Jan 12, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand. Before we get started, I wanted to turn your attention to an incredible Washington Post story about figure skater Maxim Naumov, who made the U.S. Olympic team less than a year after his parents died in that tragic plane crash over the Potomac. As the young man put it in the story, “I’ve been through unimaginable things and still was able to bounce back.”

Pod alert: Michael Ratner, the founder and president of production company OBB Media, joins The Varsity on Wednesday to dish about the biggest trends in the business. Ratner has worked on Fanatics Fest and is a big part of the Fanatics Flag Football Classic that was announced last fall. We’ll have a lot to chew over. Mentioned in this issue: Lionel Messi, Mark Cuban, Pat McAfee, Caleb Williams, Brooks Koepka, Brian Rolapp, Nick Saban, Holly Rowe, Trinidad Chambliss, Charlie Baker, Demond Williams Jr., and many more…

The Brady Meter, Playoff Edition: A–

Tom Brady received a ton of good press for his performance calling yesterday’s tight 49ers–Eagles game—from a fascinating explanation of how to throw a football in the wind to his orgasmic ululations as C.M.C. brought home a touchdown on a trick play: “Oh! Ohhh! OOOOHHHHH!” My favorite part was when the GOAT analyzed one of Jalen Hurts’s errant passes from a wide angle—ever the perfectionist, Brady tried to stay positive. “I don’t know what he was seeing,” he said. It helps, of course, that Brady had a close game, windy conditions, and some very Philly off-field drama.

The Starting Five

Quarterback sneak: The shape-shifting saga of Washington Huskies quarterback Demond Williams Jr. has become a metaphor for the lawless abandon of college football in the big-money N.I.L. era. Four days after signing a reported $4 million-plus deal to stay put in Seattle, the 19-year-old Williams brazenly declared that he was entering the transfer portal—apparently without letting his agent, Doug Hendrickson, know about his decision. Shortly thereafter, word went out that the Huskies were preparing to sue for breach of contract while leaving the door open for Williams’s return, and Hendrickson dropped him as a client “effective immediately,” citing “philosophical differences.” Anyway, Williams ultimately posted on Instagram the equivalent of “I was just kidding, guys!” and affirmed he’d be staying with the Huskies, “fully committed and focused on contributing to what we are building.”On yesterday’s episode of The Varsity, I asked NCAA president Charlie Baker what he made of Williams’s lark. He told me that he chalked it up to “growing pains” as schools and athletes directly negotiate with each other. “In many cases, this is the first time anybody’s done some of this stuff, and hopefully, we will minimize the number of things that create confusion,” Baker said. “At the same time, when something happens that creates confusion, it also gives everybody an opportunity to create clarity in the aftermath.”
More “growing pains”…: Meanwhile, the NCAA announced last week that the governing body had denied an eligibility waiver sought by Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss following the Rebels’ loss in the CFP semifinals—effectively ending his collegiate career, pending appeal. Chambliss, who transferred to Ole Miss after four years at Division II Ferris State, was seeking an extension of the Division I “five years to play four” clock. And he had an interesting argument since he appeared in only three seasons: He redshirted as a true freshman and didn’t appear in any games the following year.Last week, Chambliss’s attorney, Tom Mars, wrote to On3’s Pete Nakos that “there’s now an opportunity to move this case to a level playing field where Trinidad’s rights will be determined by the Mississippi judiciary instead of some bureaucrats in Indianapolis who couldn’t care less about the law or doing the right thing.” Mars doubled down on Sunday, telling ESPN that the pending state suit would be “far more detailed and documented than other eligibility lawsuits that have been filed in the past year.” I asked Baker how he viewed Congress’s role in situations like this. “I don’t think there’s a lot of things Congress needs to do here. But spending all kinds of money on lawyers to win most of the cases that involve things like whether ‘five years to play four’ is a reasonable rule, and the uncertainty that creates across college sports generally, is a problem,” he told me. “And I think a lot of the state laws that have been written that are designed to give schools in certain states advantages over schools in other states are also a problem. … It’s hard to run a conference if the rules around how you participate and recruit are different across the schools in your conference.”
Free the W: The WNBA and WNBPA agreed Monday to a free-agent moratorium that would block teams from issuing qualifying offers until a new C.B.A. is ratified. In theory, teams were able to issue qualifying offers, but most agents were dead set against them since they would be governed by 2025 rules, when the maximum salary was $250,000. By contrast, the league’s most recent proposal would raise the max salary to more than $1.3 million in 2026, with an average salary of about $530,000—dramatically higher than last season’s league average of just over $100,000. How this all ends up is anyone’s guess. I’m told that both sides continue to negotiate.
A PGA Tour win: Brooks Koepka’s return to the PGA Tour is a huge win for newish C.E.O. Brian Rolapp. Koepka will officially rejoin the Tour in less than two weeks, as part of Rolapp’s Returning Member Program, which was set up to give some of the golfers who defected to LIV Golf a pathway back home.To get some perspective on this move, I called up Joe House, The Ringer’s golf guru and a fellow Gonzaga alum alongside yours truly and Caleb Williams. House said the move will be considered a tragedy for LIV only if another golfer follows suit—like Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, or Cam Smith. “It’s a huge win for Rolapp, because he wants to make the PGA Tour as attractive as possible over the next 18 months so he can start negotiating a new TV deal, which is up in 2030,” House said. “You make this property as attractive as possible by getting as many big names as possible. And Koepka is a big name in the U.S. market.”
The McAfee shock poll: I recommend reading The Athletic’s reader survey on how people watched college football this past season. Readers named ABC/ESPN as their preferred broadcaster, and voted Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Holly Rowe as their favorite broadcast team. Unsurprisingly, nearly 84 percent of respondents said they preferred ESPN’s College GameDay, which is nearly 40 years old, to Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff, which is barely 5 years old. Interestingly, almost half of the respondents said they didn’t like having Pat McAfee on the show, but a whopping 73 percent of respondents said they liked having Nick Saban.

