Sep 25, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand writing today from Puck’s spiffy South Tribeca offices. On Saturday, I’ll be in the Philly area for Villanova’s parents weekend. Most activities seem to be centered around tailgating before and after (and during?) the William & Mary football game. Will the pope make it?

On deadline: NBC’s carriage negotiations with YouTube TV are going so poorly that the network just started warning subscribers tonight that their channels could go dark on the distributor next week. The two sides are far apart on price. That’s normal during this stage of the negotiations—and fixable. But both sides can’t come to an agreement on how to treat Peacock. NBC wants the same type of deal that it offered Charter—allowing subscribers free access to the streaming service. YouTube wants to ingest Peacock’s programming within YouTube TV, thereby subsuming all the subscriber and viewer information. In short, this dispute could last awhile. And for YouTube, Disney is up next… next month. 🎧 Pod alert: MoffettNathanson’s Michael Nathanson joins the Varsity pod this weekend for a conversation on the biggest issues in sports media—the evolving media rights landscape, the ambitions of the streamers, and the strategies of the incumbents. We’ll be discussing all these topics again three weeks from today, when Puck and MoffettNathanson host our inaugural In the Arena conference in Hudson Yards. Listen here and here. 🚨 Speaking of In the Arena, tickets have been moving fast. Claim yours to hear from the NBA’s Adam Silver, RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale, Fox Sports’s Eric Shanks, Prime Video’s Jay Marine, and more. Click here or contact me directly to buy tickets.

Player of the Week: Pat McAfee

Yes, Pat McAfee has introduced several unwanted controversies to ESPN—from his defenestration of Norby Williamson to his role in promoting a false story about an Ole Miss coed. But those unfortunate incidents seemed like distant memories this week as Burke Magnus, ESPN’s head of content, sang the praises of his $17 million-a-year man on Richard Deitsch’s podcast. “Every commissioner wants to be on his show,” Magnus said. “Every athlete wants to be on his show. There’s a cool factor. There’s a relevance factor. … I could not imagine our daytime schedule without his show.”

Down to the J.V.: James Franklin

The Big Ten makes about $1 billion per year selling media rights to Fox, CBS, and NBC, so some folks were understandably pissed when Penn State football coach James Franklin took a jab at Fox for supposedly considering scheduling his team’s “white out” game in a noon window rather than primetime. Anyway, it didn’t happen. My sources have told me that Fox never considered it—certainly not this year, since the game will air on NBC and Peacock. Of course, Big Ten officials, including at Penn State, approved these media deals. I’m confident that the networks would be happy to cede some scheduling power to the schools in exchange for a lower rights fee, but that’s never happening.

