SPORTS
John Ourand
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August 14, 2025
The Berson Offensive
After a quiet decade of bidding activity—passing on the NBA, NHL, NASCAR, etcetera—CBS Sports president David Berson is ready to spend his Ellisonbucks. UFC was just the opening statement.
Ellison, Ari & The Power of CBS
Paramount’s seven-year, $7.7 billion UFC deal gave David Ellison a more compelling pitch for Par+ users, while Ari Emanuel’s UFC now has exposure far beyond the ESPN+ app and pay-per-view’s walled garden. But who got a better deal?
John Ourand
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August 11, 2025
Ellison Goes on Offense
A couple days into his new gig, David Ellison announced his transformational $7.7 billion UFC deal. Sure, it won’t make Paramount+ profitable, but it will turn the service into a major player—as MLB and the NFL are likely taking note.
John Ourand
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August 7, 2025
Footnotes on the ESPN-NFL Deal
There may not have been a lot of suitors for the NFL’s media assets, but Disney found a way to get what it needed while the league preserved its optionality.
McAfee & Portnoy Walk Into a Studio…
The looming college football face-off between Pat McAfee and Dave Portnoy is the latest, hugely expensive attempt by aging networks to build brand loyalty among young audiences raised on a diet of clips, viral moments, and highlight reels. It’s a good idea in theory, but will it work in practice?
John Ourand
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August 4, 2025
The ESPN Endgame
Disney’s much-anticipated earnings call this Wednesday may finally reveal Burbank’s plans for the future of ESPN—Flagship, the NFL deal, and the balance between managing cord-cutting and building the next frontier.
John Ourand
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July 31, 2025
Major La Liga
Relative affordability—$250 million, anyone?—and some timely rule changes have opened up the market for Mexican soccer clubs to U.S. investors.
Comcast’s Back to the Future Sports Play
Brian Roberts and Matt Strauss’s plan to simulcast Peacock games on a new cable channel is a smart bet on a hybrid, skinny bundle strategy to monetize the stubbornly unconverted and squeeze more life from a dying platform. It may just work, at least for a while.
John Ourand
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July 28, 2025
Shell’s Bells
The questions and enigmas following Skydance’s finally approved acquisition of Paramount Global don’t seem to extend to CBS Sports, a no-drama zone amid a network in existential crisis. That’s largely because of David Berson’s even-keeled leadership, and Jeff Shell and David Ellison believe they can build around his CBS Sports
John Ourand
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July 24, 2025
The ESPN-NFL Media Deal Is Happening
The NFL is finally close to a deal with ESPN that would give the league an equity stake in the network, and offer ESPN total control over NFL Network and NFL RedZone. I know regular readers of The Varsity have been reading that sentence for the past 18 months now. But, really, the two sides are closer than ever.
Netflix’s Sports Scorecard
With two full years of Netflix audience data, we now have a clear sense of how its series perform. So what’s still working, and what absolutely isn’t? And when it comes to sports, is it better to be “adjacent” or in on the action?
John Ourand
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July 21, 2025
Stream Weaver
A candid conversation with Michael Nathanson, the exalted media analyst and MoffettNathanson namesake, who offers some scintillating hypotheses and observations about the NFL’s next auction winners, ESPN’s economics, and Apple’s sports media portfolio.
John Ourand
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July 17, 2025
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.
YouTube’s Full Swing
From viewership to participation, golf is having one of its best seasons in recent memory. And as it becomes cool(er) again among young people, YouTube is at the center of how it’s connecting with top players.
John Ourand
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July 14, 2025
Commissioners in Cars Getting Coffee
While Formula 1 seems to be grabbing all the headlines these days—from the wildly successful Hollywood movie to a rich new potential rights deal with Apple—NASCAR has quietly reinforced its position as the dominant domestic motorsport. Not gonna lie, as the kids say, it’s not even close.
John Ourand
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July 10, 2025
F1’s ESPN-Apple Bake-Off
Cupertino has its highest-grossing theatrical release ever in Brad Pitt’s ‘F1,’ and F1 execs think it’s time for ESPN to double the racing series’ rights deal. But Bristol doesn’t seem inclined to merge into the fast lane.
A Room of One’s DAZN
With its quixotic, billion-dollar investment in the FIFA Club World Cup and subsequent acquisition of Serie A rights, the niche streamer is doubling down on soccer to penetrate the U.S. market. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late.