Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the sports media racket—the owners, the players, the executives and investors, and now, my man Snoop Dogg.

🚨 After caving to insatiable popular demand, I’m thrilled to announce that I’m launching a new podcast with Puck in partnership with Audacy: The Varsity, the pod, will feature conversations and analysis with the smartest people in the sports industry. It will come out on Wednesdays and Sundays, beginning August 28, and I can’t wait to get started. Subscribe here. And, in case you were wondering: no Marchand. He’s too busy practicing on the pommel horse for ’28.

🎧 Meanwhile, I stepped in for the estimable Peter Hamby this week to host Puck’s The Powers That Be podcast. This morning, my partner Matt Belloni and I dove into the Cable-pocalypse, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s and Paramount Global’s decisions to write down the value of their cable networks. Tomorrow, we take a look at how the streamers are approaching sports. Make sure you subscribe here and here.

✍️ P.S.: You asked, and we’ve delivered… another member survey, which will help us continue to improve your Puck experience. It should only take a minute or two. Click here to take it—and thanks in advance.

Let’s get to it…

1. CBS Sports stability: As I’ve mentioned previously, the durability of CBS Sports was always appealing to the deal teams at Skydance and RedBird as they circled Shari Redstone for the keys to Paramount. CBS Sports, after all, has an NFL deal that runs to 2033 and a March Madness pact that goes to 2032. Its value within the parentco has never been clearer or starker—after Paramount recently wrote off $6 billion from the value of its cable channels and started laying off 15 percent of its U.S. staff. “There’s no doubt that the media and entertainment world is incredibly complex these days, but there’s no doubt that the sports world is growing in value every single day,” CBS Sports C.E.O. David Berson told reporters on Wednesday during a preview of the network’s upcoming NFL season.

   Berson, who officially took the CBS Sports reins from Sean McManus following The Masters, reinforced what everyone already knows: The sports assets are a priority for RedBird, already a major sports investor, and Skydance, which has a growing sports portfolio (including the aforementioned Hard Knocks… sorry, guys). “They believe in sports,” Berson continued. “They value sports. They love our portfolio. They love our strategy. And they love our team. Let’s see how everything plays out.”

   For what it’s worth, Berson confirmed my report from Monday about his network’s deal to produce the Christmas Day NFL games for Netflix. (CBS will also get an undetermined number of promotional spots during the game.) And he mentioned that CBS Sports renamed Studio 43, where it produces The NFL Today, as the Sean McManus Studio 43.

2. Cable-pocalypse Now: On The Powers That Be, Matt and I strategized how Warner Bros. Discovery’s affiliate fee negotiations with Comcast will go next year—its first renewal without a long-term NBA contract. Here’s a highlight reel:

   Matt: If I am controlling one of these multichannel video companies, I would go back to Turner and say, “Guys, the $3 per sub per month number has to come down. You always justified this price based on the NBA. Since you no longer have the NBA, we’re going to cut that price in half.” And if that happens, all hell breaks loose at Warner Bros. Discovery because 100 percent of its profit has been coming from their cable networks.

   John: If they want to dump the Turner networks, the distributors like Comcast, Charter, and DirecTV risk losing March Madness in the month of March. They’re going to have to go without the baseball playoffs in the month of October. They are going to have to go without a couple of College Football Playoff games. There are some big-time sports on the dial that are going to make it more of a risk for distributors to play hardball.

   Matt: The question is whether we have reached the point in the evolution of the TV business where the cable carriers are willing to walk away from the channels and focus on their broadband business and direct-to-consumer business. We don’t know the answer to that. Warners clearly believes that these companies are not willing to walk away. And if they’re not, it just becomes a matter of negotiating to get to the number that they are going to pay. But if they are willing to walk away, then that is a potential dagger to this company.

   John: Comcast walked away from local sports. They dropped Diamond Sports networks for two months, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago. They didn’t seem to suffer any problems from dropping them.

   Matt: Yeah, but they did bring them back. The baller move would have been to walk away forever.

3. LIV’s TV talks: On Monday, I noted Phil Mickelson’s comments about LIV Golf’s next media deal, which the three-time Masters winner intimated would move off of television. “Old-school media … is not the way of the future,” he said.

   Predictably, LIV executives are not moving away from television as forcefully as Mickelson suggested. In fact, I’m told that LIV is still talking to The CW, the broadcast network controlled by Nexstar, about renewing their deal. LIV has also held exploratory discussions with Warner Bros. Discovery, I’m told. But those talks have not not become serious. The truth is that LIV’s tournaments have had trouble attracting viewers to its CW telecasts. But the tour would be hard-pressed to find a better rights partner, given that The CW’s coverage reaches every corner of the country.

