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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

💵 Let’s NBSee. Comcast is formally exploring a purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and studios assets, hiring bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to weigh a bid. Last month, WBD began to formally explore a sale process after receiving an unsolicited bid from Paramount. WBD has self-imposed a Christmas deadline to decide its future.

🏈 Monday Night Sadness. Despite having the Dallas Cowboys on Monday, ESPN’s telecast of Monday Night Football averaged 16.2 million viewers and dropped by 21% year-over-year, in part due to the network’s ongoing standoff with YouTube TV. To be fair, last year’s comparable game, Chiefs-Buccaneers, had an exceptionally strong audience (20.6 million viewers).

⚾ Inside baseball. MLB Network is looking to capitalize on a strong World Series by launching a new nightly show, MLB Tonight - The Insiders, debuting Friday at 7 p.m. ET. The program will air weekly every Friday evening throughout the offseason. Matt Vasgersian will host alongside contributors Anthony Castrovince, Keegan Matheson, Jesse Rogers, and Joel Sherman.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

RIP ESPN Bet, we hardly knew ya

On Thursday, ESPN and Penn Gaming jointly announced an end to the 10-year licensing agreement entered in 2023 that would see ESPN lend its name, brand, and platforms to the sportsbook desperately fighting DraftKings and FanDuel for market share.

The writing was on the wall. One analyst called 2025 a “make or break” year for ESPN Bet as it continued to hover around a 3% share of the sports betting market outside of Nevada, compared to 37% and 35% for DraftKings and FanDuel respectively.

And to be honest, the venture caused more headaches than either side wanted, leading to the early termination a full year before a 2026 opt-out option in the original contract.

For ESPN, having its name plastered on a sportsbook came with significant reputational risk. Just a few weeks ago, the network was faced with covering a bombshell NBA gambling scandal brought forth by the FBI. That coverage has been thoroughly criticized in this very newsletter, but it wasn’t made any easier by the appearance of ESPN Bet insignias plastered across the screen.

For Penn, the company simply wasn’t getting the full value of its contract. Penn was paying ESPN $150 million per year, banking on the Worldwide Leader in Sports’ ability to drive meaningful usage to its sportsbook. That clearly didn’t happen, and showed no signs of turning around anytime soon.

So now, ESPN and Penn pivot. Shortly after ESPN announced the early termination of the Penn deal, it revealed a similar deal with DraftKings. Financial terms of that arrangement haven’t been reported, but assuming they’re similar to the Penn contract, ESPN gets all the benefits of locking arms with a sportsbook without the appearance that they, themselves, are operating the book. There’s also plenty of upside to being in business with one of the two largest sportsbooks in the country, as countless other sports media outlets have come to learn over the years.

I think it’s important to stress the relative size of these deals for a business like ESPN. The $150 million per year it earned from Penn is equivalent to one month of revenue from a distribution agreement with YouTube TV. One month of revenue, from one single TV provider, is equal to an entire year of revenue earned from plugging Stephen A. Smith’s parlays on First Take each day.

Of course, $150 million is nothing to scoff at, but it’s a very in-your-face way to grow the pie by a rather insignificant amount.

And that gets to the larger point of what is the “right” way for ESPN to go about advertising sports betting. There’s a huge market for sports betting content, that much is clear. But the way ESPN and most other legacy media outlets actually incorporate this sponsored content into their broadcasts is grating, and doesn’t even serve fans who enjoy wagering on sports.

As someone who likes to bet from time to time, I can say with confidence that I, nor anyone else, is listening to Stephen A. Smith, Elle Duncan, or Mike Greenberg for picks. So please stop serving us “Greeny’s Guarantees” or whatever. Talk about betting like a normal person would. Believe it or not, Vegas lines can actually be used as a tool to spark discussion (and fulfill sponsorship obligations).

To be sure, ESPN is, without a doubt, in a better position from a gambling perspective today than they were before these announcements yesterday. They missed the boat on being a real player in the space, but that ship sailed years ago. Now, it’s about capitalizing on their ability to reach millions of sports fans every single day, and that works best alongside one half of the current sports betting duopoly in the United States.

