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🏌️ Cutting in line. The PGA Tour is reportedly considering negotiating media rights extensions well before its current deals expire in 2030. Why? The Tour wants to make sure broadcasters have enough in their coffers before the NFL inevitably negotiates its TV deals early. Per Puck’s John Ourand, other leagues might be considering similar maneuvers.

⚾ A shitty week gets worse. After mass layoffs at both the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week, cuts have also reached MLB.com. Among those let go were St. Louis Cardinals reporter John Denton and Pittsburgh Pirates reporter Alex Stumpf. It’s unclear how many journalists were impacted by the move, which is said to be part of a larger restructuring.

🏈 It just means a billion. The SEC has officially become the first conference to make over $1 billion in revenue distributions to its member schools. The 14 members receiving full payouts earned $72.4 million each, while new members Texas and Oklahoma received $12.1 million and $2.6 million respectively. Both schools will receive full payouts beginning next season. For what it’s worth, the Big Ten, which will make its tax filing in May, is also expected to exceed $1 billion in distributions for the first time.

Disney is getting new leadership next month as longtime CEO Bob Iger hands the reins to current parks and experiences chief Josh D’Amaro.

From a sports perspective, the news has been met with a collection of furled eyebrows. D’Amaro has no experience running Disney’s media assets, including entertainment and sports. The incoming CEO has come up entirely through Disney’s theme parks division, which has increasingly become the revenue engine for the company overall.

Without any track record in media to fall back on, it’s difficult to predict how D’Amaro will value ESPN, once the crown jewel of the Disney empire, at least from a revenue standpoint.

It’s true that, when looking at Disney’s businesses, ESPN and ABC stick out. Fairy tale movies, roller coasters, and cruise ships don’t necessarily have a lot of to do with news and sports broadcasting. When the news and sports are paying the bills, that’s one thing, but as we all know, that’s not the case anymore.

Instead, Disney is leaning on its experiences business. That part of the company has seen rapid growth, going from generating $6.8 billion of operating income in 2019 to $10 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, cord-cutting has eroded the former cash cows of ESPN and ABC.

And with D’Amaro taking over next month, speculation over the future of ESPN and ABC as Disney-owned brands has grown, especially as other corporations like Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery have spun out (or plan to spin out) their own media entities.

Prominent media analyst Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners broached the subject on Matthew Belloni’s podcast earlier this week, suggesting ESPN and ABC are more likely than not to be spun out of Disney’s orbit in the next 18 months.

“I would be shocked if Disney didn’t move forward with a separation of the company to resemble what Warner did and then use that separation to invest in gaming or some other priority that when Josh looks at it, where he can put his stamp and say, ‘this is what the Disney of the next decade is going to look like,'” Greenfield said.

Belloni then noted that, in industry circles, some believe part of ESPN’s motivation to reach its equity deal with the NFL was to obtain a chunky valuation in the process. $30 billion, as it turns out.

Greenfield also believes the NFL could be a proponent of ESPN’s separation from Disney, suggesting last summer that the league’s stake in the network would be easier to sell if it were unencumbered by oversight from a massive corporation. Perhaps there’s some truth to that, although recent details about the deal structure reveal ESPN could buy back its stake from the NFL in 2034 if it wanted, which would indicate liquidity isn’t a huge concern for the league. (It’s difficult to sell a stake in something when another entity has a right to buy that stake back at a fixed price down the line.)

But the crux of the debate here is simple. Why? Why would Disney want to separate itself from ESPN and ABC?

Generally speaking, public companies decide to spinoff parts of a business for one of two reasons. Either it believes a business will be worth more as an independent entity, thus unlocking value for shareholders, or it believes its core businesses can be worth more by getting rid of declining assets, as we’ve seen from both Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Now, Greenfield would argue that by cleaving off ESPN and ABC, Disney would be freed up to invest in potential growth properties, like video games. His proposed timeline of within 18 months, however, feels a bit hasty.

Sports still generated $2.9 billion of operating income for Disney in 2025. Overall ESPN subscriptions fell just 3%, much slower than the rate of decline seen by the rest of the industry. And there’s reason to think the business is resilient.

