Dec 11, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand, prepping to take my son to John Cena’s final WWE match Saturday night at Capital One Arena. No truth to the rumor that Marchand will make an appearance as the guest referee or fly off the top rope.

Pod alert: USA Sports president Matt Hong joins The Varsity this weekend for a conversation about how Versant plans to compete for sports rights against far-better-funded rivals. My first question for Matt: How do you pronounce “Versant”? Also, make sure to listen to yesterday’s episode, wherein I reconvened the Puck Superfriends™ (Julia Alexander, Dylan Byers, Eriq Gardner) to handicap the biggest sports business personalities of 2025.

Mentioned in this issue: Michael Jordan, NASCAR, Eric Shanks, Sherrone Moore, Mark Shapiro, David Ellison, Pat McAfee, Claudia Wilken, Stephen A. Smith, Hernan Lopez, D. John Sauer, Pete Bevacqua, Rick Cordella, Paul Finebaum, Brett Yormark, and more…

Player of the Week: Michael Jordan

Well, Michael Jordan’s 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports appear to be the clear winners in the settlement that was just reached in their antitrust suit against NASCAR. The parties agreed to settle on the ninth day of the trial, giving Jordan exactly what he wanted: a permanent evergreen charter that his company doesn’t have to renew every few years.

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Player of the Week (Honorable Mention): Eric Shanks

Fox’s broadcast of the Big Ten Championship game averaged 18.33 million viewers, beating ABC’s SEC Championship audience by 1.5 million. What’s more: Shanks’s beloved Indiana Hoosiers took home their first conference championship in his lifetime—their first football title since 1967.

Down to the J.V.: Sherrone Moore

Sherrone Moore, as you well know, was fired yesterday as Michigan’s head coach after the university declared that it uncovered evidence that he’d had an inappropriate relationship with a staffer. A few hours later, it was reported that he’d also been detained by police as part of an alleged assault investigation. (He’s expected to be arraigned tomorrow.) And you thought you were having a bad week…

This is depressing on a number of levels. Moore, who is only 39, had been bequeathed an immense platform after Jim Harbaugh revived the program and then bolted for the NFL. And in his brief two-year tenure, he’d already beaten Ohio State and tapped into the bank accounts of Larry Ellison and Dave Portnoy to steal a top recruit from LSU. But this is a reminder, of course, that there are still some rules and codes of ethics in the lawless wilds of college football.

The Starting Five

A little more on M.J.’s NASCAR dunk…: As soon as I got word that NASCAR had settled its antitrust suit with 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports, I called my Puck partner Eriq Gardner for his expert legal perspective. Eriq told me he wasn’t surprised to see a settlement, even with the jury expected to take up deliberations as early as Monday. “Judge Kenneth Bell leaned on both sides to come to an agreement, and when there are such big stakes involved, juries are always risky for both sides,” Eriq told me.

Eriq cited early rulings that suggested NASCAR had been playing catch-up in this case from the beginning. “The judge really handed Jordan’s camp a victory before the trial even began,” Eriq said. “Usually, antitrust lawsuits are fights over how to define the market. In this instance, NASCAR pointed to IndyCar and F1 to show that the market was much bigger than just NASCAR. But the judge cited NASCAR’s own counterclaim alleging that Jordan’s camp was violating antitrust law. In that counterclaim, NASCAR defined the market more specifically. NASCAR made a huge strategic mistake on that. Its key defense was basically eliminated before it even got to trial.”
UFC’s betting courtship: As UFC kicks off its seven-year, $7.7 billion deal with Paramount next month, the league is looking for upgrades across its business. To wit: UFC’s lucrative sponsorship deal with DraftKings ends in the next few weeks, and the league has been courting other companies in the space to take it over. At a UBS conference earlier this week, TKO president Mark Shapiro spoke about the bump he expected to see in UFC’s sponsorship revenue, in particular, as the league pivots from ESPN to Par+ and CBS. Shapiro said that sponsor and marketing revenue from UFC and WWE, both owned by TKO, is at about $450 million for the year—“way above our internal goal of $375 million.” He added, “In our ESPN deal, we have advertising inventory inside of our events that we can sell. And in our PSKY deal, we have ad inventory that we can sell along with a lot of broadcast integration. When you factor in that inventory, we believe … that our goal of getting to $1 billion by 2030 for the TKO assets in partnerships and marketing will actually be $1.2 billion.”
Skinny sports bundles are here: YouTube TV made headlines this week when it announced plans to roll out a skinny sports package early next year. The service—which will include the broadcast networks; cable networks from WBD, Fox, and Versant; and streaming content from ESPN and NBC—is expected to be priced around $55 to $60 per month.

