Fox Sports’ ad sales chief has overseen what’s turning out to be the most lucrative Super Bowl of all time, selling at least 10 ads for a record-high price of $8 million per 30-second spot, and increasing the average price for those units by a whopping half a million bucks each. When Lachlan Murdoch announced an ad sales sellout back in November, most of the spots fell short of that $8 million threshold, though Murdoch added at the time that Fox had set a record with its pricing. As it turns out, several advertisers, like State Farm, pulled out of the game in the wake of the Los Angeles fires, enabling Evans to go back into the market and command higher rates.

During the Goodell era, the NFL has brilliantly found tactics to eventize nearly every facet of its operations, and with great success. Last year, the draft drew 275,000 fans in Detroit—a city with barely 650,000 residents—and 14 million TV viewers on its first day. The league has turned its annual scouting combine into a multiday TV show. The league has even managed to transform the release of its annual game schedule into a media event. And it has morphed its awards presentation into the sort of event that the ESPYs always tried, and largely failed, to execute. But, for whatever reason, Goodell and the league have not been able to figure out the Pro Bowl, which ESPN will carry this Sunday. The Pro Bowl has always been something of a challenge, of course. In the old days, the players phoned it in, occasionally hungover from a week hanging out in Maui. And the league was generally sensitive to the fact that no one wanted to risk a significant injury in a meaningless game—a lesson learned the hard way after the horrific Robert Edwards injury in the 1999 “Rookie Beach Bowl,” a prelude to that year’s Pro Bowl. And then there was the attrition, both from players nursing injuries and those with emotional bruises from playoff losses. This trend hit its nadir in 2022, when Ravens backup quarterback Tyler Huntley was named as an alternate for the game. This year, close to two dozen players passed on attending, including stars like Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, T.J. Watt, and CeeDee Lamb, causing future Hall of Famer J.J. Watt to mock this year’s game, posting on X: “When you get 5 alternates deep, just call it the Participation Bowl.” The league needs to fix this.

I forget: Was it Keynes or Friedman or Hayek who offered the economic truism that not all sports leagues experience the platform shift to streaming equally? After all, the interest of Amazon Prime and Peacock helped the NBA run up an 11-year $76 billion deal. Meanwhile, the NFL is licking its chops to exercise an out from the $110 billion worth of rights-fees deals the league signed about four years ago, presumably hoping that current partners like Prime, Netflix, and YouTube TV create an unforeseen market for its games. And then there’s the Pac-12. A couple of years ago, the historic league’s member presidents overestimated their economic value, passed on a linear TV deal from ESPN, and, in the end, were unable to find any deal at all, at least not at the level they wanted. Eventually, 10 of its 12 members left for other conferences. I had this parable in mind this week, when I learned that ESPN exercised the option to extend its deal with the Atlantic Coast Conference for nine more years at the same rate the conference agreed to back in 2016. (Given all the entanglements with ACC Network, it’s difficult to come up with a straight rights-fee number for this deal. But the deal was believed to be in the neighborhood of $240 million per year when it was first signed, back when the ACC had 14 schools. The conference now has 17 schools and launched the ACC Network back in 2019. But it’s the ACC’s rights fee, especially in comparison to the Big Ten’s $1.1 billion per year average haul, that irritated some of the conference’s schools.) ESPN had until the end of this week to elongate the agreement, and decided to move forward after weeks of talks with the conference commissioner, Jim Phillips. ESPN had all the leverage, of course. Bristol not only had the option in the deal, but it also owns and operates the ACC Network—a complexifier that would make a partnership inconvenient and less attractive to another potential bidder. Given the amount of coordination required between a conference network and other linear TV partners about game selection and start times, such a scenario would have been untenable. Unsurprisingly, there’s no evidence that Phillips kicked the tires with any other mediaco to get a sense of the overall market as a way to wring a better deal out of ESPN. He probably didn’t need to, either. Fox and ESPN dominate the market for college football media rights, and the overall realignment of the sport, while great for parity, has cleaved the leagues along financial lines between the haves (SEC and Big Ten) and have nots (everyone else). To wit: The Big Ten’s deal with Fox, CBS, and NBC allows the league to distribute nearly $100 million per year to each of its 18 member schools. And yet the new Pac-12 deal, with its new B-list teams, is back in the market and likely to bring in Mountain West–style money. (ESPN and Fox have passed.) Early on in these talks, ESPN had qualms about staying with the ACC, especially given that Clemson and Florida State, the conference’s biggest football brands, seemed itching to relocate to the SEC or Big Ten. At that point, the conference would basically be Bill Belichick’s UNC, SMU, Miami, and a bunch of basketball schools. But my sources told me that ESPN’s fears were allayed by the fact that neither the Big Ten nor the SEC were really all that into Clemson or FSU. Both conferences already had teams in those markets, so why divide media revenue even more? Neither Clemson nor Florida State have reached a deal to ensure that they stay in the conference, but it’s hard to believe that ESPN would cut this type of deal without those assurances. One other sweetener for ESPN: The ACC is committed to schedule its better teams (FSU, Clemson, The U) against Notre Dame, which is a league member for non-football sports. In the past, the Irish played lesser teams, such as Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, and Cal.

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