Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the heroes and villains of the sports media business. Happy Day 1 of the U.S. Open to all who celebrate.

It’s been a busy week in the industry: Paramount Global’s deal with David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale collapsed. The NBA is in the final stages of negotiating $75 billion worth of media rights deals. But the one story that dominated my social feeds on Wednesday pertained to competitive eating. Hours after Major League Eating banned Joey Chestnut from Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4, of course, Netflix announced that the hot-dog-eating champ would face off against his arch rival, Takeru Kobayashi, during a Labor Day competition—proving once and for all that the streaming giant is deadly serious about sports!

On that note, if I catch you forwarding these private emails to colleagues who can clearly afford them, I will make you watch Marchand’s competitive eating tryout for the July 4 Coney Island event! Not pretty!

Let’s get to it…

1. The NFL’s Shari problem: If you want to find out how and why Shari Redstone killed the Skydance/RedBird acquisition in the thirteenth hour, I highly encourage you to read the excellent work of my partners Bill Cohan and Matt Belloni, the latter of whom will have much more in his newsletter tonight, if you’re not already signed up. Meanwhile, I’m told that the move has caused some angst at 345 Park Ave., where NFL executives are gaming out their options in the highly unlikely (but not impossible) scenario that its highly leveraged broadcast partner is unable to make its $2 billion-plus annual rights fee payments.

   There certainly is more angst inside the league offices this week than last, now that Redstone appears willing to go it alone, at least for the moment. Paramount Global, of course, is being operated by a troika of interim C.E.O.s known derisively on Wall Street as the “Pep Boys.” On the positive side, those NFL deals, signed a couple of years ago, look like bargain-basement prices compared to the NBA packages that are on the table. “Would you rather have NBC’s $2.1 billion Sunday Night Football package, or NBC’s $2.5 billion NBA package?,” one plugged-in source asked me, rhetorically, before stating the obvious. “It’s not even close. You’d take that NFL deal.”

2. The CBS Sports scenario: Paramount’s decision to kill the Ellison bid shouldn’t have any immediate effect on CBS Sports, which has a bunch of long-term rights deals with its biggest properties. The NFL deal runs through 2033 (although the league likely will use its out in 2029), and its Big Ten, PGA Tour, and UEFA deals run until 2030. Its March Madness deals end a couple of years later. Under David Berson, the CBS Sports leadership has a steady hand and a ton of experience.

   That said, virtually all the major broadcasters are currently investing heavily in sports in pursuit of reach and live advertising. Brian Roberts and Comcast have been gunning for the NBA; Bob Iger and Jimmy Pitaro have worked out deals with the CFP and NCAA, and will soon renew Disney’s own NBA deal. Fox has essentially turned most of its primetime hours over to live sports. So while Paramount is surely happy that CBS has several big-time sports deals locked in for the next decade, it remains an open question whether it can bid on additional rights given its current predicament.

3. NBA update: I’m hearing that NBA media rights will stay on the back burner until the Celtics win the title, which is almost certain to happen either tomorrow night or Sunday. (Did I jinx it last week?) The delay is related less to a reluctance to steal the show from its players than the fact that its lawyers are still poring over pending deals with ESPN, NBCU, and Amazon to make sure the contract language can withstand potential legal scrutiny. Warner Bros. Discovery has not been given a timetable for when it can decide to exercise its matching rights. Its executives also haven’t heard whether the NBA will create a smaller fourth package that most likely would come from teams’ local rights—although I’m still told that this is a very unlikely outcome.

   The vibe among TNT staffers in Atlanta is, understandably, depressing. However, WBD’s moves to pick up rights to other sports (notably the French Open and CFP) should cushion some of the blow. But the real angst, sources told me, is coming from the 50 or so NBA TV staffers, who work out of WBD’s Atlanta studios and face a decidedly uncertain future. The channel operates as a joint venture between the NBA and WBD. But given NBA TV’s shrinking distribution, the league could unwind that relationship and allow one of its other new partners to operate the channel instead, which would certainly necessitate a move away from Atlanta.

