Welcome back to The Varsity, and Happy Total Eclipse Day. I’m John Ourand.

The sports calendar is as busy as ever—the women’s Final Four concluded yesterday afternoon in Cleveland with the undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks defeating the Caitlin Clark-led Iowa Hawkeyes; tonight, Purdue takes on defending champions UConn for the men’s title in Glendale, Arizona; baseball is in full swing, the NBA regular season is heading to the finish line, and then there’s the corporate hospitality in Augusta this week. Still, I was happy with my decision to spend the weekend in Philadelphia for the WrestleMania LV extravaganza featuring the ringside return of The Rock, an impromptu performance by Lil Wayne, and other flourishes.

The place was crawling with Netflix executives, including Brandon Riegg and Gabe Spitzer. (The streaming giant takes over WWE Raw in January.) Bold-face names were all over the place: Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, and Nick Khan were there, of course. So was NBC Sports’ Rick Cordella, Fanatics’ Michael Rubin, A&E’s Elaine Frontain Bryant and Steve Koonin, the C.E.O. of the Atlanta Hawks… not to mention Puck’s own Jon Kelly and Tina Nguyen.

Make sure you listen to Khan on Matt Belloni’s podcast, The Town. Khan, one of the most plugged-in executives in the sports media business, offers unvarnished opinions on some of the industry’s biggest topics, including the NBA’s media rights talks and its plans to move the in-season tournament to January.

As always, this email is expressly for paid Puck subscribers. If you are forwarding this to a friend, I will ask Nick to have The Rock come to your office and body slam you in front of your colleagues. No Marchand jokes tonight as he is on a silent spiritual retreat…

Let’s get to it…

1. Another record: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but there’s a new women’s college basketball viewership record. Sunday afternoon’s championship game averaged 18.7 million viewers, up 89 percent from last year and 285 percent (!) from 2022. It was the most watched basketball game (men’s or women’s, college or pro) since 2019. It broke the previous women’s college record, which was set on Friday… which, itself, broke a record set four days earlier. The number is almost certain to dwarf whatever the men’s tournament hits tonight, even though UConn-Purdue is a great matchup.
2. Kudos for Carol: For more than three decades, ESPN executive Carol Stiff lobbied her network to invest more heavily in broadcasting and covering women’s professional and amateur sports. As the NCAA women’s tournament established viewership records for every round this year, executives inside and outside of Bristol wanted to acknowledge Stiff, who now runs the Women’s Sports Network. ESPN C.E.O. Jimmy Pitaro texted on Monday morning. Bob Iger, his boss, sent a note over the weekend. George Bodenheimer, the former ESPN president, offered kind words this afternoon.

   I caught up with Stiff this morning as she was preparing to leave Cleveland. With the sport’s biggest players, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, departing for the WNBA, I asked Stiff what the college game needed to do to continue the momentum. “It’s the support of advertisers,” she said immediately. “We need investors to come in and demand better windows for exposure. Until that happens, I fear that it could fall back. But I think the pressure is on now.”

   Readers of The Varsity know that advertisers are spending much more on women’s sports this year, yet Stiff told me about meetings where clients admitted that they didn’t have any sort of tangible strategy, even if they felt aligned with a sport centered on the notion of scholar athletes—female basketball players, after all, don’t usually leave school early for the pros, seldom employ the transfer portal, and haven’t fully exploited the opportunities afforded by N.I.L. “I kept hearing that this season was just a blip, and the women’s game is going to go south, back to where it was,” Stiff said. “I don’t think it is. You could feel the momentum.”

3. The Future of Paramount+: The tragicomedy surrounding the future of Paramount+—itself a microcosm of the tragicomedy surrounding the future of Paramount Global—appears to be nearing a surprisingly sanguine outcome. The unloved puppy seems likely to survive now that controlling shareholder and Puck Cinematic Universe denizen Shari Redstone has chosen the more complex David Ellison-RedBird-KKR deal over the $26 billion Apollo offer, despite the best advice of my colleague Bill Cohan.

   The group, which apparently envisions the linear-to-streaming transformation occurring over a multi-decade timeframe, does not want to abandon the O.T.T. business. At the very least, co-broadcasting opportunities will provide added value to advertisers and rights holders, particularly on the sports side. How does the bid move forward? The Times suggested a joint venture may be in the offing. My sources keep talking about Ellison’s connection to Oracle, the font of his family fortune, which they presume will power the service. That would certainly be an upgrade…

4. The Charter Way: I received inquiries from several executives who are confused about Diamond’s Charter deal. It is confusing, but it goes something like this: Less than a year ago, Charter’s Spectrum cable systems started offering a package called Spectrum TV Select Signature, which was an inexpensive threshold tier devoid of R.S.N.s. The hook was to induce cost-sensitive new customers to cable by not jamming their packages with high-priced channels they won’t watch. The regional sports networks were structured into a higher-tier package known as Select Plus (these names are pure poetry…). Customers who are already subscribed to the package with the R.S.N.s won’t see any changes—and, therefore, the R.S.N.s expect attrition to be manageable, at least for now.

