Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the people who run your favorite sports and all the deals they cut. I am writing today from my hometown of Washington, D.C., where most of the local NFL fans are still feeling good despite a 17-point loss to the Bucs. After all, Dan Snyder is no longer running the team. Let’s see how long the Josh Harris honeymoon lasts…

Did you hear WNBA commish Cathy Engelbert on the Varsity pod this weekend? She laid out a roadmap for how her league will capitalize on this season’s Caitlin Clark-driven momentum. (I’ll be running an edited transcript of our conversation later this week.) Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s Ben Strauss joins the pod on Wednesday, and Premier Lacrosse League founder Paul Rabil will be our Sunday guest. Make sure you subscribe here. Remember: This is a Marchand-free safe space.

Let’s get to it…

1. Brady’s debut: Tom Brady’s maiden voyage in the Fox broadcast booth has elicited a plethora of strong reactions. Many of my friends thought he was terrible, but colleagues in the business were more measured. They thought that Brady was below-average—especially for a guy on a 10-year, $375 million deal—but not Chernobyl-level bad.

   My most-trusted sources keyed in on a number of specific issues. First, Brady’s analysis lacked bite and candor. He often sounded like he was keeping his most honest observations to himself. No one wants a TV color commentator to sound like a deranged drill sergeant, but it’s hard to imagine that the greatest quarterback in history would offer such beguiling commentary about Deshaun Watson’s dreadful play. In one instance, as if looking for silver linings, Brady complimented Watson for absorbing a hit in the pocket after yet another errant pass. The pitch of Brady’s voice also caught a lot of flak. He has a high voice that sounded a little bit whiny when he got excited. Fox can work on it, but ultimately, his voice is his voice.

   Nevertheless, many of my sources pleaded patience. Brady will be more compelling, they said, when he gets more comfortable just letting it rip. And Brady had a few good moments where he was insightful and decisive. As he gets more reps, producers will be able to draw those out more frequently.

2. Opening night numbers: Last Thursday night, as my social feeds filled up with video of Taylor Swift walking into GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, I became certain that the Ravens-Chiefs game would draw a huge TV audience. And it did: The 29.2 million viewers made it the most-watched kickoff game ever and second-biggest regular season audience on NBC going back to 2006. (Tops was a Cowboys game from 2012.)

   During the past few months, multiple TV executives have told me that the Chiefs and the Cowboys have separated themselves from the rest of the league as the NFL’s top two TV draws. Taylor’s boyfriend helps, of course. So, too, does the star appeal and generational talent of Patrick Mahomes. And then there is the perpetual delusion of Cowboys fans, who convince themselves every year that they have the roster to make a deep playoff run. Anyway, there’s a reason why the Chiefs and Cowboys maxed out on their primetime allotment of games this season.

3. DTV-Disney update: There is no update! All last week, my best sources were telling me that DirecTV and Disney would reach a deal before tonight’s Monday Night Football matchup between the Jets and 49ers, but it didn’t happen. DirecTV has spent the past few days needling the Disney folks, which is not the normal choreography when a resolution is close at hand. The company enlisted Disney’s Steamboat Willie in its anti-Disney marketing, per Matthew Keys. (Steamboat Willie entered the public domain earlier this year.) DirecTV also filed a complaint with the F.C.C. accusing Disney of acting in bad faith, and offered subscribers discounts to stream Fubo and Sling in order to receive ABC and ESPN. Still, it’s hard to believe that DirecTV can hold out through too many more weekends dominated by college football and the NFL.
4. Tennis Channel’s culture clash: Over the last quarter-century, Tennis Channel C.E.O. Ken Solomon has been a media reporter’s dream. One of the more eccentric sports media executives, Solomon seemed to relish going off-script and ignoring talking points. I remember interviewing him at Langan’s, that depressing Irish pub in Midtown that media people used to hang out in, about 15 years ago. Solomon went on so many tangents that his P.R. handlers eventually gave up trying to direct the conversation back to whatever deal he was trying to push.

