A Potential MLB Bidding War, NFL P.E. Structures & An ESPN Departure

Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email about all the personalities—their hopes, dreams, fantasy deals, anxieties, defenestration nightmares, and everything in between—in the sports media business. Mrs. Varsity and I are spending the long weekend hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park—empty nesting is the best! Happy U.S. Open Second Round to all who celebrate. With all due modesty, my first Varsity podcast with Peyton Manning was great. After the show, Peyton offered to add me to the ManningCast if I could get Marchand to stop parking his stroopwafel food truck next to his mansion outside Denver every Monday night. (Knock it off, Marchand!) Anyway, the NFL Hall of Famer turned media impresario was indeed a fabulous first guest and spoke mellifluously about the genesis of Omaha Productions, his partnership with Jamie Horowitz, Bill Belichick’s on-air potential, Tom Brady’s preparation for the Fox booth, and gestured at what he would have been able to rake in if he were in Knoxville during the N.I.L. era. Listen to it here. And subscribe here and here. More good news: The second episode of The Varsity pod, an in-depth conversation with ESPN honcho Jimmy Pitaro, will post on Sunday morning. Pitaro was incredibly candid and clear-eyed about his business and his optimism around ESPN’s market position and its place in the sports media future, of course. Lastly, before we dive in, a couple reading suggestions for the long weekend. My jaw dropped when I read how far apart Comcast and Disney are on their Hulu deal, via Bill Cohan’s must-read newsletter Dry Powder. JPMorgan Chase, hired by Disney, values Hulu at $27.5 billion. Morgan Stanley, hired by Comcast, pegged the number at $40 billion. The matter is now in “confidential arbitration.” Also, if you only read one story about Pat McAfee’s epic rant at ESPN’s media day—a soliloquy prompted by a reporter’s question about journalistic standards—make it the excellent piece by Ben Strauss. Per Strauss, once the panel ended, “[Elle] Duncan walked off the stage and said to an ESPN communications staffer: ‘That was something.’ ‘That was something,’ the staffer replied.” I have more on ESPN below, but first…

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Player of the Week: Erin Andrews

Fox Sports’ top NFL sideline reporter should see much more airtime this season, thanks to the new NFL rule mandating a coach or coordinator give an on-camera interview during the game. Networks can also interview home team players in uniform before kickoff. The NBA has mandated this kind of access for several years now, which has produced interviews that usually offer little value for fans.Of course, head coaches, many of whom are experts at politely saying nothing, are distracted and expert at deploying clichés. But I expect Andrews to deliver. Her strong relationships throughout the league should prompt NFL coaches to open up more than their NBA counterparts.

Down to the J.V.: Edgar Bronfman Jr.

My partner Bill Cohan has the perfect description of Bronfman’s attempt to acquire Paramount Global—indeed, it was “spectacularly unserious.” The abrupt ending of Bronfman’s insurgent bid greases the skids for David Ellison’s Skydance Media and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital to complete the acquisition, which is the best possible outcome for CBS Sports.

Down to the J.V. Honorable Mention: The ESPN and DirecTV affiliate teams

While most of the country is on vacation this weekend, ESPN and DirecTV’s affiliate groups will be locked in conference rooms and eating cold Chipotle as they try to work out a deal that keeps the sports giant’s channels from going dark on the satellite provider. The contract ends on Sunday. At least the deadline isn’t New Year’s Eve, I guess…

