Welcome back to In The Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Tonight, an inside look at Disney’s decision to license the ESPN brand to gambling company Penn Entertainment as its linear fortunes decay—a $2 billion, ten-year deal that gives the network a foothold in a new market and, just as importantly, buys Bob Iger time.

We live in a complex moment, after all—one where HBO is absorbed into Max, CNN’s cord-cutting play is aborted and its programming strategy relies on a do-more-with-less grit, Showtime’s own direct-to-consumer play is folded into Paramount, itself a historic collection of media assets with a market cap of just $10.3 billion. And yet few moves have stirred the collective anxieties of the industry more than Bob Iger’s candid CNBC interview, early this summer, during which he conveyed an openness, if not an alacrity, to finding a strategic partner for ESPN.

ESPN’s traditional business lines of carriage fees and advertising fuel a Disney cable networks division that has already brought in more than $14 billion in revenue and $3 billion in profit this year. If the greatest asset in the history of cable had such a bleak economic outlook, what was anyone else going to do?

Earlier this week, a friend and sage industry source reminded me of the tale of Hans Brinker, the fictional hero of 19th-century Dutch children’s literature, who saved his country by putting his finger in a leaking dike. (Synopsis, via Wikipedia: “The boy stays there all night, in spite of the cold, until the villagers find him and repair the dike.”) The Brinker analogy came up shortly after ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro announced that he had reached a $2 billion, ten-year deal to license Disney’s iconic brand to the gambling company Penn Entertainment to create an ESPN-branded sportsbook.

Indeed, Pitaro is an incredibly well-liked executive whose charisma and candor have made him an effective leader for ESPN during this fraught moment in its history. At the same time, I was reminded, the magnitude of his challenge makes little Hans Brinker’s feat seem quaint by comparison.

No, Disney will not run the ESPN Bet sportsbook, but it’s doing more than merely loaning out its name. The deal also guarantees Penn “exclusive promotional services across ESPN platforms including programming, content, and access to ESPN talent.” Inevitably, this will influence the programming, and probably for the worse.

Older ESPN hands bemoan the way SportsCenter started aggressively covering Ultimate Fighting once the network bought those broadcast rights; it’s fair to assume the network will now become even more obsessed—and visually cluttered—than it’s already become with odds and futures and prop bets. Its obsessive coverage of fantasy football is probably a leading indicator of what this new world might look like. (Though, to be fair, gambling isn’t entirely new to ESPN: the handicapper Hank Greenberg was a hero of the network’s early years.) However, perhaps the most pressing issue coalesces around ESPN’s top news-breaking journalists, like Woj and Adam Schefter, who routinely unearth the kind of insider intel that can move betting lines. Many around Bristol are already wondering: How are they going to continue to do their jobs in a way that doesn’t present conflicts of interest?

All that said, the Penn deal helps buy Iger and Pitaro more time to implement larger changes. And, Sisyphean as the task may be, it does suggest that Iger and Pitaro are thinking creatively, moving fast, being practical, using every tool at their disposal, and trying to do everything they can to retain ESPN’s vibrancy, albeit in a more cost-effective manner, in the post-linear era.“Iger got cash and it shows the market he’s doing something and ready to get creative and displace norms,” one veteran media executive texted me this week. Said another: “You’ve got to admire the initiative and the effort. Jimmy is a high quality, tireless leader in terrible times. He’s playing a bad hand and making the right bets to stay at the table.”

Of course, as the latter executive noted, this is a relatively small bet in the context of ESPN’s broader challenges. The real action is taking place at the table with Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, who have been brought in to support Iger’s strategic thinking regarding the challenges that Iger alluded to during his CNBC interview in Sun Valley last month. “Jimmy is at the $100 blackjack table,” this person said. “Kevin is in the room in the back where the whales play.”

We don’t have any real insight yet into what, exactly, that strategic partnership will look like. In Sun Valley, Iger said he was looking for “strategic partners that could either help us with distribution or content,” and CNBC recently reported that Disney has held talks with the NFL, NBA, and MLB about acquiring minority stakes in the company. Could there be a deal with Apple or another tech giant? “It’s still very much in formation, so no great answer yet,” one Disney veteran with insight into the company’s thinking said. But, he added, “Bob was serious about wanting to keep majority control of ESPN.”