Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the real money that fuels the sports business. I am writing today from Puck’s airy South Tribeca offices after a couple days of meetings in Gotham.

🚨🚨Programming alert: One of my favorites, former Turner president David Levy, joins the Varsity podcast this weekend. These days, he runs his own consultancy and investment firm, and I can’t wait to hear what he thinks of his old company’s new sports strategy. In the meantime, make sure you listen to my most recent episode, with Axios media reporter Sara Fischer: We dished about Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, ESPN, the NBA, and of course, local sports rights.

One last thing: Earlier this week, Puck continued our tradition of kicking off the holiday season with our Guide to Mirth & Merriment. The entire Puck family shared how they’re stuffing stockings; what they’re watching, reading, and drinking; and the big gifts they have their eyes on. Here’s my contribution: For the long-suffering Orioles fan (myself included, unfortunately), I recommend the John W. Miller book The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, & Reinvented Baseball. It sure beats riding around New York during the holidays on Marchand’s rickshaw.

Let’s get to it…

It’s easy to hear this news and speculate about the future of PTI, especially now that Mike and Tony are rarely in the same studio and both pushing deeper into the golfing phases of their careers. But my Bristol sources insist PTI will continue to anchor ESPN’s afternoon block for the foreseeable future.

1. A potential Cowboys flex: There’s a reason that TV network executives spend the offseason lobbying the NFL to get as many Cowboys games as possible on their schedule. Even in down years, Dallas draws more viewers on average than any other team. This year’s squad has its own unique set of depressing issues: The ’Boys are 3-7, their quarterback is out for the season, their coach appears ready for defenestration, etcetera. Nevertheless, Dallas has two primetime games left on its schedule: a Week 14 Monday Night Football game against the Bengals, and a Week 16 Sunday Night Football tilt against the Bucs. The league isn’t going to switch the MNF game: ESPN is doing a Simpsons tie-in, and the work that goes into producing that feed makes it impossible to flex out. But I’m told it’s possible that the Cowboys will be switched out of SNF. Apparently, NBC execs wouldn’t be verklempt over losing America’s Team.

   Alas, it won’t be easy replacing Dallas. Amazon’s Thursday Night Football also has a game (Browns-Bengals) with zero playoff implications, and the NFL would have to decide by tomorrow—28 days before kickoff—whether it wants to flex out of that game. Also, the pool of games that could anchor a primetime window is especially shallow that week. The NFL’s two highest-profile Week 16 games are on Saturday (Texans-Chiefs and Steelers-Ravens). The Lions-Bears and Eagles-Commanders games on Fox are untouchable, thanks to the NFL rule ensuring that Fox and CBS keep at least one of the two home-and-home games between division foes (Fox with the NFC teams; CBS with the AFC ones). If I had to guess, I think Fox would protect its Vikings-Seahawks game, which would leave the Broncos-Chargers available to flex. The Chargers appear headed for a wild card, and the Broncos are kind of on the periphery of the race. I wonder if lowly Dallas is actually a safer bet?

2. What’s up with Golf Channel?: Like every other cable entity, the Golf Channel is shedding subscribers, and now it’s being spun off by Comcast along with USA, Syfy, et al. But viewers shouldn’t notice a difference, at least in live event coverage, for years to come, since its current deals to carry PGA Tour and LPGA events run through 2030. As NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said yesterday at SBJ’s Media Innovators conference, “The partners that we have on cable assets like Golf Channel and USA—we’re going to fulfill every obligation and every promise we made to them.”

   Cordella also conceded that Comcast’s decision to spin off those networks was a “microcosm of our larger industry. … The cable assets, when NBCU was first purchased by Comcast, were the crown jewel. Now, we are looking at things a bit differently in this fragmented media world that we’re in.”

