Jun 26, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity, our thrice-weekly private email on all the deals in the sports media business and the people who make them. I’m John Ourand, still bleary-eyed from staying up late to watch Bill Simmons’s live NBA Draft recap show on YouTube. I was relieved that Simmons et al. liked the Wizards’ Tre Johnson pick well enough. It could have been worse—like Marchand’s decision to run as independent in the New York City mayor’s race. 🚨 Pod alert: Coming off a rousing French Open, tennis has a lot of momentum going into Wimbledon. So I rang up Jon Wertheim, the SI scribe and 60 Minutes correspondent, for a chin-wag about the health of the sport. You can listen to our conversation on The Varsity this weekend. Also, make sure to listen to yesterday’s pod: Premier Lacrosse League founder Paul Rabil went deep on his league’s five-year media rights deal with ESPN, which included an equity stake in the business. Reading list: The Athletic’s Josh Kendall previews how A.I. may disrupt professional sports, and specifically the NFL: “In a league in which teams are constantly looking for an edge, the next big one won’t be coming through the draft, or free agency, but from artificial intelligence tools that are on the verge of transforming how coaches think about the game, and do their jobs … and maybe even which coaches still have those jobs in a decade.”

Player of the Week: Derek Chang

About 13 years ago, Harvard alum Jeremy Lin fatefully came off the Knicks’ bench and went on his two-week Linsanity run that created so much buzz that Time Warner Cable was forced to work out a deal with MSG Network, which had been dark on the cable operator’s New York system for more than a month. Liberty Media president and C.E.O. Derek Chang is hoping for a similar storyline following the theatrical debut of F1 this coming weekend. Liberty has been peddling F1 rights for months, contending with the contracting U.S. sports rights marketplace. The question, of course, is whether Brad Pitt has enough left in the tank to boost the sport like Lin helped the Knicks. Early reviews are mixed.

Down to the J.V.: NFL Players Association

Pablo Torre and Mike “F’n” Florio created headlines this week by uncovering the details of an arbitration ruling filed by the NFL Players Association regarding collusion and suppression of player salaries after Deshaun Watson signed his obscene $230 million guaranteed deal with the Browns back in 2022. Long story short, the NFLPA alleged that owners conspired to dissuade one another from offering such excessive amounts of guaranteed cash in a deal. This story doesn’t feel like it has legs—after all, the arbitrator didn’t find actual collusion—but it’s a bad look for the NFL Players Association, especially since the arbitrator ruled that a league committee indeed pushed for teams to reduce the amount of guaranteed money in their deals. As Florio wrote, “Why would the NFL Players Association not trumpet this ruling? The union should have been shouting it from the rooftops. They’ve finally proved that which had been suspected for years.”

The Starting Five

NASCAR’s streaming numbers: The hotly awaited viewership numbers for NASCAR’s just-concluded, five-race Rumspringa on Amazon Prime are in, providing grist for sports business execs who’ve been starved for data intimating how sports perform on streaming services. Sure, Thursday Night Football does well on Amazon… because the NFL does well everywhere. But what about regular ol’ NASCAR races? Last month, NASCAR chief media and revenue officer Brian Herbst told me that his sport was hoping for cable-ish numbers, which seems to be the current benchmark for sports that venture to streaming. Broadcasters, of course, still bring the most viewers by far.Alas, Amazon’s overall numbers were down big—dropping 18 percent compared to their comparative numbers last year on broadcast and cable. On the bright side, those numbers are cable-ish, and growth in the younger demo counts is a strategic win for a sport that’s been trying to attract younger fans for decades. The story doesn’t end here, of course. NASCAR moves on to TNT Sports for the next several weeks, before going to NBC. How will those TNT numbers measure up to Amazon?
Sunday Ticket blues: My partner Eriq Gardner offered a critical update on the ongoing antitrust drama over NFL Sunday Ticket in his latest must-read issue of What I’m Hearing+. “Last summer, a California jury delivered a stunning $4.7 billion verdict against the league, finding that its 32 franchises had conspired to bundle and overprice the package of out-of-market games—first via DirecTV, now through YouTube TV,” Eriq noted. “The plaintiffs made the novel argument that the NFL didn’t need to function as a monolithic broadcast czar, and that individual teams should be allowed to license their own rights: Let Jerry Jones cut his own deal to air the Cowboys in Manhattan. The jury bought in, before the judge threw it out, citing questionable testimony from the plaintiffs’ economic experts.”Eriq continued: “Now, the case is back on appeal, with the Ninth Circuit again being asked to decide whether the NFL’s centrally controlled media operation is a savvy commercial enterprise, or a slow-motion cartel. … The stakes are high for broadcasters, who have spent decades paying enormous sums to produce NFL games, only to see those same games repackaged and redistributed internationally on RedZone, and through Sunday Ticket. … Will the Ninth Circuit bite? Probably not. But if the plaintiffs prevail, the case could be heading for a second act at the Supreme Court, [and] Justice Brett Kavanaugh has signaled that he’s intrigued by the idea that the NFL is a lawful joint venture that lives and dies by the coordination of its teams and their media partners.”
“A knack for media”: The Premier Lacrosse League has an impressive roster of investors, including Joe Tsai, The Chernin Group, Arctos Sports Partners, The Raine Group, The Kraft Group, CAA, WWE, Thirty Five Ventures, and, now, ESPN. If you talk to any one of them, they’ll tell you that they’re as interested in supporting the league’s founders, Paul and Mike Rabil, as they are in professional lacrosse.On this week’s Varsity podcast, I asked the former Johns Hopkins legend Paul Rabil about what he’s doing to ensure the league can eventually scale beyond the operational guidance of himself and his brother. “When I think about the impact that we have as founders, it’s more akin to Dana White and the UFC than it is to Adam Silver or Roger Goodell,” he told me. “Dana is very much front and center of the UFC. And you see me that way. … There is an active passing of the torch that I’m doing. And there’s also a fundamental proposition for a former star athlete to stay involved in the game.” He continued: “Tom Brady’s doing it right now. Tony Romo’s done it. If you have a knack for media, and you enjoy it, and you work really hard at it, there’s an afterlife. … Yes, [my brother and I] are front and center. Yes, as startups, especially in the early 10 years of build, founders are highly dependent on their businesses’ success. But part of this deal with ESPN, and what we’re moving toward, is the transition to stars.”
Agent moves: My partner Matt Belloni also had a major sports media scoop in Tuesday’s excellent What I’m Hearing+ private email. “Josh Pyatt, the co-head of WME’s sports group, and one of the key agents helping athletes like Peyton Manning and LeBron James become meaningful Hollywood producers, is leaving the agency,” Matt wrote. “Not a shocker, considering WME, which is now privately owned by sports player Silver Lake, recently offloaded its basketball representation business to TKO’s Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro, and its football group to ex-Endeavor leader Patrick Whitesell. WME, in a statement to me, called Pyatt a ‘great agent’ but said it was ‘unable to come to terms on a new deal.’ Pyatt, a 22-year WME veteran, told me he’s under contract until the end of the year and is weighing a couple options. (Usual disclosure: WME reps Puck but not me personally.)”
L.A.’s R.S.N. dealmaking: My Monday item on the Lakers’ very team-friendly R.S.N. deal sparked a lot of feedback from subscribers wondering whether Charter actually could get out from under the $200 million-per-year deal. While there is an exit path for Charter, it seems unlikely. Charter, with its $54 billion market cap, doesn’t need to file for bankruptcy to opt out of the pact—but companies with that sort of obligations don’t play dirty pool. And doing so would have other implications. To wit: The company is already under contract to pay the Dodgers, the other team owned by incoming Lakers owner Mark Walter, $334 million a year through 2038.