The product marks a continuation of a trend whereby distributors offer skinnier, genre-specific bundles as a way to slow cord-cutting. DirecTV started it a year ago, and now offers seven channels that carry ESPN Unlimited programming and five extra “Peacock Games” channels. And Comcast has a Sports & News TV package for $90 per month.
Sportspeople of the Year: On this week’s episode of The Varsity, Julia, Eriq, and Dylan joined me to debate the most notable sportspeople of the year. Dylan kicked things off by nominating Paramount Skydance C.E.O. David Ellison. “By virtue of acquiring Paramount, he immediately bought a stake in the NFL. He moved very quickly to make a deal with UFC. And now he’s potentially on the cusp of acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, which could bring even more sports rights into the portfolio,” Dylan said. “I think he’s going to be a very meaningful player, not just in the Hollywood space and media space, but in the sports media space, for a long time to come.” Julia then followed with Pat McAfee, arguing, “I think it’s impossible to talk about the current sports media landscape—the future sports media landscape, where investment in personalities is coming from, the push for companies like Disney, Fox, Netflix, and others into the sports-adjacent media podcasting space—without talking about Pat McAfee.”

Eriq went in a totally different direction, naming Judge Claudia Wilken, who approved the landmark deal allowing schools to pay their athletes directly. Her imprint, Eriq noted, extends well beyond college football. “Her rulings have not only shifted the business of college football and basketball, but are having massive downstream impacts to amateur athletics—and are going to become more and more important in the coming years.” I picked Mark Shapiro, both for the aforementioned UFC deal and WWE’s $1.6 billion package with ESPN, and even Stephen A. Smith’s $100 million contract. If I ever need someone to negotiate on my behalf, I’m calling Mark.
Hernan Lopez’s reprieve: Yesterday, Eriq shared a significant update in the long-running legal saga of Hernan Lopez, the former C.E.O. of Fox International Channels who was accused of bribing South American soccer officials to secure coveted broadcasting rights. Lopez was convicted and had faced the possibility of decades in prison as he appealed the charges. Yesterday, however, the Department of Justice moved to back away from the conviction. “Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that the government was exercising its prosecutorial discretion to pursue dismissal of the case, saying it was no longer in the public interest,” Eriq wrote. “Translation: The conviction that once looked like a trophy from the D.O.J.’s FIFA probe may soon vanish from the books altogether.”

And now for the main event…

South Bend & Down

Athletic director Pete Bevacqua alienated most of the college football world in his rant following the school’s exclusion from the College Football Playoff. But he’s found a defender in his old homies at NBC.

John Ourand

Notre Dame has taken a lot of flak since Pete Bevacqua, its athletic director, went on a media tour this week to rant about his football team’s exclusion from the College Football Playoff. Bevacqua’s beef was that the ACC, Notre Dame’s conference for all sports except football, had the temerity to lobby for the inclusion of full-time member school Miami. This was particularly relevant, as everyone knows, because the two teams were on the CFP bubble—and, as absolutely everyone knows, Miami narrowly beat Notre Dame on a last-minute field goal during their season opener on the final day in August, a veritable tie-breaker.