4. Deal of the decade: As we all wait for a judge to determine a date upon which to decide whether Diamond Sports is stable enough to exit bankruptcy, I became nostalgic about one of the most underappreciated deals in recent sports history. During the Disney-21st Century Fox merger, which was announced in late 2017 and consummated in 2019, regulators forced Bob Iger to spin out the Fox regional sports assets given the potency of their potential combination with ESPN. At the time, that deal valued the R.S.N.s at more than $20 billion, but Sinclair was the highest bidder at $10.6 billion.

   At the time, some wondered if the slimmed-down New Fox would buy the assets and celebrate fleecing Iger for $10 billion. Instead, they passed. Four years later, Sinclair’s subsidiary Diamond Sports filed for bankruptcy. And here we are today, waiting to see if Diamond will be able to emerge from bankruptcy or not. Sometimes the best deals are the ones you don’t make.

5. People in the news: ESPN exited two of its high-priced NFL analysts, Robert Griffin III and Samantha Ponder, as part of a cost-cutting move, per Marchand. RG3 and Ponder both had seven-figure deals. Early speculation has Mike Greenberg and Laura Rutledge as potential replacements… Great move by the Orioles to renew the team’s lead play-by-play voice, Kevin Brown, as part of a multiyear deal. Brown was famously suspended last season by the team’s previous owners for having the temerity to point out that the Orioles historically haven’t played well in Tampa. But Brown is one of the best voices in the game, and the team is lucky to have him in the booth… ESPN picked Adam Smith to replace Aaron LaBerge as its chief product and technology officer. This is a critical hire as the network plans to launch a sports streaming service with Fox and WBD later this month as well as its own direct-to-consumer service next year. Smith comes from YouTube and starts September 3. He will jointly report to Disney Entertainment co-chairmen Alan Bergman and Dana Walden and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro.

Another insidious sign can actually be detected under the hood of Comcast’s extraordinary successful Olympics coverage. NBC, itself, accounted for nearly 118 billion viewing minutes throughout the event’s 19 days, according to a good source of mine. That’s a 46 percent increase from the Tokyo Games, in 2021, and simply an insane number given the media environment in 2024. Peacock also had a great run, streaming 23.5 billion minutes of the Paris Olympics, up 40 percent from all the prior Summer and Winter Olympics combined. Notably, however, Comcast’s cable networks could not keep that pace. In fact, total minutes viewed on the cable networks this year fell short of even the Tokyo Games: NBCU’s cable channels logged close to 31 billion minutes of viewing this year, down from 33 billion minutes during the summer of 2021.

These days, it’s apparent that cable assets find themselves squeezed into a murky middle between streaming and broadcast. It’s not just about cord-cutting, which of course is decimating all the pay TV channels. Mediacos have changed the way they view sports on broadcast TV. Increasingly, sporting events that would have never made it to broadcast television just a couple of years ago are anchoring their primetime schedules. NBC has now committed to devote two nights of programming to NBA regular season games—a decision that would have been unfathomable a decade ago. CBS will air a Parma-AC Milan match on its broadcast channel—a first for Serie A—next weekend. Fox will have Friday night college football and college basketball this season. ABC carries as many NFL games as it can. In short, the broadcasters are increasingly using sports rights to manage their costs, possibly cannibalizing cable assets in the process.

Cordella, who previously served as Peacock’s chief revenue officer, echoed what I’ve heard from other sports media executives about how broadcast has become the best place to watch sporting events, making it one of the last vestiges of monoculture. “If you want to have the highest rating possible, broadcast is where you want to be,” he told me. “Now augmenting that with streaming will just elevate it even further.” CBS Sports president David Berson made a similar point yesterday. “We think that the broad reach of broadcast TV with our streaming strategy is a phenomenal combination, and it’s been super successful for us,” he said.

As is so often the case these days, this narrowing view is also a reflection of the challenges that David Zaslav and his WBD currently face. WBD, of course, doesn’t have a broadcast asset and is trying to spread a hodgepodge of sports assets across legacy cable assets that, despite the write-down, still make up its profit center.

On NBC’s Olympic performance: “Congratulations to Comcast/NBCU and Peacock for these Paris Olympic Games. I am really excited to see what they can work on for broadcasting the 2028 games when they’re back in the U.S. and can work with live broadcasts throughout the whole day to all Americans. The gold medal basketball game, in particular, should be scheduled for primetime Saturday night and get some record number—even more than they are reporting for the game this past Saturday! Peacock and NBC experimented with some cool things like Gold Zone, Snoop, etc., but it can be even better in 2028.” —A fired-up Varsity subscriber