John Ourand: Nathan, I want to start with you. The overall state of professional golf right now—buy, sell, hold? Where do you fall on this? Nathan Hubbard: I’m a “sell” at the moment, but I think it’s a solvable problem. I’m not sure that the leading indicators of some of the decision-makers are particularly promising at the moment. But if you look beyond what’s right in front of your face, we just had arguably a top five statistical season of all time from Scottie Scheffler; we’ve had five of the best 50 seasons ever in the last three years between Xander [Schauffele], [Jon] Rahm, and Scheffler; you’ve got an incoming president who, despite how you feel about his politics, has a great care and concern for golf. And if there were obstacles to the world of golf coming together that were going to be related to antitrust provisions, you have a sense that the Department of Justice may be less inclined to slow those down. There are also some real stars on the women’s tour. Golf is as democratized a sport as there could possibly be, and it’s what’s wonderful about it and why there’s such interest. So I think, long term, there’s reason for optimism. But in the near term… man, I’ll tell you, I go to more golf events than anybody who’s not in the golf media or playing on the tour, and I can just tell from the ground, it’s a mess. Joe House: I’m kind of surprised to hear Nathan would sell, because my answer would have definitely been ‘hold’—with a caveat: I would sell the PGA Tour. To me, in general, the state of professional golf is still pretty compelling. The majors that we have coming up are all going to be really interesting. As I see it, the only entity in professional golf that really has a challenge in front of it is the PGA Tour. I think [this year] is a transition year. I would characterize the previous year of the Tour as a dud. The single biggest thing that happened in professional golf in 2024 was that the number one player in the world [Scheffler], who’d won the Masters one month previously, was arrested trying to drive into the golf course because he wasn’t recognized. Nobody knew who the hell he was; that sort of tells you something about the state of the professional golf world. Nathan, what do you mean when you say you go to these events and it’s a mess? Hubbard: I saw an argument this week that we can’t really judge how the PGA Tour is doing by the ratings, because lots of sports have had declines in ratings—and as we consume content through a bunch of different places, that there are better measures of the popularity of the sport. But when you actually go to these events, they’re ghost towns. There was nobody there; the sponsors weren’t trying; the fan experience was neglected and forgotten; it was clear that nobody cared. In any business, when you don’t care about the customer, it has cascading impacts all the way through the rest of your business, from your revenue to your cost base—and that’s what we’re seeing. There’s a lot of interest in the sport, but what’s missing right now is great product-market fit. A ton of interest in golf is one thing, delivering on something for the end consumer is another. The PGA Tour has made a lot of noise about bigger purses and shrinking the field in an attempt to whip up interest. Do you think that will help?  House: The whipping-up of interest isn’t going to come from increased purse sizes. We’re at this inflection point where the tour has created a two-tiered level of interest. It has eight so-called signature events, and then 34 or so non-signature events. So what are you telling your consumer with respect to those 34 events? What’s the compelling reason for a sports fan to sit down and watch the PGA Tour? There is some golf out there that people will tune in to. But the true conundrum for the Tour is the rebranding required to make folks put it back on their viewing agenda. Hubbard: It speaks to a larger issue. Phil Mickelson gets a lot of credit and a lot of blame. He gets credit, in my mind, for at least rightly identifying that the balance of revenue flows between the Tour and the players was out of whack—and that there was probably an opportunity for players to have more control and make more money. On the other hand, I think he gets a lot of blame for the way it was executed. Money is the question now, because there’s been an enormous amount of money that’s been invested in both of the major tours. And it’s not clear that the money that’s flowing to the players is justified by the business model. We haven’t yet proven that these guys are worth a $20 million purse every week. We haven’t yet justified that Scottie Scheffler—who, again, just had one of the top five statistical seasons of all time—was worth making $40 million. So when I talk about product-market fit, eventually this is going to catch up with you. Yes, the Saudis have other reasons for investing in the sport, because it gives them access. The PGA Tour doesn’t have the same situation. And in both cases, I’m not sure that losing money in perpetuity and hoping that you make it up in volume is a winning way to run a business. The PGA Tour made a very conscious decision to take investment from the Strategic Sports Group, who have a lot of people who are very skilled and gifted at business. The question is: Are they going to use them? Will those folks actually have the ability to put their whole palm print on the sport and make the dollars and cents actually work for the long run?

