Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on everything about the sports business—and the executives who shape it. Happy first day of the NFL season to all who celebrate. I fully expect Christian McCaffrey to lead me to glory in Puck’s inaugural fantasy league. I teamed up with Puck’s engineering director Phil Roth. Our squad’s name? Obviously, it’s The Grinfuckers! (Drink!) Our goal: We just want to finish higher than Peter Hamby.

Puck superfans will be interested to know that Dylan Byers and Lauren Sherman, co-managers of The Byers Club, drafted Breece Hall with their first-round pick. (Byers Club picked up Aaron Rodgers in the 10th round, too.) Matt Belloni was busy writing What I’m Hearing and missed the draft…

The Varsity podcast’s lineup of heavy-hitters continues this weekend with WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert. The pod posts Sunday morning, and you’re not going to want to miss it. You can find my conversations with Peyton Manning and Jimmy Pitaro here and here. As always, this is a Marchand-free safe space.

Reading list: Before we begin, I want to highlight Bryan Curtis’s must-read piece on how Fox landed Tom Brady—starting with an early Sunday morning meeting at the Hotel Bel-Air two and a half years ago between Brady and his rep Steve Dubin and Fox Sports’ Eric Shanks and Brad Zager. “It was a meeting that I think changed my life forever,” Brady told Curtis.

Let’s get to it…

1. A DirecTV-Disney prediction: Judging by their media interviews, DirecTV and Disney executives appear prepared for a protracted skirmish that could deprive the satellite service’s customers access to ESPN channels for a long time. (The ESPN nets have been dark on DirecTV since the weekend.) But the consensus among my best sources is that DirecTV and Disney will reach an agreement by early next week, probably before the Jets-49ers Monday Night Football game, which will be simulcast on ABC and ESPN. The truth is that Disney can stand to hold out longer than DirecTV.

   What would an agreement look like? I expect that Disney will allow DirecTV to market smaller packages, like a sports bundle with the ESPN channels and ABC. In fact, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro told CNBC that Disney already offered that package to DirecTV. I also expect that the deal will be finalized once Disney moderates its minimum penetration requirements for other channels. In his own CNBC interview, DirecTV chief content officer Rob Thun said that Disney attached too many conditions to its skinny bundle offer, including minimum penetration requirements. “That’s not what they gave themselves in Venu,” he said, invoking the original sin of the au courant bundling wars.

2. Collateral DirecTV damage: DirecTV Stream, the company’s virtual MVPD, is a particularly acute victim in this fight. While DirecTV can still stream local ABC channels not owned by Disney during the negotiating standoff, its streaming entity cannot, because of a decade-old agreement. Alas, some of those local affiliates not owned by Disney are caught in the crossfire of this skirmish.

   Yesterday, Nexstar C.E.O. Perry Sook railed against that decision during a talk at the Citi 2024 Global TMT Conference. My friend Ted Hearn has a more thorough review of Sook’s remarks on his Substack, Policyband.

3. ESPN layoffs: Last week, I reported that ESPN’s highest-ranking female production executive, Steph Druley, was among the half-dozen executives defenestrated as a result of the company’s recent reorg. Today, I found out that Nate Ravitz was also a casualty. Only two years ago, the 17-year veteran was promoted to senior vice president of digital content and audience expansion—a job where he oversaw more than 200 people. During his tenure, Ravitz helped launch the ESPN+ streaming service and was involved in big streaming events like Monday Night Football and College Football Playoff. Most recently, he was involved in ESPN’s fantasy and sports-betting businesses.
4. WBD’s sports strategy, cont’d: Last week, after ESPN signed its 12-year, $2 billion extension with the U.S. Open, many in the industry took note of its option to sublicense some of the tournament’s first-week matches to another linear TV home. Immediately, all attention turned to Warner Bros. Discovery, which recently sublicensed a couple CFP playoff games from ESPN and is desperately trying to add whatever sports rights it can after losing the NBA—the French Open, the Big East, Mountain West football, the Savannah Bananas, etcetera. And just yesterday, Golf Week broke the news that it would carry a new version of The Match pitting PGA Tour players (Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler) against LIV players (Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka). My sources tell me that ESPN and WBD have not started talking about U.S. Open rights yet, but it’s only been a week.
5. R.I.P., Jim Riswold: Riswold, an advertising executive for Wieden + Kennedy, was the creative genius behind the Nike ads for superstar athletes like Michael Jordan (“Spike and Mike”), Tiger Woods (“Hello World”), and Bo Jackson (“Bo Knows”). He died last month. This Times obit is well worth a click.