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The Starting Five

TKO’s new deal: I’ve just learned that Paramount is likely to pick up rights to TKO’s new Zuffa Boxing league, with the announcement coming as soon as next week. This deal comes a little more than a month after TKO convinced Paramount to shell out $7.7 billion for UFC rights over the next seven years. Originally, TKO looked to bundle the Zuffa rights in the UFC deal, but ultimately decided to separate the two. “The UFC was such a big deal that we needed to close that out and give the announcement its own stage,” TKO president Mark Shapiro told me recently on The Varsity. “And we moved boxing to the back burner.”This would mark another significant deal for a company that David Ellison and Skydance took over less than two months ago. TKO and the Saudi Arabian events company Sela have been out with a package of 12-16 boxing events per year, plus two to four “super fights” akin to the Canelo Álvarez–Terence Crawford bout earlier this month. The undercard of those fights will feature Zuffa boxers. “That gives us a chance to promote our portfolio, our stable of fighters, on the undercard,” Shapiro said.
Crazy valuations: I was having coffee yesterday morning with a couple of sports business stalwarts when the conversation turned to potential red flags that should worry leagues and teams in the white-hot sports marketplace. They brought up the skyrocketing team valuations—$10 billion for the Lakers, $4 billion for the Blazers.Alas, if there’s going to be a market correction around valuations, it’s not happening this week. After I left the café, my phone buzzed with the news that the Bears have been valued at $8.9 billion after the estate of Andrew McKenna sold his 2.35 percent stake to the McCaskey and Ryan families, per CNBC’s Michael Ozanian. This morning, Ben Fischer reported that the Patriots are now valued at $9 billion after Sixth Street Partners agreed to buy 3 percent of the team from Robert Kraft.
The access era: The current sports documentary trend seems to be all about access, resulting in athletes exerting more and more influence over how their stories are told, often to the detriment of the viewer and, arguably, the athletes themselves. When I caught up with Words + Pictures’ Connor Schell at NASCAR’s Partner Meeting in New York yesterday, I asked for his take. Connor, of course, is the true O.G. of the sports doc genre—a mastermind of 30 for 30 and O.J.: Made in America. “You don’t need to have access all the time,” he said. “But we need to have the right access. We need to bring new fans to places that they don’t ordinarily get to go. We try to be thoughtful about the types of personalities we want to have on the show, and we want to make sure that everyone is a very willing participant. If you get those things right, you’re going to get enough real and authentic moments to make it work.”
The case for spring football: Spring football has never worked, from the original USFL in the 1980s to the folding of AAF six years ago. So I asked Dany Garcia, co-owner of the current UFL, why she thinks it’s a good place to invest her money. She talked about how the league’s ownership structure—with Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird, Fox, and Disney all on the cap table—offers an advantage. “We know this is a five-year-plus run to profitability,” Garcia told me on the Varsity podcast. “We have the capital to make a long-term investment.”But I was more interested in the part of her answer where Garcia spoke of the passion she has for the game, and the number of stories she can tell around players who still have something to prove. “Because it is a league, I am in a position to control the amount of storytelling that I want to do,” Garcia said. “We can focus on digital. We can tell stories. We can build I.P. We can work with brands. We are very fan-centric.”
Hulk lives on: The Hulk Hogan documentary that the late wrestling legend’s son sued to keep from airing is back on again. Puck’s legal genius, Eriq Gardner, shared the latest details in What I’m Hearing+. “Florida judge Tom Barber has cleared the release of Video Killed the Radio Star, a documentary on the Hulk Hogan sex tape scandal—the repercussions of which brought down Gawker and introduced media watchers to Peter Thiel,” Eriq wrote. “The order backtracked a restraining order he issued earlier this month after Nick Hogan, the late Hulkster’s son, filed suit. The judge’s change of heart came last week after he learned that Nick hadn’t been established as a representative of the wrestler’s estate, and that the sex tape excerpts in the documentary hadn’t come from Bubba the Love Sponge, who’d secretly recorded the original footage.”

Now, the main event…

The NFL’s Premature Exhortations

The league and its broadcast partners are weighing early renegotiations of their billion-dollar media deals, with a possible 18th game and new streaming packages on the table.

John Ourand

It’s common knowledge that broadcast executives have already started preparing to negotiate new NFL deals, even though the league’s contractual opt-out is technically still four years away. So a day after Roger Goodell told CNBC that the NFL could start renegotiating its media rights deals as early as next year, several executives signaled that they were ready to go. “Investors need certainty,” one of them told me.

One potential snag is the 18th game that the league has been pushing to add to the schedule, thereby allowing it to create another package to sell. But the league can’t extend the season without the support of the NFL Players Association, whose collective bargaining agreement runs through the 2030 season. Over the past year, the league hasn’t settled on whether it wanted to prioritize its media deals or labor agreement. Judging by Goodell’s comments, the league is focused on the media deals—which, of course, will set off a workstream with the NFLPA over the extended schedule. The NFL could also create a new package by taking games out of the Sunday afternoon windows, but it’s clear that the league’s ultimate goal is to carve any new package out of an expanded regular season. Compared to the NBA’s recent $76 billion, 11-year arrangement, the NFL’s $110 billion worth of deals over 11 years seems like it was signed during the Stone Age rather than 2021. NFL executives certainly took notice that some of the league’s partners had shelled out more for NBA rights than they did for the NFL. NBC, for instance, pays the NBA $2.5 billion per year versus about $2 billion for the NFL. Amazon, which pays the NFL about $1 billion per year for the rights to broadcast Thursday Night Football, will now be forking over $1.8 billion to Adam Silver. ESPN, for its part, pays the NFL $2.7 billion and the NBA $2.6 billion.

