Daily Sports: Orioles-Yanks & 1980s NFL Highlight Friday

The New York Yankees are six games out of first place in the AL East, and on the outside looking in the wild-card picture. There’s no need to panic, but there is a need to play with some sense of urgency right now, and that sets up a good series this weekend in the Bronx with the Baltimore Orioles. The Birds swept the Yanks last weekend and the return visit starts tonight on MLB Network at 7 PM ET.

If you’re looking for other action on TV’s daily sports docket, I hope you have the day off on this holiday weekend. The other good programming is during the afternoon. Wimbledon will run up until 2 PM ET on ESPN.

You can also watch the best of 1980s NFL on the NFL Network. The Washington Redskins won three Super Bowls, in 1982, 1987 and 1991. Each one came under a different quarterback as Joe Gibbs built his legacy as the one, in my view, who is the best football coach of the Super Bowl era (including Lombardi). From 2 PM ET to 4 PM ET, there are a series of one-hour segments looking at each championship year.

If Gibbs was the best coach, no one was more consequential in the modern development of the NFL than former San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh, who developed the West Coast passing offense and spawned a tree of coaches unlike anything we’ve seen in any other sport. Walsh’s Super Bowl runs in 1981 and 1984 will be featured in a two-hour window from 5 PM ET to 7 PM ET. Note, for the record, that Walsh only won the Super Bowl in 1988, and the 49ers repeated in 1989 under the leadership of former Walsh assistant George Seifert.

Here at TheSportsNotebook, it’s about NASCAR. The Sprint Cup Series returns to Daytona tomorrow night, and we’ll preview the race here later today. MLB coverage has run from Monday to Thursday and will resume over the weekend.