The Starting Five

1. The NFL’s private equity rush: Thanks to an owners’ vote on Tuesday, the NFL became the last of the big U.S. leagues to allow private equity funds to take ownership stakes in its teams. But the NFL has rules in place that show it still wants to move slowly in this direction. While leagues like the NBA, WNBA, NHL, and MLS allow private equity to buy up to 30 percent of a team, the NFL is keeping its limit at 10 percent, at least for now. Most of my sources believe that the NFL will get to that 30 percent cap eventually, but nobody has a good handle on whether that will happen in a year, or two, or three… Puck superfriend Peter Schrager and I discussed this topic yesterday on his podcast, The Season. As Schrager noted, the fear around P.E. entering sports has always centered on the hypothesis that the limited partners would be focused on cost-reduction, operating profit, and free cash flow—the hallmarks that have turned private equity into a $6 trillion industry in only a few decades. But these firms will have minority, non-controlling positions, so they won’t be replacing anyone’s MacBooks with Acers anytime soon. Instead, they’ll probably be deploying their capital to provide some liquidity events for existing minority partners… and then selling their positions to another firm down the line at a significant return—it’s all about the basis points, babis points, baby! In the meantime, not only is the NFL capping the size of the positions, it’s also limiting the firms that can actually participate. The league has a small list of what it calls permitted funds—Ares, Arctos, and Sixth Street, in addition to a consortium of Blackstone, Carlyle, CVC, Dynasty Equity, and Ludis, a fund operated by former NFL great Curtis Martin. As you can imagine, plenty of funds were pissed that they didn’t make the cut, and there was some surprise that RedBird wasn’t on the list—though their involvement in Paramount Global, parentco of CBS Sports, likely posed a conflict. 2. ESPN layoff: One of the half-dozen executives who was defenestrated as a result of this week’s ESPN reorg is head of content operations Stephanie Druley, the highest-ranking female production executive in the company’s history. Druley spent 34 years with ESPN and has one of the gaudiest résumés in the company, having overseen production for ESPN’s top properties, such as Monday Night Football, the NBA, college football, and MLS. She oversaw the launch of three networks (SEC Network, ACC Network, and Longhorn Network), and determined the look for all on-air content at those channels. ESPNers also remember Druley for what she did outside of production, including her work developing SportsCenter’s “My Wish” collaboration with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Druley is also known for being a trailblazer and mentor to women at ESPN. One former ESPNer texted me: “She is a true leader. She put women in places they needed to be, because they were good and deserving, and because the men never had the courage or inclination.” 3. The Brady rules: Assuming Tom Brady closes his deal to become a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, as is expected, the NFL has imposed some serious restrictions—he would be barred from criticizing officials, prevented from visiting other teams’ facilities and watching their practices, and removed from broadcast production meetings, as Seth Wickersham has reported. The restrictions aren’t ideal for a new analyst. John Madden, the greatest NFL analyst of all time, would often evangelize about how important it was for a broadcaster to watch practices and talk to coaches. But my sources on the Fox lot tell me that these challenges will not impact their broadcast. Executives at Fox Sports, which is paying Brady $375 million over 10 years, are convinced that Brady is a football savant (he is) who will be able to study film even if he’s not attending production meetings. 4. Entourage, redux: Last week, I noted that Excel had filed a lawsuit seeking a preliminary restraining order and temporary injunction against three of its broadcasting agents—Gideon Cohen, William Petok, and Katherine Cutler—who had left for Athletes First. Today, the New York State Supreme Court tossed the case. Per the court, “the parties have met and conferred to resolve the dispute and have advised the court that they have come to an agreement.” 5. Peyton’s placements: Because of its success with sports series like Drive to Survive, Netflix seems to be the perfect place for a show like Quarterbacks, which is co-produced by NFL Films, 2PM Productions, and Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions. But Manning told me on the Varsity pod that his company doesn’t necessarily set out to make certain projects based on the perceived interest of a single streamer. Indeed, Omaha’s brand of optimistic sports-adjacent content arrived at a time when the streaming industry wanted that sort of programming the most, and the company is experiencing Peak TV vibes. “You don’t just say anymore, ‘Hey, that’s not going to work,’ because any idea could get picked up by someone, right? All it takes is one team to like you coming out of the draft, and if one team likes you, then you’re going to get a chance to play. So when we make pitches, we just pitch five or six to different networks—streaming, traditional, whatever it may be. You feel that there’s a place for everything, and you hope to find a landing place. … And I think that’s why our pitches work. Most of them have been able to get picked up.”

MLB’s Brewing Bidding War

I’m told that several of the world’s biggest media and technology companies—Amazon, Apple, Google/YouTube, and NBCUniversal—are checking in with MLB on a regular basis about the possibility of getting local rights as they come available.