🏈 GRADE THE 2025 COLLEGE FOOTBALL TV ANNOUNCERS 🏈

It’s that time of year again, we’re grading the best (and worst) college football announcing teams on television! We’ve compiled the 25 most-prominent booths in college football, representing each network, and are asking you to grade them A to F.

Fill out your report card here!

🎺 AROUND AA 🎺

It’s been a tumultuous stretch for ESPN from a public perception standpoint. The once-beloved brand now finds itself as the target of fan angst, both deserved and undeserved. Our Matt Yoder took a dive into the myriad reasons that ESPN has lost the trust of sports fans over the years.

ESPN is at the center of the sports universe for American sports fans. It’s next to impossible to be a sports fan without ESPN and its 45-plus-year history as the Worldwide Leader in Sports.

But in 2025, more sports fans than ever don’t have a positive relationship with ESPN. The network has been hit from all sides in recent years, becoming a piñata batted around in everything from culture wars to carriage disputes.

ESPN will likely tell you its business has never been better. They have built an impenetrable position at the top of the sports media landscape. They own the rights to almost all the major sporting events and are watched by millions consistently. Their bottom line with corporate parent Disney is showing increased resistance against industry headwinds after years of turmoil. ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro would not be touted as a potential successor to Disney CEO Bob Iger if things weren’t going well.

ESPN has navigated incredible change and transitions in the sports and media worlds and are trying to build the plane as they fly it. That means redoing how they do content by splashing out cash for big personalities and doing licensing deals to get top shows. It also means putting a new puzzle together for their revenue stream by trying to launch a new streaming service while still keeping the line open to cable and satellite subscribers. And it means new partnerships like the proposed equity deal with the NFL to cement the network’s future further.

But this isn’t about ESPN’s business. It’s about their relationship with the sports fan.

And everywhere you look, fans are losing trust and losing patience with ESPN. From failed ventures to carriage disputes to polarizing personalities and endless apologies, it seems like not a day goes by without some kind of drama circulating around Bristol.

Is ESPN too woke? Not woke enough? Are they carrying water for the SEC? Can they still do journalism and reporting? Who is fighting with whom?

All of it chips away at the foundation that has been laid for decades, which made ESPN a trusted home for sports fans. And in its current state, those cracks have never been deeper or wider.

Read the rest of Matt’s brilliant column here.

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

We’re still waiting

We’re officially one week into the carriage dispute between Disney and YouTube TV that has kept Disney-owned networks off the platform for approximately 10 million subscribers. And it’s also officially the third week that the Friday newsletter has used this topic for The Closer. (Thank you for those scoring at home.)

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess when this fiasco will mercifully come to an end. But it is worth taking the opportunity to address some of the finer points in this negotiation.

We all know that the main squabble is over price. YouTube TV, the fourth-largest pay TV distributor in the country, wants to pay prices commensurate with the largest distributors since they will be the largest distributor soon enough. There’s nothing mystical about that.

But there is an interesting dynamic going on regarding how blame is being assigned in this dispute. In our very unscientific social media poll last week, 74% of respondents placed the blame on Disney rather than YouTube TV.

This result is even more stunning when considering that YouTube TV has been involved in several high-profile carriage disputes in just the last few months. Negotiations with Fox and Comcast both went down to the wire, all the while TelevisaUnivision channels have been dark for over a month.

Why this is the case is a mystery. For years, folks would generally blame the big bad cable companies for any sort of blackout, even when it was content providers demanding higher prices (that would then be passed on to the consumer).

Puck’s Julia Alexander had an interesting theory, suggesting there’s some level of brand loyalty to YouTube. Despite the platform being owned by a $3 trillion company (compared to Disney’s measly $200 billion), people just like YouTube, plain and simple. Meanwhile, the ESPN brand, as our guy Matt Yoder outlined above, is in the doghouse.

Will this force Disney’s hand? Perhaps.

Another full weekend of college football starts tomorrow. Then on Monday, Packers-Eagles will be a must-watch for NFL fans. Logic would dictate a deal is done before then. After all, both sides are losing money because of this. But at this point, it’s not clear if logic is winning out.