Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on all the power, money, egos, and egomaniacs driving the business of sports. Happy ESPYs Day to all who celebrate.

I will be in Dallas early next week for MLB’s All-Star Game festivities. It was 25 years ago that the league announced its All-Century team at Fenway Park—an anniversary that will prompt a ton of coverage on MLB Network over the next five days. Expect to see this Kevin Costner-narrated video on overdrive.

The fate of democracy appears to be hanging in the balance, and we’ve convened here to discuss the future of regional sports networks. I am convinced that this is how the founding fathers intended it! Meanwhile, this is a useful reminder to stop forwarding this damn email to your freeloading colleagues! If you keep it up, Marchand will show up at your door and offer a rousing recital of the Federalist Papers.

Okay, let’s get to it…

1. Goodell’s P.E. curiosity: NFL commish Roger Goodell sat down for a seven-minute interview with Julia Boorstin on CNBC this morning, and a couple of his comments piqued my interest. For one, Goodell was sheepishly optimistic about the possibility of allowing private equity firms to take minority positions of up to 10 percent in franchises: “Hopefully, we’ll have something by the end of the year,” he told Boorstin. She followed up by noting that the MLB, NBA, and NHL already allow private equity firms the opportunity to take stakes up to 30 percent in teams. Goodell retorted: “This is also something that’s an initial cap. Could we raise it at some point in time? Of course.”

   As was the case with everything from gambling to streaming, the NFL appears poised to follow the lead of other leagues and improve upon their positioning. Reading between the lines, I do expect that cap to get raised to 30 percent before long. And it’s hard to overstate how this multi-trillion dollar industry will impact team valuations over time. It might even make that Sunday Ticket judgment look like chump change.

2. Goodell on Paramount: In the wake of Skydance and RedBird’s deal to acquire Paramount Global, Goodell was evasive about whether he would use a change-of-control provision to renegotiate the NFL’s $2.1 billion annual deal with CBS. “We’ll look at the structure of the deal. We’ll see how it impacts us. We’ll see how it impacts our business. And we’ll make the best decision for the NFL at that point.”

   Obviously, the NFL has a ton of leverage, and its 11-year media deal that started just last year is clearly undervalued in the wake of the NBA’s $76 billion haul. None of my sources believe that the NFL would open up CBS’s deal and demand a larger rights fee, but they do believe the league would twist arms in more subtle ways—enhancing the value of its existing deal with Skydance, say, or noodling with the CBS telecasts, or perhaps having the network run more promos for the league and its teams. Probably all of the above, and more.

3. Olympic basketball on Fox: I was surprised to see USA Basketball’s first exhibition game on FS1 last night, with Gus Johnson and Bill Raftery calling the win against Canada. I expected the game to be on NBC, which, of course, holds the Olympic rights through 2032, and has carried all of the Olympic trials this year—including swimming, diving, track & field, and gymnastics. Adding to my confusion, Fox hasn’t carried NBA programming since it sold its regional sports networks to Disney more than five years ago.

   But it turns out that Fox quietly cut a deal with the NBA last year to carry six USA Basketball exhibitions in the lead-up to the Olympics.

   For Fox, these games bring a ton of new viewers into the fold: Wednesday night’s win over Canada drew 1.162 million viewers, making it the most-watched basketball game in the history of FS1. For NBC, it can’t hurt to have competing networks carry these games. After all, the additional exposure helps to market the Olympics, itself.

4. NBA moves: As I reported in Monday’s edition of The Varsity, ESPN, NBC, and Amazon had expected to receive written deal drafts from the NBA by the end of this week, and sure enough, they did. Now the league’s owners will vote to approve the deal at their board of governors meeting in Vegas, on Tuesday, which will finally kick off the five-day window for Warner Bros. Discovery to exercise its matching rights.

