Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email chronicling the inner sanctums of the sports business.

While I agree with Woj that time isn’t in endless supply, I have no plans to retire from the news industry anytime soon. In fact, I’m able to produce this private email twice a week while still managing my underperforming fantasy football team, The Grinfuckers, in Puck’s highly competitive league. (The last-place contestant of our premiership risks relegation to the Semafor league next year.) Marchand, on the other hand, would be gone in a heartbeat if only he could get his script in front of the right producer (Dirty Dancing meets Platoon, I’m told).

Programming note: Molly Solomon and Amy Rosenfeld, NBC’s top Olympics producers, join me on The Varsity pod this weekend to talk lessons from Paris, L.A. 2028 expectations, and, of course, Snoop. Meanwhile, make sure to catch yesterday’s show and listen in as Axios’s Sara Fischer and I discuss the dreadful R.S.N. scene, Zaz, and Disney versus DirecTV.

Okay, let’s get to it…

1. Woj’s decision: If an NBA basketball coach ever voluntarily resigned right before the season, citing the desire to spend more time with his family, you can be sure that Adrian Wojnarowski would be the first reporter to call bullshit and tweet out the real reason. This probably explains why I’ve been inundated with conspiracy theories and hypotheses regarding Woj’s own startling decision to step down from his $7 million-a-year ESPN job to become the G.M. of the St. Bonaventure basketball program and take a breather. I’ve heard it all in the past day or so: Was Woj pissed about yet another reboot of ESPN’s NBA coverage coming this fall? Did the NBA, upset over some of his reporting, push ESPN to make a move?

   Of course, none of that is true. (Or, at least, none of it appears to be true.) All my sources, including several of Woj’s good friends, described him as being burned out from having to be connected 24/7. Shortly after the NBA Finals, he started conversations with St. Bonaventure, his alma mater. He waited until now to see if the burnout was temporary. Apparently, it wasn’t.

   I got a glimpse of 24/7 Woj last December at a retirement party for ESPN’s longtime comms chief Chris LaPlaca, who also happens to be a St. Bonaventure alum. In the middle of LaPlaca’s speech, Woj got up and walked out of the room. He returned five or so minutes later, after breaking the news on X of Draymond Green’s indefinite suspension. (As an interesting aside, Woj’s son Ben was dressed at the event as the St. Bonaventure mascot, Bona Wolf.)

2. Will ESPN hire Woj 2.0?: Woj’s sometimes-bitter rival Shams Charania is at the top of everybody’s list as a possible replacement at ESPN, partly because his contract with The Athletic (and, ergo, The New York Times Company) is up soon. My partner Dylan Byers suggests former TNT reporter Chris Haynes as another option, since he’s also a free agent. But as Dylan noted in last night’s excellent column, the constantly pivoting ESPN might reimagine Woj’s beat. “Free agency Twitter scoopage is meaningful to a reporter’s reputation and personal brand, sure, but it’s not really a business,” Dylan wrote. “Woj’s most significant economic value was that his push alerts enticed people with cable subscriptions to tune into ESPN, but his scoopage would be a futile tool to actually attract users to the forthcoming flagship app or ESPN+ or Venu, if that ever happens.” A number of my sources concurred that ESPN doesn’t need a Woj 2.0 and can break NBA news by committee with their deep roster of NBA reporting talent.
3. Snoop tales: Snoop Dogg, the iconic rapper who once faced first- and second-degree murder charges before being acquitted, has enjoyed one of the most surprising and prosperous second acts in American life—Corona, Tumi, the pistachios ad, a Garfield voiceover, etcetera. He also emerged as NBC’s uncontested on-air star during the Paris Olympics. On the forthcoming Varsity podcast, Molly Solomon told me why NBC went all-in on Tha Doggfather this summer. During the 2021 Tokyo Games, she reminded me, Snoop and comedian Kevin Hart hosted an alternate telecast that produced several viral moments. She thought Snoop would fit right in with how NBC wanted to produce these Games. “I've been told that the Olympics sometimes feels like sports church,” Solomon told me. “It was so reverential, but it was uplifting and it told great stories. I was like, How can we shake that, because it’s also fun and people want to watch things that entertain them.”

   Solomon, Mike Tirico, and producer Rob Hyland went to meet Snoop in L.A. to gauge his interest. “He's got just this sense of the moment,” Solomon said. “Everyone wants to be around him. That was the headline for us. All the different federations, the international athletes, the American athletes—everybody wanted to be near Snoop. He makes you smile. I called him the ‘ambassador of happiness’ because he experienced the Olympics in a way that we had never presented before. It's kind of like, we all loosened up our collar and we enjoyed it.”

