Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the
deals and egos populating your favorite sports. I’m in D.C. at the moment, but planning to hit Vegas for the annual broadcasters convention next week. And if you must know, I’m sitting in sixth place in Puck’s annual March Madness pool. The good news is that I’m ahead of Jon Kelly, who went all in for Michigan. The bad news: I’m behind noted Dukie Bill Cohan and famed Hoya Peter Hamby.
🚨 Pod alert: Marchand rejoins The Varsity on Wednesday to discuss the news of the day… while fetching me my prized William Poll tea sandwiches and a thimble of green chartreuse. Also make sure to download yesterday’s great episode, during which Gary Danielson candidly details his decision to retire as CBS Sports’s top college football analyst after 20 years.
A few H.R. updates.: Before jumping in, I want to highlight two moves that hit my social feeds today. After a nine-year run, Puck superfriend Peter Schrager
signed off from NFL Network’s Good Morning Football. (Marchand reports that Schrager is finalizing a deal to move over to ESPN.) And six months after leaving ESPN, Zach Lowe has predictably joined The Ringer, where he plans to launch a pod called The Zach Lowe Show, presumably a reprise of his excellent former
Lowe Post show. Congrats to both.
Let’s get to it…
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- The NFL’s Christmas tripleheader: Yes, that was Netflix C.E.O. Ted Sarandos rolling up to the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach to take part in the NFL owners meetings. As Varsity readers know, the streaming giant has been dabbling in live sports, and top media executives have always considered attendance at the owners meetings basically mandatory: The value of having team owners, presidents, GMs, coaches, and execs all together in one space is
considerable.
This was Sarandos’s first time in attendance. Tonight, he joined a panel titled “Sports and Entertainment in the Age of Streaming” alongside Roger Goodell, who announced plans for a tripleheader of NFL games this Christmas—with two games on Netflix and one on Amazon Prime. Christmas falls on a Thursday, which is why Amazon, the home of Thursday Night Football, gets a game.
If the NFL exercises an out in its current media contracts at
the end of the decade, the league obviously wants Netflix to be a significant bidder. Of course, Netflix has the cash to boost rights deals into the stratosphere, and the international reach—a perk of Prime, too—to possibly do the same for the league’s global audience.
- More on the Ari-Patrick uncoupling: My partner Matt Belloni broke some sports news in his great private email, What I’m Hearing, when he
reported that newly emancipated Endeavor executive chairman Patrick Whitesell plans to deploy a chunk of his Silver Lake–backed $250 million investment fund into another Silver Lake company, Diamond Baseball Holdings. Here’s Matt: “Endeavor previously backed DBH, which owns minor league baseball teams like the Louisville
Bats and the Tulsa Drillers, but the MLB players union didn’t love that Endeavor also owned an agency, WME, that repped players. (Sound familiar? That’s also why Endeavor is now offloading its football agency to Whitesell personally.) So in 2022, Endeavor sold DBH to Silver Lake for $280 million, and now the Silver Lake–backed Whitesell is maneuvering for a stake in its sister company. Very incestuous. (A rep for Whitesell declined to comment; DBH didn’t respond. Usual disclosure: WME represents
Puck but not me personally.)”
- The Tao of Gary: Between unregulated N.I.L. deals and an overactive transfer portal, the business of college sports feels like a mess right now. But while some see chaos, retiring CBS Sports college football analyst Gary Danielson offered a Zen-like vision of a transition period. “I can remember back when the coaches went crazy when they couldn’t have 150 scholarships or when ESPN started putting games on Thursday nights,
which was going to ruin Saturday college football,” Danielson told me on the Varsity podcast yesterday. “You call it a mess. I think it’s just normal growth of college football. … If you fight change, you’re going to die in this business. You have to roll through the changes, accept them, and diversify.”
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Julia Alexander
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- Gen Z’s sports media diet: By his own admission, the generational shift among sports fans keeps ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro up at night. It’s hard to blame him: Per Deloitte, viewers between the ages of 13 and 24 consume about 70 percent of their sports content purely through digital platforms—i.e., social media and streaming. This tracks with previous YouGov polling that found engaged sports fans under 34 were twice as likely as older
generations to watch sports primarily via social media.
