Jun 09, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity, my thrice-weekly email on the money andpower behind the sports business. In the wake of Zaz’s decision to spin out the WBD cable assets, Puck has moved to DEFCON-1: Expect genre-defining reportage and analysis in the coming days from Matt Belloni on the Hollywood implications (sign up here for his What I’m Hearing email), Bill Cohan on the financial structure of the deal (ensure you never miss his Dry Powder), and Dylan Byers on what this means for CNN. (Dylan’s In the Room moves the media markets.) Tonight, I’m focusing on how the spinoff will impact TNT and WBD’s sports media rights packages. Tomorrow, Julia Alexander will envision the role that sports media will play in GunnarCo. Ratings guesses: Thanks to everyone who sent in their predictions for NBA Finals ratings. The most optimistic guess has ABC averaging 11.2 million viewers for the series, which would be slightly down from last year’s Boston-Dallas matchup. Most of the emails predicted a short series. If it winds up going six or seven games, I’d take the over. Meanwhile, ABC averaged 8.91 million viewers for Game 1—the worst Game 1 results since 2021. As usual, the winner gets one of Marchand’s original signed water lilies. Pod alert: Top WBD executives have a ton of respect for LightShed Partners’ Rich Greenfield, so I thought this would be a great week to get him on the Varsity podcast. That episode will post on Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, make sure you listen to yesterday’s episode, where my guest was Len Perna, one of the sports business’ top headhunters. Len gives a clear-eyed assessment of where college sports is headed, and he’s playing an active role in the transformation.

The Starting Five

Caitlin, where art thou?: We’re starting to get an idea of just how important Caitlin Clark is to the WNBA’s media partners. Viewership for the league’s national TV games is down 55 percent over the two weeks that Clark has been out with a quad injury, per Nielsen numbers. The nine nationally televised games prior to Clark’s injury averaged 1.02 million viewers across its media partners. In the seven national TV games since her injury, that figure has fallen to 463,000. The drop-off doesn’t come as a big surprise, since women’s college basketball experienced a similar ratings downturn the year after Clark left—despite a plethora of other generational talents in the sport. Viewership for the NCAA women’s basketball tournament was down 45 percent from the previous year, and the championship game was down 55 percent.
Comcast says YES: Back in March, when YES Network and Comcast agreed to keep the Yankees’ regional sports network on an expanded basic tier, I wondered if this was a one-off deal—the result of Trump hectoring the cable company to help out his buddy, Randy Levine, who happens to be the Yankees’ president and runs the network—or a new paradigm. Had the ultimate grinfuckers been seduced by the relative virtues of the glide path over the cliff path?Dear reader, it’s now looking like a one-off, and the cliff path is alive and well. After an eight-month battle, Comcast has placed the Chicago Sports Network—which owns the rights to the White Sox, Blackhawks, and Bulls—on a digital tier. CHSN owners, it seems, didn’t have the same political might. Meanwhile, YES Network’s extension only runs through this MLB season, which means that we’ll restart this ritual again in about four months.
The OneTeam F.B.I. stakeout: Last week, several news organizations reported that F.B.I. agents had questioned MLB and NFL players about OneTeam Partners, a licensing business founded six years ago by the NFLPA, MLBPA, and RedBird Capital to help athletes secure media and N.I.L. deals. ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., one of the reporters who broke the story, joined me on The Varsity last week to explain what might come next.According to D.V.N., the F.B.I. might be looking into whether former NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith and MLBPA executive director Tony Clark received improper compensation around the time when RedBird Capital exited from OneTeam Partners to the tune of $800 million, in 2021. “If they find evidence of that—and obviously, the feds have a lot of tools at their disposal where they can track where the money is—this could get very serious, very quickly,” Van Natta told me. “I want to be really clear: I don’t know that Tony Clark or DeMaurice Smith are targets of the investigation. It’s just way too early.” For the record, OneTeam told Van Natta and Jeff Passan that it will cooperate with the investigation, and also: “We want to emphasize that OneTeam is not the subject of the investigation and has not been accused of any wrongdoing in any way.” Similarly, the MLBPA told the reporters that it has not heard from the F.B.I., but “we intend to cooperate fully with any investigation.”
Professionalizing college football: About 15 months ago, I wrote about a plan to professionalize college football, hatched by TurnkeyZRG’s Len Perna and backed by some of the biggest names in the sports business—people like the NFL’s Brian Rolapp, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, and 76ers owner David Blitzer. Their plan was to create a single college football league to gain more leverage in media rights and sponsorship negotiations, and set up an equitable system for compensating players.Alas, that idea has been on ice for a while, and Perna admits he was three to five years too early with the proposal. On this week’s Varsity podcast, Perna outlined one of the challenges college football will have with collective bargaining. “The schools in the SEC have a lot of politics wrapped around not bargaining with a union of student athletes. There’s a lot of history around right-to-work states and the boards of those SEC schools,” he said. “I don’t think that the SEC will ever really be comfortable with collective bargaining with college football players. But I am very confident that schools in the Northeast, the Midwest, all throughout the Big Ten region and out West, will land on collective bargaining as a way to create a package of work rules that govern the transfer of talent—the transfer portal, a salary floor, a salary cap—all the things that create competitive balance in pro sports. I think that schools in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West will wind up playing in one league that has collective bargaining, and schools in the South will play in a separate league that won’t have collective bargaining. He continued: “Ultimately, they’re going to have different cost structures because the schools with collective bargaining will be able to budget plan and predict their costs. And the schools in the South that don’t have collective bargaining will be in a perpetual free agent marketplace being driven by college football agents that will be driving up the cost every year. Those two leagues will look so different that I think the wedge issue is not a media issue. I think it’s a collectively bargained issue.”
Super Bowl ad sales: Yes, TV advertisers say that they are concerned about the effect tariffs will have on the economy toward the end of the year. But those same advertisers appear to be falling all over themselves to make sure they aren’t left out of the Super Bowl, broadcast this year on NBC, per this report from Variety’s Brian Steinberg that says the game is a near sellout. NBC’s initial ask was $7 million for a 30-second spot. Plus, advertisers would have to commit to buy time elsewhere on NBC’s schedule. The story’s money quote, delivered by an ad buyer: “Are the broadcasters being very aggressive in sports? Absolutely. Are they getting what they want? No, but they’re still getting more than what we were hoping to give them. And basically, after sports, there’s no rush for any of it.”