   My favorite Riswold story is about those Jordan-Spike commercials. Riswold was inspired by Spike Lee’s Mars Blackmon character in his 1986 breakthrough film, She’s Gotta Have It. Blackmon, as you may recall, was so obsessed with his Air Jordans that he left them on even during his most intimate moments. “When Mr. Riswold saw the movie, he later said,” according to the Times “‘It was like, that’s an idea, that’s an advertising campaign.’”

The only turd in this golden punchbowl, I suppose, has been the NFL’s ongoing, unsuccessful attempt to offload NFL Media, the entity that consists of the NFL Network, NFL RedZone, and the league’s fantasy business. Three years ago, when the league put NFL Media on the block, many expected a frothy market. After all, despite the decline of the linear TV business, every company wanted to work with the NFL. At the time, nearly every mediaco considered cutting a deal, some more seriously than others. Earlier this year, ESPN was reportedly in advanced talks to take control of NFL Media in exchange for the league taking an equity stake in the sports company. (Of course, ESPN is owned by Disney, and the deal wasn’t going to be simple.)

In the meantime, my sources are telling me that the NFL Media deal is decidedly on the back burner. And while the ESPN talks haven’t formally ended, many outside executives have assumed that the deal was dead. Despite all that interest years ago, it’s unclear if any other suitors are out there. Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube don’t have much use for a linear television channel—especially one that’s in only 48.5 million homes, according to Nielsen’s latest figures, and has made a series of cost-cutting moves, from getting rid of high-priced talent to ending popular shows and moving its popular morning show Good Morning Football across the country. I’m told that the NFL never seriously brought up any kind of NFL Media sale as it talked with Skydance executives during the Paramount Global sale process.

Just a few years ago, NFL Network’s distribution was pushing the 70 million mark. But, alas, it’s hard to sympathize with a league that’s about to start the second-year of its decade-plus deals, which provide precisely the sort of cushion to absorb such an annoyance.

“DirecTV has long been the backbone for sports bars across the U.S., offering packages that other providers just can’t match for commercial businesses. I know the complexities involved. However, seeing how this situation affected my wife’s pub—a small business that fought to stay afloat through the pandemic—hit close to home. The disappointment in the room was palpable, and I realized her pub’s experience wasn’t unique. Thousands of bars across the country likely faced the same frustration, as loyal patrons had to scramble for other options to catch a game that should have brought people together. It’s moments like this that underscore just how far-reaching these disputes can be, even down to local businesses that have been part of the fabric of their communities for generations.” —A producer

On my podcast interview with Jimmy Pitaro: “Why was Jimmy Pitaro so offended by you calling ESPN a ‘network’? Doesn’t the ‘N’ in ‘ESPN’ stand for network? Is Pitaro planning on a rebrand?” —A Varsity subscriber

On Pitaro’s high-school days: “I loved listening to your podcast with Jimmy. I never shared with you the photos in our high-school yearbook that showed Jimmy as ‘best looking,’ ‘best physique,’ and some other attribute that we were all envious about. But when you brought up that your producer Bobby Tabaddor knew Jimmy from school and spilled the beans, I just had to laugh. Please ask Bobby if he remembers me from high school. If so, tell him I said hello.” —Pitaro’s high-school classmate

[Ed. note: Bobby says hi.]