Mar 30, 2026

Welcome back to The Varsity, where I am celebrating the robot umps who made these two call reversals on the same at bat on Sunday and helped secure a victory for my Orioles. Speaking of robot umps, I want to nominate Sam Blum for the MLB story of the year so far: His recent missive in The Athletic documented how players have collectively shrunk by 20 feet now that the league needs more-accurate height measurements to manage the robot umps. Six MLB players dropped three full inches each on the official stat sheets.

Before we begin: Check out Gayle King’s interview with Michael Jordan from yesterday’s CBS Sunday Morning that focused on the GOAT’s NASCAR era. Jordan, who began to comprehend the sport’s lopsided and executive-heavy financial structure early in his ownership tenure, said he realized he needed to sue NASCAR almost as soon as he got involved with the league. “It was wrong,” he said. “This sport was not set up for success, long-term, for the individuals involved in the sport. Now, up top—yeah, they were making a good living.”

Pod alert: ESPN’s Jeff Passan joins the Varsity podcast on Wednesday to offer a season preview of everything from MLB’s new media deals and its impending labor crisis to, of course, the robot umps. Also, make sure to listen to yesterday’s podcast: Top ESPN exec Susie Piotrkowski presented the business case for why media companies should invest in women’s sports.

This issue was created with contributions from Curtis Rowser.

Also mentioned in this issue: Roger Goodell, David Berson, Hans Schroeder, James Earl Jones, and more…

The Triple Play

Aussie rule: A couple of weeks ago, the NFL drew a lot of interest from media companies eager to secure its stand-alone Week 1 game in Melbourne. YouTube was a serious contender, as was Fox—which, of course, is led by a certain all-powerful Australian media family. Netflix, however, showed little interest, even as it remained keen on expanding its NFL slate. Ultimately, the league packaged the Australian matchup with other regular-season games, including one scheduled for Thanksgiving Eve—and The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Netflix is now interested in acquiring those two games to go along with its two Christmas games.

Tomorrow, the NFL’s top media executive, Hans Schroeder, will brief team owners on the status of that package (which could have up to five games) and the new windows the league is considering (such as the Thanksgiving Eve one). Plus, owners are expecting an update on where things stand around the league’s broader media rights negotiations. Don’t expect media news to emerge from the owners’ annual meeting in Phoenix, which is being held today and tomorrow. Stay tuned.
In defense of “chalk”: Just four years ago, in 2022, Saint Peter’s made a Cinderella run to the Elite Eight, where it eventually lost to UNC by 20. Within weeks, its coach had departed for a better job at his alma mater and eight players followed suit. Welcome to the modern era of college basketball, where N.I.L. and the transfer portal have largely vaporized these sorts of Cinderella stories.

But that’s just fine with media executives! Teams like Michigan, UConn, Arizona, and Illinois—all advancing to next weekend’s Final Four—are far more reliable ratings drivers than Saint Peter’s or George Mason, which made its improbable Final Four run back in 2006. The numbers bear that out. This year, CBS, TBS, TNT, and TruTV set viewership records in the first two rounds, with games averaging more than 10 million viewers. Audience numbers from last weekend’s Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight are expected to continue that trend.

Three weeks ago, at the start of the NCAA tournament, CBS Sports president David Berson emphasized that the event would retain its status as one of the industry’s top assets even without the Cinderella pixie dust. The tournament remains unpredictable, with plenty of upsets and do-or-die moments, which ultimately drives ratings. Look no further than UConn’s own stunning victory over an obscure Carolina trade school yesterday evening.
Women’s Monday Night Football: When Sunday Night Baseball departed ESPN last September after more than three decades, it opened up a valuable programming void. Starting June 21, the network will fill that gap with Women’s Sports Sunday. Susie Piotrkowski, ESPN’s V.P. of women’s sports, walked me through the decision on yesterday’s episode of The Varsity. “For the better part of three years, I worked on our women’s sports strategy—which is about mainstreaming women’s sports across our ecosystem, maximizing our rights, and creating more opportunities to generate revenue. This fits squarely within those pillars,” Piotrkowski told me.

ESPN holds a deep summer portfolio of women’s sports—WNBA, USL, Little League Softball, and NWSL—and Piotrkowski & Co. saw a chance to consolidate that inventory into something much bigger. “The majority of our women’s sports inventory and premium positions are sold out. To keep growing, we needed new, ownable opportunities—because that’s what the marketplace told us,” she said. “I knew we had excellent programming, and that we could create consistency and generate real revenue. Of course, we are home to Monday Night Football—this is the women’s sports version of Monday Night Football.”

And now for the main event…

Their Eyes Were Watching Goodell

The NFL’s bid to fix blown calls with centralized, A.I.-assisted officiating—framed as insurance against a referee lockout—risks morphing into a far messier test case at the intersection of gambling, union power, and the future of human labor on the field.