Bevacqua got plenty of pushback from the usual suspects, much of it citing the ACC’s bailout of Notre Dame during the Covid-affected 2020 season, when it otherwise would have been unable to schedule games, and the program’s longstanding refusal to join a conference and share some of its lucrative TV money. A lot of the criticism boiled down to old-school Irish player-hating and the fairly common complaint that Notre Dame’s vision of itself is saturated with myopia, Four Horsemen- and Rudy-addled nostalgia, and self-selective institutional narcissism. Yes, the Irish played in the national championship game last season, but it’s been decades since the program won a title, and we’ve still not forgotten about the Bob Davie, Tyrone Willingham, and Charlie Weis eras. (Never forget!)

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There’s been talk that teams have been so turned off by Notre Dame’s complaints this week that they may stop scheduling the Irish in future years. Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark called Bevacqua’s media tour “egregious” and said he was “totally out of bounds in his approach—and if he was in the room, I’d tell him the same thing.”

Sure, Notre Dame has not been a singular college football program for ages, and the program’s last coach up and left for LSU. And the Irish’s TV viewership this season was meh, although that had more to do with a series of blowouts following an 0–2 start. Its biggest audience came during that Miami season opener—the only one of its broadcasts that cracked college football’s top 20 this season. As Paul Finebaum put it on ESPN this week: “They think they’re great, but they’re not.” They’re not even the best team in Indiana anymore.

But Notre Dame’s vision of itself is bolstered by its $50 million-a-season deal with NBC, a relationship that dates back to 1991 and is set to run through at least 2029. In fact, before taking Notre Dame’s A.D. job, Bevacqua ran NBC Sports for five years, from 2018 to 2023. So perhaps unsurprisingly, NBC was one of the few entities to rally to the program’s defense this week.

Current NBC Sports president Rick Cordella told me on Thursday that the criticisms lobbed against the Irish missed the mark—badly. “Having our Notre Dame and Big Ten partnerships has been a great combination for us of tier-one college football,” Cordella said. “We’ve had this property for well over 30 years, and it was a premier property back then and it still is today. The conversations we’re having right now across America about Notre Dame not being in the CFP—that’s because it’s Notre Dame. That same conversation would not happen with any other team.”

Indeed, teams like Alabama and Texas already have Notre Dame games scheduled over the next three or four years, and it’s hard to imagine any real program reconsidering playing a historic team that commands a national TV schedule. Cordella told me that Notre Dame’s appearance in last year’s CFP Championship game helped NBC sell out sponsorships and advertising faster this year than ever before. “We know that brand advertisers want to be associated with the Notre Dame brand,” Cordella said. “They pay a premium in order to do so versus other college football teams. We still look at Notre Dame as being a much higher premium property than many other properties.”

He’s got a point: When Netflix considered poaching a college football property that it could eventize, the company focused on Notre Dame. Anyway, that CFP expansion can’t come soon enough…

From the Cheap Seats

On Notre Dame’s CFP snub: “Notre Dame may be ticked at the ACC, but they have the best deal by joining the ACC in all sports but football. They couldn’t find football teams to play during the Covid season, so we let them join in football that year and they earned a College Football Playoff berth. They wouldn’t have been able to play that season unless we bailed them out. Not only did we let them in, we gave them a voting share and allowed them to keep their independence and 100 percent of their football money. The SEC and Big Ten would never be as stupid as the ACC was. So Notre Dame may be upset, but they aren’t going anywhere.” —A media exec and UNC fan

On NWSL’s Trinity Rodman problem: “It’s worth noting that while the Women’s Super League doesn’t have a salary cap, it does have a ‘spending control framework.’ That means teams can only spend up to 80 percent of their women’s team revenues, with an owners’ contribution of about £4 million on top of that. Call it the Kang-Kroenke-Clearlake clause! The WSL is primed to replicate the success of the EPL if it can somehow convince UEFA to expand the Women’s Champions League, because the resources and opportunity in the women’s football market are huge over here if they can keep improving the product via better player trading.” —A Varsity subscriber who calls it football instead of soccer

On the most recent Varsity podcast: “W.T.F. I’m an Inner Circle member. Shouldn’t I be a Varsity Superfriend, too?” —A cable guy

Have a great weekend. See you Monday,

John

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