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Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the sturm und drang of the sports media business. I’m coming to you, once again, from Washington, D.C., where everyone is ready to elect Jayden Daniels as president of the town. Do skeptical sports fans recall another big-armed, lightning-quick No. 2 overall pick who also nearly single-handedly turned around the franchise? I don’t want to hear it! This kid is awesome, and we have the ownership and staff to protect him. You can send all your anxious texts to Marchand, who is currently dressed up like Santa at the Short Hills Mall. (Andrew, don’t forget my matcha latte half-caf!!) 🚨🚨 Pod alert: Make sure you listen to Constance Schwartz-Morini, the C.E.O. and co-founder of SMAC Entertainment, on the latest episode of the Varsity podcast. Con spoke candidly about how the ever-changing media market is affecting her roster of all-star clients, such as Deion Sanders, Michael Strahan, and Erin Andrews. Also, be sure to check out the pod on Wednesday. Puck’s Media Superfriends—Jon Kelly and Dylan Byers—joined me to pick over some of the most pressing storylines of the year. (Listen here.) Finally, NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe had me on Weekend Edition to discuss Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL experiment. Thanks, Ayesha! Also also: Take a moment to fill out this survey for the second installment of The Puck Private Conversation series, powered by Orchestra. It only takes a minute or two, and the data will provide a snapshot of how our elite readership is thinking about the Trump transition, among other fun topics.

The Brady Meter: Week 16 Ravens 34, Steelers 17 Grade: C+

Alas, this recurring feature would be so much better if Tom Brady was either a great analyst or a truly horrible one. Unfortunately, Brady remains stuck somewhere in the middle—bumbling along with that $37.5 million salary and occasionally showing signs of promise as news leaks that he’s eventually going to become a more involved owner of the Raiders, presumably nuking this experiment in the process. Indeed, his performance this week continued the pattern of jejune nothingburgers. During a slightly lopsided rivalry game, Brady didn’t really offer any memorable commentary. Sure, he ably described how the Ravens’ Mark Andrews got so open late in the third quarter for a go-ahead touchdown, noting that the Steelers defensive backs had miscommunicated and lost track of the tight end. His analysis of Russell Wilson’s critical interception, which was returned for a game-sealing touchdown, was similarly wan. “You just would love to have that one back,” Brady said. Truly, brilliant stuff. The Fox Sports pregame show poked fun at the fact that Brady lost his voice a couple of weeks ago by depicting his Christmas stocking filled with lozenges. “Tom had the most hot tea that he’s ever had in his life last week to make sure his voice was good, and it carried him through the broadcast,” his booth mate, Kevin Burkhardt, quipped.

The Starting Five

The NFL’s local TV numbers: Nationally, the NFL has a positive broadcast story to tell this season. Viewership has largely been keeping pace with last year’s big numbers—a surprise, given the prevailing consensus that the presidential election would lead to a drop. Locally, of course, the TV story isn’t nearly as good: Only nine of the 32 teams have posted a viewership increase in their local markets. Two teams are flat, and 21 have seen their local viewership drop compared to last year. As has been the case all season, the league’s performance in the country’s biggest media market has been abysmal: The Giants and Jets, with their six combined wins, have seen the league’s two biggest viewership declines year over year. The Giants, with Tommy Cutlets back under center, are down 30 percent. The Jets, with their chronic dysfunction, are down 29 percent. Interestingly, the Jets are attracting slightly larger audiences (578,000 homes) than the Giants (523,000 homes). But that’s probably because the Jets still have Pro Bowl talent on both sides of the ball, the Rodgers shitshow endures, and the Giants were always supposed to suck. Other areas of concern for the league: Raiders viewership in Las Vegas is down 27 percent, and Browns viewership in Cleveland is down 22 percent compared to last year. Once again, both of those teams have woefully underperformed this year. Unsurprisingly, the Texans have the biggest increase (up 21 percent) followed by the Lions (up 10 percent). The Texans have clinched the AFC South and the Lions are in position to grab the NFC’s top playoff seed.
Deion’s Barstool move: Back in the summer of 2000, when Deion Sanders walked away from NFL Network for a spot at Barstool Sports, it seemed like an insane risk. On this week’s Varsity podcast, I asked SMAC Entertainment C.E.O. and co-founder Constance Schwartz-Morini, who represents Deion, to walk me through the strategy. “His contract was up at the NFL Network and they were reducing his time on air,” she explained. “He ended up leaving and I started making calls to get to Erika [Ayers Badan, who was C.E.O. of Barstool Sports at the time] because I didn’t know her. Unbeknownst to me, [the hosts] Gillie and Wallo had reached out to him and said that he should be on Barstool. All of sudden, I got a call from Deion saying, ‘What do you think of Barstool?’ Talk about serendipity! I’m showing him my emails and my texts trying to get to Erika. And after my first meeting with her, I just knew this was going to change the landscape.” She continued: “When Deion got the Jackson State job, I pitched the Coach Prime show to all the majors, and everybody passed. So I went to Erika and said, ‘Here’s one of my crazy, out-of-the-box ideas. Would you partner with SMAC and produce this together?’ Barstool was really good at short-form content, and they hadn’t done much long-form content. So it was a leap of faith on both sides. That’s kind of how it started. And again, for Barstool to believe in him and this team at Jackson State, I’m forever indebted to Erika.”
Talent decisions: I asked Jon Kelly and Dylan Byers to identify the sports media stories of the year on the Varsity podcast that posts Wednesday morning. Dylan pointed to Stephen A. Smith’s negotiations, which led to this fascinating back-and-forth between Jon and Dylan. Jon: If you look at Anderson Cooper’s ratings and then realize CNN is paying him around $20 million, how would you explain that to a martian? And I think the same thing is true with Stephen A. Ratings for Get Up are good by the standards of basic cable, but it’s not needle-moving, as they say in Bristol. Dylan: One of the great mysteries of this industry is that you could not explain that to a martian. You couldn’t explain it to anyone in finance. It doesn’t make sense. And yet they continue to make those investments, even as they’ve accepted the notion that the salaries were way out of whack. They continue to believe that you at least need to invest and that there are certain people who warrant those salaries despite what the P&L tells you.