That’s exactly why, in 2022, Pitaro offered Pat McAfee a whopping $85 million over five years to bring his YouTube show to ESPN: He’s an athlete and a talking head, but he’s also, predominantly, a YouTuber. As Gen Z spends more time with YouTube personalities, things like authenticity and relatability are some of the most oft-cited attributes that determine time spent with one creator over
another, per the Deloitte study. McAfee is unapologetically himself, while Stephen A. Smith is trying to bring that same brash realness to a new audience as he juggles ESPN duties and his own growing YouTube channel. Both, of course, also know how to go viral: McAfee’s interview with LeBron James last week has amassed 2 million views on YouTube, and the broken-out clip of LeBron’s comments on Smith has more than 250,000 views.
Some sports fans might
interpret the McAfee-LeBron-Smith kerfuffle as a momentary lapse in judgment. But everyone involved—digital-first McAfee, media empire–building James, and generational provocateur Smith—knew what they were doing. In our personality-driven media ecosystem, on-air feuds are rarely harmful to brands, but rather a helpful way to differentiate your content. Unlike 90 percent of broadcast execs, these three are already living in sports media’s future.
- MLB.TV’s
opening day blooper: Speaking of sports media’s future, MLB.tv went down for tens of thousands of viewers across the country on opening day—a surefire way to piss off subscribers paying hundreds of dollars for access to their favorite teams’ games… all while Major League Baseball tries to sell the market on its streaming future. This snafu reminded me of MLB’s fascinating history. MLB.tv came to market nearly a quarter-century ago, and the league became the first to launch
a sports streaming service and the first major media property to go digital. By 2012, five years before most major streaming services launched, MLB.tv boasted more than 3 million subscribers. In 2024, MLB.tv’s viewers clocked 14.5 billion minutes, a 14 percent increase from the year before.
As is the case with NBA League Pass, MLB.tv is seeing a surge in usage as fans continue to flock to streaming. But a rapid increase in engagement often means tech problems. Unsurprisingly,
having a product with strong tech can make the difference when people are deciding what to watch: Just look at all the young fans hooked on sports content served to them by Instagram’s powerful, streamlined, and targeted algorithmic feeds. Netflix has had some buffering issues during its live events, including the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight. But that fight attracted 65 million concurrent viewers (which is a lot) on a platform that isn’t solely
dedicated to livestreaming. While opening day is undeniably big for MLB, it’s not big enough to explain away tech outages of that magnitude. And the league needs to take this seriously, as I’m sure it does.
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And now, on to the main event…
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The battle between the Yankees’ YES Network and Comcast is about to go
nuclear, and it might even feature a Trump angle that no one saw coming.
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It’s not a certainty that YES Network will go dark on Comcast systems in New
Jersey and Connecticut at midnight tonight when the latest extension to its current carriage deal expires, but consider this: YES Network already filed a complaint with the F.C.C. on Sunday night alleging that the cable operator wants to put it on “the Siberia of a tier.” And yesterday, while the Yankees’ Tim Hill was striking out the Brewers’ Jake Bauers in the top of the sixth, viewers
heard the voice of YES president and C.E.O. Jon Litner warning of an expected blackout and accusing Comcast of “bullying” in negotiations. His rant lasted a solid three and a half minutes.
Regular readers of this column have seen this movie multiple times over
the past year. Comcast president of content acquisition Greg Rigdon has perfected a strategy that has methodically relegated costly regional sports networks to underloved digital tiers—a move that many in the industry have perceived as vindictive but is undeniably brilliant and driven by data showing the declining popularity of R.S.N.s. Rigdon even coined his own industrial nomenclature: the glide path (a managed journey to Siberia); the cliff path (a sudden
ejection to the Vladivostok rail station); and my own addition to the lexicon: the grinfuck, the term of art for this pleasantly served-cold dish.
