Sep 11, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand, in D.C. today packing my rucksack for England, where I’ll be taking part in the annual IMG X RedBird Summit in the Cotswolds next week. Let me know if you’re going to be around.

🚨Pod alert: Since retiring from the league last year, former QB Matt Ryan has turned into a star TV analyst with CBS. He’ll join the Varsity podcast this weekend to discuss it all: his new career, of course, as well as the NFL’s biggest off-field issues. Also, make sure to listen to yesterday’s episode, where Pablo Torre talked about leaving ESPN to start his own independent podcast, as well as his new deal with The Athletic. I’ve gotten a ton of great feedback on Pablo’s appearance. Subscribe to The Varsity here and here. In today’s issue, we’ll cover the good (TV ratings) and the bad (a pharma ad-sales red flag) from the NFL’s first week. Plus, top execs from ESPN, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime attended the NBA’s board of governors meeting in New York this week, and I have some fresh details on what went down. Okay, let’s get to it…

Players of the Week: Napheesa Collier, Breanna Stewart

As the WNBA girds for a bruising labor battle, one of its top competitors is expanding. Unrivaled, the three-on-three league that Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart launched last year, is adding two teams (for a total of eight) and a fourth TV window for its next season, which will run from January through March. Unrivaled execs bent over backward to say that the moves had nothing to do with the WNBA’s labor situation, but it’s clear that the salaries this league pays—which average well over $200,000—will help WNBA players take a harder line in negotiations.

Down to the J.V.: Christopher Ilitch

Eight men who worked for the Detroit Tigers have been accused of misconduct in the past two years, and the team has been hit with three federal lawsuits for age discrimination since 2022. The ball club’s alleged toxic work environment came to light yesterday in a bombshell report from The Athletic’s Brittany Ghiroli and Alex Andrejev. Ilitch, the Tigers C.E.O., reached out to local media after the story was published. And while he didn’t dispute any of the incidents, he did claim that The Athletic mischaracterized the team’s front-office culture.

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The Starting Five

NFL week one: The NFL media partners used a lot of superlatives while talking about the first week of the 2025 season. The Vikings-Bears game gave ESPN its second-largest week-one audience on record; CBS said it posted its highest week-one viewership since it picked up the AFC package back in 1998; NBC’s Cowboys-Eagles opener on Thursday and Ravens-Bills Sunday Night Football barn burner brought in the biggest combined audience since 2015; and Fox had the NFL’s most watched Sunday afternoon single-header in a decade.What’s going on here? Sources pointed to Nielsen’s new Big Data measurements as a contributing factor: TV networks estimated that NFL games received a 3 percent lift from the new system, but less popular sports didn’t see the same jump. However, the networks seem to have benefited more from other factors, like great matchups. Still, it’s true that the new measurement system has been helping sports across the board. Oregon’s 69-3 blowout win over Oklahoma State, which was carried on CBS, saw a 21 percent bump from the Big Data count over the regular Nielsen count, and Fox’s coverage of the NHRA registered a 40 percent bump.
TKO’s rights run: WME Group/TKO president Mark Shapiro, who just closed two of the year’s biggest media deals (UFC and WWE’s Premium Live Events), has intimated that he’s a few weeks away from closing another one—this time for Zuffa Boxing. I’m hearing that Zuffa Boxing—a joint venture between TKO and Saudi Arabian entertainment company Sela—is in the market with a package of 12 to 16 fights per year. TKO, for its part, is looking for a five-year deal. At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference yesterday, Shapiro said he’s “hopeful to have an announcement in the next two or three weeks.” (WME, a division of Endeavor, represents Puck.)Separate from the Zuffa Boxing J.V., Sela is planning to put on between two and four “super fights” per year. TKO would help produce and sell those events.
Pablo’s next move: Pablo Torre, who launched his Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast with Meadowlark Media in 2023, recently signed a licensing deal with The Athletic for the show. On yesterday’s Varsity podcast, I asked Pablo about how he envisions growing his podcast beyond that. Here’s what he told me: “This should live on whatever television is—and I say that not knowing what television is anymore. More than a third of our YouTube audience watches it on a physical television set. On some level, I’m just making a television show for people who watch digital video on televisions. I do think there’s a place to put this on some streaming service or a linear network.”Torre told me he could “do this show forever,” thanks to a staff he can’t live without. But he also acknowledged that change is the one constant in the media business. “The other lesson I’ve learned in my journeys through media since I became a fact-checker at Sports Illustrated is that something will get re-org’ed. There’s going to be a memo. There’s going to be a platform change,” he said. “[You find out] we pivoted to the wrong thing, and I’m five years too late instead of five years too early. I don’t pretend to know the future. I just believe that whatever this thing is now is malleable as a matter of concept.”
Paramount’s WBD play: When the news broke this afternoon that Paramount Skydance was preparing a majority cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, I immediately thought of my partner Bill Cohan’s must-read private email, Dry Powder. Yesterday, Bill highlighted a report from Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall speculating that a combined Discovery Global/Versant could bid on the Fox broadcast network and the two Fox sports channels, FS1 and FS2. Obviously there will be no Discovery Global/Versant merger if David Ellison’s master plan comes to fruition. But Cahall’s point still rings true: These days, the surest way for traditional media companies to grow is through sports rights. Paramount must be thinking the same thing, given TNT Sports holds rights to MLB, NHL, NASCAR, and March Madness, among others.
A short reading list: Panini can’t be happy with this Ben Strauss story in the Post detailing the company’s antitrust lawsuit against Fanatics that “has the potential to reshape the card business.” The battle lines are revealed in the story’s kicker: Strauss quotes Panini lawyers as saying that the case most likely will be settled, but it also quotes Fanatics C.E.O. Michael Rubin saying he will never settle.Meanwhile, this Journal report on Trump’s crackdown on pharma commercials, which accounted for $11 billion in ad sales last year, should raise some red flags for the TV networks: “The new regulations wouldn’t completely ban these ads,” Suzanne Vranica and Joseph Walker reported. “But some drug companies might reduce their TV ad spending if the administration mandated the inclusion of more side effects in advertisements, since spots would be longer and more expensive.”

