities with storied franchises and strong fan bases are also probably high on the list of priorities. And it’s also a good idea to have space for not only the draft stage itself (along with the many people trying to watch), but also for various auxiliary activities surrounding the draft, which can take up many times more space than the actual draft stage. Detroit managed to host the draft in a small, awkwardly shaped space where there’s mostly parking and parks, so the league will find a way if it needs to, but the logistics of it, as well as whether or not the draft can be held near a local landmark or with a picturesque backdrop, will still be factors differentiating cities with similar credentials.

I’ve ranked all 30 NFL cities based on how likely I think they are to host the draft in the near future, based on these factors and others. This is a very approximate ranking and shouldn’t be taken to point to who I think will host the 2028 Draft or any other particular future draft. Rather, these are the sites that I think are worth watching and which I think the league will go to in the future. (This post took long enough to put together that it cut into the time I have to put together a mock schedule for this season, so I hope it’s worth it.) Without further ado, let us begin.

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Memo to the NFL: Don’t Foster Pick-Tipping By Slowing Down the NFL Draft

After a long period of scuttlebutt that the NFL would move the draft to a streaming service, last year we started to get clarity about the future of the draft. First, the Athletic‘s Andrew Marchand confirmed previous reporting that ESPN would retain rights to the draft and share them with a “digital player”, predicting that “you will see two places have the draft in the future”. Of course, right now the draft airs in at least two places, ESPN and NFL Network, but ESPN and the league have engaged in renewed talks for ESPN to acquire NFL Media which would put both networks under one roof. Still, this might seem to suggest that NFL Network’s separate broadcast of the draft might not be long for this world… until Front Office Sports reported the following day that NFLN was, in fact, expected to retain the rights to the NFL Draft beyond this year, while YouTube was in “pole position” to land international distribution rights to the draft.

It’s not clear whether YouTube would be able to distribute its draft broadcast in the United States, though there are enough places for people to catch the draft as it stands that, on the surface, one more wouldn’t hurt. What is clear is that, in all likelihood, YouTube won’t merely be redistributing the ESPN or NFL Network coverage but producing its own oriented towards an international audience that may not be familiar with American football, or at the least college football. That would make it a fourth official draft broadcast to join the traditional broadcasts on ESPN and NFL Network as well as the more human-interest-focused coverage on ABC.

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Cantonmetrics: 2025 Inductions and Offseason Snapshot

Congratulations to Antonio Gates, Jared Allen, Eric Allen, and Sterling Sharpe on their induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now it’s time to look at how this year’s selection process affects who the players most likely to get in next year are, and with the 2024 season fully at a close, what active and recently-retired players have most built their resumes for eventual induction into Canton.

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Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame: Initial Ballot

As I wrote earlier, I’m working on a “shadow Hall of Fame” to settle the debate over how exclusive the Pro Football Hall of Fame is by sorting players into five tiers, adopting Bill Simmons’ “pyramid” model for Halls of Fame. You can help by voting on the initial ballot, which contains 500 players, 50 coaches, and 50 contributors, telling me which level you think each player should be inducted to or if they should be inducted at all.

The players listed on the ballot consist of:

  • All current Hall of Famers
  • All players to make at least the final 50 modern-era or senior candidate lists in the 2025 round of balloting, and have a Hall of Fame Monitor at Pro Football Reference over 40
  • Any other players with a Monitor over 60
  • Any players that started their career before 1955 and therefore don’t have a Monitor that made the list of preliminary senior candidates
  • Any players that have been inducted as part of Not In Hall Of Fame‘s Hall of Fame Revisited project because of their contributions in the NFL
  • Other players added at my discretion, with a broad goal of 375 players with Monitor scores and 125 without

This does not include a number of players that people have called for induction; you may add them in the Other category or leave a comment here or elsewhere vouching for them. The coaches and contributors consist of current Hall of Famers and people on the current ballots that I consider particularly deserving or likely to be inducted; these are subject to straight up/down votes, but you can also vote on if they should be sorted into tiers like the players.

The ballot is located HERE.

After the jump, if you need more help to decide what level to vote players to, I’ve adapted Simmons’ descriptions of each level in his proposed baseball and basketball Halls to the football context to serve as rules of thumb. Note that these have been only lightly edited from what Simmons wrote in each context and don’t necessarily translate to the football Hall, and I don’t necessarily agree that these are or should be criteria to separate the levels.

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Introducing Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame

Less than a week after the Class of 2022 was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Deion Sanders implicitly trashed it. In a video running just over a minute and 45 seconds, Sanders claimed that “the Hall of Fame ain’t the Hall of Fame no more”, that it had become a “free for all” where players that were merely good could be inducted, that the Hall should be for “people who changed the game” and not those who just had “three or four good years”.

Sanders didn’t name any names of any specific players that he felt didn’t belong in Canton, but a fellow Hall of Famer did call out a specific member of the 2022 class as undeserving and even problematic. Two months earlier, Bruce Smith, the NFL’s all-time sack leader, questioned the reasoning behind the induction of Tony Boselli as part of the 2022 class, specifically that people were citing Boselli’s performance against Smith in a 1996 playoff game. Using players’ performances against other Hall of Famers as criteria for induction, in Smith’s view, would erode the “exclusive fraternity” of Hall of Famers by incentivizing players to play up their performance against other Hall of Famers, creating “friction and discord”. Smith also noted that Boselli’s accomplishments weren’t quite comparable to other left tackles since the quarterback he was protecting, Mark Brunell, was left-handed, meaning Boselli wasn’t protecting his blind side.

Boselli had a relatively brief seven-year career, but was highly acclaimed with five Pro Bowl selections and was named first-team All-Pro three times as well as being selected to the All-Decade Team of the 1990s. It would certainly seem that the people who watched him play felt he could have protected the blind side of a right-handed quarterback at a level comparable to the best to do so, and the 1996 playoff game is just a single piece of evidence in favor of that. His Hall of Fame Monitor score at Pro Football Reference is 80.68, behind only two tackles not in Canton: Jim Tyrer and the only-recently-retired Jason Peters.

A more questionable 2022 inductee, if you wanted to do so, would be Sam Mills, who was named first-team All-Pro by the AP only once (though he was named to the first team by other selectors on two other occasions) in an 11-year career that got him named to the Pro Bowl five times (tied for the fewest of any post-merger linebacker in Canton), resulting in a Monitor score of only 55.78. Dave Wilcox is the only linebacker with a lower score in Canton, and among inside linebackers Mills has the lowest score by over seven points. Also worth noting is that year’s senior inductee, Cliff Branch, whose 8685 receiving yards is the second-fewest of any wide receiver in Canton who played his entire career after the merger (not counting Devin Hester), and Drew Pearson, unlike Branch, was named to an All-Decade team.

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Cantonmetrics: 2025 Finalists

Offseason Snapshot

Each year, the Pro Football Hall of Fame names at least 15 modern-era players (more if there’s a tie for the last spot), narrowed down from the semifinalists named in November, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as finalists for induction to the Hall of Fame. Before Super Bowl LIX, the panel will meet virtually and narrow down the list of modern-era finalists down to seven, from which at least three and no more than five will be selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The committee will also consider three senior candidates, a coach, and a contributor, each selected by their own individual committees earlier in December, from which at least one and no more than three will be selected for induction. Unless they have only a handful of years of eligibility left, modern-era players that are named finalists are almost always inducted eventually, so this provides a glimpse at what players can look forward to eventual induction.

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