Welcome to The Varsity, my private email that details the inner workings of the sports business. I’m writing this from my hometown of Washington, D.C., the District of Disaster as my partner Peter Hamby calls it, where the State of the Union is scheduled for this evening. But I’m focused instead on the concerns of a number of cable providers who have come to town to air their Spulu grievances to lawmakers. I was talking about this over dinner last night with a source at Millie’s in Spring Valley, a Nantucket-themed restaurant named after the famed “Madaket Millie” Jewett. Yes, of course I ordered the lobster roll.

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Before I begin, I want to highlight a couple of peripheral developments in the Varsity Cinematic Universe. Here in D.C., Capitol Hill’s true hometown cable channel, C-SPAN, has seen less turnover than the Supreme Court. But this week, its co-C.E.O.s, Rob Kennedy and Susan Swain, announced that they are leaving. Swain started at the network in 1982 and Kennedy in 1987. Both are among the most respected and well-liked executives that I have covered. It’s impossible to imagine C-SPAN without them.

And today, the great Don Van Natta announced that he will publish a Jerry Jones biography in 2026 via Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press. I expect the book to be excellent, especially given Van Natta’s legendary 2014 profile of the Cowboys owner.

Let’s get to it…

1. A New Kaepernick Scandal: Two years ago, ESPN Films announced a multipart, Spike Lee-produced documentary on Colin Kaepernick. The project seemed like a masterstroke, and one that harkened back to the network’s creative panacea of the Connor Schell-Bill Simmons-30 for 30 era. Recently, however, a number of Varsity types have reached out and inquired as to why the film hasn’t seen the light of day. One source suggested that I look into whether the NFL had anything to do with the delay—was this project, as this person hypothesized, getting the ol’ Playmakers treatment?

   It sounded like an informed hypothesis. But after making several calls based on this tip, the story is not as juicy as I had hoped. The documentary is taking longer than usual, and the NFL has nothing to do with any delay. I’m told that Lee and Kaepernick have had some creative differences, but nothing that is considered unusual when it comes to big personalities working together on big projects. Apparently, the production has been “far along” since last spring and is in postproduction. ESPN executives had initially targeted the beginning of the 2023-24 NFL season to release the series. In the meantime, though, they still don’t have a hard date scheduled.

2. Notes on the UFC renewal: ESPN will start negotiating to renew its UFC deal this fall, according to Shapiro, who spoke yesterday at a Morgan Stanley conference. The Endeavor boss noted that the UFC’s negotiating window opens in January, but “there’s no reason that we can’t start talking about it earlier,” and he would like to re-up with ESPN. “To say that we’re loyal to them would be an understatement.”

   But Shapiro also cited “three different platforms” who have asked when they could start talking about taking the UFC rights away from ESPN, “which we will do if we can’t get the right deal.” Shapiro was also circumspect about ESPN’s other commitments, and the general arbitrage in the cable rights bidding game. After all, as he prepares UFC’s rights for the market, ESPN is bidding for another NBA deal, launching a direct-to-consumer flagship service, protecting its cable bundle, and dealing with activist investor Nelson Peltz’s P.R. onslaught. “There’s a lot of questions that need to be answered if you’re a premier property partner,” Shapiro said, “which is what we are.”

3. An update on the NFL-CFP wars: The NFL is still trying to convince the College Football Playoff governing corpus to amend its schedule this fall, I’m told, so that it doesn’t step on the NFL’s late-season Saturday game turf. In particular, as I’ve already reported, the CFP scheduled three games for Saturday, Dec. 21. That’s a Saturday that the NFL has claimed over the past several years. The CFP has said that it will hold one game in the early afternoon, one in the late afternoon, and one in the evening.

   Sources tell me the NFL knows that it’s unlikely the CFP will move all three games off of that Saturday. Its new tactic is to convince CFP to move at least one of those games from Saturday to Friday. (There is already a game on Friday, and this would allow for two games on each day.) This appears to be the most likely scenario, but it will be fascinating to watch this game of Vulcan chess play out.