Sports remains the only programming people watch live at any meaningful clip. ESPN’s direct-to-consumer product is in its infancy, and has already proven to capture a segment of consumers that weren’t subscribed via traditional means, without eroding the cable or satellite bundle. And there’s something to be said about Disney’s ability to offer a fully diversified media bundle: family programming on Disney+, general entertainment with Hulu, news with ABC, and sports with ESPN.

It’s one thing to offload cable channels like Food Network or SyFy. It’s another to get rid of the one channel holding everything together. Entertainment channels are dropping like a rock in the Mariana Trench. ESPN’s decline is much flatter. It’s not a drag on Disney’s overall business. At least not yet.

And it seems unlikely ESPN would be worth more separated from Disney. For one, Disney provides ESPN the financial might to compete for the upper echelon of sports rights, as evidenced by the fact that the network will air both the Super Bowl and College Football Playoff National Championship next year, perhaps the two biggest sporting events of the year. Along those lines, there’s no obvious M&A that would improve ESPN’s core business, which is carriage fees from cable and satellite distributors. ESPN can’t add any inventory that would make it more valuable to distributors than it already is.

This is far from the first time an ESPN spinoff has been discussed. The network has always been a bit of a redheaded stepchild at Disney. And there likely will come a day where Disney decides to sell the network, spin it out, or otherwise separate itself from the Worldwide Leader. In a way, the Greenfields of the world are like the analysts on CNBC who are always predicting a recession. Eventually, one comes and they all get to take their victory lap.

In the same way, ESPN will separate from Disney, eventually. But is that split imminent, as Greenfield suggests? That’s a much more debatable proposition. It’s certainly possible that D’Amaro comes in and wants to make a splash. Spinning off ESPN and ABC, then making a big play for something like Roblox, would be the definition of splashy. But that’s not really the Disney ethos. Sure, the company has made huge acquisitions in the past — Star Wars, 21st Century Fox — but this would be the opposite. This would be contraction. That’s not what Disney has been about in recent years.

Though, if there was ever a time for that to change, it’d be with a new CEO in charge.

🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎙️

Will Lewis likes sports. He just doesn’t like paying sports journalists.

The Washington Post publisher who presided over the axing of the paper’s sports division was too ashamed to join Wednesday’s conference call to announce the layoff of 300 staffers himself, but apparently didn’t feel too ashamed to walk the red carpet at Thursday evening’s NFL Honors in San Francisco.

Lewis, in his two years in charge of the Post, has completely gutted the storied paper. The most recent cuts not only killed the sports desk but also slashed the publication’s foreign and metro sections dramatically.

There’s a cruel irony to Lewis’s appearance in the Bay Area during Super Bowl week. Usually, a newspaper like the Post would send a handful of reporters to cover the Super Bowl each year. That, of course, isn’t happening this week. Deserving journalists are sitting at home, Post subscribers aren’t getting the quality of coverage they pay for, all the while Will Lewis struts down the red carpet as if his lack of vision for the paper didn’t directly lead to one of the largest mass media layoffs in years.

What’s worse? Lewis clearly doesn’t care. As The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis revealed in his brilliantly reported piece on the killing of the Post‘s sports section, Lewis goes to the Super Bowl every year. He’s a big sports fan. But when he called a meeting with the Post‘s sportswriters during last year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans, most expected the boss to lay out a blueprint for what everyone knew was a department in need of guidance. “You thought there would be some articulation of a plan,” one writer told Curtis. Instead, Lewis just wanted to “talk ball.”

“In New Orleans, Post writers who worried the paper was on the ropes found themselves in a conversation about Eagles-Chiefs,” Curtis reported.

One can imagine Lewis is having those same conversations about the Seahawks and Patriots now, only without his own sportswriters.

“Killing the paper’s sports section doesn’t mean missing the Super Bowl. Unbelievable stuff,” Curtis wrote on X in response to Lewis’s red carpet appearance.

Well, we didn’t expect the same guy who chose not to be present when firing one-third of his company to exercise one ounce of self-awareness, did we?