Top Gunnar

Amid the seismic news of the WBD divorce, Zaslav’s hodgepodge of post-NBA sports assets will find themselves in an excised cable company run by a severe belt-tightener. There are worse options, right? Right?! Actually, yes.

John Ourand

As recently as yesterday, TNT Sports’s place in the U.S. media rights firmament seemed at least momentarily reassured. Yes, the network recently bid adieu to its multidecade relationship with the NBA, and fans will soon delight in seeing Chuck, Kenny, Shaq, and Ernie on ESPN, of all places, but TNT Sports seemed to be gaining momentum. A successful fortnight broadcast of the French Open, up 23 percent year over year, culminated in a women’s final featuring the American star Coco Gauff. And the men’s final—an epic five-and-a-half-hour, five-set match—already seems destined for history. Meanwhile, news broke over the weekend that TNT Sports would be sublicensing more College Football Playoff games from ESPN. And the network is less than three weeks away from producing the first race of its seven-year NASCAR deal. And yet, all of the oxygen was sucked out of the room around 7:30 this morning when parentco Warner Bros. Discovery announced, after endless speculation, that it would be splitting the company in half. Well-compensated quarter-zip enthusiast David Zaslav would be making off with the glamour assets—the film studio, HBO, the streamer, and all the Warner Bros. I.P. His longtime C.F.O. and financial bad cop, Gunnar Wiedenfels, would be taking charge of the declining cable networks after the divorce, set to be finalized in the middle of next year. The split had been near-assured ever since Zaz reorganized the company into these separate units months ago. Indeed, Zaz and Gunnar’s multiyear plan of treating WBD like a public-market leveraged buyout—paying down debt while improving EBITDA margins—had never quite worked out. As recently as last month, an analyst from S&P Global prognosticated—before downgrading the company’s debt—that WBD’s EBITDA would be stuck at around $9 billion for the next three years. The prediction, of course, was based on the rapid decline of its cable networks. “We now forecast EBITDA at global networks will decline 20 percent to $6.5 billion due to accelerating revenue declines and elevated content costs from newly acquired sports rights content coupled with its last year of NBA rights in 2025,” the analyst, Jawad Hussain, wrote. (For more on this subtopic, read my partner Bill Cohan’s prescient piece, The Zaz Downgrade Debacle.) Meanwhile, Zaz had raised eyebrows when he said that the company’s sports rights were not a key driver for converting HBO Max subscribers in the United States—a view that runs counter to the way Paramount+ views CBS Sports and Peacock views NBC Sports. HBO Max will continue to carry live sports after the split, but it seemed clear that neither Zaz nor Wiedenfels viewed HBO Max as an acceptable long-term solution for TNT Sports content.

