Apr 2, 2026

Welcome back to The Varsity. I spent last night at Capital One Arena watching my hometown Wizards, losers of 20 out of their last 21 games, give up 80 second-half points in a loss to the 76ers… and that wasn’t even the most embarrassing part of the night for the woebegone franchise.

🚨 Pod alert: It’s Final Four weekend, so naturally I asked former Kentucky great Jamal Mashburn—one of the breakout on-air stars during this year’s NCAA tournament—to join the Varsity podcast. Watch out for that episode. Also, make sure to listen to yesterday’s show, if only to hear ESPN baseball insider Jeff Passan come clean about his real height. Listen here and here.

This issue was created with contributions from Curtis Rowser.

Mentioned in this issue: Luis Silberwasser, David Berson, Gary Bettman, Rob Manfred, Jeff Bezos, Bailey Johnson, Danielle Allentuck, Mike Lee, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Goodell, Charlie Yook, Mike McQuade, Todd Sperry, Jessica Lee, Tony Cole, Sarah Parsons, David Ellison, Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson, Ernie Johnson, Mike Krzyzewski, and more…

Player of the Week: Rob Manfred

Just three years after upsetting traditionalists with pitch clocks and ghost runners, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has introduced yet another fan-friendly innovation: the robo umps, which have added an unexpected level of excitement to the first week of the season. The final play of the Orioles’ Wednesday win over the Rangers was an overturned call, resulting in a strikeout (a walk-off A.B.S. challenge!) and the loudest cheers of the day.

Down to the J.V.: Jeff Bezos

I’m not going to relitigate Jeff Bezos’s boneheaded decision to shutter the sports department at my hometown paper. (I’m obviously still peeved.) But now comes word that the Post has started hiring back some of the sports reporters it canned two months ago, including Bailey Johnson, who covers the Caps. This move followed the Post’s hiring of Danielle Allentuck as a Nationals beat reporter. Turns out subscribers want to read about their local sports teams in their local paper. Who the heck knew?

The Triple Play

Rupert takes on the NFL: About a month ago, NFL executives privately traded suspicions that Fox had played a role in the F.C.C.’s decision to open an inquiry into the migration of sports to streaming services. A week later, several league executives again privately pointed a finger at Fox when Republican Sen. Mike Lee urged the Department of Justice to look into the costs of streaming NFL games.

Given all the off-the-books chatter, it was particularly fascinating to come across a Wednesday editorial from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal that explicitly called on regulators to force the league to “explain why it still deserves” the antitrust exemption it received in 1961. “Maybe the billionaires [team owners] should consider the backlash building against the antitrust exemption they retain from another era,” the editorial board wrote. “Mr. Goodell is using the threat of an early opt-out provision to change the terms only halfway through the deals. The assumption is that he thinks he can get more money from Big Tech’s streaming services than he can from his longtime TV partners. That would hurt the networks, especially local stations, that rely on the NFL for ad revenue.” Yes, it would, and that’s precisely the point. But as Rupert knows—and the Journal’s famously Gigot-esque conservative editorial board frequently observes—we chose free market capitalism.
NFL Network under ESPN rule: Wednesday marked the NFL Network’s first full day under ESPN control, and I’ve been told that viewers should not expect any significant changes to the programming or on-air look, at least not before next year’s Super Bowl. The main difference, I’m told, will come when ESPN talent appears on NFL Network and vice versa.

ESPN is expected to run the NFL Network similarly to its college channels, like SEC Network and ACC Network. The NFL Network crew will still have its own separate coverage of the combine and draft, etcetera. On the personnel side, Charlie Yook will continue to oversee its production, but he’ll report to Mike McQuade, ESPN’s executive vice president of sports production. Meanwhile, four other NFL execs moved to ESPN as part of the deal: vice president and executive editor Todd Sperry, vice president of production operations and engineering Jessica Lee, vice president of media operations Tony Cole, and vice president of programming and acquisitions Sarah Parsons.
Baseball and the Olympics: As I’ve noted in recent weeks, the once-derided World Baseball Classic has become a massive success story for MLB at a time when every major league has been trying to globalize. As Jeff Passan, ESPN’s senior MLB insider, put it on yesterday’s episode of The Varsity: “The league has created, from scratch, a made-for-TV juggernaut.”

Given the wild success, I wondered why the WBC wouldn’t increase its cadence. After all, I’m sure the league’s broadcast partners would embrace increased frequency. But Jeff shut that down. “I don’t think it should be more than every three years,” he said. “I abide by the scarcity principle. If you have it too often, the beauty and allure of it just goes away.” In fact, he added, the next edition of the WBC may come even later. “I think the next one’s going to actually come in four years, because we have the 2028 Olympics. And I do think, at the end of the day, MLB and the Players Association are going to come to a deal to get professional players at the Olympics. I think it’s a no-brainer, and it’s a huge win for both sides if they can do that.”

And now for the main event…

On the Silberwasser Front

Everyone’s favorite TNT Sports boss opens up about the NCAA tournament, losing their NBA rights, the evolution of the network—and, of course, the ParaBros merger likely to close this fall.

John Ourand

Four years after taking the helm at TNT Sports, Luis Silberwasser has the preternatural ability to make his job sound almost completely normal: He’s negotiating with Gary Bettman on a new NHL deal (the rights expire after the 2027-28 season), staying close with MLB about re-upping their agreement (which also ends in 2028), and pursuing more sports to add to TNT’s robust portfolio—all while overseeing the production plans around this weekend’s Final Four, which will be carried on his cable channels. “In the middle of all this, we’re producing more hours than we’ve ever produced on TNT Sports,” he told me recently.

