Welcome to The Varsity, where my strategy of picking chalk worked perfectly until the
Final Four. Congrats to Puck’s newest V.P. of basketball operations, Amy LoPiccolo, whose official title is technically V.P. of people, for riding Michigan all the way to the top of the company’s bracket challenge.
Way back in November, I broke the news that NBC had been pitching the rights to this year’s Big Ten Championship to some of the streamers and held early talks
with Amazon. Initially, NBC placed a $70 million price tag on the game. The only hiccup: Any deal would have to be okayed by Fox, which controls the conference’s rights through its majority ownership of Big Ten Network. Well, it looks like Fox is about to pick up the rights to the 2026 championship game for between $45 million and $55 million, with NBC
getting the rights to an extra regular-season game, per Joe Flint on X. It should be noted that last year’s title game featured Indiana and Ohio State and drew more than 18 million viewers.
These days, every league is trying to court younger audiences that may not be able to sit still for two hours—let alone the two hours and 40 minutes that MLB games have
averaged since the dawn of the pitch clock. (An improvement, to be sure, but still the equivalent of sitting down to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai a couple times a week.) Last June, MLB invested an undisclosed amount in JomBoy Media, which has created a bunch of viral videos around the sport, and in tonight’s issue, the great Julia Alexander looks into how that deal is already showing signs of paying off.
Take it away, Julia… |
Stat of the Week: 60 Percent
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At the start of the NBA season, commissioner Adam Silver was praying that
the league’s perennial, widely criticized, and seemingly intractable tanking issue was behind him. Alas, that did not prove to be the case: Even more teams decided to keep their star players out of games this year to a) save their energy for the postseason or b) lose more games.
On any given evening, only 60 percent of the NBA’s star players are active in their matchups, per a new analysis from Yahoo Sports. That’s down from around 80 percent last year. So if more star players
are sitting out than ever, why are tickets still exorbitantly expensive? I have some questions for Michael Rapino… |
- New York’s PWHL Craze: On Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending a Professional Women’s Hockey League matchup between Sarah Fillier’s New York Sirens and Hilary Knight’s Seattle Torrent. More than 18,000 fans (the vast majority were women) piled into MSG to watch a tense shootout ending in a victory for the home team. It was the most attended PWHL game in the league’s three-year history, and another reminder that hockey’s
Heated Rivalry moment hasn’t ended.
Last year, in its sophomore season, the PWHL saw a 27 percent increase in overall attendance, a 100 percent increase in merchandise sales, and a nearly 70 percent increase in social media views. No, the league isn’t driving significant viewership yet. But nearly selling out MSG certainly means something. - Is sports betting headed to the Supreme Court?: Tracking the states in which so-called
“prediction markets” are allowed to operate is like playing whack-a-mole. After all, the more that Kalshi expands into sports betting, the more resistance it meets on the state level. Users placed more than $12 billion in trades during March alone, driven primarily by sports and—you guessed it—March Madness. That same month, Nevada’s gambling board won its case to restrict Kalshi’s local operations. But this week, a federal appeals court ruled that New Jersey can’t prevent Kalshi from
operating in the state.
I wondered whether these cases could help illuminate Kalshi’s eventual fate at the federal level, so I asked Puck’s resident legal guru, Eriq Gardner, for his thoughts on the New Jersey ruling. “This one seems more significant than others because it was the Third Circuit—the first federal appeals court to weigh in—and they broadly suggest that the power to police prediction markets falls with federal regulators, rather than state gaming
commissions,” Eriq told me. “That’s a position that, if adopted by other circuits and the Supreme Court, would give Kalshi its ultimate goal of being permitted everywhere.”
Eriq continued: “Will this circuit's logic preventing states from enforcing local gaming laws be adopted elsewhere? That’s unclear. Other decisions elsewhere in the nation have come down differently. Anyway, the prediction market on whether this dispute reaches the Supreme Court is going way up right now.” - A true A.B.S. victory: While most observers would agree that MLB’s recent rules tweaks, like the pitch clock and extra-innings ghost runner, have made the game more watchable, the jury is still out on this year’s biggest change: the automated-ball-strike system, or A.B.S., which allows players to challenge an umpire’s call. (To invoke the rule, a catcher, batter, or pitcher must repeatedly tap on his head, which has, predictably, led to plenty of
memes.)
All the hubbub surrounding this somewhat goofy new ritual isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As Bill Simmons recently noted on his Ringer podcast, it’s given fans yet another reason to tune in. But writer Chuck Klosterman, a cultural critic and erstwhile ESPN contributor, disagreed with Simmons, positing that incorporating technology into the officiating process takes away from the human element of the game. Both points are well taken, but I tend to
agree with Simmons: In this highly competitive sports ecosystem, this has been a home run for Rob Manfred.