And now, news and notes on a happy media marriage…

A Spulu Silver Lining

Venu, the sports frankenstreamer that died on the vine, did have one lasting impact on the sports viewing universe: It gave birth to skinny bundle offerings, like DirecTV’s, that were meant to compete against it.

John Ourand

Venu (née Spulu), which closed up shop back in January, may be a distant memory, but its legacy lives on. In fact, the fallout from the decision by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery to launch a joint venture sports streaming service recently took an interesting turn. Earlier today, DirecTV and Paramount signed an expansive programming deal, which will allow the satellite distributor to offer skinny bundles for kids, news, Spanish language programming, and yes, sports. That gives DirecTV’s skinny sports bundle access to all of the events on CBS Sports: the NFL, PGA Tour, Masters, March Madness, UEFA, etcetera. Distributors like DirecTV have been fantasizing about offering these kinds of skinny bundles forever, but were swatted aside by the media companies that didn’t want to cannibalize their best assets and undercut their leverage. For the most part, they have realized that the full bundles are pricing many subscribers out of the market. Prior to Venu, Disney forced distributors who wanted ESPN to also pay for National Geographic, Freeform, and everything in between. Same with WBD. Distributors couldn’t just buy TNT or TBS. They’d have to take TruTV, too. After Venu, media companies have gotten more promiscuous (and desperate) and allowed distributors to be more flexible with how they offer those packages. Plus, DirecTV still has around 10 million subscribers, which makes it appealing. “Some of our subscribers are giant sports fans who, if we provide a cheaper alternative to other things in the marketplace, could be enticed to stick around,” DirecTV chief content officer Rob Thun told me. “We’re trying to find ways to lower the cost and provide more flexible packages for customers so they can control what they buy based on the genres they like.” In the 18 months after Venu was first announced, DirecTV pushed for the rights to offer skinny genre-specific bundles as a retention tool. In reality, though, the Paramount-DirecTV skinny bundle seems like more of a test to see whether it can attract subscribers—especially since it costs $70 per month. Still, Thun wanted to get this deal done well before the NFL season in order to launch a marketing push. “We’ve held back from going full force in the marketplace, because we didn’t have all the rights for the channels that we wanted,” Thun said. Now that it has deals with big media companies, look for DirecTV to start marketing these skinny bundles more heavily.

From the Cheap Seats

On Amazon Prime’s rating releases: “Amazon reports viewership wins among younger demos because they are sold and monetized to a much greater degree than the 55-plus demo. Gains there also illustrate that Prime Video and its league partners are strengthening relationships with future generations of fans. In a sports landscape growing longer in the tooth, these advancements are newsworthy, not subterfuge, as one media executive recently howled in From the Cheap Seats.” —A cheeky Varsity Inner Circle subscriber who may or may not work for Amazon On the Pac-12’s CBS deal: “Isn’t it typical for conferences like the Pac-12 to announce the value of their TV deal, at least if it’s a good number? The conference initially talked about a deal in the $10 million to $15 million range per school, but it seems safe to assume that it’s looking at something less than that.” —A Varsity subscriber A note from the grammar police: “I had to write, to scratch the itch triggered by a pet peeve. Warner Bros. is a historic studio. You wrote ‘an historic studio.’ It’s only an historic studio if you’re saying it with a Cockney accent.” —A pettifogger On The Varsity’s Marchand jokes: “You’re in the middle part of the ‘funny > stale > amusing forever’ comedy cycle, where people want to hate on the Marchand bit. Don’t ditch it. It’s like the Kimmel ‘apologies to Matt Damon’ bit: It can live on forever if you persist.” —A strikingly handsome and fascinating Varsity subscriber

Have a great weekend, John

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