Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly email on the biggest news, trends, and gossip in the sports business. I’m John Ourand.

I’m writing this private email from the salt mines of South Beach, where I will soon be speaking at J.P. Morgan’s Global High Yield and Leveraged Finance conference. As a reminder: The Varsity is heading behind a paywall in a couple of weeks, so you may as well sign up here to become a paid Puck subscriber if you haven’t already. Five out of five doctors say a Puck subscription will improve your health and mental well-being. Take their advice.

In this issue, I channel my inner Lauren Sherman and tackle the big fashion story in sports: MLB’s pantsgate, and why Fanatics is unfairly taking the brunt of the blame for the biggest apparel mishap in sports since the Janet Jackson halftime show. I also provide an NBA rights update, and a look at why Apple is in the market for sports reporters.

Mentioned in this email: Seth Wickersham, Don Van Natta Jr., Mike Florio, Peter King, Zaz, Gunnar Wiedenfels, pantsgate, Luis Silberwasser, Steve Bornstein, Dick Ebersol, the XFL, Patrick Crumb, Peter Schrager, Michael Rubin, Fanatics, Roger Goodell, Les Moonves, and many more.

Okay, let’s get started…

1. The Miami industry gossip: I’ve participated in this annual J.P. Morgan confab at the Loews South Beach for the last five years, and the main topic has generally coalesced around the declining (and declining further) regional sports network business. This year, attendees are still interested in how teams will replace local media revenue, but most of the chatter is otherwise about Spulu, the most famous Big Three in modern sports media history.

   Less than a month since its unveiling, network executives want to know whether it will be weighed down by the Department of Justice. (My partner Eriq Gardner has an excellent analysis on this topic.) They also want to know why it doesn’t include Paramount or NBC. (Though, of course, they could just read my recent piece about the vendettas involved there.) Other areas of interest have included: the NBA’s rights deal, ESPN’s direct-to-consumer push, the Disney-Charter deal, and Peacock’s exclusive NFL wild card game.

   Funnily enough, my decision to dump Xfinity has come up more than once. (I didn’t realize my cord-cutting item would have such legs, and I thank Comcast P.R. for our lovely talks last week!) Most people want to know how I will watch the Orioles this spring. That is still a work in progress. Meanwhile, I’ll have more on my presentation in Thursday’s edition of The Varsity.

2. The NBA on ZAZ: If you haven’t already, go read Matt Belloni’s What I’m Hearing private email from last night for an on-point analysis of Warner Bros. Discovery’s fourth-quarter earnings call. My favorite part is how Matt dispensed with traditional financial arcana and relied on a different thesaurus to accurately depict the results: “Disastrous!” “Tanked!” “Yikes!”

   Matt has done a brilliant job conveying the uneasy entrance David Zaslav has made into Hollywood as a swashbuckling executive known for slashing costs, dumping projects, and not always being fluent in the unspoken lingua franca of the industry. The same is true in pro sports. Zaz and his C.F.O., Gunnar Wiedenfels, have repeatedly uttered aloud comments that pro sports leagues are unaccustomed to hearing. Remember in November 2022 when Zaz said that WBD didn’t need the NBA? That led to several calls between the league and network to smooth things over.

   On last week’s call, I was interested to hear Zaz note that WBD is “fully engaged in renewal discussions, and they are constructive and productive,” especially since WBD’s exclusive negotiating window doesn’t open until next month. (It runs through April 22.) In its talks with the league, I’m told that WBD is emphasizing the quality of its productions, noting that its Inside the NBA is the best studio show on TV today. (It is.) Zaz & Co. have also emphasized their ability to reach younger audiences through Bleacher Report and House of Highlights, though that may be a more dubious claim. And its executives take every opportunity to mention TNT’s 40-year relationship with the league, which both Zaz and Gunnar highlighted on the earnings call. As in Hollywood, Zaz appears to be a fast learner.

3. More Zaz: Gunnar made another comment on the call that stuck out to me. While mentioning that WBD spends around $20 billion on programming, he said, “We generally like to own our content. That’s not the case with sports.”

   Obviously, this is not a novel observation, and it’s the philosophical barrier that has generally prevented Netflix from moving into live sports. (Though, sure, WWE may be a gateway drug.) It’s also as old as time. A vertically integrated sports content pipeline motivated Steve Bornstein to have ESPN invest in the X-Games back in the 1990s. It’s why Dick Ebersol went all-in with the original XFL two decades ago. And it’s why Luis Silberwasser moved Patrick Crumb to president of sports ventures at TNT, as I reported last week. “The industry is in the middle of a transformation,” Silberwasser told me during NBA All-Star weekend. “The same way we are innovating on the content side and with Max, we wanted to innovate with the rights and with the portfolio that we have.” Let’s see what they do…

4. Apple’s Sporting News: An interesting job opportunity crossed my desk the other day: Apple is creating a sports-writing team. According to the posting, the writing jobs pay between $104,000 and $202,600, and are based in Culver City under the aegis of Apple’s marketing department.

