July 17, 2025

Welcome to The Varsity, my thrice-weekly private email on the sports business. I’m John Ourand, writing from Washington, D.C., where I’ve had one eye on USA Network’s coverage of the British Open. Of course, NBC has long agitated that we refer to the tournament as simply “The Open”—part of some sort of branding exercise—but fear not, it will always be referred to as the British Open in this private email. (Marchand, stop yelling “The Open!” and fork over the sancerre—crisp, not tart!) Meanwhile, my weekend plans include a Saturday visit to D.C.’s Audi Field, where the USA men’s and women’s rugby teams will play a doubleheader against Fiji and England. Drop me a note if you’ll be around.

🚨Pod alert: MoffettNathanson’s Michael Nathanson rejoins the Varsity pod this weekend to break down the biggest issues in the sports business, from Apple’s potential deal with F1 to ESPN’s coming direct-to-consumer launch. Also, make sure you download yesterday’s episode, where NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps analyzed the first year of his new media deals. Listen here and here. Let’s get to it…

Player of the Week: Dave Portnoy

Eight years after ESPN canceled Barstool Van Talk after only one episode, Barstool founder, pizza-review legend, and new-money arriviste Dave Portnoy has found his way back to linear TV. In his new deal with Fox Sports, Portnoy will appear on Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff while his Stoolies will take over a two-hour daily window on FS1. The deal, which leaked out earlier this week, was officially announced this morning, and demonstrates just how different sports media looks today than it did back in 2017. In some ways, I wondered what took so long for Fox to make Portnoy into its McAfee. More on this below…

Down to the J.V.: Cathy Engelbert

On Saturday, Cathy Engelbert and the WNBA will host the league’s All-Star Game in Indiana. It was supposed to be a coronation for host hero Caitlin Clark, but the generational star is injured, and won’t participate in the three-point shooting contest or the game. Anyway, Engelbert likely has other things on her mind: While in Indy, she’ll have to sit through hours of contentious meetings about a new collective bargaining agreement. Both factors cast a pall over what is supposed to be a celebratory weekend for a league that has experienced tremendous growth over the past couple of years.

