Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on all the news, rumors, and innuendo running through the sports business. I’m writing this from my hometown of Washington, D.C., while trying to process another disheartening Orioles playoff letdown. At least I have my October back.

On Tuesday, the legendary Chris “Boomer” Berman celebrated his 45th year at ESPN. He joins me on The Varsity podcast this weekend for a wide-ranging Sunday Conversation (get it…) that traces his personal arc at Bristol and also captures the extraordinary story of a regional sports network that grew into a global colossus. Meanwhile, make sure you listen to this week’s pod with Business Insider’s Peter Kafka, who goes deep into the streamers’ sports strategies. (Subscribe here and here.)

Tonight, some scenes from the R.S.N. telenovela, some major Beltway sports business news, an Athletic sign of the times, and a major signaling hire at YouTube. As always, please stop forwarding this email to freeloading cheapskates and merely encourage them to sign up on their own. As you know, Puck’s audience is the most influential cross-section of executives, lawmakers, financial professionals, media elites, collectors, and rainmakers in our culture. This is merely one reason why we keep returning Marchand’s cashier’s check. (Hey, Andrew, give Semafor a try!)

Let’s get to it…

1. R.S.N. cruel realities: In a recent interview with S&P Global Market Intelligence, Tegna’s S.V.P. of media operations, Brad Ramsey, essentially outlined the new normal for pro sports teams: Sports franchises that cut deals with local broadcast stations should expect lower rights fees in exchange for a wider audience. In other words, it’s a marketing play. “There are different economics than in the past,” he said. “And we’re all feeling our way through that.”

   Ramsey referenced Tegna’s Denver deal for 20 games each from the Nuggets and Avalanche. Kroenke Sports & Entertainment owns those teams, as well as the Altitude Sports regional sports network that Comcast dropped five years ago. Kroenke executives clearly viewed the Tegna deal as a marketing vehicle to get their games in front of as many people as possible, hoping to open up other revenue channels. Ramsey also highlighted Tegna’s reach in regard to its 70-game deal with the Dallas Mavericks, pointing to viewership numbers from last season that were three times higher than games that aired on Bally Sports Southwest.

2. Why I left The Athletic: The Athletic’s chief content officer, Paul Fichtenbaum, the former editor-in-chief of Sports Illustrated, is leaving the New York Times Company-owned publication. His last day is tomorrow, and he plans to do some consulting and advisory work before searching for a new job. Fichtenbaum’s arrival at The Athletic gave an instant dose of credibility to the startup.

   But The Athletic found it hard to maintain its startup mentality after the Times Co. acquired the business for a staggering $550 million, far more than other bidders were willing to stomach. And while the newspaper killed off its own sports section to make room for the disruptor, The Athletic inevitably became a more establishment—Timesian, if you will—kinda joint.

   On September 9, just after Fichtenbaum finished a standards presentation to The Athletic’s hockey journalists in New York, he told his bosses that he wanted to take a break. In a note to The Athletic’s staff this week, Fichtenbaum reflected on the vision of co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, who had met while working on the startup Strava, and went on to enjoy the greatest sports media exit of their generation. “Although they didn’t have formal journalism experience, Alex and Adam had the smarts, moxie and compassion to start and run a business that filled a gaping hole in the sports media landscape for differentiated, quality work. Quickly, The Athletic became an influential voice and a central part of the local and national fan experience.”

3. YouTube’s big hire: Jen Chun, the NBA executive most responsible for negotiating the league’s local rights deal with Diamond Sports, has left to join YouTube as managing director and head of sports and studio partnerships. At the NBA, Chun was an E.V.P. and head of content partnerships who handled relationships with tech platforms, including Amazon, Apple, Meta, and yes, YouTube. Now she will report to the company’s global head of TV, film, and sports partnerships, Lori Conkling, who cemented YouTube TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket deal. The poach is an obvious tell that YouTube plans to continue amassing sports rights: In December 2022, it acquired Sunday Ticket, and earlier this year, it was involved in negotiations for an NBA package that ultimately went to Amazon.
4. Berman’s chase for 50: Chris Berman’s first day at ESPN was October 1, 1979. On Tuesday, he celebrated his 45th year in Bristol. Now 69, Berman describes himself as “semi-retired,” hosting his famous “Fastest Three Minutes” segment for Monday Night Football and NFL Primetime on ESPN+. I asked him how important it was for him to go five more years, to make it an even half-century at ESPN. “The number 50 only hit my mind this summer,” he told me on the Varsity pod. “We have a Super Bowl in a couple years. I would like to think they'll keep me around for that, whatever that means—maybe the exact same capacity. If that’s the case, that’d be 48 years.” He continued: “If they’ll have me, yeah. But I will be honest with this. I will know way ahead of you or anyone else [if I’m] starting to slip a little. Even if [50 years is] the plan, I’m not gonna do it just to do it.”
5. BPI enters the game: Communications firm Bully Pulpit International is best known around the Beltway for its political work, advising companies like Walmart and McDonald’s. (Obama’s White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, one former partner, now advises David Zaslav as the comms chief at Warner Bros. Discovery. Another partner, Ben LaBolt, has an even bigger job—he’s the White House’s senior communications director and a senior advisor to Joe Biden.) BPI has long viewed the sports business as a growth area—especially through its work with the NCAA, F1, and NBC. Tomorrow, the company will announce that it is formally entering the sports business, and setting up a dedicated practice led by senior advisors Mark Patricof and Terrence Burns.

