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Your listening to Fox Sports Radio. Okay, couple of different stories that I'm enjoying today, neither of which has anything remotely and common with the other.

First, the NBA anthem controversy. In fact, I would argue this is emblematic of larger issues that the leagues have between the NBA and the NFL NBA anthem controversy.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban decides he's not going to play the anthem anymore at the start of Dallas Mavericks games.

That news comes out late Tuesday night starts to trickle out a bit by Wednesday. It turns on to a full on raging fire.

Everybody is weighing in with their opinions and then Mark Cuban comes out and says, oh, by the way, the NBA basically has let me know that everybody's required to play the national anthem and we have no problem with that the NBA.

And Adam silver basically shuts down the idea that the anthem is no longer going to be played.

Why does Adam silver do that to try to protect the NBA's business because the NBA tanked last year when they got hyper political and now they are hoping people are going to forget about that that they're going to get lost in the game itself as things start to come back to normalcy.

They know I bet that they are going to have more trouble selling tickets than they ever have before I bet there are a lot of corporate sponsors out there, even though most of them have not gone public that have said, hey, by the way, we're not going to be spending money like we have before you have alienated a decent amount of your fan base.

And if you alienate your fan base, no matter what business you are in, that is not a good position to find yourself. And so it's not a surprise to me that the NBA came back and that Adam silver is trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

The NBA, an NBA team deciding they weren't going to play the national anthem was highly probable just based on the fact that it is now braver to kneel for the national anthem, then it is to stand for the national anthem.

And that is its own absurd universe in which we live. We have gone from Colin Kaepernick being criticized for kneeling for the anthem to now athletes being criticized for standing with their hand on their heart for the national anthem.

That to me is a sign of how wildly broken much of our national discourse is. And personally, I actually like whether you agree or disagree with it, I actually like now the idea of before game start having a couple of minutes of reflection upon how lucky we are to all be Americans, whether we are white, black Asian, Hispanic, whether we are gay or straight, whether we are male or female, whatever identity we may have.

I love that in sports at its best when your team scores you turn in high five everybody around you and you don't think how they might have voted for president and you don't think what they their opinion on abortion might be or tax policy.

You just think, hey, I'm glad to be a part of this tribe that is winning a game. And I think we need more things that unite us. We need more opportunities for neurosurgeons and janitors to sit down at a table and be on the same page when they talk about whether or not their team is any good, whether they believe in the quarterback, whether the team is good enough to win the trophy in the NCAA tournament.

All of those things I think are important and it's probably not a surprise, but I put up a poll question you can go vote in it. Maybe the numbers will change one of our most popular polls that we have had in a very, very long time and the question was pretty simple.

Do you believe the national anthem should be played at sporting events tens of thousands of you voted in this you can still go vote in it you have to scroll down a little bit on my on my profile.

I put it up on Wednesday afternoon and 82% of you said yes, you believe the national anthem should be played at sporting events now.

Whenever I do one of these polls, I always like to add the caveat, hey, my audience isn't necessarily 100% representative of the larger sports audience, right. There are certainly other people who could put this poll up and get a decent different result, but I've got a pretty big audience.

We are in fact the biggest audience in all of sports for morning radio. So if you want to go talk to people on morning radio anywhere in the country, there is no one that has more people listening than we do.

That's just those are the facts, right. You go look at the podcast you go look at the videos that we put up you think about the 300 plus AM FM station satellite radio streaming all of those different ways we are the straw that stirs the drink nationwide morning sports talk radio.

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