The Starting Five

A Netflix advertising surprise: In the coming days, most of the media oxygen will be sucked up by Netflix’s second-quarter earnings, which beat expectations. But the sports business, in particular, should key in on the results for Netflix’s advertising business, which the company projected will double for the full year. Netflix didn’t outline specifics, but did say it was just about finished with its upfront negotiations.With Netflix, it’s always better to observe the company’s strategy rather than what its executives tell the press. Ted Sarandos is correct when he says that live “is a relatively small part of the total content spend,” but the company’s focus on its advertising business is an auspicious sign for leagues and conferences that Netflix wants to amplify its bidding presence. Netflix has already closed a couple of strategic rights deals, including for the Women’s World Cup. The company is also rumored to be interested in the UFC. And Sarandos intimated to analysts that the company is only in the early innings of its investment in the space. “What we’ve seen with live is that it has outsize positive impacts around conversation, around acquisition, and, we suspect, around retention,” Sarandos said on the earnings call. “Today, our live events have all primarily been in the U.S., keep in mind. So over time, we’re going to continue to invest and grow our live capabilities for events around the world in the years ahead.”
The R.S.N. scorecard: As you know, the Tigers have the best record in baseball this season, and their TV ratings are through the roof. Through the first week of July, local viewership more than doubled the team’s performance on FanDuel Sports Network Detroit last season. The second-biggest increase was New York, where Mets games are up 41 percent on SNY. Meanwhile, Cubs games on Marquee are up 30 percent; Dodgers games on Spectrum SportsNet are up 29 percent; and Red Sox games on NESN and Royals games on FanDuel Sports Network Kansas City are both up 26 percent.On the other hand, it should surprise absolutely nobody that the White Sox, who suck, and A’s, who are orphaned in Sacramento, are showing the biggest viewership decreases—50 percent and 44 percent drops, apiece. All told, MLB local games are flat with last season. And in 16 of the 26 MLB markets, live games beat everything else on linear TV, including shows on both over-the-air stations and cable channels.
The MLB rights auction: When MLB commissioner Rob Manfred was in Sun Valley last week, he noted that he had several productive meetings surrounding media rights for the package of games that ESPN walked away from months ago. In an interview with CNBC’s Alex Sherman, Manfred refused to name names, but he confirmed to Sherman that MLB had at least three bidders on the packages: Apple, NBC, and ESPN. “The most complicated part of it, right now, is whether somebody takes all of it or we end up doing a couple of deals. But I am confident we’re gonna make a deal that will be good for our fans,” he said.It’s clear that Manfred is biding his time until 2028, when all of baseball’s rights are up. This year, it was only the ESPN deal. “The key in media negotiations now is having all of your rights available,” he said. “Both the NFL and the NBA have demonstrated this. If you have all of your content, all of your playoffs, all of your regular season available, there will be buyers. And I’m confident that there will be buyers at a higher price for us.”
Drivers, open up your personalities: Steve Phelps, the affable NASCAR commissioner, has been candid about his desire for circuit drivers to show more personality, both on the track and beyond, pointing to Denny Hamlin as a model. If anything, his comments are at least a little surprising given that 23XI Racing, Hamlin and Michael Jordan’s team, is currently entrenched in an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR. “I’ve said this before and he doesn’t believe it, but I wish we had 35 other Denny Hamlins, because he drives fandom,” Phelps told me on the Varsity podcast this week. “He’s a polarizing figure, and I want polarizing figures, because rivalries are important. You have someone to root for and someone to root against.”To wit: Last month, at the FireKeepers Casino 400 in Michigan, Hamlin told a jeering crowd, “I’m sorry, but I beat your favorite driver, folks.” Of course, playing the heel is easier said than done, as sponsors generally tend to avoid them. If NASCAR really wants more personality from their drivers, they’ll have to convince advertisers that it’s actually good for business.
The Silver Lake–Endeavor death match: My partner Eriq Gardner has a great story on a head-spinning legal fight in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over the price that Silver Lake, the private equity firm, paid to take Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor private. Here’s Eriq: “The original plan seemed straightforward enough. Private equity giant Silver Lake agreed to buy out Endeavor’s public shareholders at $27.50 a share, valuing the whole enterprise—the WME talent agency, a 51 percent stake in TKO (parent of WWE and UFC), plus a curious assortment of tennis tournaments, New York Fashion Week, and even a bull-riding league—at around $25 billion. … But a funny thing happened on the way to the octagon.”Eriq continued: “Between the privatization announcement and the actual squeeze-out this past April, the share price of TKO nearly doubled, sending Endeavor’s stake soaring in value. Suddenly, that $27.50 offer looked downright miserly. Investors began piling in, betting that the Delaware Court of Chancery would side with them.”
Eriq goes on to detail what he described as a “heated” hearing earlier this week. (Disclosure: WME represents Puck.)

And now, on to the main event…

How Portnoy Got to Fox

Talks between Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy and Fox Sports kicked off with horse racing, but soon moved to something more ambitious: a deal that would give Portnoy and his buds a new platform, bequeath the Big Ten a true-blue booster of their own, and offer Fox the kind of trouble that they could use right now.

John Ourand

Dave Portnoy’s path to Fox Sports began over a year ago, in the spring of 2024. At the time, his UTA agents, Ryan Hayden, Jerry Silbowitz, and Oren Rosenbaum, reached out to various media companies to gauge their interest in a deal with Barstool. In their initial call with Fox Sports executive vice president Jordan Bazant, Hayden and Silbowitz started small: The conversation focused solely on horse racing. Portnoy loves horse racing, after all, and much of Barstool’s content focuses on gambling. Plus, over the years, Fox has amassed a bunch of horse-racing rights, including the Belmont Stakes, and a separate partnership with the New York Racing Association. Both sides were intrigued, and talks continued in the following months.

