If you’re like most people in 2026, you don’t have cable and only miss it occasionally—mostly when there’s a specific live sporting event taking place and you need a way to catch it. What if you could get cable for a single day, then ditch it? That’s the basic idea behind Sling’s 1 Day Pass. For $5, you can get a day’s access to ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, and a few more channels besides. That array will cover quite a few nationally broadcast sporting events.
Unfortunately, like most everything related to watching live television in the age of streaming, this is more complicated than I’d like. A 1 Day Pass is only available for Sling Orange, which includes just a subset of Sling’s overall offers. On top of that, Sling has always been a little bit confusing—an attribute it shares with the legacy cable companies still standing. But if you need one of the channels offered on Sling Orange, it’s theoretically a good deal.
Given it’s February, and you might be wondering whether you can use a 1 Day Pass to watch the Super Bowl without cable. Sadly, the answer is no: The big game is on NBC this year, and while Sling does offer NBC in a few markets, local channels aren’t covered by Sling Orange The same goes for the winter Olympics, which will air on NBC and USA; you’ll have to make a different plan to watch the Winter Games.
But March Madness is coming up too, and quite a few of those games are going to be available via a 1 Day Pass, so keep this service in mind if there’s a single sporting event you want to watch, especially if you notice it’s on ESPN, TBS, or TNT.