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🖖 Split, off. As rumors ramp up about ESPN’s possible split from Disney with incoming CEO Josh D’Amaro taking over next month, it seems that the Worldwide Leader is staying put for now. CNBC reports that an ESPN spinoff won’t be happening “anytime soon” based on information gathered about the CEO selection process.

📰 Washington Banner? At least one company is trying to take advantage of the void left by the Washington Post shuttering its sports desk. The Baltimore Banner announced Thursday it will expand its sports coverage to include the Commanders and Nationals, alongside the Capitals, Wizards, and Maryland Terrapins when warranted.

⛸️ Olympic surge. NBC is seeing its best Winter Olympics viewership since Sochi in 2014, the network says. So far, its combined late-afternoon and primetime audience figures are averaging 26.5 million viewers, nearly double what the 2022 Beijing games were averaging over the same period.

At this time last year, it was pretty safe to say there would be a lull in media rights news for the foreseeable future. The NBA had recently finalized its 11-year mega-deals with ESPN, NBC, and Prime Video, the NFL was still four years away from its 2029 opt-outs, college football was spoken for, and the NHL was locked up through 2028. Other than ESPN exiting its Sunday Night Baseball contract, triggering a half-year scramble by MLB to find a set of short-term TV partners, the media rights waters were calm.

As it would turn out, a storm was brewing.

Reports first surfaced last fall that the NFL would likely seek to renegotiate its media rights deals prior to its opt-out options in 2029 (or 2030 for its ESPN contract). There was reason enough to do so. As we all know by now, the NFL felt its rights were vastly undervalued after seeing the NBA secure $76 billion for its deals. NBC and Prime Video, somehow and some way, will end up paying the NBA more on an average annual basis than the NFL, if the current contracts reached the end of their terms.

That, of course, will not be happening on the NFL’s watch. It is, by all metrics, peerless in terms of the most valuable programming on television, except in the one metric that matters to the league: Revenue.

Networks, especially the likes of CBS, Fox, and NBC, will pay whatever they need to retain a piece of the NFL. The plurality of advertising revenue for these networks comes directly from NFL programming, and the value the Shield provides to command higher retransmission fees from pay TV distributors is not quantifiable (read: existential).

There are two clear knock-on effects from the NFL taking its rights to market early. The first is obvious; the league might split its inventory differently, and games that used to be on one broadcaster might end up on another. The second impacts the entire sports rights landscape. Leagues other than the NFL now have to consider how to approach their next set of broadcast agreements knowing that the NFL is about to take considerable money out of the market.

Let’s start with the first point. How will the NFL distribute its games once it locks in new agreements?

First off, we know by way of the NFL renegotiating these deals early that the league will have to engage with its current partners. There’s no early negotiations if, say, CBS or Fox didn’t want to talk. That means, in all likelihood, any deals that the NFL wants to redo before 2029 will include its current partners.

There’s many reasons why this is good for both the NFL and the incumbent broadcasters. For the incumbents, it gives an opportunity to secure NFL rights, and thereby some level of business stability, well into the 2030s. There’s reason to believe the NFL won’t want to apply maximum pressure on the incumbents from a pricing perspective during early negotiations. The league wants to get paid more, yes. But it doesn’t want to price its packages so high that it jeopardizes the already fraught economics networks like CBS and Fox are facing. The NFL stands to benefit from keeping these networks in a strong enough financial position where they could conceivably compete with streaming giants like YouTube and Netflix the next time media rights are up for auction.

Secondly, the NFL is incentivized to reprice its incumbent packages in such a way where a deal actually gets done. If the league were to demand a price that a network saw as outrageous, so outrageous that the network decided to exit negotiations entirely and save the billions of dollars per year it would have spent on NFL rights, the league would then be stuck with a lame duck partner until its 2029 opt-out hit. The NFL does not want one of its broadcasters to divest resources from coverage of the league, or potentially risk a brain drain as talent jumps ship to a broadcaster that will have the NFL long-term.

In order to reach a “fair” price, however, the league will likely have some demands. One would assume that the NFL will ask its incumbents, especially its Sunday afternoon partners in CBS and Fox, to give up a bit of inventory that can in turn be sold as a separate package to streamers. Perhaps it asks ESPN, which now owns NFL Network, to cleave off some of the remaining international games on the channel to create a new package. There are countless possibilities, and the NFL is known to get creative in this regard.

But, assuming both the league and its current partners can settle on a fair price and suitable inventory allotment, it’s a win-win. The NFL gets more money now and sets itself up for advantageous media rights negotiations down the line, and the networks gain stability knowing they’ll have NFL programming into the 2030s.

The losers in this scenario are other leagues. As we’ve seen reported in the last week, both the PGA Tour and NHL are now looking to renegotiate their media rights ahead of schedule to try and avoid a world where the NFL takes too much money out of broadcasters’ coffers and they get left behind. No doubt, other properties like the Premier League and MLB, both of which have deals that expire in 2028, are just as worried.