4. A Messi production: Following the lead of several of the world’s best athletes, Lionel Messi has decided that he will set up his own production company that will focus on TV, film, and live sports, per Variety. Called 525 Rosario, it’s a joint venture with Smuggler Entertainment, which produced the two Apple TV+ docuseries about the soccer star, Messi’s World Cup: The Rise of a Legend and Messi Meets America. WME will rep 525 Rosario, which will be based in Miami and Los Angeles. Smuggler Entertainment C.E.O. Tim Pastore will be in charge. (Disclaimer: WME represents Puck.)
5. Podcast frenzy: Two podcasts I’m looking forward to this fall…
   • Who Killed College Football, a six-part show co-hosted by sports journalists Steven Godfrey and Ryan Nanni, launches September 26. Each episode focuses on a different element of the sport’s current transformation—the agents, the conference realignment, the NCAA’s legal woes, and so forth. The first episode, “Did Television Kill College Football,” probes Notre Dame’s NBC deals, made-for-TV matchups, and the explosion of conference networks.
   • Then there’s Tom Rinaldi’s six-episode series Sacred Acre, which tells the story of Ed Thomas, a high-school football coach in Iowa who was murdered by a former player in 2009. Rinaldi is a good storyteller, and this is the second podcast series he’s done with Fox Sports.

Indeed, cable news network ratings saw an uptick on Sunday, according to Nielsen data. Combined viewership for the Nielsen-rated news channels (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and Newsmax) was up 37 percent from the previous Sunday, per a network source. But the combined audience of those channels totaled a mere 629,000 viewers, well below—infinitely below—what sports TV networks feared. Meanwhile, Fox posted an increase in its 1 p.m. window, thanks largely to the underperforming Cowboys. And CBS drew the largest Week 2 audience in 34 years, nearly 28 million viewers, as the Chiefs beat the Bengals in a nail-biter.

The league is only two games into the season so far, sure, but network executives are already seeing signs that the current election campaign is not likely to diminish ratings as significantly as in the past. Many of my sources still expect NFL viewership to drop this season based on a variety of factors, from fewer broadcast windows to more streaming exclusives. But they don’t see the presidential campaign as having a big effect.

A second dynamic at play involves the intersection of sports and politics. In 2016, the issue of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem became a campaign issue. In 2020, the pandemic forced teams to play in mostly empty stadiums. “Sports did not offer fans that reprieve that they were looking for,” one TV executive told me. “It just wasn’t possible.”

Now, NFL games are largely political no-fly zones. Sure, Tom Brady is a Trumper, but the guy would never bring it up on Fox. And while Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, her support of boyfriend Travis Kelce is more TMZ than CNN. “It’s clear that we have gone back to the impact that we saw prior to 2016, which is a much more cyclical impact rather than a widespread impact over the entire season,” another media executive said. “That's because sports like the NFL can deliver a sort of positivity bubble and an escape that was difficult during Covid and the 2016 election.”

Indeed, NFL TV viewership has so far exceeded expectations—up 12 percent compared to last season through two weeks. In fact, league executives are less worried about the election than they are about the fact that the Giants, the preferred team in the league’s biggest market, seem to be so hopeless. The Giants have posted the largest local ratings decline in the league, down around 12 percent, with a lousy quarterback, cocky G.M., and arrogant crosstown rival. And when you have a problem in the top TV market, you have a problem beyond politics.

On Charter’s streaming plan: “With all of these streaming services Spectrum has acquired—and the programmer’s own linear carriage fees rapidly disintegrating—how long will it be until future carriage disputes end up forcing all of the internet-only customers into subsidizing the cost of sports content? I can imagine the day: All customers with Spectrum Internet Standard now receive EVERY GAME with Spectrum Internet with the new ESPN flagship streaming app! Spectrum Internet Standard is available for the low, low price of only $149.99 per month!” —A media executive

On the influx of college football on broadcast TV: “Count me in as loving broadcast college football. What was it, not even 20 years ago when college football required special cable packages, PPV games were normal, and some games were radio only?” —An aging Varsity subscriber

On Zaz’s NBA lawsuit: “Zaz just wants a settlement with the NBA to say he won.” —A perspicacious Zaz-watcher

On the potential WTA-ATP merger: “I almost fell over when I heard tennis mentioned on your latest pod! There are going to be some big changes in tennis soon, it’s all being sorted out in boardrooms. But from a media perspective, the potential/likely merger of the ATP and WTA tours will allow them to sell the media rights to men and women together. It’s truly the only sport where the men and women share events.” —A happy pod listener

On Monday’s Tom Brady-free private email: “Mentioning Brady made it a Brady Zone.” —A sports business publicist

On Patrick Antonetti producing The Varsity’s podcast: “First, you broke up the Simon and Garfunkel of sports media podcasting. Next, you take Richard Deitsch’s longtime producer. Jimmy Traina, Bryan Curtis, and Jon Lewis better watch their backs!” —Another happy pod listener (at least I think he’s happy?)

[Ed. note: Antonetti will continue to produce Deitsch’s pod.]