Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the executives, and the mishegas, defining the sports media business. Happy NFL schedule release week to all who celebrate.

A reminder: This private email is actually pretty inexpensive and way less than what you’re paying for your favorite R.S.N., whether or not you’re on a glide path or a cliff path. Please stop forwarding this product or else we’ll send you the early demos of Marchand’s country crossover album.

Before I get started, I want to turn your attention to my partner Bill Cohan’s cogent piece in defense of David Zaslav (sort of). Bill, a former M&A banker, offers a thoughtful and semi-counterintuitive evaluation of Zaz’s recent performance and strategy at Warner Bros. Discovery. On the matter most pertinent to this audience, my best sources have ruthlessly vilified Zaz for his mishandling of the NBA negotiations—the fact that he publicly distanced himself from the league two years ago and, more recently, exited the exclusive negotiating window sans a deal framework. But Cohan points out that Zaz will be fine if he loses the league rights and is forced to “find a profitable alternative use for that $25 billion-plus that he would have spent over the next decade.”

Cohan continues: “While it’s obvious that the NBA would shore up TNT’s and WBD’s cable leverage with distributors in the near term, who knows what the future value of those advertising packages will be after all the biggest players build out their AVOD tiers.” Cohan’s whole piece, Vulcan Zaz, is worth a click.

Let’s get to it…

1. A Christmas battle: We’re just two days away from the NFL’s rescheduled schedule release date, and the league still doesn’t have a signed deal with Netflix for the two Christmas Day games that I reported on last week. Complicating matters: After I wrote about the dynamic Netflix negotiations, Amazon tried to...