4. The Good Morning Football shit show: Could the NFL be gussying up its media division for a sale to Disney? For months there have been lingering rumors that the NFL would take a stake in ESPN and the network would reciprocally manage the NFL’s media properties. But two new stories, both out this week, suggest that there’s some there there. First came word that around 60 NFL employees accepted a voluntary buyout, with most of them coming from NFL Films, per SBJ’s Terry Lefton and Ben Fischer. Then came news that NFL Network was putting its popular morning show Good Morning Football, co-hosted by the great Peter Schrager, on hiatus this summer and moving its production across the country, from lower Manhattan to Los Angeles.

   It’s unknown whether any of the show’s popular hosts will move with the show. I’m told that Kyle Brandt, Jamie Erdahl, Jason McCourty, and Schrager found out about the move via individual Zoom calls held the night before the league issued its release. It’s worth noting, too, that the show was not on-site in Vegas during Super Bowl week, suggesting that not even the NFL’s 24-7 channel is immune from the problems plaguing the cable bundle.

5. Spulu Voodoo: As they prepare to partner with Disney to launch the sports-focused Spulu bundle later this year, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery’s truTV are being more intentional about adding sports to their programming lineups. Today, WBD announced that truTV will carry a primetime sports programming block every weeknight starting Monday. (Memo to my kids: Don’t worry, Impractical Jokers is moving to TBS.)

   TruTV will have live games, simulcasts, and alternate telecasts, plus original productions like a nightly highlights show called TNT Sports Update at 6 p.m. and a nightly betting show called The Line at 6:30 p.m. It will also feature a House of Highlights show called The Broadcast Boys. Maybe this works, maybe it doesn’t, but adding sports and gambling series will give truTV—a sort of meaningless channel in the uncertain ocean of cable—some added value in the bundles that WBD negotiates with providers. Meanwhile, Fox will use highly rated college football games to replace WWE programming on Friday nights this fall. The broadcast network will pick from Big Ten, Big 12, and Mountain West games for the primetime slot. My bet is that the college football games will draw bigger audiences for Fox than WWE SmackDown.

But small cable operators hate Spulu the most. They fear the sports-focused streaming service will likely cannibalize their own customers as much as the cord-nevers. Exacerbating matters is the fact that they feel powerless to stop its formation—outside of a long-shot and utterly quixotic bid to have federal antitrust regulators put the kibosh on it. But, alas, desperate times call for desperate measures…

As a result, a group of small-cable executives descended on Washington, D.C., this week as part of the annual America’s Communications Association Connects confab. I like to attend these events as a way to preview bigger issues that will crop up on a national scale. To wit: The vulnerabilities of the cable bundle were first previewed, decades ago, by these smaller distributors before they migrated to a larger, more metastatic level. In fact, I first heard the little guys complain about the rising cost of sports channels. For them, it was a life-or-death struggle. Executives run their small cable systems on such a shoestring budget that they have to justify any sizable rate increase five times over.

The executives at these companies are frustrated because they know they’d never be allowed to roll out their own semi-skinny bundles like the Spulu offering. Cable, once the greatest business model ever, operates on a cartel-style quid pro quo framework. If distributors want to carry ESPN, they also have to carry all the lesser Disney channels. If they want to carry TNT and TBS, WBD will make them pay to carry all the subprime Discovery channels, too.

During the ACA meeting, one idea that gained traction centered on creating a smaller bundle of 35-40 channels, plus some FAST channels. This type of package could keep small cable operators in the video business without having to pay full freight for more expensive channels. Lou Borrelli, president of the National Content & Technology Cooperative, which negotiates programming deals on behalf of the small cable operators, actually alluded to this idea onstage at the event, adding that he expects more details by summer.

Everything was civil and constructive, but my epiphany was that these cable companies are digging in for a real fight. They want the flexibility to offer skinny bundles, like Spulu, to their own customers. Charter C.E.O. Chris Winfrey previewed the battle cry at a Morgan Stanley investor conference just yesterday. “What I interpreted from the announcement is that three of the largest programmers decided that genre-based packaging is the way to go. Distributors have been saying that for a couple of decades now,” he said. “I fully expect that we’ll have the ability to distribute content in a similar fashion.” Let the battle begin.

“What’s going on at Dartmouth [where the men’s basketball team voted to unionize]? If the school just dropped men’s basketball, would that just be a Band-Aid on the issue?” —A former network executive

“The way you described Amazon’s investment in Diamond Sports was perfect, with the R.S.N.s as a basement apartment that Amazon rents out to pay its mortgage.” —A league executive

Until Monday,
John