   But Solomon was also an effective executive. He was instrumental in landing rights to all the tennis majors for Tennis Channel, a small and seemingly inconsequential network at the time. He had the passion for tennis and media and the moxie to get those kinds of deals done. And he was not shy about his liberal politics.

   Perhaps it’s not a surprise, then, that Solomon was fired on Friday by Sinclair, which bought Tennis Channel in 2016 for $350 million and operates in an entirely different fashion. Based in the Baltimore suburbs, it’s a buttoned-up company filled with executives who want to stay on-message. Plus, Sinclair is known for its conservative pedigree. Maybe a culture clash was inevitable.

   The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint wrote about Solomon’s sudden firing, which occurred during the frenetic final days of the U.S. Open. Apparently, Sinclair took issue with Solomon advising Dr. Phil’s Merit Street Media and questioned why, despite a commitment to work out of the Tennis Channel’s Santa Monica offices, he’d recently acquired land near Dallas. According to Flint, Solomon says the land purchase was a horse ranch for his wife, and he still keeps a house in L.A.

5. Caitlinsanity: There’s no denying that Caitlin Clark is primarily responsible for the wave of momentum that the WNBA is riding this year. But in my conversation with WNBA commish Cathy Engelbert, it became clear that decisions she made five years ago laid the necessary groundwork for the league to capitalize on its current class of popular rookies.

   On The Varsity podcast, Engelbert recalled that the WNBA employed only one marketer when she joined the league back in 2019. Now, it has 25 people in the department, and its marketing budget is nine times larger, which has led to more ad buys and more national campaigns. “But I would say most of the financial capital was used to hire human capital to help us grow this league—dedicated engineers, social media marketers, data people,” Engelbert said. “The one thing I knew about sports, just from being a sports fanatic my whole life and growing up with my brothers, was that you need rivalries, household names, and games of consequence. And then you have to make it easy for your fans to find you and to follow you.”

NFL fans shouldn’t care about TV ratings, which help the networks as they set ad rates for their programming, or about the merits and demerits of the Nielsen system, which has fielded its fair share of complaints over the years, even if ad buyers have generally supported having an independent company tabulate viewership numbers. But in recent years, fans have become more conversant in TV ratings, viewing them as a proxy for the popularity of a given sport. And under pressure from the leagues and the networks, Nielsen has turbocharged those numbers by changing its methodology. In 2020, it began incorporating out-of-home viewing in its regular ratings—counting viewers that previously would have been ignored because they watched games at a bar, in a hotel room, etcetera.

The incorporation of out-of-home viewing alone has been responsible for, generally, a 10 percent uptick in ratings for any given game. Contests held on holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, can see even larger jumps given the group-viewing tendencies. And now, this year, comes another tweak in methodology that stands to benefit the top line, especially from streamers like Amazon Prime and Netflix: Nielsen is using first-party data in their numbers for the first time and has signed deals with most, but not all, of the league’s media partners to include them in this season’s ratings.

What makes this year different is that some of those same media companies will use this system for their benefit. The streaming services ESPN+ and Peacock, for example, carry exclusive games and will be able to use their internal numbers to increase viewership, too. Nielsen doesn’t just rely on those internal numbers, obviously, but it will use them in conjunction with other datasets (like numbers from distributors and Roku, etcetera) to arrive at viewership figures that, presumably, will be higher than last year for streamed games.

Several TV executives are still unhappy, since they know this new system will inevitably benefit streamers at their expense. Sure, they can use the new system for games that are simulcast on both linear TV and streaming. But in those cases, they will surely derive a much smaller benefit than the games that are only being streamed.

Alas, NFL viewing is expected to endure a slight correction this season, regardless. Besides the looming election, the league benefitted from the paucity of competition last season, an unintended consequence of dual writers and actors strikes that starved networks of fresh content for months. (ABC, of course, simulcast many more MNF games as a result.) The decision to change the way Nielsen counts streamers, though, is certain to mitigate that expected viewer shortfall.

On my prediction that Tom Brady would open to rave reviews: “Wish I could have found a way to make money fading your Brady gushing reviews prediction!” —An anonymous X account