But it wasn’t until this February—nearly a year after that initial call—that Portnoy’s team finally met with Fox’s executives at the network’s Super Bowl hospitality suite at the New Orleans Four Seasons. Once again, the conversation started with horse racing, with both parties focused on working out a deal surrounding the Saratoga Live race. But it didn’t take long for both sides to see potential for a bigger, more ambitious vision. Earlier today, Fox, Portnoy, and Barstool announced a deal that will see the bawdy, pizza-reviewing, centimillionaire entrepreneur become a regular contributor on Big Noon Kickoff, Fox’s college football pregame show. Barstool’s Dan “Big Cat” Katz will also regularly appear on set. The Barstool-produced Barstool College Football Show will head to the same campus as Big Noon Kickoff for a handful of games, and will feature several of that show’s talent. That show will run from 9 to 9:45 a.m. ET, and will be carried on Tubi, the Fox Sports app, and FoxSports.com. The deal also includes a two-hour live show that will be produced by Barstool and run on FS1. The deal presents an opportunity for both parties. For Portnoy, a spot on Fox’s college football pregame show is a chance to gain new viewers, of course. But it will also allow Portnoy to extend Barstool’s brand to more-mainstream platforms—and it’s a nice narrative turnaround after the highly lucrative but unsuccessful Penn acquisition, which led to a $1 spin-out when ESPN bought the gaming company. (Don’t feel bad for Portnoy, who has a chance to earn a second liquidity event after all this.) Meanwhile, Fox executives see a chance to insert a big personality to their lineup, and to leverage Portnoy’s Michigan fandom, which dovetails naturally with their Big Ten rights package. (Fox also holds a majority stake in the Big Ten Network.) After all, ESPN has a number of high-profile commentators, like Paul Finebaum, who openly advocate for the SEC, especially when it comes to getting teams in the College Football Playoff. (ESPN, of course, holds all of the SEC’s media rights through 2034.) In short, Fox executives and Big Ten officials wanted an on-air fanboy of their own. And the need for a passionate conference booster had been a topic among conference brass and network executives long before this deal. Portnoy’s past did not scare away Fox executives. Back in 2017, ESPN famously canceled a late-night Barstool-branded show after one episode, blaming the decision on internal backlash from employees upset with his non-P.C. commentary. There’s a sense at Fox that Portnoy is older and wiser now. Also, Fox has a sturdy corporate appetite for rogue personalities. This is a good fit. Back in May, when talks between the two sides finally got serious, Fox’s top executives descended on Manhattan for a weeklong celebration of Fox Sports’s trailblazer, the Australian personality David Hill, who essentially created the division. Hill was being feted with lifetime achievement awards from both the Sports Emmys and Sports Business Journal. Both onstage and off, old Fox hands spoke of the Fox attitude, which Hill famously embodied—a production style that is purposefully in your face and loud. Some current and former Fox executives have lamented that the Fox attitude has dissipated in recent years, but they hold out hope that Portnoy can restore it. Barstool-induced headaches seem inevitable, but there’s a lot of enthusiasm on the Fox lot for dealing with whatever comes the network’s way. Plus, Fox executives can glance at what’s happening in Bristol, where ESPN is thriving on headaches, particularly from Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith.

From the Cheap Seats

On F1 in the U.S.: “I’m a lifelong NASCAR fan, so I’m certainly biased toward that style of racing, but I struggle to see how F1’s racing will permanently catch on in the States. With Drive to Survive, we saw interest jump, then plateau, and then come back down as viewers tuned in, realized the actual product was not what the show sold them on, and then watched Max Verstappen lead seemingly every lap of every race. I imagine we’ll see a similar trend with the new movie’s success. Fans will try to convert after seeing the movie, and then they’ll realize that each time they tune in, they’re just watching the McLaren drivers pace the field with little other action occurring. The races are just too boring.” —A NASCAR fan

On Apple’s F1 deal: “A short-term deal is risky for F1. If the audience falls with Apple, and F1 wants to return to a traditional player (ESPN) when the deal expires, the haircut will be tough to swallow.” —A hedge fund executive On ESPN’s carriage negotiations: “You wrote that ESPN is becoming more selective in sports rights deals that will generate appropriate returns from affiliate fee negotiations. Well, being more selective while continuing to dilute current rights by moving previously exclusive events to ABC translates to reduced/flat affiliate fees on this side of the table.” —A cable guy On NASCAR in Sonoma: “Duck confit and sauv blanc at a NASCAR race?! Yum!!” —A media executive Thanks, Mom: “I don’t know what you were drinking at Sonoma, but your West Coast visit sure did spark The Varsity’s velocity… especially Julia’s turn at the wheel. This is precisely why I subscribe to the Inner Circle.” —A lawyer

See you Monday, John

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