3. NFL blesses Ellison’s move: I perked up this week when Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s top business executive, revealed some NFL kremlinology at the SBJ conference. In particular, Rolapp praised David Ellison’s Skydance, which is in the process of acquiring Paramount Global with the assistance of Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital. Of course, Rolapp knows Ellison through the league’s collaboration with Skydance Sports, which produces Hard Knocks, among other I.P. “They’re smart,” said Rolapp. “They’re certainly now well-capitalized. They have a vision in leadership. And I think there’s a new sense of stability around that business, which will allow them to innovate, which is exactly what we want our partners to do.”

   It’s not a surprise to hear well-compensated business leaders engage in the time-honored tradition of log-rolling. But the industry remains infatuated with the NFL-CBS relationship, which was one of the key assets that made Paramount so attractive to Ellison and Gerry. Will the NFL stick to its full deal? Will it exercise its option to reopen negotiations at the end of the decade? If it does the latter, will Paramount be able to afford the rights without Ellison pleading with his dad for a lifeline?

   These questions remain unanswerable at the moment. But for now, at least, everyone is playing nice. Rolapp didn’t comment on whether the NFL will use a change-of-control provision to open up CBS’s media rights deal, but he made a point to say, “We want our partners to be stable and healthy and innovative, especially with the change that you’re going to see in the next 10 years. We expect and want that from all of our partners.” Meanwhile, let’s see what happens with those Netflix Christmas Day games…

4. An NFL Media non-update update: Three years ago, the NFL said it was looking for strategic partners to invest in NFL Media, the league-owned group that includes the NFL Network, NFL RedZone, the NFL app, and NFL.com. The league has had a bunch of talks since then, but Rolapp admitted that none of the suitors has met the NFL’s position. “We have not seen a plan that achieves our reach, strategic, and financial objectives,” he said. “But I think we will at some point. We’re fine with operating the way we operate it now. We’re in zero hurry.”

   Despite the inexorable decline of cable, Rolapp pointed out that NFL Media has grown its revenue and operating income every year. “We are not distressed. It’s just the opposite,” he said. He also talked about how NFL Media has changed how it produces content, focusing on the studio show Good Morning Football. The league was criticized when it moved production of the show from New York to Los Angeles, which Rolapp says completely misses the point. “It’s now a franchise we’re leaning into that’s distributed on Roku,” he said. “It’s locally syndicated on broadcast stations, and it’s on the NFL Network. We’ve just turned a franchise into one that has much bigger reach and a bigger financial opportunity for us.”

5. A ‘Varsity’ excerpt: Sara Fischer on Trump 2.0 and R.S.N.s: I had Fischer on the pod this week for a great and digressive chat. But I wanted to leave you with the Axios media reporter’s fascinating analysis of how Trump might impact the worsening R.S.N. doomscape.

   Here’s Sara: “As you know, the regional sports network business has really fallen under, and a lot of teams are taking their sports packages and rights out of the cable bundle, and giving them to local broadcast companies. The Trump administration and conservative telecom policy wonks writ large have always preferred to deregulate and empower local broadcast; it’s a publicly owned good. During the first Trump administration, there was a huge wave of local television consolidation, which has helped a lot of these TV stations survive, to be honest. Looking ahead, we expect even more local television consolidation. And with that will obviously come synergies, but it also empowers these companies to have more leverage for bigger deals.” [Listen here]

Not surprisingly, in the higher calling of broadcast television, a profession stocked with members of the sainthood, TV network sources started pouring cold water on those numbers immediately. “We’re trying to say that at 11 o’clock on a Friday night, a women’s boxing match got 47 million viewers, greater than every NFL regular season game of all time on broadcast TV?” Cordella asked rhetorically. “It’s hard to believe that’s the right number.”

To be fair, Cordella had already had a long week by the time the question was lobbed at him. On Tuesday night, Comcast leaked to the Journal that it would be spinning off its cable assets, minus Bravo, and that NBCU Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus would move over to become the C.E.O. of the spinco. Matt Strauss would be ascending to take over many of Laz’s responsibilities as the leader of Peacock and NBC Sports. There was a lot going down in Philly and at 30 Rock. Anyway, this is a long way of saying that Cordella answered the question with an unusual level of candor, especially for a Comcast executive.