And now, the main event…

The NBA’s Plural Marriage

As the NBA gathered media partners for its board meeting this week, one thing became clear: This year, viewing is going to be more complicated, more fragmented, and more expensive than ever before. Adam Silver wants to make sure that his media partners can work together amicably to mitigate some of the complaints.

John Ourand

Almost all of the headlines that emerged from the NBA board of governors meeting on Wednesday focused on the allegations that the L.A. Clippers circumvented the salary cap when the team re-signed Kawhi Leonard. In fact, at least half of the questions that reporters asked Adam Silver at a post-meeting press conference related to the scandal, even though the commissioner made it clear he had nothing new to add. (He’s “withholding judgment” until the league’s investigation is completed.) Regardless of whether Steve Ballmer knowingly funded a company that paid Leonard $28 million for a no-show job, the circus overshadowed one of the main agenda items of the meeting, which dealt with media issues.

But the media rights story is a big deal, too. Next month, the NBA will kick off its first season under its new 11-year, $76 billion media deal with Disney, NBCU, and Amazon. Naturally, ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro, NBC’s Rick Cordella, and Amazon Prime’s Jay Marine were all inside the room to discuss the new bells and whistles adorning their telecasts. But the three executives also wanted to demonstrate that they’re capable of working together to help fans find games—something that will be more difficult this season since broadcasts are spread across ABC (on Saturdays and Sundays), NBC (Sundays and Tuesdays), ESPN (Wednesdays and Fridays), Peacock (Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays), and Amazon Prime (Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays).

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This is no small thing. The history of sports media is defined by network executives bashing each other rather than working together. But Pitaro, Cordella, and Marine all spoke yesterday of the importance of discoverability—the corporate pablum they all use when they mean making games easier to find. “They talked about ways in which they’re going to seek to elevate the game this season, ways they’re going to market it,” Silver said afterward. “We talked with them, and among our owners, on issues around streaming, the opportunities that presents for our league over time to customize the telecast to do a better job engaging with our fans.”

The sport’s fans, after all, aren’t uniformly thrilled with the NBA’s multi-partner, decade-plus rights deal. In the past, you only needed a cable subscription to watch all the league’s national games. Now, fans need a subscription to Peacock and Amazon Prime, in addition to a pay TV package or a v.M.V.P.D. It’s not a situation that’s unique to the NBA. Most leagues have to deal with viewer complaints over this issue. Some officials in other sports have dismissed the griping—pointing to television viewership as evidence that fans are still finding and tuning in to games. But on Wednesday, Silver acknowledged that he takes the accessibility issue seriously, and admitted that it caused him concern as he negotiated the media deals last year. “This is a new world now of streaming media, and we’re paying a lot of attention to that,” he said. “It was one of the discussions we had with our media partners, not just the cost of the games—and I think most people are conditioned to paying a certain amount for high-value content—but also the discovery of those games.” That’s one reason that Silver increased the number of NBA games available on national broadcast channels from 15 in the old deal to 75 in the new ones. “To the extent someone wants to put little rabbit ears on their television, you can still get 75 marquee games in essence for free in the marketplace,” he said. He also pointed to team deals that have increasingly incorporated local broadcast television. “I never would have predicted this was coming 10 years ago, but a lot of our local games are moving back to broadcast television.” Of course, Silver nodded at the reality that as traditional media viewership has fragmented, younger viewers, in particular, are increasingly finding NBA content on platforms that the league has historically struggled to monetize, including Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. “This is a new world now of streaming media,” Silver said. “And we’re paying a lot of attention to that.”

From the Cheap Seats

On NFL RedZone ads: “This is an example of the NFL taking one step forward and two steps back. It’s an unneeded foot fault. Sure, it’s only one minute in seven hours, but isn’t that exactly the point? Why bother at all? What does one minute of ad time bring to the NFL that is worth the guff? Nothing. It’s just bad optics. Unless—and this is how the NFL does stuff so often—this is just the incubator approach to a much larger intrusion in coming years.” —A former DirecTV executive [Ed. note: As Peter Hamby pointed out to me, the NFL’s decision to abandon RedZone’s commercial-free premise has become an issue in at least one political race.]

On the new era of sports viewing: “Reading those descriptions of trying to watch sports in the U.S.: God, the future sucks.” —A Canadian Varsity subscriber On YouTube’s international NFL audience: “Didn’t the time of a night game in Brazil differ drastically from Netflix’s Christmas games? It feels like the start time basically cut out a lot of the global audience. If the NFL does an international package, I’d assume they’d all be targeting games with times that provide the greatest global audience.” —A researcher More on that international audience: “YouTube’s showing internationally was a reflection of the NFL’s global appeal. It dominates in the U.S., but it’s got a whole lot of work to do abroad.” —A journalist

Have a great weekend. See you Monday.

John

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