Of course, this transition has not been without its fits and starts. Last summer, Main Street Sports (née Diamond Sports) went dark on Comcast systems for three months as C.E.O. David Preschlack protested the move. Other R.S.N.s had to
follow suit, including many of the NBC Sports–branded networks owned by Comcast. Other high-profile R.S.N.s, such as NESN, which carries the Red Sox, were also relegated to the digital tier.
In many ways, this feels like a typical cable carriage fight. But YES Network is counting on its uniqueness—it serves New York, after all, and broadcasts the most famous team in sports—to avoid the fate of its peers.
There are also some other interesting features of the dispute. First, Comcast owns a small stake (less than 10 percent) in SportsNet New York, the R.S.N. that carries Mets games. (Charter also has a minority stake of 27 percent; Fred Wilpon’s Sterling Equities owns the rest.) YES Network and Litner hope to convince regulators and fans that Comcast is putting its proverbial finger on the scales. “I guess this is the Comcast playbook: to favor their own networks, and disadvantage
networks they do not own,” Litner said on the YES Network telecast.
Alas, this is all going to get messy. Contra Litner’s accusations of favoritism, Comcast has already moved its NBC-branded R.S.N.s to a digital tier, and it will certainly move SNY once its carriage deal is up in several years. Since Comcast only holds a minority stake in SNY, however, the conglomerate can’t move it to a digital tier
without buy-in from the Wilpons and Charter—neither of whom would ever approve of such a move before the contract expires.
This is where the F.C.C. comes in, and why it’s so noteworthy that YES Network already engaged the agency. Donald Trump’s F.C.C. chairman Brendan Carr, who has opened inquiries into ABC, CBS, and NBC News,
posted on X yesterday afternoon that he “would encourage a quick and favorable resolution” to the Comcast–YES Network dispute, warning that “the FCC does have authority to step in and address claims of discriminatory conduct.” The president, meanwhile, called
Comcast C.E.O. Brian Roberts “a pathetic loser” in a post complaining about NBC News’s Meet the Press.
The shot at Roberts is noteworthy. After all, Yankee Global Enterprises owns a majority stake in YES, and Trump’s affection for Yankees brass goes back to his friendship with George Steinbrenner, when the two would prowl Manhattan nightspots with an entourage that might’ve included Rupert Murdoch,
Reggie Jackson, and Roy Cohn. Earlier this year, Trump appointed Mindy Levine, the wife of Yankees president Randy Levine, to the board of the Kennedy Center. And whatever happens with YES, of course, has the potential to affect Comcast’s other R.S.N. deals. Could Rigdon finally end up getting grinfucked, himself?
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On the Nielsen stat that around 3,000 people watched at least one minute of
*every* first- and second-round March Madness game: “Only 3,000? That number seems low. We had two people watch at least a minute of every game in my house alone. (Having a four-TV setup helps…) —A D.C.-based telecom lawyer
On NCAA start times: “What can we do about these late tip times in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament? It was 10 p.m. ET on a work night, and we still
had two Sweet 16 games that hadn’t tipped. That has to lead to significant East Coast drop-off. I don’t understand why it’s so late.” —A bleary-eyed fan via X
On NBC and USA Network: “How will rights work between NBCU and SpinCo? EPL, for example:
Would NBC essentially be licensing out the coverage on USA Network? Could NBCU just make the Premier League exclusive to NBC/Peacock and no USA Network?” —A devoted reader
[Ed. note: I expect NBCU to license rights across golf, EPL, and others for Golf Channel and USA Network, though nothing has been formally announced yet.]
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Puck’s daily political newsletter from Washington on what’s really happening in this town, from the White House to
the Pentagon to Capitol Hill, K Street, and the campaign trail.
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Finally, a media podcast about what’s actually happening in the media—not the oversanitized,
legal-and-standards-approved version you read online. Join Dylan Byers, Puck’s veteran media reporter, as he sits down with TV personalities, moguls, pundits, and industry executives for raw, honest, sometimes salacious conversations about the business of media and its biggest egos. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Friday.
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