Welcome to the 36th Media Mailbag for The Athletic. Writing a mailbag — as egocentric as it is — is always a fun exercise. Thanks for sending in your questions via the website and app. There were more than 200 questions, so this is a two-parter. Part 2 will appear next week.
Note: Questions have been edited for clarity and length.
Richard, can you explain Tom Brady’s post-career media strategy to me? Why is he doing Hertz commercials? Surely not the money and it seems beneath him. I get he wants to be a broadcaster, but is there any precedent for his entitlement in taking Greg Olsen’s job? Is all of this good for his brand? Related, are we really in for another lame duck Olsen year where we are supposed to pretend it isn’t deeply weird that he’s a dead man walking? — Lex S.
There’s a lot to chew on here, Lex S.! First, Tom Brady did not hire Tom Brady to call games for Fox Sports. Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch hired Brady, so it’s on his Fox Sports management to figure out how to navigate Brady coming in after Greg Olsen established himself with Kevin Burkhardt as a terrific broadcast team. (Also, never forget that Murdoch called Brady “an ambassador for us, particularly with respect to client and promotional initiatives,” and that’s a big part of Brady getting paid big money.) There is no precedent for an NFL analyst-in-waiting at the No. 1 level, so Fox Sports executives are going to have to get creative. (Giving people money usually helps said creativity.)
I will say Olsen has handled this incredibly well. First, he’s open about the situation, he’s self-deprecating about it, and he’s done the most important thing — he’s made it tough for his employer given how good he’s been. If Brady opts to join Fox in 2024, he will be in the No. 1 booth. There is no other option given his fame and what Fox Corp is paying him. The irony of all this is that Brady would be far better served by starting on the No. 2 team where he can get a full season of reps to learn the television business.
The Hertz commercials? We all like money, and rich people really like money.
Finally, I don’t know Brady’s post-career plans, but he has a clear interest in media given his production company (199 Productions) and partnership in Religion of Sport. He’s also savvier than you think: He just racked up a jillion video views appearing with social media influencer Mr. Beast. The Brady brand seems very strong to me.
How important is Wimbledon as a sports property to ESPN? It occupies a part of the calendar when not much is going on. It’s a big ESPN+ property. It definitely has casual appeal. If a non-tennis or non-sports fan knows one tennis tournament, it’s Wimbledon. Obviously, the time difference hampers viewership. And what is the value (or lack of value) of Novak Djokovic as a viewership play for U.S. audiences? — Tripp A.
It’s definitely important to ESPN. Is it NFL, college football or NBA important? Of course not. But they declared what it meant in 2021 when they signed a 12-year agreement with the All England Lawn Tennis Club. (The agreement begins with the 2024 tournament and extends through 2035.)
Here’s sort of a secret about tennis: Media company executives like tennis because these are very sexy events and world cities to conduct business at. (You’ll see top ESPN execs at Wimbledon this year.) The viewership is what it is — you are dealing with a significant time difference. As for Novak: The biggest tennis viewership drivers for ESPN over the past 15 years were Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Venus Williams and Djokovic, with Serena being at the top. The best viewership scenario for ESPN on the men’s side, in my mind, would be Carlos Alcaraz and Novak playing in some major finals over the next two to three years.
Wimbledon begins Monday on ESPN’s properties. Four-time defending champ Novak Djokovic seeks his eighth title overall, which would tie Roger Federer’s record. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
I am interested in the comparison of the ratings between the XFL and USFL now that the regular season is complete. Based on the ratings, do you have any opinions or can you draw any conclusions about these spring leagues based on the ratings? — Jay S.
