For years, Sunday Ticket has been the NFL’s expensive little miracle: pay a king’s ransom and get the privilege of watching the league’s full buffet of out-of-market games, assuming your bank account survives the checkout screen. Now comes the wonderfully bureaucratic twist — the league could be willing to deconstruct the whole thing by the 2030 season, which is corporate-speak for “we might break the toy and rebuild it in a way that makes more money.” In the NFL’s world, nothing says innovation like taking a package fans already complain about and asking whether it can be sliced into even more pieces.

And honestly, this is the most NFL thing imaginable. The league has spent decades turning football into a 24/7 content empire, and Sunday Ticket has always been the premium chair at the grown-ups’ table: useful, pricey, and somehow still not enough for everyone. If the next rights deal really does move toward a different structure, it could mean more flexibility, more digital experimentation, and more opportunities for fans to wonder why watching one football game now requires the strategic planning of a fantasy draft and the budget discipline of a mortgage refinance. The takeaway is simple: Sunday Ticket isn’t necessarily disappearing, but the league appears ready to put it on the operating table and see how many extra organs can be sold separately.

The Dodgers spent Game 1 of the NLDS doing what rich baseball teams are apparently allowed to do now: casually importing a two-time Cy Young winner and asking him to bully an entire lineup into compliance. Tarik Skubal obliged with the kind of October debut that makes the rest of the league file a complaint with the baseball gods. After a leadoff single, he retired 15 straight Braves batters, which is less a pitching line than a polite eviction notice.

The heat at Dodger Stadium was brutal, the stakes were huge, and Skubal still worked like a man trying to shut off the stadium’s electricity bill. He finished with seven strikeouts, allowed just two hits and one run, and never really looked like he was in danger of handing Atlanta much of anything besides a long, frustrated bus ride. Meanwhile, the Dodgers offense did what playoff offenses are supposed to do when a starter is throwing flamethrowers and changeups like a wizard with a pension plan: it piled up three home runs. Teoscar Hernández got it started, Kyle Tucker added the kind of blast that makes opposing dugouts stare into the middle distance, and Max Muncy provided the insurance policy nobody asked for but everybody appreciated.

Atlanta managed to make the final score respectable with late homers of its own, which is nice in the same way a fire extinguisher is nice after the house is already on fire. But the night belonged to Skubal and the Dodgers, who grabbed a 1-0 series lead and reminded everyone that October baseball is often just three hours of someone else’s ace ruining your life one hitter at a time.

The Chicago White Sox opened their ALDS with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer in a china shop, blanking the Cleveland Guardians 3-0 and making the first game of October look suspiciously like a bullpen audition gone right. Five Chicago pitchers combined on a three-hitter, struck out 12, and generally treated the Guardians’ lineup like it had been asked to file paperwork instead of hit a baseball. If this was Cleveland’s plan to make the White Sox uncomfortable, it went about as well as trying to steal second with a bowling ball in your back pocket.

The real hammer came from Munetaka Murakami, who launched a two-run homer 440 feet into the right-field seats and gave Chicago all the cushion it needed. Grant Taylor then spent four scoreless innings making the kind of statement that usually gets framed on a wall, fanning six and slamming the door like a man who had personally decided the series was not going back to even. The Guardians kept finding traffic, loading the bases twice, but failed to cash in, which is the October version of pulling up to the casino, hitting the jackpot alarm, and leaving with nothing but a parking stub. For a White Sox club that has spent the year finding creative ways to survive, this was the cleanest possible start: sharp pitching, one thunderous swing, and a reminder that playoff baseball still belongs to whichever team can make the other side look confused for nine innings.