On its face, Tuesday was an awesome day for sports fans to sit back, relax, and watch compelling action all day long.

All four MLB Wild Card series began with Game 1, staggered across the day beginning at 2 p.m. ET. We had two elimination games in the WNBA playoffs, with Game 2 of both Aces-Fever and Lynx-Liberty. Heck, we even had the launch of a new sporting season with NHL opening day, featuring a tripleheader of marquee games on ESPN. Fans of international soccer, tennis, and college volleyball had plenty of options as well.

But while the amount of selections on the sports menu was impressively broad, actually being able to watch all of those great sporting events was a different challenge entirely.

Part of this was due to timing. It was a busy day! It’s understandable that MLB and the WNBA do not want to put their own playoff games against each other, as fans of each sport would likely want to tune into both. This results in MLB playoff games starting at 2 p.m., 5 p.m., 8 p.m., and 10 p.m. ET and WNBA playoff games tipping off at 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. It is completely fair to ask why the NHL decided to celebrate its opening day against an already busy sports calendar—they would have only been up against a single NFL game had they started on Monday—but to each their own.

Busy sports schedules happen in the fall. We are closing in on sports equinox season. Ideally, a fan of any one of these sports would be able to turn on whatever channel was hosting their favorite sport and simply let the television ride all day. But in 2026, nothing can be so simple.

Impossible night to watch sports

Games all over the place.

— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) September 30, 2026

Those who wanted to watch baseball all day had two games on NBC (Phillies-Braves, Red Sox-Yankees) and two games on Peacock (White Sox-Astros, Cubs-Padres). WNBA fans had to check in for Aces-Fever on Prime Video, then jump over to USA Network for Lynx-Liberty. Hockey fans had it fairly easy, with ESPN’s tripleheader being the only national games on the sport’s schedule, but for fans looking to watch games outside of that national window, a trip to ESPN+ was necessary. This is before we even get to a USMNT friendly against Chile on TNT, truTV and HBO Max.

Fans of a specific sport—be it baseball, basketball, or hockey—needed cable for one game and a streaming service for others. Fans of multiple sports, which let us stress, is a whole lot of people, needed at least three different streaming services plus a cable subscription to jump around and follow the action. Somehow, this wide array of viewing necessities doesn’t even involve the NFL.

Being able to watch more sports is great. The fact that we have these options in 2026 would be nothing short of a miracle to fans who were stuck listening to the radio or checking box scores in the days before ESPN, the internet, and the ubiquity of screens. But there’s something especially frustrating about having all of these options available but stretched so far apart.

In the days of cable, it was simple. One game was on one channel, another game was on another channel. To switch, you would jump from one to the other. You even had a button on your remote that served as a perfect “go back to the last channel because this game just went to commercial” toggle switch. While there might not have been the same amount of games available, you can bet that playoff baseball, playoff basketball, and the first day of hockey season would all have some representation on cable—just as they all did on Tuesday.

But in the streaming era, it’s not that simple. Closing out of Peacock and opening up Prime is not the same as toggling from ESPN to NBC. There are apps, passwords, and god forbid verification codes that may be requested. Even if you are lucky enough to have subscriptions to all of the different services necessary to watch all the games, switching from watching a game on one streamer to another can be a real commitment.

It is fantastic that we have all of these viewing options available to us. Living in the future is great. But the downside to living in this future is that in order to keep up with everything, eight different companies need your information and credit card number and anywhere between $10 and $40 a month.

What’s the solution? Not sure. But night’s like Tuesday make clear that there simply has to be a better way to do this.