It's Open Championship week, and Paul Burke joins me to talk Royal Birkdale before the year's toughest major gets underway across the pond.

We start with a question Paul's been sitting on all week: what actually makes a great sporting event?

From there we get into the buzz building around an English run to a World Cup final this week, and a look at the trends that pop out from former champions at Birkdale — Palmer, Watson, Miller, Trevino, Harrington, O'Meara, Spieth — and what that list tells us about who might contend. We also stake out early tee times, salute a great story in qualifier David Howard, dig into golf's ongoing fan-behavior debate, and lay out best-case/worst-case scenarios before locking in our picks.