And now for the main event…

Fox–TikTok Beef & Hard Rock Life

News and notes on the topics keeping the industry’s hearts aflutter in advance of the CFP, the World Cup, and more.

John Ourand

Late last week, FIFA announced that TikTok would be the “preferred platform” for this summer’s World Cup. The distinction of this brand-new category partnership ostensibly conferred all sorts of rights and opportunities, including the crucial right to livestream parts of matches during the monthlong tournament.

Alas, it seems that someone neglected to check with Fox before signing the deal. The network acquired World Cup rights from FIFA back in 2011, and extended the agreement four years later to include this year’s tournament. As part of the arrangement, Fox holds all U.S. video rights to the World Cup—there’s no carve-out for FIFA to sell live look-ins during games. That means TikTok will have to cut a separate deal with Fox if it wants to have live highlights and look-ins for the home U.S. market when the tournament opens this June. Even then, TikTok wouldn’t really have much of that preferred partner afterglow: The platform likely would not be the exclusive social platform for live look-ins or extended in-game highlights in the United States. In fact, I’m told that Fox is negotiating another deal with a rival social media platform. Think YouTube or Meta—or, if past is prologue, Twitter/X. During previous World Cups, Fox forged deals with Twitter to broadcast match highlights in almost real time via the network’s handles. Fox also produced a studio show for Twitter, FIFA World Cup Now, during the Men’s World Cup in 2018 and 2022, and the Women’s World Cup in 2023. With five months until the start of the tournament, there’s still plenty of time for TikTok to work out a deal with Fox. As of now, though, they aren’t close. Streamers and digital companies across the board have become increasingly aggressive in the sports rights marketplace. So far, however, soccer appears to be the only sport that has motivated TikTok: The company signed a similar deal with FIFA for the Women’s World Cup in 2023, when it also reached a distribution agreement with broadcasters like the BBC in the United Kingdom. That same year, TikTok set up a partnership with Major League Soccer for content that included a livestream focused on Lionel Messi during his first MLS Cup playoff game. Last spring, MLS and TikTok renewed that deal for several more years.

A Rock and a Hard Rock Place

Miami and Indiana fans are freaking out about the cost just to get into the stadium for next Monday’s national championship game at Hard Rock Stadium: The cheapest nosebleed seats on the secondary market are listed for more than $3,500, and 50-yard-line seats have a five-figure price tag. Mark Cuban, whose $9 billion net worth surely puts him among Indiana’s more flush alums, took to X to ask whether fans should wait to see if prices will drop as kickoff gets closer—presumably more on their behalf than his own (unless he’s planning to buy up half the stadium and beneficently bestow tickets on his fellow Hoosiers).

I checked in with a bunch of people who earn their living in this business, and they confirmed it’s impossible to predict how prices will fluctuate this week. “There aren’t good comps for most sporting events like this in general, because each market is different,” said Patrick Ryan, co-founder of Eventellect, a company that provides ticketing strategy to rights-holders. “But there’s particularly no comp for this game because of all the unique circumstances we have.” Indeed, Miami’s 65,000-seat Hard Rock is the smallest stadium ever to hold a CFP national championship game. (Last year’s game was played at the 78,000-seat Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.) Then you have the Hurricanes playing what is essentially a home game, and a long-suffering Indiana fan base aching for a win and known for traveling en masse to CFP games. That would argue for prices staying high due to the unprecedented demand. But so far, nobody knows how many tickets are actually on the market. Each team gets 20,000 tickets to distribute to season-ticket holders, and Miami hasn’t allotted them yet. Once those tickets are assigned, there’s a chance the secondary market will see an influx of new inventory from fans selling their tickets or brokers on the alert for national championship passes. In the meantime, Miami is putting fans who buy a full schedule next season into the drawing for a chance to buy tickets to Monday’s game. Those tickets will be allocated on Tuesday. “With the get-in price being so high—and it’s been that high for a decent number of days now—it’s just really hard to maintain that level,” Ryan said. “I imagine we’ll see a decrease in some price areas. I do think we could see some softness with premium tickets in between the 30-yard lines. But we don’t know yet. The bottom line is that we haven’t seen all the inventory in the market yet. That’s one big piece of the puzzle.”

From the Cheap Seats

On the Great Rebundling: “The hidden success of Prime Video is that it’s a bundle. People primarily subscribe to Prime for free shipping, deals, and convenience, and Prime Video is the icing on the cake. They never have to worry about churn when seasons end because Prime Video is a bonus, not the hook. This is a vastly different strategy from that of other streamers.” —A Varsity subscriber

On college chaos: “I would love to see what kind of impact the portal and N.I.L. have had on the Group of Five schools and mid-majors in college football and basketball. I live in Boise, and have seen firsthand how a program that routinely knocked off major power programs has been relegated to spare parts for the big guys. When you think about March Madness Cinderellas or some of the great college football upsets, it’s sad that those will be few and far between in the future.” —A sports media executive On NBC Sports’s TikTok dances: “Making a career out of producing Reels and TikToks for brands has revealed a useful metric: ‘If industry peers think you’re cringe, you’re probably on the right track.’” —A producer

Have a great week. See you tomorrow,

John

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