JOHN OURAND

Don’t worry, dear reader, this story isn’t actually about regional sports networks—it’s merely R.S.N.-adjacent. But the potential collapse of Diamond Sports Group, a bankruptcy journey that has become one of the great leitmotifs of the Varsity cinematic universe, has created a fascinating emerging opportunity—and potential bidding war—for some far larger players. I’m told that several of the world’s biggest media and technology companies—Amazon, Apple, Google/YouTube, and NBCUniversal—are checking in with MLB on a regular basis about the possibility of getting local rights as they come available. A Diamond default would strike the mother lode.ESPN, for its part, has been in contact with MLB for more than a year—even before Diamond filed for bankruptcy. At a media day event in Bristol on Wednesday, chairman Jimmy Pitaro revealed that he would be very interested in putting those rights on the ESPN “flagship” streaming service he’s planning to launch next fall. “If Major League Baseball is able to put together a group of teams, we would love to be able to do a larger deal,” he said.No deal is imminent, of course, and there is some structural bureaucracy to wade through yet—every organization is waiting to see what happens with Diamond Sports’ bankruptcy filing. (Quick: glide path, cliff path, grinfuck… drink!) And if Diamond Sports continues to make payments to MLB teams, the league won’t have the rights to sell a streaming package to another media company. Also: Even if Diamond’s rights do revert back to MLB, the league won’t hold the rights to all 29 U.S.-based teams, including the most popular franchises in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston.And yet, executives across the industry view a bundle as a valuable minimum viable product, with a collective expectation that the list of rights will grow over time. It’s an open question, of course, whether those big-market teams will find more value in participating in a more national product through some of the Big Tech companies. The Yankees, of course, are an outlier given their YES Network product. So, too, are the Dodgers, who have a sweetheart deal with SportsNet LA. But other teams will likely be amenable to some sort of not-quite-yet-defined pan-league super-bundle of the future—a tantalizing concept for many streamers, all of which have been, by now, thoroughly persuaded about the power of live sports rights. Many in the industry expected that ESPN would negotiate for these potential local rights at the end of next season, when the network is likely to exercise an out clause in order to renegotiate downward its MLB rights deal. (ESPN currently pays MLB $540 million per year—a ton of money for a package that includes Sunday Night Baseball and a few days’ worth of playoffs.) But with other big companies circling, ESPN’s timeline to negotiate for local MLB rights is almost certainly going to be expedited.Just before media day festivities heated up, Pitaro joined me for a lengthy conversation that will air in full on the Varsity podcast this Sunday. “Local is really interesting to us,” he told me. “We want to be part of the solution. … We believe that ESPN ‘flagship’ should be part of the solution—meaning, if you’re interested in your local games, come to ESPN and we will make them available.”As part of ESPN’s pitch, Pitaro pointed to his company’s digital performance. ESPN posted more than 102 million unique visitors in July, besting even NBC’s Olympic performance, he said. “It was pleasing for me to see that even in Olympics month, where we obviously do not have domestic rights, when things were happening, people were still tuning in, were firing up the ESPN app or going onto ESPN.com to see the news. We’re the place of record.”

From the Cheap Seats

On ESPN’s reorg: “I’ve been in the business for 28 years and have worked with some of the most talented people in our industry. I’ve learned more about television in the 12 years I was with Mike McQuade than from everyone else combined. While he's a quirky guy, he has great instincts and vision. Once you’ve earned his trust, Mike lets you do your thing without standing over your shoulder. Many bosses at ESPN tried to push Mike aside… but his talent kept bringing him back whenever they needed something done right. It’s great to see Mike finally get his due.” —A sports TV producerOn Pat McAfee’s meltdown at ESPN’s media day: “Losing half your lead-in audience on TV literally every day, mocking the hard work your colleagues do, and cashing checks for $17 million a year? Good work if you can get it.” —A network executive On Paramount’s Champions League telecasts: “Mark it down: Zlatan will be the Charles Barkley of soccer. He’s on the P+ Champions League draw show, and he’s incredible.” —A former media executive. On Peyton’s appearance on the inaugural Varsity pod : “Pod was great… So glad you didn’t talk about R.S.N.s.” —A cheeky sports media veteran On all the new media podcasts: “Now that you and Marchand are both starting new podcasts, will we get the Mando crossover reunion that we all deserve? No other sports media podcast covers the Orioles as much, and the only Ripley I heard about this year was on Netflix and not running Sinclair.” —A Varsity subscriber Thanks, Mom! “Your Varsity column is tremendous: Insightful, well-sourced, concise, quick to read. The economic value created by the world’s growing passion for live sports on TV is unbelievable. There is no better genre within the entertainment industry to write and read about than the business of sports. Sports is the glue in the ad-supported linear and streaming TV world.” —A former cable guy

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT

The Invisible Bronfman

On the end of Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s Paramount dream.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

CNN’s Debate Whisperers

The anonymous duo behind CNN’s latest “gets.”

DYLAN BYERS

The ’25 K Street Draft Lottery

Manchin, Sinema, McHenry… Walz??

ABBY LIVINGSTON

Powder Trip

Examining the hero product disaster at Givenchy Beauty.

RACHEL STRUGATZ

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