NFL vs. CFP: According to the early numbers, at least, the NFL more than doubled CFP viewership in this weekend’s head-to-head matchups. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery reported final CFP numbers right as we were hitting send. We still haven’t seen the final NFL ratings. But the overnight ratings suggest that the Steelers-Ravens game drew a 7.6 on Fox, and the Texans-Chiefs contest made a 7.4 on NBC. The two CFP games that competed directly with the NFL, which aired on TBS, TNT, and TruTV, fared far more modestly: SMU-Penn State posted a 3.1 and Clemson-Texas, a 3.6. Is this because the games weren’t close, and neither Clemson nor SMU is in the top 12? (I’m not throwing shade on the committee here, but these numbers would have looked different if Alabama and Miami were involved. The scores might have looked different, too…) Alas, there’s no easy fix for the CFP if it insists on playing its first round on this weekend every year. TNT Sports’s final numbers were as good as could have been expected going up against the NFL (8.6 million viewers for Clemson-Texas and 6.4 million viewers for SMU-Penn State), but it’s undeniable those numbers would have been even bigger had there been no NFL competition. (For reference, ABC earned 14.3 million viewers for Tennessee-Ohio State and 13.4 million for Indiana-Notre Dame.) In retrospect, perhaps the CFP could have scheduled two games on Friday and two on Saturday to avoid the NFL windows. In the future, the CFP may be pressured to move its first round to the weekend that traditionally hosts the Army-Navy game—which, of course, might create issues with the Heisman ceremony—or stack them even earlier in the calendar.
R.I.P. Zach Jones: Zach Jones, a 14-year veteran of ESPN’s stats and information group, died yesterday after a two-year battle with colorectal cancer. On SportsCenter, an emotional Randy Scott paid tribute to the researcher on air. “You may have never seen him on your screens,” he said, “but you saw his work on our live golf coverage or our women’s college basketball coverage or on any of our SportsCenter shows.”

Netflix’s Next Step Toward World Domination

In a surprise move, Netflix has acquired the rights to the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cup, stunning the industry and amplifying expectations about its live sports ambitions.

