Welcome back to The Varsity, my still-new-ish private email on the sports business and the egos that run it. I’m John Ourand.

I am flying to Miami this weekend to speak at J.P.Morgan’s Global High Yield and Leveraged Finance conference. Reach out if you’re in town.

🎙️ Programming note: I also want to spotlight my appearance on Brian Berger’s Sports Business Radio this week. It’s impressive to see what Brian has built up over the past 20 years (former NBA commissioner David Stern was his very first guest). He has produced a show every week since then, rendering him the Cal Ripken of the podcast business. Congrats on making it to two decades, Brian.

📖 Required reading: If you haven’t already, check out New York magazine’s excellent profile of my Puck partner Matt Belloni, whose What I’m Hearing private email is required reading in Hollywood and the concentric circles around the entertainment media business. High praise is heaped upon Matt from luminaries all over town. My favorite compliment was paid to him by The New York Times’ Brooks Barnes, who told the magazine, “You never quite know what Matt’s about to say. I open each newsletter and immediately wonder, ‘Is he going to ruin my day?’” For a journalist, that’s the highest praise there is…

📢 Also, a public service announcement: This issue of The Varsity is free. The next one will be free, too. And the one after that. But in a few weeks, we’re taking it behind the paywall. Sign up here to convert to a paid Puck membership if you haven’t already. Remember, your subscription price will give you access to the best writers in the business unveiling all the latest dirt from D.C., Hollywood, Wall Street, and (currently) Milan. Honestly, Puck will make you smarter, more attractive, and charming. It’s better than Ozempic and Botox!

Today, I’m focused on a simmering beef between the NFL and the College Football Playoff over television dates. I’ve also got updates on Apple’s underwhelming sports app, some TV news around the Orioles and Nationals, a Peacock turnaround, and the start of the MLS season.

Mentioned in this email: Eddy Cue, David Gandler, Greg Rigdon, Lia Assimakopoulos, Gary Bettman, Spulu, Bret McCormick, Adley Rutschman, the College Football Playoff, David Rubenstein, Messi, and many, many more…

Okay, let’s get started…

Well, I was wrong. Here we are, a decade later, and the numbers from the Stadium Series event from MetLife Stadium earlier this week blew me away. It had a great atmosphere and 80,000 fans. And as SBJ’s Bret McCormick noted, the hospitality company Delaware North set records selling food, drinks, and merch—to the tune of $53 per attendee, which is pretty damn good. Regular season games typically are somewhere between $20-$30.

Gary Bettman is the O.G. commissioner of the Big Four, and he’s been in his job so long that it’s easy to overlook his innovations. The Stadium Series helped push the envelope in professional sports, and you can see its influence everywhere, from the MLB playing in Iowa cornfields to the NBA’s in-season tournament going down on color-blocked floors.

Every distributor has griped about these same issues, but the Fubo suit seems like a nonstarter, and the company’s stock was punished by the announcement. (It’s still down more than 20 percent since we first heard of the sports streaming plans.) Most of my legal sources describe the suit as a long-shot, and my Puck partner Eriq Gardner recently confirmed that analysis in his private email on the white-collar bar, The Rainmaker.

Will the suit serve as a cudgel to help Fubo negotiate down costs with these companies in the future? Well, that’s one way to do business. In reality, I assume that the consolidation we all expect in streaming will also descend to FAST services. I’m sure Fubo wants to be the last one standing.

1. What is Apple doing?: It’s easy to lampoon Apple’s sports app, which launched Wednesday and features real-time scores, links to live games, betting odds, and other features that ESPN has been offering forever. In the interest of being charitable, however, let me offer up another possibility. Eddy Cue has long wanted Apple to develop a larger footprint in sports, and this sports app might be a Trojan horse in the space. Lest we forget, of course, that services like Apple News and Apple Music debuted to less-than-stellar reviews and eventually iterated their way to substantial market share. Also, don’t discount how the development of this app could service Vision Pro, Apple’s mixed-reality device, which needs data to be successful. It will take some time before we know how and if the new sports app benefits the company, but I wouldn’t count these guys out. And I presume there are executives in Burbank and Bristol quivering about what the guys in Cupertino are really up to.
2. A looming blackout…: There’s a good, old-fashioned cable carriage battle brewing in the Beltway. Comcast and the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, the R.S.N. that carries the Orioles and Nationals, are so far apart in their negotiations that insiders are warning that the channel could go dark when its deal runs out February 29. There’s a good chance that Xfinity subscribers in D.C. and Baltimore will not be able to watch Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, or any games involving the team pundits predict will win the A.L. East. Well, I’m predicting it, anyway. (Ed note: No chance.)

