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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏈 Dennis Dodd retires. The longtime CBS Sports college football writer is calling it a career. Dodd is leaving behind quite a legacy. He is one of seven media members to have covered all 16 BCS National Championship Games from 1999-2014, while also chronicling the sport’s ever-shifting landscape in more recent years. “I’ll miss the hell out of all of it,” Dodd wrote in his farewell column. “Well, everything but the parking.”

📰 RIP John Feinstein. Prolific author and longtime Washington Post sportswriter John Feinstein passed away on Thursday at the age of 69. Tributes poured in from across the sports media landscape throughout the day. No cause of death was reported, but Feinstein’s passing seems to have been unexpected; he filed his final story covering Michigan State’s Tom Izzo on Wednesday night.

📺 ESPN All Access? That could be the name for the network’s impending direct-to-consumer streaming service, according to Amy Maclean of Cablefax. The name will be officially revealed in the next couple of months. ESPN’s main goal with branding its streamer? Avoiding confusion. ESPN+ already exists, but doesn’t include the ESPN linear networks. How can the network convey this service includes everything? Well, it’s in the name.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

NBC secures Olympics through 2036

Long before a deal needed to be struck, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Comcast’s NBCUniversal agreed to extend their long-term partnership, keeping NBC as the U.S. television home of the Olympics through 2036.

Prior to Thursday’s announcement, NBC and the IOC already had an agreement in place keeping the biennial competition on the peacock network through the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane. Now, NBC has secured the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah and an additional summer games in location TBD two years later.

The two additional Olympiads will run NBC $3 billion, a modest increase over the approximately $1.4 billion the network pays per two-year cycle in its current agreement.

The extension shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. For one, NBC’s current deal with the IOC was consummated back in 2014, a full 18 years before the final Olympics of the agreement would even be contested. So by that standard, this extension was overdue!

But more importantly, NBC is able to lock in a fair price for two additional Olympic cycles, while the IOC has bought itself a level of financial stability that takes them well into the 2030s.

While the Olympics can often be an afterthought for sports fans considering the competition takes place over just a few weeks in even-numbered years only, this extension helps solidify NBC’s position as a destination for premier sporting events for the next decade.

Last year, as the Olympics returned to a more viewership-friendly timezone for an American audience, NBC saw a ratings resurgence. The Paris Olympics regularly averaged over 30 million viewers across NBC platforms during its primetime windows. Those are audiences only surpassed by the mighty NFL during its most coveted time slots on Thanksgiving Day and in the postseason.

Luckily for NBC, four of the next five Olympics take place in either the United States or Europe, both favorable locations for the American viewer. The network will surely hope to replicate the Paris model for years to come.

Zooming out, NBC now has two flagship live sports properties locked up through 2036: the Olympics and the NBA. No other sports media company can say that.

Sure, neither of these properties compare to the NFL, who will be the ultimate kingmaker in this game of sports media musical chairs when they inevitably decide to opt-out of their current broadcast agreements in 2030. But if you’re NBC, the Olympics-NBA combo through 2036 has you feeling pretty indispensable for most sports viewers. That could even help the network retain NFL rights when the time comes.

This is also a huge boon for Peacock, which is slowly becoming a need-to-have streaming service for many sports fans. Later this year, Peacock will begin airing exclusive NBA games. Then, every two years, Peacock will be able to count on a huge subscriber boost during the Olympics. And while some of those subs might churn, they’ve proven to be stickier than many originally thought.

As far as long-term prospects go, it’s hard to find a network that holds a better hand than NBC.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

👏 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🗣️

• NASCAR president Steve Phelps believes fans will flock to Amazon in the same numbers that viewers tune in on cable. “[The] expectation is it’s going to drive viewership that’s probably at least as good as what we’d see on cable,” he told Sports Business Journal. That’s no easy feat. It took the NFL about three years for its Thursday Night Football package to draw comparable numbers on Amazon as it did on broadcast. Of course, broadcast and cable are different animals, but it’s a high bar to clear nonetheless.

• DirecTV’s MySports skinny bundle is adding regional sports networks in 18 markets. The sports-centric package will offer an add-on for customers living in areas served by any of the FanDuel Sports Network channels, as well as Chicago Sports Network and Marquee Sports Network in the Chicago market, and Altitude Sports in Denver. The add-on will run subscribers an additional $19.99 per month on top of the $69.99 monthly price of the base package.

• CBS and The CW have picked up rights to the professional beach volleyball league, AVP. The CBS broadcast channel will air the AVP League Championship match on August 31, while CBS Sports Network and The CW will be home to regular season matches between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

✍️AROUND AA✍️

Kendrick Perkins has a point…

Given the popularity of TNT’s Inside the NBA, it’s very easy to dismiss any number of the cast’s frequent mishaps about the league as simply part of the show’s charm. But occasionally, it crosses a line.

