It's Masters Week, So All's Right in the Sports World

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I’ve never really thought about The Masters as the sign we’re entering a new phase of the yearly cycle of sports, but maybe I should moving forward? It’s the perfect sendoff and kickoff for what’s happening in the sports world every year.

This week really changes my sports viewing habits, and I never really thought about that much until yesterday.

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The week starts with March Madness coming to a close — congrats goes out to Operation13whitebread for winning our inaugural OS event. Whitebread finished with a bracket that was better than 99.9 percent(!) of the other brackets out there in the wild and will deservedly take home the OS March Madness hoodie.

And just as the door closes on March Madness, The Masters is here to kickoff the changing of the guard and wake everyone back up with a nice friendly kick to the shins. While it seems like the majority of MLB games are still being played in frigid climates, Augusta National looked absolutely radiant yesterday.

It was an enjoyable first round, and the course conditions were ripe for some quality play. So even if I tend to enjoy when everyone has to scratch and claw to put up low rounds at majors, this is the one week of the year where I think everyone is a little bit of a golf fan. And with that in mind, I think it’s better for the sport when Augusta is being friendly to the golfers as I think the “casual” fans would prefer to see birdies rather than up-and-down survival sessions.

All this is to say that my brain clicked into a new place while watching The Masters yesterday, and I realized (again, probably for the first time) how much my sports habits change at this time every year.

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And I’m talking both real sports and video game sports. I’ve essentially abandoned playing every “traditional” sports game besides MLB The Show 26 now, and I’m now playing the waiting game as we creep towards the start of College Football 27 news.

Beyond that, I’m in full-on quad-box mode. I’m mainlining four baseball games — or praying there are enough afternoon games on to reach the quad-box status on the MLB.TV/ESPN app — and then quad-boxing all over again at night as the NHL playoff races come down to the final 10 days.

I’m already fantasizing about staying up late to watch five hours of NHL playoffs one night and then five hours of NBA playoffs the next. People talk about why they stop playing yearly sports games at this point in the year, and yes, while I am tired of the games and need a break, I just don’t have time to play as many video games when this part of the year kicks off.

Say what you will about the lengthy regular seasons of the NBA, NHL, or MLB, but the playoffs are the playoffs. They rule, and for me, they beat out video games for my screen time.

The NHL likes to say they have the best playoffs (and I tend to agree), but even with the issues with regular season play (especially in the NBA), playoff sports are fantastic. We all have our favorite teams, but I’m always a little perturbed when fans don’t watch anything but “their” team this time of year.

I hate to just say “how can you not be a fan of the league this time of year?” because it feels a little “Rob Lowe wearing an NFL hat” levels of propaganda, but if you love a team then you probably love the sport. And if you love the sport, why wouldn’t you want to watch the best teams going balls to the wall every night for the next 6-8 weeks?

So whether it’s the NBA or the NHL, we’ve got weeks of wall-to-wall playoffs on the horizon before we get down to the conference finals in each league. But before we get to that, The Masters cleanses the palette and gives everyone something different to enjoy for the week.

I suppose baseball season starting up could be the other turning point, but as much as Opening Day might be an event, 162 games is still 162 games. It only feels so special and transitional because you know you’ve got months of it ahead of you, and there’s going to be a time once the NHL and NBA playoffs end where MLB is just about the only thing on every night for a month.

As wild as it might be to say, it also didn’t really feel like baseball season for me until Jo Adell went insane and then we got the first Jomboy benches clearing brawl breakdown of the year. For me, once the lip-reading gold medalist gets to analyze an entire baseball fight, then I know baseball season has really kicked off.

Anyway, there’s not a ton of news this week, so I hope you’ll forgive me for rambling a bit about my sports-viewing habits, and I’ll forgive you if you think I’m a bozo for taking this many years to realize The Masters is the winter into spring transition that it probably has always been meant to be anyway.

Here’s Your News For The Week

In preparation for the playoffs, NBA 2K26 is out with its latest roster ratings update. NBA 2K26 is now available on Game Pass, and joining it on April 16 will be NHL 26. So we’ll have both postseason-bound sports up for “free” on Xbox consoles.

If you do want to dabble in some Masters content — but don’t want to play EA’s game — there are custom Masters courses you can search for in PGA 2K25. The “best” one is always somewhat up for debate, but three ones to look out for include: August National GC Master, Berckmans Place, and Ike’s Playground.

Here is a look at August National GC Master:

You might need to dig around in various Societies to find these courses, but if you do find them, just favorite them and then they’ll be available to you when you want to play a round (or eight) there.

If you just want some dumb golf fun, I will back my favorite new “friendslop” game once again here by saying Super Battle Golf’s Frozen Fairway update is out now — and the game is still 30% off on Steam right now.

Varsity High School Football has an upcoming playtest at the end of April if you’d like to be involved:

No, I don’t know if SDS will be updating the managers in the game (yes, it does suck so many are generic due to some dumb licensing issue), but I did laugh at this post on Reddit this week:

Forza Horizon 6 is nearing its May 19 release, and this week feels like the last big preview push for maybe the biggest racing game of the year. There was plenty of fresh hands-on impressions released, and Microsoft showed off the first six minutes of the game.

They also unveiled the map at long last:

Finally, if you want a nice wholesome read, Mike Straw interviewed Lindsay Barnett about her role in helping to bring back Backyard Sports. A former teacher now turned CEO of the publisher helping to bring back Backyard Baseball this summer had a lot of things to say that I think will resonate with a lot of us, and I’m rooting for this series to succeed because my childhood memories have a lot riding on it.