   Here’s the issue. Comcast wants to move MASN from its most-penetrated tier to a digital one that has far fewer subscribers. When I wrote about dumping Xfinity on Monday, I mentioned that the cable system charged an $11.15-per-month regional sports fee. Comcast, which owns Xfinity, wants to do away with that fee altogether, and moving R.S.N.s to a digital tier would allow it to do that. Alas, that switch would cost MASN as much as a third of its revenue overnight. I don’t know any R.S.N. or R.S.N. group that would agree to that.

   The question now is whether Comcast will blink. Comcast’s president of content acquisition, Greg Rigdon, is handling these negotiations and, so far, is holding a hard line. But this isn’t any old R.S.N. This is the one that covers Washington, D.C., where 100 U.S. senators and 435 congressional representatives spend most of their time. If Brian Roberts starts to get phone calls from pissed-off politicians, I would expect a deal to follow quickly. Or, worse, he might get a call from David Rubenstein, the billionaire private equity founder who is buying the Orioles and a majority stake in MASN.

3. MLS intrigue: There are $2.5 billion reasons why MLS cut a 10-year deal with Apple last year. But as the league kicks off its second season with the tech giant this week, there are two main storylines that I will be following.

   First: Will Apple become more transparent about usage figures? Quick answer: It won’t. But that secretive attitude doesn’t play well in the sports business. Last season, I heard consistent grumbles from advertisers and sponsors that were kept in the dark about how many people were actually watching the games. For all the complaints about how Nielsen collects its TV viewership numbers, advertisers get far more information from television networks.

   Second: How will MLS draw in more casual viewers? Every major league is figuring out how to balance the switch in behavior from linear to streaming, but the NBA and NFL and MLB are American institutions with zillions of fans. MLS, on the other hand, is an often-imperiled upstart that is constantly competing for market and mind share—and going all in with one company, even if it’s the biggest company in the world, risks closing the top of the marketing funnel. Disney, Fox, Paramount, NBC, and their tens of millions of viewers have no incentive to help market MLS. Messi certainly has helped, at least for Inter Miami, but MLS needs to find a way to get casual fans to take more of an interest in its games.

4. The Peacockaissance: I love how my Puck partner Julia Alexander describes Peacock as “Comcast’s half-hearted entrant into the late-stage streaming wars.” But in her most recent column, Julia wrote that the streaming service “appears to be turning a corner.” I’m hearing the same things.

   Sports, of course, has been a big driver of Peacock’s growth, including the NFL wild card playoff game that it carried exclusively. Notably, as my other partner Matt Belloni said on his The Town podcast this week, “I’ve heard from some NBCU sources that the churn numbers after the Peacock game are surprisingly good.” It’s hardly a bold prediction to expect NBC to push Peacock even harder this summer, especially in the run-up to the Paris Olympics. The Opening Ceremony is July 26, and it will be interesting to see what other programming they serve to users after the games to prevent churn.

5. Screams from the R.S.N. salt mines: I use the word “chaos” every time I am asked about the regional sports network business. R.S.N.s were the first ones to deal with all the problems that have hurt multichannel video. To wit: Diamond Sports Group is in bankruptcy, and Warner Bros. Discovery got out of the business entirely. Still, I was surprised to see Lia Assimakopoulos’ story last night in The Dallas Morning News about how the Dallas Stars are looking into making their games available for free locally via a direct-to-consumer service.

   My two main takeaways: First: Boy… the situation is bleak and getting bleaker. Teams are hopeful, and bordering on desperate, for Amazon or Fanatics to enter the void because setting up a D.T.C. business isn’t precisely their core competency. (Perhaps sensing the desperation, Amazon and their ilk increasingly have all the leverage.) Also, this sort of O.T.T. option could only work for an NHL team. MLB and NBA teams are accustomed to deals with much higher revenue. And, ergo, they need a much more significant solution to the R.S.N. chaos.

The advent of the 12-team C.F.P., which debuts this year, has suffered through innumerable delays, including recent ones. The executives that I speak to enumerate the usual suspects: figuring out what the hell to do with those two orphaned Pac-12 schools; nailing an equitable way to distribute revenue to the conferences, which are increasingly becoming a duopoly; and perhaps the most prosaic challenge: scheduling. And yet, that final nit—the issue of landing upon a workable schedule, particularly for those opening-round games—is becoming an increasingly significant pain in the neck.

