It may seem weird — especially considering it’s an Olympic sport — but the first thing that I thought of after finding out that The Curling Group had signed a deal with ESPN to broadcast their Grand Slam of Curling series and the second season of the Rock League on ESPN+ was the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

Dodgeball was a shockingly popular movie when it came out — finishing just outside the top ten in domestic gross for 2004 — and caused a massive reverberation throughout sports history, erecting two of the most important pillars of our little community:

The former was an entirely fictional magazine focused on its titular concern, functioning basically as the paper version of a coincidental broadcast. Mentioned in passing by erstwhile subscriber and gym member Gordon Pibb (played by Stephen Root), the magazine’s advertising of an obscure dodgeball tournament is what ends up pushing Vince Vaughn’s Average Joes to sign up for it in an effort to pay off the mortgage now held by Ben Stiller, the owner of the neighboring GloboGym and Vaughn’s arch nemesis.

The latter was the (then-fictional) channel on which the dodgeball tournament is aired as part of a broadcast slate that canonically includes essentially any competition that qualifies as “almost a sport”. In the context of the movie, it exists both as a joke² and as way to explain why Gary Cole and Jason Bateman’s characters are there to provide expository information that the filmmaker didn’t have the time and/or money to show us instead of have them tell us about it.

After the movie, “The Ocho” also became shorthand for basically any time “weird” sports ended up on the Worldwide Leader, from pinball to tractor pulls. By 2017, almost a decade and a half later, the “meme” had reached the point where ESPN started to plan an annual block of content around the idea. Ever year, they would find space on their August calendar to focus a spotlight on these specific kind of sporting oddities. That it was also a cheap way to fill in the gaps between the dog days of summer baseball and the beginning of football season’s stranglehold on their content was surely just a coincidence.

It’s a tradition which has continued through the last decade, with this year’s schedule (which aired for three days just two weeks ago,) featuring events as disparate as soapbox racing and steinholding. But while it was as much fun as it had been in years past, it didn’t carry as much emotional resonance, either on the internet or around here, as it had previously.

This was not because of a failure by the programmers to put on intriguing competitions or a centralization and/or commercialization of the content that make it feel like the performers we were watching it weren’t doing what they were for the love of the game. Instead, the relative silence around this year’s programming was a result of ESPN+ becoming, in many ways, the Platonic ideal of the Ocho³ over the last few years.

Originally making its way in the world of streaming services as ESPN3, ESPN+ has evolved from a dump site for mid-major conference college sports programming into a safety net for any sporting event to fall into, presuming ESPN has the rights to⁴ them. Just this weekend, in addition to a full slate of literal Ocho⁵ content (which appears to be rerun from the beginning of the month and earlier than that) on ESPNNEWS (which available on the service), there will be pickleball and axe throwing competitions running alongside the start of the NCAA fall sport season, top-flight Dutch soccer and PGA Tour golf.

Curling, as a result of this new deal, will likely find itself somewhere in between those two extremes with this new slate of curling programming. Because while the sport is extremely popular in Canada, as well as a bunch of other northern countries (especially in Scandinavia), it suffers from the “every four years” problem for Americans that soccer has just started to break free from. But it’s overcome bigger obstacles before.

Known by most folks as something that shows up at the Olympics, curling has managed to move (extremely quickly) beyond the question of whether what they are doing even constitutes a sport (as it is very clearly an extremely difficult sport to master or even play at the highest levels). However, it still sits in limbo between being too popular to be a novelty that generates views on YouTube through sheer curiosity and not popular enough to be an attraction that necessarily warrants paying 80 dollars to watch it on a dedicated streaming service.

Which is where ESPN+ can come in. With a distribution network which is presumably a full order of magnitude larger than anything that The Curling Group⁶ would be able to conjure up themselves. With this opportunity, the powers that be behind curling may finally be providing the sport with the platform it needs to succeed in an increasingly crowded sporting environment where they have managed to develop a niche but have difficult prospering because of barriers to entry for new fans they’ve pulled in during Winter Olympic years over the past few decades.

There is no guarantee, of course, that this won’t be some kind of catastrophic failure for both sides. But, either way, it’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ‘em.

This might only be a big story for Brad⁷ and I, but it’s still exciting nevertheless:

Exciting for me because, as former Hofstra alum, it’s always exciting to see the football stadium get used when lacrosse isn’t in season and for everyone else because it means that the USL (which will be introducing promotion and relegation sooner or later) has started to push closer and closer towards a team in New York City proper, to go along with Westchester SC and this Long Island-based squad.

And with the push by the USL towards a promotion and relegation system, it means that a team like this one could eventually find its way into the USL Championship, America’s premier second-tier soccer league. Which, honestly, I think Brad would rather have than ever having to watch another MLS game again.