John Ourand

The guessing games started almost as soon as FIFA executives told their counterparts from CBS, Fox, and NBC that the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cup rights were going to a non-traditional partner, which seemed like a nom de guerre for a streamer. Naturally, the clannish sports media business immediately played a game of elimination. It was apparent that ESPN, Amazon, and Google wouldn’t end up with the rights, not least because they did not bid on them. Apple seemed like a possibility, but an unlikely one: The company allegedly irritated FIFA by pulling out of a deal to carry the Club World Cup toward the end of the summer. It wouldn’t have made sense that the two would have consummated a Women’s World Cup deal just four months later. Those Club World Cup rights ended up going to DAZN for $1 billion, which is why so many media executives concluded that the Women’s World Cup would be headed there, too. The fact that DAZN executives basically went silent before the holidays—even canceling scheduled meetings—bolstered the theory that the British streamer had ended up with the rights. Netflix, meanwhile, was never considered a serious threat. The company’s top executives had convinced the rest of the industry that they were relentlessly focused on flawlessly executing their two NFL Christmas Day games. Why would they bother getting tangled up in a drawn-out negotiation? But on Friday morning, a full week and a half after telling all the linear TV networks that they weren’t getting the rights, FIFA announced that the next two Women’s World Cup events were indeed headed to Netflix. There’s so much that we don’t yet know—including, importantly, the price paid. But the simple fact that Netflix is now in the World Cup business has added to the pervasive fear among traditional mediacos that the streamer is insidiously preparing to eat their lunch, one or two one-off live events at a time. As Netflix escalates its live sports ambitions from Tom Brady roasts and Tyson fights to Christmas Day NFL games and global sporting events, it’s increasingly obvious that the plan is to change the way sports are distributed forever. The question now is, how soon?

The Netflix Move

Netflix’s forays into the live event business have been well documented. Last month, it carried a night of boxing featuring a reality star fighting a 58-year-old former champ that was so popular it nearly broke the internet. On January 6, the company will start carrying WWE Raw weekly as part of a 10-year, $5 billion deal. And, of course, in two days it will air two NFL games featuring four of the league’s most popular teams: the Chiefs, Steelers, Ravens, and Texans. Netflix executives ostensibly believe that live events, including sports, will help the company build out its advertising tier. And there’s no doubt that its deal for Women’s World Cup rights marks its biggest push into the sports arena. It’s not hard to envision a scenario where Netflix is aggressive in bidding for the Men’s World Cup rights in 2030 and 2034 when they become available. But Netflix’s recent activity doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is going all-in on sports rights. Netflix executives have always said that they are interested in one-off events, perhaps as a way to defray production costs and other CapEx. The Women’s World Cup deal is an extension of this strategy, though this “one-off event” comprises multiple games over several weeks. If you talk to a Netflix exec long enough, they’ll almost certainly use the hackneyed phrase “crawl, walk, run” to define their manifest destiny in the industry. Netflix traditionally approaches new initiatives slowly while honing its investment thesis. It’s been operating this way at least since it started dabbling in original series, as investments in shows like Lilyhammer paved the way for House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. Netflix crawled when it carried made-for-TV tennis, golf, and boxing matches. Its move into the NFL, WWE, and FIFA marks more of a walking phase. After all, as Variety reported, the two NFL games (and Beyoncé’s halftime show) will disappear from Netflix three hours after the livestream ends. That’s definitely not “running” mode yet… The hope among all leagues and conferences is that Netflix soon segues to the next phase of its development. After all, the NFL is expected to exercise an out in its broadcast deals by 2030. The MLB and NHL national media rights deals are up, too, in 2028. Some wonder aloud if Netflix is already poised to take over the sports media business as surreptitiously as it did Hollywood.

From the Cheap Seats

On LIV’s pending TV deal with Fox: “You were awfully kind to the value of LIV and their obvious product issues. It’s not like journalists who criticize the Saudis have a bad track record with them!” —A media executive On the CFP blowouts: “This College Football Playoff looks like a total bust. They could’ve put Maryland in and gotten an equally entertaining game. This reminds me of when ESPN bought NASCAR back in the day. It paid top dollar for a sport going through debilitating change.” —A journalist On the CFP schedule: “College football is played on Saturdays. You don’t run from a bully. And the NFL’s greed knows no end. Having the Chiefs play three games in 10 days?! Are they trying to ruin their most popular team?! I may be biased because I’m in a place where college football is more popular. Perhaps some casual fans nationally aren’t aware of the first-round games since this is Year 1, but I believe the ratings will be better than you think. Sign me up!” —A Varsity subscriber who was not prepared for all those blowouts

We have a full house this week with all the kids back in town, so I will be off on Thursday. Look for my next private email on Monday. John

Puck sports correspondent John Ourand and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you inside the executive suites and owners boxes where the decisions that shape the entire sports business are made. You’ll hear interviews with players, network execs, and everyone in between. The Varsity is an extension of John’s private email for Puck by the same name. New episodes publish every Wednesday and Sunday.

Ace media reporter Dylan Byers lets readers into his notebook as he reports on the biggest stories (and egos) in the industry.

SpinCo City

WILLIAM D. COHAN

Sotheby’s Surrender

MARION MANEKER

WaPo’s Inside Man

DYLAN BYERS

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