   BPI executives told me that they want to take the lessons learned in politics and apply them to pro sports organizations that are in the middle of significant transformations and having to manage huge cultural stories that go beyond sports, like the PGA Tour’s death match with LIV or the NCAA’s constant dealings on Capitol Hill. There should be no paucity of work.

Miraculously, Preshlack set out upon his labors like a full-blown Calvinist. Diamond worked out deals with Comcast, Charter, and DirecTV that ensured affiliate revenue would still flow in. And it convinced the NBA and NHL to sign new rights deals. When the bankruptcy court reconvenes, in the middle of next month, most of my sources believe that it will bless Diamond to come out of bankruptcy.

And yet, on Wednesday, a couple other truths emerged, too. If and when Diamond emerges from bankruptcy, it almost certainly will not have a baseball deal. In fact, Major League Baseball has the opportunity to take back almost all of its local rights from the company. Or, as a baseball industry source told me earlier today, “Diamond’s latest misstep is what we’ve been looking for all along.”

Diamond had deals with four baseball teams that expired at the end of the season on Sunday: the Brewers, Twins, Guardians, and Rangers. Even amid this chaos of bankruptcy, the company is negotiating with at least a couple of those teams. But the negotiations are hitting the same snags that have caused so much friction between the league and the R.S.N. over the past two years. Diamond has an offer on the table for the Guardians, for example, for an undetermined amount to carry the team’s games, including streaming rights, for three years. The Guardians not only want a shorter deal, maximizing their options in case Diamond’s woes return, they want to control their own streaming rights.

Indeed, like many teams, the Guardians are also operating in a brave new world of media rights that is far from the old terra firma. The club would make a lot more money in fees from Bally Sports Ohio than it would from direct-to-consumer or a local broadcast channel. But MLB has a lingering, open-secret plan to eventually package its local streaming rights and sell them to a media company, like Amazon or ESPN, in need of the content. The collective bargaining would benefit all clubs, but this outcome is clearly on a different horizon. Either way, the clubs will gladly take less immediate-term cash in order to hoard their digital rights. Diamond, understandably, hates this: Why would an R.S.N. willingly allow a partner to hoard its digital rights and sell them elsewhere, thereby nuking the value of the linear and satellite deal?

So, yes, it appears that Diamond will live to see another day, but the beef with MLB will undermine its chances at long-term stability. Baseball’s 162-game schedule, which stretches six months, has been the mother’s milk of the R.S.N. business, and few have succeeded without the national pastime in their portfolio. There’s also history here. In 2023, when Diamond dropped the rights to the Padres and Diamondbacks, MLB stepped in and produced their games, and worked out carriage deals with local cable and satellite operators. The teams made less money from local media, but they had more flexibility with their rights. Diamond, meanwhile, gave distributors like DirecTV and Charter rebates. So the feud is familiar, the stakes are increasingly existential, and Diamond has less leverage than ever. I’ve never seen a movie with so many endings.

On the post-R.S.N. world: “If Gary Bettman has teams earning as much from Scripps and Tegna as they were from their R.S.N.s, his teams had some super shitty R.S.N. deals. Broadcast deals are glorified ad buys, sometimes with a bit of cash. They might as well be longform infomercials. I hear about broadcast reach all the time, and it doesn’t make any sense. That reach doesn’t seem to be getting to the kind of people who go to games, much less care at all about sports (or they would have had cable or satellite).” —A media executive