   Anyone hoping for a swift denouement, however, will be sorely disappointed. I’ve been hearing increasingly louder rumblings that WBD is set on trying to exercise its matching rights on Amazon’s $1.8 billion-per-year “C” package, which includes the in-season tournament and a conference finals matchup every other year. This has the potential to throw a monkey wrench into these negotiations and cause them to drag on for several more weeks. Stay tuned…

5. Don’t forget the W: As my social feed filled up yesterday with stories about the NBA’s media rights deals, I received a call from a frustrated Carol Stiff, the former ESPNer who runs the Women’s Sports Network. Stiff was rightly miffed that none of the stories mentioned the WNBA, which is included in the packages. The league, of course, is enjoying huge viewership gains this season. “I would like to see the headline read NBA and WNBA Rights instead of just the NBA,” she told me. “Perhaps even a quote from WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert will be included high in the release? The time seems right to me.”

The bad news is that plenty of hiccups still remain. And while the two sides are, at the very least, listening to each other, they remain far apart on a couple of key issues, according to several sources. Importantly, Rigdon has not budged from his demand that the Bally Sports networks immediately move to the cable operator’s digital tier—his original position from the start of these negotiations and one that Preschlack flat-out rejected back in May. Comcast has pushed this same deal with every R.S.N. that has come up for renewal over the past year, including Root Sports in Seattle, SportsNet Pittsburgh, and the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in Baltimore and Washington. (I’m told that Comcast’s deal with NESN, the popular New England R.S.N. that carries Red Sox games, is up at the end of this year. Rigdon will certainly hold firm with his digital cliff path strategy there, too.)

So why is Diamond suddenly interested in accepting Comcast’s digital tier deal? Preschlack has obviously run the numbers and decided that the court will favor a bad Comcast deal over no deal. Diamond also allayed some of its own fears that other distributors would exercise most-favored-nations clauses in their contracts if it acceded to Comcast’s cliff path demands. Some, like Charter, which signed a deal with Diamond in early April, told company executives that they would continue to use the glide path method that migrates Diamond Sports’ R.S.N.s to a digital tier over time. (Charter has already embraced the glide path route with its Dodgers and Lakers R.S.N.s and told Diamond that they will not alter that strategy with others.) Others, like DirecTV, which signed a deal with Diamond in early May, and doesn’t own its own R.S.N.s, said it wouldn’t think twice about using a M.F.N. clause that it already negotiated into its contract.

And yet even if Diamond agrees to Rigdon’s cliff path strategy and even if it gets assurances from some cable operators that they won’t exercise their M.F.N. clauses, a deal does not appear imminent. Among other things, Comcast wants assurances that Diamond will not start to sell live games direct-to-consumer at a price that undercuts Comcast. That’s long been a bone of contention for cable operators, who so far have convinced teams and R.S.N.s to set high prices on their D.T.C. offerings.

Alas, it’s too early to say whether a Comcast deal will have any effect on the July 29 hearing. Even if it secures a Comcast deal, Diamond still faces pressure from other distributors (Altice dropped the Bally Sports R.S.N.s last week) and the NBA and NHL are loath to sign any long-term deal for their digital rights. Meanwhile, an era keeps ending…

On my tortured Sunday Ticket class-action lawsuit analogy: “You keep making the comparison with vending machines by saying it's like the soda companies getting together and determining the price is higher. But a better comparison is saying that the Sunday Ticket model is like requiring me to buy the entire vending machine just to get the one soda that I want!” —A social media executive, via Threads

On NHL teams that have ditched R.S.N.s: “You missed the Seattle Kraken in your rundown of teams who have left their R.S.N.s. The team announced back in April that its games would be carried locally by Amazon Prime and Tenga.” —A Varsity subscriber

On Jeff Shell’s new role as New Paramount president: “I’ve had some dealings with Shell. He’s a straight-shooter.” —A cable guy

On The Varsity’s headline writers: “For Whom Shell Tolls! Haha. I’m sure Hemingway would be proud.” —A network executive who majored in English

On The Varsity’s coverage of Michael Rubin’s White Party: “How could you leave out your partner Marion Maneker’s observation: ‘One of the unexpected stars of Michael Rubin’s endlessly Instagrammed and post-tacky Fourth of July all-white party was a Rashid Johnson ‘bruise painting,’ which was seen in the background of the official party video shot in the Fanatics owner’s $50 million beachfront Water Mill house.’” —A podcast host