Are you surprised that LIV hasn’t been more popular than it is? House: No. I’m continuously surprised by the lack of planning. They chose, as their arrival on the scene, to be an antagonist to the PGA Tour—that was their core identity, not the product itself. It remains hard to follow. It feels contrived. It feels like an exhibition. Hubbard: I think LIV’s strategy worked in that it became a chaos agent and that it damaged the PGA Tour. The extent to which the idea was, Let’s break away, do our damage, and force them to the negotiating table, that worked. But when you’ve got a diluted field of athletes, there’s no compelling proposition. I just don’t think they were able to build something that anybody’s going to watch and care about in the current state—not to mention the U.S. and European regulatory issues that clearly have been a hindrance to the kind of progress that you might have expected by now. The Saudi Public Investment Fund’s proposed investment in the PGA Tour is apparently in front of the Department of Justice. With the incoming Trump administration, that’s almost certain to be greenlit. What do you expect from that? Hubbard: What we’ve heard is on the table is like a 6 percent investment—so in the grand scheme of things, relatively nominal. But what I expect to come out of that are some pathways for the top players on both tours to play together more often—either new events that they put together, or to take a handful of the top events from each tour and make it possible for players to go. I expect them to potentially reorient the schedule so that they’re not going head-to-head all the time, making the viewership consolidated around each of these events. But I don’t expect a full merger today. One last question. TGL—buy, sell, or hold? House: I can go first. I’m going to buy, because first and foremost, it is a vehicle by which the greatest golfer—the greatest golfer of my lifetime that I got to watch and enjoy, Tiger Woods—is going to be able to play, and he’s going to be able to compete. He doesn’t have to go out and walk seven miles a day, and he’s still going to be excellent. I’m confessing it, but I do think that it’s going to be innovative. It’s going to be well-presented, because the ESPN overlay means that it’s going to look professional, and it’s going to be something that we haven’t seen before. Hubbard: I’m selling the TGL at the moment, but I am rooting so hard for it, because I do think it’s the right idea. What are the ways that we can take this massive interest in the game of golf and make it accessible and democratized and turn it into new and interesting products? But I also feel like, if I wanted to play Tiger or watch Tiger Woods play golf, I would pick up the video game on my own screen and play it. So I feel like the guy shorting the housing market during the financial crisis—I’m either going to be really right or really wrong. So even if the TGL doesn’t ultimately go and succeed and have massive ratings, I think it is absolutely the right step in the right direction. House: Well, since I’m the “buy” guy, a couple quick observations: First of all, this is not going to be anything like green grass golf, where it’s shot, wait around, shot, wait around. There’s going to be constant action. And in that respect, I’m glass-half-fulling the hell out of this. The personalities of the guys are going to be shown through the competition. Because there is going to be a finite amount of time each of them are taking shots and working together as a team, what we’re going to see is them in their craft, not yukking it up and trying to make awkward jokes with Charles Barkley. They’re going to be processing, right? So we get to see how the world’s very best golfers process a new kind of challenge and work in a team concept. I think there’s a way it could work.

On NBA ratings: “The talk about NBA ratings is a sideshow. Regardless of the spin around Christmas Day, the ratings issue only validates a deeper, more fundamental product problem for the league: Young fans, even those who like the NBA, don’t watch games outside of the playoffs and special events like Christmas Day (provided they’re on broadcast). The NFL continues to thrive, in part, because the product is optimized for the way young fans like to engage: RedZone highlight viewing, fantasy, gambling, etcetera. Unlike the NBA, the NFL is not overly dependent on cable. The difficult truth for the NBA is that brands interested in reaching their fans can do so without buying ads in games but rather through YT highlights and player/league-related social media, podcasts, etcetera. Silver did an awesome job extracting maximum value from the market for the league broadcast rights, so he has time to solve this problem. But make no mistake, it is the termites-in-the-basement issue the league must address in the next few years.” —A media executive On the biggest sports media story of 2025: “Here is a question for exploration in 2025: Will ESPN Flagship just replace Venu? Venu was theoretically a temporary service, and the lawsuit almost guarantees it will never get started anyway. With ESPN Flagship about to launch, there have been rumblings of it offering perhaps Fox Sports and R.S.N.s as an add-on. If ESPN Flagship were $25 plus $10 for Fox Sports and $15 for all local teams in a region (maybe the price would vary in multi-team cities like New York), wouldn’t that $50 monthly package give sports fans what they really wanted from Venu? It really seems that Fubo may be hastening their own demise by pushing ESPN Flagship to be more aggressive about offering a comprehensive sports package.” —A Varsity subscriber On NBA ratings: “The NBA’s TV ratings are still down because of TNT, but they back-loaded their schedule with better games.” —A journalist

Here’s to a great 2025, John