For this one, I decided to bring in one of the foremost sports viewership experts in the country, Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal:
“I was surprised that the USFL’s 2023 regular-season audience was lower than the XFL for one reason — distribution. The difference was marginal this year — just 3 percent (622,000 vs. 601,000) — but the USFL had the benefit of two broadcast networks airing its games (NBC and Fox) versus just one for the XFL (ABC). For the USFL’s second season, 26 of its 40 games were on one of those two channels. For the XFL, just seven games were on ABC. Cable was a differentiator for the XFL, with games on sports-fan-favorite ESPN, ESPN2 and FX. The USFL’s cable efforts were on FS1 and USA. The XFL also had the benefit of the curiosity factor in Week 1 of its return, drawing over 1 million viewers for three of those games. It drew five games over 1 million viewers for the entire season. For the USFL, only one game in 2023 — airing just after the Kentucky Derby on NBC — was able to crack 1 million viewers. In its debut season in 2022, the USFL cracked 1 million on seven occasions during the regular season.
“You cannot overlook the timing of each league’s season. The XFL rolled out immediately after the Super Bowl, when the NBA and NHL and college hoops were still in their regular seasons. … Meanwhile, the USFL started at the same time as the NBA playoffs and competed with those games in the U.S. sports zeitgeist for basically nine of 10 regular-season weeks (and six of 10 weeks competing with the Stanley Cup playoffs).
“I’m curious to see how things settle in 2024, when there is no curiosity factor for the XFL. Fox Sports, which owns the USFL, seems to be in for more, and having NBC as a partner is a nice hedge. Owning and operating a spring football league may be cheaper than shelling out a big-time rights fee for something that draws the same size audience. The XFL lost significant money in Year 1 (reportedly $60 million) and The Rock has said it’s coming back for Year 2, but we have a long time before next season. I doubt the XFL’s other financial backers want to go through another season of losses like that. While there may be appetite for spring football, having two leagues is a tough sell to fans, even if their seasons don’t overlap much.”
With the talk in the NBA during the playoffs about weak coverage for the Nuggets, I got to thinking about how much more viewership the women’s game has gotten now that the media is giving it the minimum amount of respect. I was wondering about the cause/effect relationship of overall coverage and fan engagement. When producers see that there is more response rehashing the same thing with the Lakers instead of a good investment, is it a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario from decisions made to elevate the Lakers decades ago? Could new stars and equivalent viewership be made with a different attitude, and how would you even test for that? — Ben W.
Whether it’s traditional television, cable, newspapers or digital sites, you have to bring eyeballs in if your business is dependent on audience (and all that extends from that, including advertising, subscriptions, etc.). So it creates an immense amount of disincentive, in my opinion, to find new areas of content talk. It’s easy to talk about the Cowboys, Aaron Rodgers and LeBron James because there is a known minimal audience for those topics. It’s the same premise for why the laziest of executive producers helm shows where talent trashes athletes all day long. There’s always some audience for it. It takes internal leadership, vision, and often an initial investment from an advertiser to change content direction.
Using women’s basketball as an example, I credit a group of women executives at ESPN (and then some front-facing talent who loved the sport) who worked behind the scenes for years to push women’s college basketball to the programming department and top execs. The sport kept getting better and better programming windows, and this year you really saw an explosion — 9.9 million viewers watching LSU defeat Iowa.
LSU’s NCAA title-game victory over Iowa averaged 9.9 million viewers, a testament to increasing efforts to cover and grow women’s basketball. (Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
A few weeks ago, the ABC affiliate in the Atlanta area (WSB-TV) decided not to air Formula One in Monaco live, instead opting for a tape-delayed broadcast. How much autonomy do local affiliates have to make these types of decisions? It seems like ABC/ESPN would want as many people tuned in as possible. — Zack K.
I checked in with ESPN on this one. “ABC affiliates are free to make their own programming decisions, and it’s not unusual for an affiliate to either air a program later or move it to the affiliate’s digital tier channel,” said spokesperson Andy Hall. “In the case of the F1 race, the Atlanta affiliate aired the race live on its digital tier channel and then carried the ABC re-air later that day.”