After all, those opening-round games are scheduled for December 20 and 21 this year. The latter date, as you surely know from consulting your Farmer’s Almanac, falls on a Saturday—and the NFL historically schedules games on that day, which is set up to be Week 16 this year. (Last season, the NFL scheduled two games on its Week 16 Saturday: the Bengals-Steelers on NBC and the Bills-Chargers on Peacock.) It’s the same deal the following year, too: The C.F.P.’s opening-round games are on Friday and Saturday.

Is this a matter of grave consequence, on the level with munitions funding for Ukraine or climate change? That, it is not. But NFL executives are aggrieved because C.F.P. officials met with them as they worked through the schedule, and simply did not take heed of the league’s desire to schedule games on that Saturday. The move leaves the NFL with two options: cede that Saturday for the college football games or counterprogram the newly expanded C.F.P. with regular season games of its own. (The conflict is only with those first-round games. The quarterfinals and subsequent rounds are largely midweek.)

Executives who have done business with the NFL fully expect the league to dig in and schedule its own games on that Saturday. The NFL doesn’t take a back seat to anyone—not TV networks, not Big Tech, not sponsors, and certainly not a C.F.P. that appears to be rudderless. Without trying to sound draconian or hyperbolic, the NFL looks at anything that could potentially cannibalize viewers as a threat. And early-round C.F.P. games certainly constitute a viewership threat.

A league source described the mood inside the NFL as closer to befuddlement than anger. The NFL has worked with college football on scheduling issues for decades, and the two organizations have an age-old détente in place that lets them carve up fall weekends: The NFL has only scheduled Saturday games after conference championships, and college football has stayed away from Sunday and Mondays. The league historically has described this as a collaborative approach—i.e., they would say they want to schedule games with the football fan in mind, with minimal overlap, and not siphon audiences from each other.

For the next two years, the NFL will remain peeved at the C.F.P. for encroaching on its turf. But the date everyone should circle is 2026, which is when the C.F.P. is considering another expansion to as many as 16 teams. The C.F.P. faces a myriad of questions before then, not the least of which is whether the S.E.C.’s Greg Sankey and the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti will remain committed to the playoffs or if they will forge ahead on their own. Amid these existential questions, the C.F.P. could soon find out that it’s better to have the NFL in their corner, especially over a topic as seemingly mundane as scheduling.

On Spulu: “As a YouTube TV subscriber, this would be of interest to me. I pretty much have to subscribe to Peacock and P+ to see all the games I want anyways, so cutting $30/month or so off YTTV’s price would probably have me at least trialing it.”

“The irony in Spulu being created as a spiteful cold shoulder to Comcast and Paramount is that CBS was the broadcast network that most prioritized the linear experience during the great digital transition of the last 16 years. Network owners made a strategic decision not to join Hulu with its rivals in order to create easier next-day-air availability. CBS All Access (for all its flaws) had clear windowing strategies (and initial NFL broadcast restrictions). CBS emphasized nonexclusive licensing agreements with Netflix, and the investment in CBS All Access originals was comparatively modest. All the while, the rest of the industry arguably expedited the decline of linear and the rise of streaming with a number of concessions and shortsighted decisions. Throw in CBS’s clearly defined audience target and it's no wonder the network has led broadcast in total viewers throughout the majority of the last 20 years. None of that excuses the perceived mistakes of today, but it certainly adds a comedic touch to this game of middle school lunch table alliances.”

On NBA rights: “Could Apple make a bid for a ‘simulcast broadcast,’ independent of the other packages, exclusively for Apple Vision Pro? Not sure if there’s any precedent for this, but perhaps there’s an argument to be made that this is an all-new type of broadcast, on a new medium, and therefore, wouldn’t need to compete with these other packages? Eyeballs are eyeballs, regardless if the screen is a 65” TV eight feet away or a Vision Pro three inches from your eyeballs, but I have to imagine Tim Cook and Eddy Cue are pitching the Vision Pro as an all-new way to consume sports, and therefore, could necessitate an all-new approach to licensing. As a product design director, this is so far outside my wheelhouse, and I’m sure I’m wrong in 99 ways here. But as someone deeply invested in the future of sports, I’m so excited about what’s possible here.”