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Speaking of MLB’s streak… |
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MLB’s partnership with viral video guru James O’Brien, a.k.a. JomBoy, reflects the
league’s increasingly sophisticated approach to winning over Gen Z viewers who aren’t watching TV: If you can’t beat them, join them. |
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A couple of years ago, I was introduced to James “JomBoy” O’Brien’s YouTube
channel after a die-hard Yankees buddy shared one of his now-famous MLB lip-reading videos in our baseball group chat. Overnight, O’Brien’s baseball content became an integral part of my daily online diet. Naturally, JomBoy also caught the eye of commissioner Rob Manfred: Last June, MLB took a stake in O’Brien’s channel, incorporating his viral videos into MLB feeds and giving the 37-year-old creator the green light to use MLB content on his channels.
As it turns out,
it’s been one of the more prudent bets that Manfred has made in his decade-long tenure atop the league. The commish, like his counterparts at the NBA, NFL, and NHL, knows that live sports is one of the last bastions of appointment television (which is why they can hold partners over a barrel while negotiating rights deals). They’re also all acutely aware that how fans engage with sports is changing. These days, getting young, cord-never audiences to pay for multiple streamers—let
alone cable or YouTube TV—can be a Herculean challenge. So leagues are increasingly turning to creators like O’Brien to reach new audiences.
While it’s still relatively early in the JomBoy–MLB marriage, the results have been promising. During last year’s postseason, JomBoy’s platforms racked up more than 2 billion views, a 76 percent year-over-year increase, per Morning Brew. That’s roughly in line with MLB’s own social media growth, with posts tagging the league up 60 percent
year over year on TikTok in 2025. Moreover, last year’s S&P Global survey on sports viewing in the United States found that MLB fandom ranked five percentage points higher than the NBA. Finally—and perhaps most importantly for MLB executives—last year was the first time since 2007 that arena attendance exceeded 70 million, a third consecutive year of growth driven largely by all-important Gen Z and Millennial audiences. |
In many ways, JomBoy represents the latest step in the long evolution of sports
programming. While Pat McAfee and Dave Portnoy are essentially modern alternatives to debate show/talker hybrids like First Take or Get Up, JomBoy offers something more comedic and digitally native. Like Madeline Hill and Charlotte Wilder’s Sports Gossip Show podcast, or Miles and Arch Shepherd’s popular social media commentary, JomBoy guides fans into the league’s
storylines and characters in an offbeat manner, an entry point for audiences who might not be interested in baseball, per se, but can still appreciate the dynamics between players and the more absurdist aspects of sports—widening the proverbial top of the funnel.
As leagues and networks white-knuckle the transition from linear to streaming, executives hope that this kind of unorthodox programming will mint new sports fans. Thankfully, plenty of data supports the notion. More than 40
percent of TikTok users who follow sports creators are more likely to tune into a live game, the company found last December in one of its internal studies. Meanwhile, nearly 30 percent of Gen Z users across TikTok and YouTube said shortform content increased their interest in a given sport, while more than 60 percent of Gen Z and Millennial users attested that they discovered a new sport, team, or player through TikTok, per A.I.-assisted content platform WSC’s 2025 annual report. And last year,
more than 40 billion hours of sports content was consumed on YouTube, which has become a fertile ground for league-creator partnerships.
Of course, partnering with someone like O’Brien isn’t going to automatically translate to millions of new viewers in Nielsen reports. The markers of success will largely manifest elsewhere, including attendance, social media following, and—even more intangibly—awareness in the cultural zeitgeist. Indeed, the investment represents a generational
bet. As Manfred told McAfee last year, the league was “wrong” to wait so long to partner with creators and let them use licensed footage when they were attempting to bring new audiences to MLB.TV. It was an admission that converting fans is vital, but the league’s sustained success will depend on cultivating and maintaining interest outside their walled gardens.
About that zeitgeist: It’s early yet, but the baseball vibes have already been pretty good this year, continuing an upswing
that started a few seasons ago. The pitch clock made games roughly 30 minutes shorter. Stars like Shohei Ohtani, Cal Raleigh, Aaron Judge, and Bryce Harper have electrified fans. Team owners have invested in mini-neighborhoods around their stadiums. The Dodgers are a genuine dynasty. Working with popular YouTubers and TikTokers has undeniably played a role in keeping the cultural momentum, too. And if the next version of ESPN
emerges from the McAfees and JomBoys of the world, executives are starting to finally realize that investing in them early is far easier than fighting with them later. |
Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday.
John |
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Puck sports correspondent John Ourand and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you inside the executive suites
and owners boxes where the decisions that shape the entire sports business are made. You’ll hear interviews with players, network execs, and everyone in between. The Varsity is an extension of John’s private email for Puck by the same name. New episodes publish every Wednesday and Sunday. |
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Ace media reporter Dylan Byers brings readers into the C-suite as he chronicles the biggest stories in the industry:
the future of cable news in the streaming era, the transformation of legacy publishers, the tech giants remaking the market, and all the egos involved. |
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