With Diamond Sports’ bankruptcy hitting the RSN model hard, do you see an effort by MLB or other professional leagues to take broadcasting in-house, or still on a team-by-team basis? I realize there would be a huge front-end cost to get it up and running but then you can control the entire product and rights to either broadcast or stream. Or will MLB (or NHL, NBA, etc.) still try to sell those platforms individually? — Kate C.
For some insight, I asked Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive turned media consultant for his own business, Crakes Media:
“Any decision to consolidate game distribution on a league-owned platform must answer whether such a maneuver immediately replaces economics derived from current sources — and then grow off that figure at an acceptable rate on an annual basis,” Crakes said. “While it’s true the Diamond reorganization has resulted in the MLB producing Padres games, it’s important to understand that MLB has assumed the RSN-focused business model that Diamond operated while adding a non-competitive DTC (direct-to-consumer) product that’s priced very high. MLB doesn’t believe there’s any daylight between what they can earn from the established partner-heavy distribution model versus a league-wide proprietary platform that sees them produce and distribute the games exclusively on their own. Keep in mind, while the Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy may enable MLB and its teams to get local rights back for some teams, there will be many more team rights that are years from becoming available for MLB to control production and distribution.
“Looking ahead, I would expect MLB to make production available for teams at the local level if the circumstances warrant over time, but I wouldn’t expect radical change in the current distribution of games via local RSNs for MLB except you’ll see a complementary high-priced streaming option that doesn’t threaten the general market economics that still can only be derived via pay TV. MLB has made it clear that while it’s looking to grow its control over local rights, that doesn’t mean they won’t operate an RSN in conjunction with a streaming option that is priced to complement the RSN and not be competitive with it.”
Did SEC commissioner Greg Sankey overplay his hand with ESPN? Obviously the money is good, but the conference’s scheduling mess suggests that they find themselves in a similar position to the ACC. Does having a long-term exclusive media contract remove a lot of the SEC’s leverage? — Chris G.
Some thoughts from my colleague Stewart Mandel:
“It’s interesting how quickly the SEC’s deal got recast. When announced in December 2020, Sankey was universally lauded for getting ESPN to pay $300 million a year just for the one game a week that has long aired on CBS (which was paying only $55 million). In hindsight, making the deal four years before it would go into effect and not taking it to the open market may have cost the league a lot of money. Because there’s no good reason for the SEC to be getting less for its biggest game of the week than the Big Ten is getting from CBS and NBC ($350 million) for packages that early this season will include such heart-stoppers as Northwestern vs. Rutgers and Charlotte vs. Maryland. It’s not the end of the world, as the conference is still far closer to the Big Ten financially than it is the ACC, but Sankey could have an ACC-esque problem in seven years when the Big Ten goes to the table again, four years before the SEC can.”
Coming off a thrilling (men’s College World Series), I’m curious on your latest take on the media value of NCAA sports outside football and men’s basketball. This year seems to have been a bit of a breakthrough on viewership, but maybe I’m wrong. — Hunter P.
We did a small item this week on the great MCWS viewership and I mentioned here what kind of run college sports viewership is on for its championships away from the sports you mentioned. It’s been a phenomenal stretch.
Can you explain the purpose of having NFL studio shows outside in freezing temps? What purpose does that serve? — Mike D.
There’s branding value for your show being onsite with a frenzied crowd — you can feel the importance of the event. It’s also something any league likes; it gives the NFL a big feel. Remember, it’s a television show at the end of the day, and they like these images. To me, the bigger question is, why do news channels insist on putting reporters live in the middle of a hurricane or a major weather event? Nonsense.
Who is your favorite podcast guest: Chad Finn, Jimmy Traina, John Ourand or James Andrew Miller? — Edward C.
Adnan Virk and Holly Rowe.
GO DEEPER
Victor Wembanyama is here: Can he and the Spurs be a ratings boon for the NBA?
(Photo of Tom Brady: Chris Unger / Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