Of course, it’s hardly a period of normalcy for TNT Sports, which is on the precipice of being absorbed into the Paramount mothership just as soon as David Ellison’s $111 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery closes. If all goes according to plan, TNT Sports will merge with CBS Sports sometime in the third quarter—and CBS Sports president David Berson is seen as the odds-on favorite to run the combined division. But in our latest conversation, Silberwasser didn’t betray any sense of anxiety. “David Berson and I have a really good professional and personal relationship,” he told me. “We’re friends.”

In the meantime, Silberwasser and his team have remained laser-focused on their own programming strategy. Somewhat ironically, that involves collaborating with CBS on the NCAA tournament—a 15-year-old partnership, which has given some TNT insiders faith that the eventual combination won’t be too agonizing. “There is no discussion about what happens in the future,” Silberwasser insisted. “All those things are being decided later. We have the ability to continue to do the deals that we’re doing now, and to operate this company as an independent company.”

One of those deals will manifest during the Final Four this weekend: TNT Sports signed Michigan’s original Fab Five—Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson—to do an alt cast for the Michigan–Arizona game. Silberwasser also hyped an interview that Ernie Johnson conducted with Mike Krzyzewski, which will air during Saturday’s pregame show. (Duke’s Elite Eight loss must have carried an extra sting knowing the sit-down would air this weekend.)

Anyway, you can find our full conversation below. Luis and I discussed everything from TNT’s latest negotiations to his stoic philosophy regarding the looming ParaBros regime. As always, the following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Forward Thinking

John Ourand: Is it difficult to focus on work when your company is in the process of being sold?

Luis Silberwasser: When we talk about the transaction, it’s important to note that we are operating as two separate companies until the transaction is completed. In the meantime, there’s no discussion about the future or what happens. All those things are being decided later. We have the ability to continue to do the deals we’re doing now, and to operate this company as an independent company and a separate company from Paramount.

You’ve partnered with CBS on the NCAA tournament since 2011—and now CBS’s parent company is buying you. Has this year’s tournament felt different?

[CBS Sports president] David Berson and I have a really good professional and personal relationship. We’re friends. As the news started coming out, we wanted to be very certain that this tournament was business as usual. Our teams have been working incredibly well together, from the beginning of the planning of the tournament to now, when we’re in the middle of execution.

Since losing NBA rights, how has your strategy changed?

Very few sports organizations go through the transformation we’ve been going through. It [happened] in the middle of a year that we launched seven new properties: CFP, NASCAR, Roland-Garros, Unrivaled, Big East, Big 12, and we did a deal with DAZN for the Club World Cup. In the middle of all the noise, we’ve been very focused on those properties. We’ve had more volume, more decisions to be made about production, more decisions to be made about marketing, and resources to allocate. We haven’t stopped. And that’s the way we’re approaching the next few months until the transaction is done.

How would you describe the state of TNT Sports right now?

We made a very conscious decision to transform the portfolio even before we knew what the outcome with the NBA was. We wanted to do three things: First, we needed to create a unifying brand for the whole portfolio. People knew about Turner Sports, but they knew it as an industry brand; it wasn’t a consumer-facing brand, so we wanted to unify everything we do under the umbrella of TNT Sports. Second, we wanted our portfolio to touch more people—to have a larger variety of sports. We’ve done that. And third, we wanted to put our stake in the ground on a couple of verticals. We decided to make a big investment in college sports and women’s sports.

NHL’s Gary Bettman has said he’s talked with you about a renewal. Where do things stand?

We are extremely interested in continuing our relationship with hockey. Basically, we will do it in the timing that Gary wants. If Gary wants to engage early, great. If he wants to wait, that’s fine, too.

From the Cheap Seats

On the NFL’s streaming strategy: “Netflix’s reported interest in adding more NFL games is a good litmus test for how seriously the major sports leagues take the possibility of legislative action from Washington. Selling more games to a streamer now would be a double middle finger to Congress and the F.C.C. It would be the NFL saying, ‘We’ll do what we want, and what are you going to do about it?’ It’s beyond poking the bear. It’s shocking the bear with a cattle prod.” —A media exec

On the robo umps: “I think MLB will one day be like tennis. With Hawk-Eye, for years, tennis players would get three (unsuccessful) challenges per set. Eventually, tennis got rid of that and let the robots make every call. It’s accepted even if there’s a margin of error. Players can ask for a review so they can see just how close the call was, for information only. The margin of error from the robots is much smaller than humans.” —A Varsity subscriber

More on retrans: “Nielsen reported broadcast at 50.3 percent of total linear viewing in January 2026 (last month available—Nielsen Gauge), and S&P/Kagan estimated 31 percent of total retrans fees went to broadcasters in 2025. That suggests broadcasters are actually woefully underpaid on retransmission fees.” —A broadcast executive

On NFL media: “With news that multiple streamers are kicking the tires on the NFL’s five-game package of games available for the 2026 season, part of me wants to see Amazon get at least the Australia game (they don’t have a Week 1 contest) just to see Kirk Herbstreit and his golden retriever, Peter, navigate College GameDay, ABC, and Prime Video duties with the likelihood that Kirk and Chris Fowler would be assigned to Clemson vs. LSU at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. Do I smell a 30 for 30?” —A sports business executive

Have a great weekend. See you Monday,

John

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