Eriq Gardner

When NFL owners, team executives, and coaches descend on Phoenix this week for the annual league meeting—equal parts country club reunion and back-channel trade summit—they’ll do what they always do: tweak the rulebook. But alongside the usual tinkering with kickoffs, the competition committee will consider a proposal allowing the league office to immediately correct “clear and obvious” officiating mistakes during the upcoming season. The rationale is to provide coverage for a potential referee work stoppage if collective bargaining talks go sideways; everyone remembers 2012, when replacement refs turned Mondays into a weekly national grievance session.

But here’s the more interesting scenario: Having given itself something close to deus ex machina authority, the league could use this moment to expand the role of A.I. in officiating. Back in October, Roger Goodell said the NFL was exploring how A.I. could improve calls. This rule change, along with the league’s ongoing efforts to centralize officiating authority in New York, could be the on-ramp.

That’s where things could get very messy. Start with integrity: This is a league deeply intertwined with legalized sports betting, where milliseconds and inches already move markets. Layer in A.I.-assisted corrections, and you could invite questions about accountability, audit trails, and who ultimately “made” the call. Then there’s transparency: If a team challenges a decision, what exactly gets preserved and disclosed? A model output? The underlying data? The parameters?

Most immediately, though, the thorniest issue is labor. The referees’ union could plausibly argue that this isn’t a mere procedural tweak, but rather a material change to working conditions, performance evaluation, and even job security. That would push the issue squarely into mandatory bargaining territory—and tee up a potential Section 8(a)(5) refusal-to-bargain claim at the National Labor Relations Board.

Darth Vader Theory

It would be a bold, but not unprecedented, claim. Just last year, after Llama Productions, an Epic Games subsidiary, used A.I. to generate Darth Vader’s voice in Fortnite, SAG-AFTRA argued under Section 8 that the company had unilaterally altered terms and conditions of employment without notice or bargaining. Llama Productions withdrew the complaint after a deal was struck with James Earl Jones’s estate, but the theory is now out there.

You can imagine a similar test case emerging here, with Goodell’s lawyers pointing to existing C.B.A. management-rights clauses or replay provisions, and arguing that A.I. sharpens existing oversight and quality control. The referees’ union would counter that A.I.-assisted intervention reduces an already shrinking corps of humans to little more than rubber-stamping signals from New York. That, they might insist, is a material change that should be prenegotiated.

If this gets to the federal labor cops, the action would move to Washington—in the middle of an election cycle, and against the backdrop of a White House that has been broadly pro-A.I. but perhaps newly sensitive to voter anxiety about job displacement. In short, what looks like a simple fix for blown calls could end up becoming the first real collision between artificial intelligence and labor law. Now that’s a topic worth discussing in Phoenix.

In the meantime, over the weekend, the league reportedly issued a memo to teams calling for improvement in officiating, chiding the union for resisting positive changes, and cautioning everyone not to comment publicly on this “sensitive” matter. Hmm.

From the Cheap Seats

Retrans redux: “A note to the former NAB spokesman who was in Cheap Seats on Thursday. You made my point. Anyone with an antenna can get broadcast stations for free. But local stations and their network partners are collecting up to $12 per month per station from cable and fiber distributors thanks to antiquated retransmission consent laws. If milk prices mirrored retrans increases over the past 20 years, milk would cost more than $96 a gallon!” —A cable guy

On NFL negotiations: “You said there’s a chance that the networks simply just hold out until 2030 and not pay the NFL an extra billion per year. If that’s the case, and they continue to renegotiate with CBS and get the extra billion per year, wouldn’t CBS have an M.F.N.? There’s no way CBS will be the only ones that pay an extra billion per year.” —A Varsity subscriber

[Ed. note: On account of Skydance’s recent acquisition of Paramount, CBS would be uniquely subject to a change-of-control clause that would allow the NFL to open up its deal right away. The other networks are simply preempting the NFL’s opt-out option after the 2029-30 season.]

On Netflix’s MLB debut: “I fully expect Netflix’s MLB viewership to be good, so Netflix certainly deserves some props. But a lot of it is MLB momentum, too. I really think there’s going to be a generally strong MLB story across networks to start this season.” —A media executive

More on Netflix’s MLB debut: “The game wasn’t even listed on my Netflix home page via my television. I searched for the Yankees, the Giants, MLB. Nothing. If it’s such an event, shouldn’t it have been pasted to the home page?” —A New Jersey–based Varsity subscriber

[Ed. note: Sounds like the algo of a Love Is Blind viewer.]

On NCAA basketball coaches: “Based on the UNC precedent, I expect Duke to be firing Scheyer any day now.” —A Varsity subscriber

Have a great week. See you tomorrow,
John

Join Puck’s chief political columnist, John Heilemann, as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you beyond the headlines with the people who shape our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected… and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.

An essential, insider-friendly Hollywood tip sheet from Matthew Belloni, who spent 14 years in the trenches at The Hollywood Reporter and five before that practicing entertainment law. What I’m Hearing also features veteran Hollywood journalist Kim Masters, as well as a special companion email from Eriq Gardner, focused on entertainment law, and weekly box office analysis from Scott Mendelson.

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