Will any broadcasters take the bait? Well, it’s a calculated risk that likely depends on just how much these other leagues that are looking to jump the NFL in line value stability versus maximizing media revenue. If any prospective broadcaster were to take a deal with one of these smaller (relative to the NFL) leagues before re-upping their NFL rights, it’d have to be at a rate that they perceive as a discount. No one is going to overextend to secure rights for a non-NFL entity, only to realize that there’s not enough left in the bank to match what the NFL is asking for.

For these leagues, it’s either discount your media rights enough to where a broadcaster is willing to pay you before the NFL deals get done, or risk waiting until the NFL deals are finalized and fighting for what’s left. Neither option is good, but it does open up opportunities for companies that aren’t in the NFL bidding war; think Warner Bros. Discovery (or future spinoff Discovery Global), Versant, or Nexstar. They could be next in line to compete for some of these leagues that inevitably get boxed out by the NFL.

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has already alluded to this reality. During a quarterly earnings call last week, Murdoch talked about a “rebalancing” in Fox’s rights portfolio to accommodate for more expensive NFL rights. That means some of Fox’s other properties, namely the World Cup (which expires after this year anyway) and MLB, could be on the chopping block.

The NFL’s decision to renegotiate its deals early will have a ripple effect on the entire industry. Leagues that aren’t the NFL will face an uphill battle to secure the rights increases they expect, while networks will need to evaluate what’s core to their sports strategy and what isn’t.

What’s clear is that 2026 will be anything but sleepy for the media rights news cycle, as both leagues and networks jockey to secure their futures.

NBC has aired every Winter Olympics since 2002, in Salt Lake City, UT. At this point, its broadcast teams are chock-full of grizzled veterans, many of whom have covered a dozen or more Games for the network (which started broadcasting the Summer Games in 1988).

Over the years, those broadcasters have gained a level of expertise and comfort in sports they may not see very often between quadrennial Olympic cycles. It’s a key reason NBC’s coverage of the Games is so well received year after year.

But what’s it like to cover the Olympics on television for the first time? In sports scarcely seen on TV, but for every four years during the Olympics? Awful Announcing caught up with Nicole Auerbach, who is currently covering her first Olympics for NBC Sports, to see what it’s like.

Auerbach is serving as a reporter for both the ski jumping and cross-country skiing competitions. Of course, she’s best known as one of the preeminent reporters on the college football beat, appearing as an analyst for NBC’s Big Ten studio. But right now, she’s neck-deep in ski jumping controversies rather than North Dakota State’s jump from D-II to the Mountain West.

Check out what Auerbach had to say about her first Olympic assignment for NBC, and whether or not she’ll be around for the LA28 games in two years.

🎙️ THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎙️

On the latest episode of The Play-By-Play, the crew dives into this year’s Super Bowl ratings. Then, they discuss the fiasco that unfolded earlier this week when ESPN and MLB rolled out their plans for MLB.tv.

With Main Street Sports Group, owner of the FanDuel Sports Networks, preparing to close its doors once the current NBA and NHL regular seasons wind to a close, the NBA is preparing its teams for a new local rights reality next season.

And according to a report by Puck sports correspondent John Ourand, it seems like the league would prefer to get a head-start on its plans to centralize local broadcast rights onto a single platform to sell to a streamer. Per Ourand, most of the 13 NBA teams currently inked to deals with Main Street would likely be part of the centralized package beginning next season. This would include the Hawks, Hornets, Heat, Thunder, Cavaliers, Pacers, Pistons, Timberwolves, Magic, Bucks, Spurs, Clippers, and Grizzlies.

While the ultimate goal would be for the NBA to get all 30 of its teams on board with this centralized package, the league has reportedly been told by streaming executives that they would prefer buying an incomplete set of local rights instead of having to negotiate deals on a team-by-team basis.

As time goes on, and teams that have deals with other regional sports networks see their contracts expire, the league can add more teams to its centralized package. “Within the next two years, all NBA teams could be part of that package,” Ourand reports.

As far as where this package goes, it’s still anyone’s guess. The NBA has reportedly spoken with YouTube, Prime Video, Apple, ESPN, and DAZN about such a package.

The idea, at least from the NBA’s perspective, is that combining local rights for many teams into one package and selling them to a streamer can command more money than if those teams sold their own rights separately. Given the declining economics of regional sports networks, that’s probably a safe bet. The challenge, as with MLB and its similar plan to centralize local rights in the coming years, will be to convince teams that already have lucrative local media rights deals, like the Lakers or Knicks, to join the league’s package.

That’s seemingly not a concern for the NBA for next season. They just want to get something off the ground and build from there. But down the line, getting its glamour teams to commit to joining the bundle will be key if the league wants to maximize its potential earnings.