Saturday Night Live completed its late-summer run of Weekend Update Summer Edition Thursday night, and hit on a few sports topics that were in the news while covering the past week in current events.
Conor McGregor (played by Alex Moffat) stopped by the Update desk to discuss Saturday night’s much-hyped fight with Floyd Mayweather. Co-anchor Colin Jost, like much of sports fandom, was skeptical of McGregor’s chances, but the MMA fighter maintained confidence, mostly due to the fact that he’s Irish.
McGregor boasted of making Mayweather see orange stars, pink hearts, yellow moons and green clovers — with some bonus red balloons — with one punch. Take a look.
https://youtu.be/48hGClz_c00
We look forward to McGregor taking on Michael Phelps in a swimming meet under “shark rules” (underwater, just teeth). That should be more exciting than Phelps losing to a CGI shark last month.
Pete Davidson joined the fun to discuss Wednesday’s rally for Colin Kaepernick outside NFL headquarters in New York. The demonstration was intended to protest Kaepernick not being signed by an NFL team after kneeling during the National Anthem last season, in addition to social and racial injustice.
Davidson pointed out that Kaepernick isn’t being blackballed because he’s controversial, but because he’s not good enough to be controversial and worth the public relations trouble of signing him. What if one of the NFL’s top quarterbacks was protesting the National Anthem instead?
Davidson ended by taking a shot at the NFL for drawing a line against Kaepernick while showing a less aggressive stance on concussions, CTE and players who won’t “be able to stand up at all by the time they’re 50.”
Weekend Update also couldn’t let this week’s controversy over ESPN pulling play-by-play announcer Robert Lee from a Virginia football broadcast, in light of recent events in Charlottesville.
Does SNL joking about the Lee controversy mean that we’re ready to move on from this story? That might depend on those “with a personal agenda.” Imagine if SNL made fun of that and the glee that would provoke.