Earlier this week, a very clear line was crossed when Shaquille O’Neal referred to Chauncey Billups as the head coach of the Detroit Pistons. That’s innocent enough on its own, but when Candace Parker quickly called him out on the mistake, Shaq admitted, “I don’t watch Detroit.”

The incident lent credence to ESPN’s Kendrick Perkins, who has been critical of the Inside crew in the past for their collective lack of ball knowledge.

Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder brilliantly explained why Perk is right to be upset in this instance, and why Shaq’s flippant attitude towards the Pistons is a disservice to NBA coverage. Here are a couple excerpts from Matt’s column:

The Pistons are one of the absolute best stories in the NBA this year, and they may wind up with one of the largest one-year turnarounds in association history. But because Shaquille O’Neal and Inside the NBA can’t be bothered to pay attention or actually know who is coaching the team, they just get carelessly thrown on the trash heap that they believe is the modern-day NBA.

Could you imagine Jason Kelce going on ESPN without knowing the name of the Minnesota Vikings head coach when he was talking about the NFL last year? It would be an embarrassment to both Kelce and ESPN. What if it was Shaq correcting Candace Parker instead of the other way around? Could you imagine the backlash?

So why don’t we collectively have that same energy here? Shaquille O’Neal gets paid $15 million a year by TNT! He is one of the highest-paid personalities in all of sports media. Is it too much to ask to know who coaches playoff teams? This isn’t the Washington Wizards or New Orleans Pelicans we’re discussing here.

…

Nobody is expecting Shaquille O’Neal or Charles Barkley to suddenly transform themselves into the NBA version of Dan Orlovsky. Still, a little bit of effort would go a long way when it comes to knowing today’s NBA. It wouldn’t have to take away from the entertainment they bring nightly, either. And if these fabulous, funny, engaging personalities actually engaged with today’s NBA a little bit more, maybe they would like what they see.

Maybe they could build up a new generation of young stars like Cade Cunningham. Perhaps it would help the ratings and interest and popularity of the NBA grow instead of being sucked into another negativity vortex about the regular season not mattering, players shooting too many threes, and nobody stepping up to be the next face of the NBA. Maybe nobody’s stepping up because they don’t have the opportunity with Stephen A., Barkley, Shaq, and others sucking up all the oxygen. After all, they are too focused on themselves.

When Shaquille O’Neal dismisses one of the best stories in the NBA as “boring” or flatly says, “I don’t watch,” it communicates to NBA fans and the world that it just doesn’t matter. If Shaq doesn’t care then why should anybody else? And that’s when it moves from something that can easily be laughed off as part of the fun to something that’s actually detrimental to the NBA.

️‍🔥THE CLOSER🔥

If you’re expecting fewer commercials during PGA Tour events, don’t

Seasons come and seasons go, but one thing remains consistent in the minds of golf fans: the PGA Tour airs too many damn commercials.

Golf is a challenging sport to broadcast. There are no natural breaks in the action, and at any given time, dozens of golf shots are happening across 18 holes. Quite honestly, it’s a miracle that the golf presentation on television looks as good as it does.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t occasionally some snafus. Last week, NBC had a big one when the network failed to come back from commercial in time to see all of Russell Henley’s tournament-winning chip-in for eagle. Blunders like that provide plenty of fodder for golf diehards to complain about the PGA Tour’s commercial load. And make no mistake, the Tour airs a lot of commercials.

Per the terms of the PGA Tour’s agreements with CBS and NBC, each our of broadcast will include between 17 and 21 minutes of commercials. That’s nearly a third of viewing time taken up by ads for BMW or Morgan Stanley, quite a large ask for viewers tuning in to watch golf.

When PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan was confronted with this issue during the Players Championship this week, he dodged and weaved.

“Commercial inventory is one element of the value that our partners generate through our partnership with the PGA Tour,” Monahan said. “We’re going to do everything that we can to continue to improve and to continue to evolve, but make no mistake about it, the commercial underpinning we receive, and the ability for our partners to be able to express their brand and tell their stories is an important element of how we’re able to present the very best tour in the world.”

In other words: there’s too much money at stake for the PGA Tour to give up its high commercial load. And when you think about it, it makes sense.

Advertising to golf fans is on the whole more valuable for marketers than advertising in other sports. Golf audiences over-index in people with plenty of disposable income, meaning the types of advertisers that the PGA Tour attracts (luxury car brands, financial services, etc.) are more than willing to pay a premium to get in front of the eyeballs of golf fans. That makes it quite tricky for Monahan to commit to any reduction in commercial load during the broadcasts.

So, as much as it might be nice for golf viewers to sit through fewer ads every weekend, don’t expect that anytime soon.