   The job description, featuring typically Apple corporate pablum, is pretty vague. Apple wants its sports writers to “craft and evolve new ways to connect sports, teams, athletes and fans.” Apple’s sports writers “will impact editorial, marketing, live game coverage and more.” I don’t want to draw too much from one job posting, but… Apple launched its sports app last week, and its second MLS season just started. It seems like we are getting a glimpse at Apple’s sports strategy in real-time.

5. The King: The NFL Network and Fox’s Peter Schrager put it perfectly when he tweeted this morning that he “can’t overstate how kind and gracious Peter [King] was and is to younger scribes … or so many of the kind/helpful words he’s shared—in print or note—to so many of us over the years.”

   I don’t know Peter King well, but I was a fan of his columns before I started covering sports business, and I do know that all the kind words being written about him today, in the hours after he announced his retirement, ring true. I saw first-hand how kind he was with his time and advice when I was new to SBJ and bumped into him on the field before some NFL game.

   King’s legacy will be as a perspicacious and accessible reporter, super-plugged-in expert, and newsroom mensch. But his greatest legacy in the media business has largely been underappreciated. A quarter-century ago, King created the industry’s first proto-newsletter experience. His weekly column, “Monday Morning Quarterback,” was a visionary product that offered news, analysis, and copious personal touches about his coffee addiction, craft beer fetish, and personal life in Montclair. It was published to the Sports Illustrated website, sure, but it became the framework for this modern era of publishing. Companies like Puck would not exist but for the insights it offered into our brave new world.

But what made pantsgate truly irresistible, of course, was the involvement of Michael Rubin, the billionaire man-about-town, “white party” aficionado, and C.E.O. of Fanatics, which is manufacturing the uniforms. (While Nike designs, develops, and markets the uniforms, Fanatics produces and delivers them.) Fanatics’ reputation for questionable fabric quality has trailed the company since its earliest days. Run a quick Google search and you’ll find Reddit groups and Twitter handles complaining about poor-quality merch they’ve bought from the company. As a result, Fanatics and Rubin have spent the past two weeks getting crushed on social media, and in various publications, for their role in this unforced mess.

Inside MLB, executives are approaching pantsgate with a mixture of bemusement and frustration. They feel that the players are merely going through an adjustment period, and will eventually get used to them. It is noteworthy, however, that most of the complaints deal with how the jerseys look, not that they are too heavy or too restrictive.

One of the reasons MLB picked Nike to design their teams’ uniforms was the promise that they would roll out improvements while preserving the traditional aesthetics of the jerseys. But player complaints have to do with aesthetics—because these uniforms are lighter and use less material, Nike made the decision to make the numbers, letters, logos and patches smaller. The see-through pants? I’m told that Nike used the same fabric as previous years. Insiders say MLB has had to deal with “see-through pants” on its Photo Day pictures in previous years, and this is nothing new.

On Comcast-MASN: “Don’t bet against Comcast drawing a line in the sand on the tiering of the network. Comcast already has done that with R.S.N.s in Seattle (Root) and Pittsburgh (SportsNet Pittsburgh), with the latter being negotiated against one of the best in the business (NESN’s parent, Fenway Sports Group, owns the Pittsburgh R.S.N.). It will be interesting to see if Comcast implements the tiering strategy with Ballys and/or, more importantly, their own R.S.N.s (NBC Sports Regionals).” —A former league executive

On Spulu: “CBS’s success was all due to Les Moonves. His troubles aside, there was no smarter person in the TV biz in his time, and there’s zero chance the Paramount+ debacle happens on his watch.” —A sports media executive

On the NFL: “With the Spulu streamer popping up with little warning and now the C.F.P. stepping on the NFL’s toes with scheduling, it seems like everyone is playing a not-so-quiet game of ‘How mad can we make Roger?’” —A Puck subscriber

On the C.F.P.’s schedule: “The NFL/NCAA scheduling alliance isn’t really deference by the NFL or NCAA. The antitrust exemption literally doesn’t allow the NFL to play on Friday (high school) or Saturday (college) until that weekend in December. It’s somewhat rich that the NFL is now upset about losing a couple time slots when they encroached into college’s extra primetime night (Thursday) which pushed more college football to Friday/Wednesday and even Tuesday.

“NCAA wouldn’t normally dare to schedule against the NFL, but they also may find it hard to host on-campus games midweek in December. They likely don’t have much of a choice—and they also know the product will be competitive. We will know how serious the NFL is about squashing it based on how good the matchups they run against it are, I suppose.” —A sports executive and ever-hopeful Cornhuskers fan