Internally, of course, these kinds of bitchfests aren’t uncommon in the ongoing battle between defensive traditional mediacos and ambitious and well-capitalized streamers, particularly as they compete for sports rights. Last month, sports business executives mocked Apple for declaring that Lionel Messi’s playoff debut was “the most widely viewed sporting event ever presented by Apple” without disclosing the actual number. More than a year ago, linear TV network executives howled in protest when Nielsen consented to incorporate some of Amazon’s own first-party data in its Thursday Night Football ratings—a concession that many likened to allowing the world’s fourth-largest company to gently rig its own numbers. Their complaints were so obstreperous that Nielsen and Amazon shelved the plan for a year.

You’ve got to feel for the TV guys, who are fighting at a disadvantage here. Of course, they’re frustrated by the platform companies’ ability to either disregard transparency or gerrymander the data. But also, the TV networks have all played by the same rules, using Nielsen since the ’50s under the premise that a third-party source was required to validate the data that is the coin of the ad sales realm. Has their obedient example meant nothing? Sure, Netflix used a third-party company, TVision, for its U.S. numbers, but it wasn’t Nielsen and the way it counts viewers is different.

In their defense, the streamers steadfastly believe that Nielsen is inherently biased toward linear, and that their internal numbers are most accurate. Unfortunately, no one is incentivized to standardize these measures, and instead the industry is deluged with emphatic and occasionally misleading press releases and handout stories. (Credit where it’s due: While Netflix didn’t use Nielsen for its Tyson-Paul fight, it will use the ratings service for its two Christmas NFL games.)

Much more than ego is at stake here. As the incumbents and streamers compete for both eyeballs and deal flow, especially in sports, the old-school linear guys truly fear that these self-reported numbers are tilting the scales away from their favor. “What we’re trying to figure out is probably not the size of the audience, it’s how relative it is to everything else that we do,” Cordella said this week. “If you’re a sports league, you’re like, do I want to put my content on this platform versus a broadcast network? What’s the difference in reach I’m really going to have? If you believe the numbers, you’re going to say, Wow, I can get higher than an NFL game gets by doing Netflix.”

Obviously, it’s hard to square those numbers with those released by Netflix. “When they came out with such a big number, the whole industry attacked them and, I think, they looked kind of ridiculous,” one traditional media exec said. “If they had come out with a number around 25 million, that still would have been a huge win for them to claim.”

Netflix isn’t commenting beyond the releases it already put out. But it’s not alone in wanting to change the way the business counts streaming viewers. Last winter, using Nielsen, Peacock reported 23 million viewers, which stands as the most streamed NFL game to date. But NBC sources said internal data showed a higher number of viewers, which is a frequent complaint among streamers. Amazon, for example, consistently says that Nielsen underreports its NFL streaming numbers, too. Alas, one hallmark of this new era is that everyone complains about Nielsen. Let’s see what happens, though, if the NFL Christmas games can’t outrate a women’s boxing match.

On ESPN dealing with Sir Charles’ comments: “Historically, this would be a prelude to disaster in Bristol. How well do we think it will go over these days in central Connecticut when Charles gets agitated about something with ESPN and candidly speaks his mind?” —A league executive

On Dr. John Malone: “Comcast is spinning off linear networks. Charter will acquire Liberty Broadband. And Dr. John supports merging Charter with Comcast. If anyone thought Malone was slowing down and heading for the sunset phase of his career, they would be wrong. Dead wrong.” —A cable guy

On Mike Florio’s first job as a paperboy: “Memories of my teens delivering The Courier-Journal in southern Indiana flooded me like a drenching shower. What a fantastic framing of your question. I always feel like I’m in your room while listening to your pods.” —A happy Puck subscriber

More on the ‘Varsity’ podcast: “Is Marchand gonna be a guest soon, or does the abuse just continue indefinitely (which is fine)?” —Another happy Puck subscriber

[Ed note: Who is Marchand, again?]