4. Private equity comes sniffing around the NCAA: For the past year, I have listened to people like Gerry Cardinale and Casey Wasserman talk about the investment opportunity in college sports. Their contention, broadly speaking, is that professionalizing the college landscape would not only be better for the schools, it would also lead to significantly higher revenue. So I wasn’t overly surprised by Dennis Dodd’s blockbuster report today that the Big 12 is considering selling a 15-20 percent stake in its conference to private equity firm CVC Capital Partners for between $800 million and $1 billion.

   The key part of Dodd’s story came from his interview with Florida State A.D. Mike Alford: “The future is—we’re looking at it—private equity. I think it will start at the conference level first if it doesn’t start with us first.” And if the Big 12 is worth $5 billion, one can only imagine the sort of valuations that the SEC and Big Ten might pursue…

5. R.I.P. Jerry West: When I saw the news that the Logo died yesterday, my first phone call was to legendary front office executive Rod Thorn. Thorn had known West since he was a teenager. They both attended West Virginia and competed against each other as players and general managers in the NBA. “Everything Jerry did, he did at an extremely high level,” Thorn told me, recalling West as both a player and a G.M. “He was a very, very talented person, who just happened to be one of the best basketball players to ever play the game.”

   West was a senior at West Virginia when Thorn was a freshman. At the time, freshmen weren’t allowed to play on the varsity team, but the two practiced against each other. Thorn recalled one practice when West walked into the gym wearing a stylish outfit. “I said to him, Boy, what a great-looking shirt. The next thing I know, he takes the shirt off and just gives it to me,” Thorn said. “He was a very, very generous person. If Jerry liked you, he’d do anything for you. He was a very loyal person.”

But Malone, restless as ever at 83, has also been looking to re-create the magic he discovered when Liberty Media—Liberty Global’s separate sister company—bought the commercial rights to Formula One in 2017. Malone is currently on the lookout for mismanaged and underperforming global sports businesses that he can turn around quickly—a strategy he employed earlier this year when Liberty bought the motorcycle racing series Moto GP. (That deal is still awaiting regulatory approval in Europe.) Formula E, which has had a difficult time keeping top sponsors engaged, fits this deal thesis neatly.

The other benefit, meanwhile, is vertical integration. Media companies don’t merely want to rent their programming. They want to own it. That’s why Fox Sports and Disney are part owners of the spring United Football League. It’s why ESPN launched the X Games in the mid-1990s. Malone also has some air cover as his team of operators dig into the business. As Sportico recently reported, Formula E’s former part-owner, WBD, signed a 10-year deal to broadcast the races just a few months ago.

X Games’ problems, in a way, came down to ESPN, which still holds a minority stake in the company. The network launched the action sports series in 1995 to provide live programming for its growing list of TV channels. And that, for better or worse, was purely how they evaluated it. “We were a TV company, and this was live television. That’s what we did,” Guglielmino recalled, before noting that the entity will now put more emphasis on marketing, commercialization, and event revenue. “MSP’s thesis is to really stand it up and operate it as a business. It's inspired by Formula One, from a focus on the athletes to its global calendar.”

That global calendar is crucial, not just to X Games, but also to Formula E and Moto GP. That’s because the audiences and the participants are global. “Each Formula One race has become an event unto itself,” Guglielmino said. “It's aspirational. I mean, our north star is to really: Create a global, thriving, durable business around the athletes. This is a way to organize the calendar and to make it year-round, both from a summer and a winter perspective.”

“I wonder if PIF will take on Tennis Channel and use it as a distribution arm for the WTA/ATP tours, and inject some investment into its streaming product and app. On top of the rights that Tennis Channel has lost, their distribution via linear and app/streaming is abysmal and doesn't help things.” —A self-described “layperson.”

“Question: If ESPN told Stephen A. to go seek his fortune elsewhere and centered First Take around newly signed Shannon Sharpe, do ratings decline that much?” —A sports business veteran