A Sling One-Day Pass Is the Best Way to Catch a Major Sporting Event Without Cable

If you’re like most people in 2026, you don’t have cable and only miss it occasionally, mostly when a specific live sporting event is happening and you need a way to catch it. What if you could get cable for just one day and then ditch it? This is the basic idea of ​​the Sling 1-day pass. For $5 you can get access to ESPN, ESPN2, TNT and a few other channels for a day. This range will cover a number of nationally broadcast sporting events.

Unfortunately, like almost everything about watching live TV in the streaming age, it’s more complicated than I’d like. A day pass is only available for Sling Orange, which only includes a subset of Sling’s overall offerings. On top of that, Sling has always been a bit confusing, an attribute it shares with legacy cable companies still around. But if you need one of the channels offered on Sling Orange, it’s theoretically a good deal.

Credit: Fronde

Since it’s February, you may be wondering if you can use a day pass to watch the Super Bowl without cable. Unfortunately, the answer is no: the big game is on NBC this year, and while Sling offers NBC in a few markets, the local channels aren’t covered by Sling Orange. The same goes for the Winter Olympics, which will be broadcast on NBC and in the United States; you’ll need to make a different plan for watching the Winter Games.

But March Madness is also coming, and many of these games will be available via a 1-day pass, so keep that service in mind if you want to watch just one sporting event, especially if you notice it’s on ESPN, TBS, or TNT.

Now, could one argue that it’s easier to install an ad blocker and search the internet for a pirated stream than it is to figure out how to watch something legally? Yes. Yes, we could. But a Sling 1 Day Pass can save you from that temptation (not to mention accidentally downloading malware) for just $5.