What’s Next

Even if the move had been telegraphed, executives from many sectors of the business—leagues, media, agencies, etcetera—reacted with confusion about what this means for TNT Sports, which still has premier rights, including March Madness and both MLB and NHL postseason games. Zaz and Wiedenfels did not offer much guidance on a morning conference call. Several of my sources suggested that a subsequent sale of the cable business seemed inevitable, especially considering the number of potential suitors in the market—rival media companies, streamers, and a ton of P.E. capital. Versant, the group of cable channels spun off from Comcast, was mentioned as the most likely buyer, especially considering the company’s C.E.O., Mark Lazarus, has said that he’s planning to be in the market for sports rights. (Versant is currently light on sports.) And yet, GunnarCo needs TNT and its sports portfolio, along with other key assets, like CNN and the Food Network, to drive long-term rights deals with distributors. Another school of thought suggested that Wiedenfels always wanted to be a C.E.O., and he likes the challenge of trying to turn a group of declining assets into a success. “I have full conviction that we will see very successful networks for many, many years to come,” he said on the conference call. The CFP sublicense deal with ESPN that leaked out over the weekend underscores this point—it’s a legit bargaining chip with cable companies. “We know sports remains a key pillar to support affiliate fee stability in the years ahead,” MoffettNathanson noted in a report this afternoon. “We expect WBD’s handling of its U.S. sports rights—whether through partnerships, licensing, or renewed distribution deals—to be a focal point in shaping the trajectory of Global Networks.” Regardless of what eventually happens, league executives say they still view TNT Sports the same way. TBS, TNT, and TruTV face the same problem the rest of the cable business does: Distribution is falling faster than ever. But TNT Sports will continue to have a seat at the table, as it’s had for decades. In fact, TNT Sports C.E.O. Luis Silberwasser surprised many in the industry by pivoting after the NBA debacle to gather a smaller, more diffuse, and far more affordable portfolio of niche rights. (Silberwasser is also still in negotiations to pick up rights to one of the UFC’s packages.) Some league executives praised the quality of TNT Sports’s French Open coverage, which included five sets, a whip-around channel, and an effective social media plan around Bleacher Report. The NBA auction may have drawn a boundary line between the haves and have-nots of the modern media landscape, but TNT’s response also articulated a new playbook for the subscale players—and it’s one Laz is likely already studying.

From the Cheap Seats

On YouTube v. Disney: “Kind of ironic that YouTube TV is the presenting sponsor of the NBA Finals on ABC while they are in litigation over Justin Connolly.” —An ad sales executive On Rob Manfred’s legacy: “If fans judged Manfred on what he does instead of what he says, he would be considered a great commissioner. He’s going to leave the game in a better place. Unfortunately, he often puts his foot in his mouth.” —A Varsity subscriber On multipartner league media strategies: “Do the leagues take into account that it dilutes the brand? For instance, do the St. Louis Cardinals take into consideration the generations of new fans they’ve potentially lost out on by not showing their games on O.T.A. TV?” —A Varsity subscriber via Bluesky

See you tomorrow, John

Puck founding partner Matt Belloni takes you inside the business of Hollywood, using exclusive reporting and insight to explain the backstories on everything from Marvel movies to the streaming wars.

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