   This structure highlights the differences between Charter and Comcast’s approach to regional sports networks. Charter is allowing for a more gradual step-down approach, wherein R.S.N.s expect to lose about 10 percent of their distribution in the first year. Comcast is deploying the more ruthless tactic that people in the business refer to as “the cliff method”—wherein the company changes the R.S.N. tier immediately and a given channel loses 30 percent of its distribution overnight.

5. MLB’s most team-friendly deal: My ears perked up this week when I heard Amanda Dobbins, co-host of The Ringer’s podcast The Big Picture, give a shout-out to The Varsity in the middle of a rant about the Dodgers’ regional sports network, Spectrum SportsNet LA, an offering from Charter. Dobbins’ monologue begins around the 25-minute mark, where she complains about paying hundreds of dollars for pay TV, not to mention taxes for the upkeep of the stadium, only to have to pay extra to switch to Spectrum Mobile if she wants to watch Dodgers games.

   The good news for Dobbins is that the Dodgers have the most team-friendly local rights deal in sports—one that can help it afford to acquire Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (and Tyler Glasnow and Manuel Margot) in a single offseason. The bad news is that the Dodgers have no incentive to change how the R.S.N. is delivered. Charter pays the team $334 million per year through 2038 for its local rights, no matter the number of subscribers. While Diamond Sports Group struggles to get out of bankruptcy and Warner Bros. Discovery got out of the business entirely, Charter Communications—with its $44 billion market cap—would have to file for bankruptcy to end this deal… and that’s not happening.

For all the rhetoric about the disparate content visions between Williamson and his old boss Burke Magnus—and there are some differences—the two executives simply deployed different management styles and eventually found it impossible to work together. Magnus, known for his collaborative approach, became Williamson’s boss about a year ago, when he was named ESPN’s president of content. No one would accuse him of being a micromanager, but the guy likes to be involved. Meanwhile, Williamson always operated like a field general: Over the past several decades, he’s been one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes executives in Bristol, and was used to making his own decisions and dealing with the fallout. He was trusted by ESPN’s corner offices, operated with independence, and was supported by a lot of people who work behind the scenes on studio shows. Williamson, they believed, had their back.

Of course, Williamson had accumulated this sort of gravitas and support over decades of work as a fixer and talent-whisperer. Since the 1990s, when he was the coordinating producer for Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick’s iconic SportsCenter, he’s been the executive that the ESPN corporate suite leaned on to make tough decisions. He demonstrated both his company fealty and no-bullshit mettle after George Bodenheimer tapped him, years later, to fix the fledgling SC6. The show, which featured the immensely talented hosts Jemele Hill and Michael Smith, was a gamble that didn’t pay off, and Norby had the unenviable job of recasting the program in public view. In the process, he endured a shitstorm of epic proportions, which provided a heat shield for top executives.

On some level, the recent McAfee dustup suggested that Norby might be assuming that position once again. But the talent-executive dynamic has shifted in the late-stage linear era. ESPN C.E.O. Jimmy Pitaro and Magnus were not happy about McAfee’s outburst, but I’m told they were sympathetic to his broader complaints. They viewed Williamson, who is considered inside Bristol as a linear guy, as insufficiently embracing the brand’s quest for new audiences and platforms. McAfee’s show appears on ESPN and ESPN+, and it’s also available for free via YouTube. And while the show has struggled with linear TV viewership—it has seen a drop from its lead-in, First Take—executives have generally compartmentalized the numbers as baked in to the multiplatform transition.

I’ve known these guys forever, and I feel like the most tangible example of their differing perspectives can be articulated with a single example. Later this fall, ESPN is planning to launch “Spulu,” a cable-derived sports streaming service with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery. Next year, it will also launch its flagship channel as a direct-to-consumer streaming app. Its future strategy goes far beyond traditional linear TV. When reports talk about the different content visions between Magnus and Williamson, this is what they are talking about.

Moreover, last Friday’s shift establishes Magnus as the one executive firmly in charge of the content division, and ESPN’s clear number two behind Jimmy—a position that has outsize significance these days given his role in the highly public Iger succession bake-off.

“I’m a Brazilian Puck subscriber. I really hate sports, but I love your private email. It may seem strange, but media is a topic I love, and your sports media analyses are phenomenal. Great piece about Skydance and Ellison’s interest in CBS because of the NFL. No one thinks there’s interest in Paramount+, but the agreement with the NFL also involves the availability of games on Paramount+. In the possible end of P+, could the ‘new’ Paramount make an agreement for these games to also be carried on another streaming partner, such as Apple or Amazon?” —A concerned Paramount+ viewer
(Ed note: The word from Skydance sources is that they will keep Paramount+, which will continue to carry NFL games.]

“I love the ‘Player of the Week’ feature. Great job giving Jeremy Carey and Optimum the credit they deserve.” —A former ad sales executive

“John, women’s basketball is a must-see. Watch WNBA team valuations after this crop of college players turn pro.” —A Puck subscriber