Josh Schaffer

Repping citizens accused & speaking truth to power deep in the heart of TX

[Milo Hamilton’s Microphone @MicrophoneMilo]

Intentionally walking Alvarez in a game you’re losing 9-2 is weak.

Skip Schumaker is a dork.

#Rangers

[Molly Frazer @MollyFrazer0]

Dream come true! I’m excited to announce that I've committed to the admissions process at NYU! I'm feeling immense gratitude to the incredible coaches and teammates that helped me get to this point.
Go Violets!
@coach_clark512 @WestlakeWBB
@SW_Select3SSB
@Khensle

[Jason @PowderBlue_J]

This decade UNC athletics has played in a national championship game in men's basketball and baseball, ACC tournament title games in men's basketball and football. They have lost them all.

[Astros Radio @AstrosRadioMLB]

“It was 10:17p when Kyle Tucker moved into foul territory and gloved Nick Castellano’s fly ball for the final out. The first thing I did was write down on my lineup card who made the last out, like I always did, and then I held on for dear life. We’d won the game.” -Dusty Baker

[laura @xylauraz]

The Dutch have invaded Dutch Bros. 🇳🇱

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

This is not The Onion. This is not AI. This is not even Idiocracy.
This...is John Cafaro, the guy who got the no-bid contract to re-do the defecting pool's circulation and filtering system.
He's Trump's Florida neighbor, he's a Trump donor, and he's been linked to bribery scandals.
The name of his company? Greenwater Services.
You cannot make this stuff up

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

.@JamesTalarico: There's been a lot of talk in this race about what it means to be a real man.

Recently on the campaign trail I told the story of my adoptive dad, Mark Talarico. Every Saturday morning, he would mow our lawn, and then without anyone asking him to, he would go next door and mow our neighbor's lawn because she was a widow. My dad never talked about it — he just did it, because that's what a man does.

A man takes responsibility, upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors, and does what's right, even when no one is watching.

Here's what real men don't do. They don't lie and cheat their way through life, sell their soul to the highest bidder, or steal from other people in order to enrich themselves. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man, and I don't think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is.

[Alex @ajak1033]

The Spurs know how to TAKE the lead, they just don't know how to HOLD the lead. And that's really the most important part of the lead: the holding

[Josh Schaffer @JoshSchafferLaw]

@SarahLongwell25 @JohnCornyn

[Molly Frazer @MollyFrazer0]

My team had a great 3-1 weekend at #heartoftexas. Proud to be a part of our victories, including a game-winner with two seconds left in Game 1!

@coach_clark512 @SW_Select3SSB

[David McKenzie @mckenzielaw]

This is what I think is going on with the Duke-Amazon deal and why the Big Ten is whining. It's all about a direct-to-consumer model and risk allocation. Let's start with the law because the law explains the deal.

College sports media rights flow through a stacked architecture that schools rarely discuss in public but that governs everything they can and cannot do. Every ACC member, Duke included, has executed a Grant of Rights to the conference— an irrevocable assignment of media rights running through 2036. The ACC then licensed that aggregated catalogue to ESPN under a parallel agreement of comparable duration. The Big Ten and Fox sit atop an identical structure on their side of the ledger. The consequence is that Duke does not own the broadcast rights to its own basketball games in any meaningful sense. ESPN does. And Michigan's rights belong to Fox.

That architecture is the entire reason the Amazon deal required permission rather than a checkbook, as suggested by @RossDellenger. Duke could not license a game to Amazon any more than a tenant could sell the building. What Duke could do is ask the actual rights holder — ESPN, through the ACC — to carve out three games from its exclusive bundle and allow Amazon to distribute them. ESPN agreed. Dellenger's reporting suggests ESPN extracted a licensing fee plus future Duke scheduling commitments in return. That is a sublicense, structured as a limited waiver of exclusivity, and it is the legal mechanism that makes the entire arrangement possible. Without ESPN's consent, the deal is a straightforward breach of the Grant of Rights cascade. With it, the deal is unremarkable contract law.

Which brings us to the Big Ten. Its claim that it "owns" the Duke-Michigan game is the sound of a conference dressing up a contractual reciprocity provision as a property right. The actual mechanism the B1G is invoking is an alternation arrangement between the conferences and their rights holders for neutral-site games played in shared metropolitan territory with New York, a virtual home game for Duke, being the one at issue. Even taking that at face value, it is a contract claim running between the conferences, not a proprietary interest enforceable against Duke, Amazon, or Madison Square Garden. And the party whose alternation turn was supposedly violated, ESPN, has already blessed the deal. It is hard to articulate a coherent legal theory under which the B1G or Fox enforces ESPN's contractual entitlement against ESPN's wishes. The B1G's posture is a negotiating marker, not a litigation position, and any honest reading of the underlying agreements would say so.