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Those are numbers Goodell won’t countenance for long, and for good reason. In a report released this morning, Guggenheim Securities’ Michael Morris noted that “the most recent NBA rights agreement has a rights cost per viewer hour of nearly 3x the current NFL average annual value (even before the incremental ratings strength this season). Our initial estimate sees an aggregate annual rights value of ~$18 billion versus the current ~$10 billion, with the addition of two new packages.” Morris continued: “While a sizable step up, the implied cost per viewer hour would remain attractive for distribution partners in comparison to other rights.”

For the networks, the early renewals mean that they will be paying a lot more for, basically, the same packages. But they also view these extensions as a way to keep the streamers at bay. Netflix and YouTube have now had a taste of the NFL and will almost certainly be interested in expanding their relationships.

The 18th Hole

Back in July, I first reported that the NFL would likely negotiate its media deals before its contracts opened up in 2030. That story was sparked by Skydance’s purchase of Paramount, whose NFL deal included a change-of-control clause that would have allowed the NFL to renegotiate those rights. As anyone who has ever done business with the NFL knows, the league uses its leverage. But in this case, it decided not to trigger the change-of-control clause, partly because the league was considering moving early on all of its media rights deals, not just the one with Paramount. Plus, with MLB and NHL rights coming up in 2028, if the NFL moves now, it can take money out of the market before media companies commit to those other leagues.

As Goodell told CNBC’s Alex Sherman, “The reason why we felt so strongly about the option is the landscape is changing. It could be a long-term deal with the benefit of having that stability and security of it. But I think the reality of it is it changes so quickly that you want to have the ability to move. I think those options are going to give us a lot of flexibility to potentially go earlier.” The timing is good for the league, as Morris pointed out. NFL viewership is up 10 percent through three weeks “despite ongoing high-single-digit declines in pay-TV subscriptions and low-single-digit declines in overall domestic television engagement,” he said. In truth, almost everything is good for the NFL, and these negotiations could turn into a true existential event for some legacy media companies. After all, they can’t actually be in the broadcast business if they aren’t in business with the NFL.

From the Cheap Seats

On The Athletic’s strategy: “I’ve been an Athletic subscriber since early 2018 when they hired Bob Sturm and Jamey Newberg for Athletic Dallas. So I call bullshit on NYT Co. C.E.O. Meredith Kopit Levien when she said [to Dylan Byers on his podcast]: ‘Beat coverage is the core of The Athletic.’ They’ve gutted beat writers. Reading that statement is infuriating exactly because it’s what once made The Athletic great. Beat writing was its advantage. I’ve only kept my subscription because it’s the easiest way to follow Chelsea FC from the U.S. (thankfully they spared Chelsea’s beat writers).” —A Varsity subscriber

On the legal profession: “In writing about the delay in MLB’s media contracts, you said: ‘In fairness, it takes many months for lawyers representing three mediacos to comb through those longform docs.’ Us global media company in-house lawyers thank you kindly for your sympathy.” —A tired in-house lawyer On Amazon’s Charlie Neiman: “Great pod with Charlie. I don’t know him, but I have followed his career since he overlapped with Will Mao at YouTube. He has had incredible impact. He’s someone who could be the Burke Magnus or David Berson of the future.” —A Varsity subscriber

Have a great weekend, John

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