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Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on
the sports media industrial complex. I hope that you all had a great holiday in Vail or Uruguay or St. Barts or on the Big Island. Rust never sleeps here at Puck. I rang in 2025 watching a livestream of Ryan Seacrest’s show on ABC and kicking around Marchand material for the new year. (Dammit, Andrew, a nice dry chablis would be perfect right now… but those grapes don’t stomp themselves!)

My stream lagged by about a minute, which meant that my family officially celebrated the new year at precisely 12:01 a.m. eastern. Happy New Year to Varsity nation. Expect some exciting news on our expansion later this month.

🎧 PGAT of Arabia: The Ringer’s golf gurus, Joe House and Nate Hubbard,
stopped by the Varsity podcast on Wednesday to talk about how the golf world is ready to turn things around after a couple of lean years.

Nota bene: The pod is starting off the year with a bang, and in the coming weeks, look out for my conversations with WWE’s
Nick Khan, just before his Netflix debut, and CFP’s Rich Clark, right in the middle of college football’s first expanded playoffs. (Subscribe here and here.)

Let’s get started…

2024’s Player of the Year...

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Play It as It Lays

Professional golf is a mess, with competing leagues diluting the
talent pool and overstretched PGA Tour tournaments that few are watching. But with a new crop of talent, a pro-merger golf fanatic in the White House, and a new indoor offering, could this year be a turning point?

John Ourand

It’s been a rough four years for professional golf, ever since the Saudi-funded
LIV Golf revolt created a civil war in the sport. The two-league reality is a mess: It’s resulted in a diluted talent pool, an overstretched calendar with too many forgettable tournaments, and an expanding income gap. On top of that, no one is really watching outside of the majors. But this may be the year that everything changes, with the Saudis’ proposed investment in the rival PGA Tour, a golf-friendly administration in the White House, and some incredible talent playing at...

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Ace media reporter Dylan Byers lets readers into his notebook as he reports on the biggest stories (and egos) in
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The Granger Mystery

ABBY LIVINGSTON

Hollywood’s Hero of the Year

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WaPo H.R. Headaches

DYLAN BYERS

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