So why did ESPN say yes? This is where the law stops explaining things and strategy takes over. I'm not just guessing here. ESPN launched its standalone streaming flagship into a market in which the most important commercial question in sports media remains unanswered: will cord-cutters pay to watch a Tuesday-night college basketball game? Disney has spent the better part of a decade rearranging its streaming portfolio without producing a clean answer, and the cost of running that experiment on ESPN's own platform —with ESPN's own marquee inventory and ESPN's own reputation on the line — is considerable. The Pac-12 tried a version of this experiment with Apple two years ago. Apple would not pay linear money, the schools would not accept streaming-only reach, and the conference disintegrated before the deal did. The lesson the industry absorbed was that premium college sports was not yet ready for direct-to-consumer exclusivity. ESPN needs to know whether that lesson still holds, and it would prefer not to find out the hard way.

The structure of the Duke deal seems to be the answer. Amazon bears the production cost, the promotional spend, and the conversion risk against Prime's installed 200M+ worldwide subscriber base. ESPN collects a licensing fee, future scheduling inventory it can deploy on its own terms, and a clean read on whether streaming-exclusive premium college basketball actually works as a commercial proposition. If Amazon's experiment succeeds, ESPN learns the model and pulls future games back in-house at the next negotiation. If it fails, Amazon absorbs the loss and ESPN quietly concludes the market is not ready, having paid nothing for the information beyond the foregone value of three games it was compensated for anyway. That is not a concession. It is a hedged bet, and a clever one.

Fox cannot afford the same posture, which is why the B1G is whining. Fox One and Tubi are real but considerably smaller than the combined Disney streaming footprint, and every individual rights leak feels more existential to a network without the same DTC depth to fall back on. ESPN can be magnanimous because Disney has room to be patient. Fox and the B1G have less room, so the B1G is now tasked with escalating a routine reciprocity dispute into a public claim of ownership it cannot sustain. That tells you more about the B1G and Fox's competitive position than it does about the merits of the contract.

The deeper point, and the one worth dwelling on, is that the rights architecture schools accepted a decade ago to keep their conferences intact is now being tested by the schools themselves. Duke did not break the system. Duke worked within it, asked ESPN for permission, gave up something in return, and brought a streaming partner to the table that the network was apparently happy to let bear the risk of an experiment Disney has not figured out how to run on its own. The B1G and Fox would prefer that schools not learn this trick. They are about to learn it anyway. And the next negotiation, whenever it comes, will reflect what Amazon's three games taught everyone about who the audience really is and what they will pay to watch.

The Duke-Amazon arrangement is being described as a turning point for college sports media. My honest guess is that it's more of a market test, structured by a rights holder who needed information from a 200M+ subscriber base more than it needed three basketball games. It's now being resisted by a competitor who cannot afford to be that patient. The law explains how the deal got done. The strategy explains why ESPN wanted it done this way. And the B1G's complaint, stripped of its proprietary language, is the complaint of a conference that wishes it had thought of it first.

[Matt Giles @MattGilesBD]

Jon Scheyer was hilarious today in addressing those who criticize these past two Duke teams for the way they give up leads in the rare instances when they actually do lose.⬇️

"I guess I would just ask, how do you want us to lose?"😂🤣😂

[Christian Odjakjian @OdjHoops]

Duke has only lost 4 games since 2/11/2025

vs UConn, UNC, Texas Tech, and Houston

Duke had a 2H double digit lead in each of those games

Meaning Duke has either won or had a 2H double digit lead in 54 straight games. And in 71 of their last 72 (blown 8pt lead 2H lead at Clemson)

To Scheyer's point below - isn't it better to have been in a position to win and lost it than to not have been in one at all?

I'm not excusing the blown leads, I just refuse to centralize the blame on Scheyer not coaching this group well enough

If Proctor made FTs vs Houston or Boozer just held the ball, or if Mullins didn't drill a 40 footer, there is no case here

Scheyer has 0% control over those individual events I just described

Duke didn't lose the games on just those plays I get it. There are definitely things I bet he wishes he did differently. BUT I would disagree with someone who said he definitely mismanaged those 2Hs either.

My point here is, Scheyer has been absolutely elite as the head coach of this group. March Madness is March Madness. A perfect storm of events occurred that led to heartbreak for Duke. You need a bit of good fortune to win the tournament. Just ask Florida.

I'm not buying into this narrative that there is a deeper reason why Duke is blowing these double digit leads. I think they just, well, happened. It's basketball.

If Duke blows a 2H double digit lead again next season in the dance, fine I'll revisit

[Jacob Schaffer @Jacobschball]

Freshman Highlights (JV)

[Josh Schaffer @JoshSchafferLaw]

@Scott_AbellFB make this kid an Owl!

https://t.co/Gv5NRnieaB

[Josh Schaffer @JoshSchafferLaw]

@14_0productions Read “Across the River” by Kent Babb, if you haven’t already done so. Tells the remarkable story of Coach Brown and the Karr team during the 2019 season—and sheds light on why he won’t leave Karr. A special man who clearly has found his calling right where he is.

[Abbie Kamin @AbbieKamin]

I’m in!

As Harris County Attorney I will do what I’ve always done: fight for all of our families as fiercely as I fight for my own.

Join us at https://t.co/XXBGt6v58E

[Texas Jamboree @TxJamboree]

Sub Varsity Jamboree MVP

Harrison Hadnot (21) - 10 PTS

Jacob Schaffer ( 12) - 8 PTS

[Josh Schaffer @JoshSchafferLaw]

@stjohnsmavs @Coach_Veltri Does it get any better than this?