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It’s not easy for me to acknowledge when PUCK gets something first and right. I can’t say I’m a fan of its founder and champion to whom who I have given the pseudonym Matt Baloney. I tend to find his works alternately arrogant and condescending, relying heavily upon curated relationships with whom he deems to be players in order to offer what he considers to be “scoops” as clickbait behind one of the more onerous paywalls around. And since I no longer have a corporate expense account nor significant residual income to blindly drop into his lap, I always pass on the myriad subscription offers my personal algorithm shoves into my inbox multiple times a day.
But when one of my more passionate followers passed along a piece as a gift from earlier this week that clearly touched a nerve in him, I was for once able to actually give Belloni (actual spelling) both the attention and respect so many contend he deserves. And let me tell you–at least on this issue, he’s spot on.
Some of that comes from the fact that he purloined someone I’ve read and respected for years, John Ourand, a respected veteran who contributed FRONT OFFICE SPORTS and various media trades our of Washington for years. And it was Ourand’s reporting that he cited when he sounded this alarm of how the intersection of sports and Hollywood is heading for a painful collision:
Are you following the NFL’s latest shakedown attempt? You should be. The league’s current broadcast partners—that’s CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, and Amazon Prime Video—together pay more than $10 billion per year in rights deals that run through 2033, with an opt-out after the 2029-30 season. (Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV and a few games on Netflix contribute a couple billion more.) That $10 billion rents the most consistently popular programming on TV, but it also represents a decent chunk of those broadcasters’ overall content budgets. You see where this is going.
(T)he NFL wants—and will almost certainly get—more, citing its outsize ratings compared to other sports leagues like the NBA, which scored $6.9 billion per year from TV partners in its 2024 deals. To secure basketball, NBC/Peacock, for instance, agreed to pay $2.5 billion per year, about 25 percent more than the $2 billion it shells out annually for Sunday Night Football. The NBA provides many more hours of content, of course, but SNF averaged 23.5 million viewers last season, while NBA games on NBC this season are averaging about 2.6 million viewers. Given the value disparity, the NFL argues, NBC shouldn’t be paying less to the dominant league.
So the NFL has begun to renegotiate, starting with CBS owner Paramount, whose acquisition by Skydance triggered a “change-of-control” clause that allows the league to start talks now. Those are heating up, I’m told, with the NFL effectively leveraging the deep-pocketed streamers—Netflix, Prime Video, and YouTube—all of which would love to have more NFL. And right on cue, MoffettNathanson is out with a new report predicting the average annual value of NFL rights deals will rise to $15.9 billion after renegotiations—including the carve-outs of additional smaller packages, likely to sell to Netflix or YouTube. That’s 58 percent higher than the current deals, and here’s the key line: “We expect media companies will be forced to offset higher NFL costs through a reallocation of content budgets mitigating the EBITDA impact.” That’s analyst-speak for, Do you hear that giant sucking sound? It’s film and TV cash being hoovered up by the NFL.
And in short order yesterday we got this news from the entertainment side of CBS that can be cited as Exhibit A in this case. Per THE WRAP’s Tess Patton:
CBS passed on regency-era multi-cam sitcom pilot “The Tillbrooks” from “Big Bang Theory” EP Tara Hernandez. The decision leaves the network airing three comedy series instead of four.
And as per usual El Intrepidita–aka DEADLINE’s Nellie Andreeva–provided additional sobering context:
CBS will be dropping below four comedy series on the air in one season for the first time in a long time – or ever…(i)n addition to not going forward with The Tillbrooks, CBS canceled freshman DMV, and its veteran sitcom The Neighborhood also is ending.
For a network that’s built the foundation of its continuing streak of primetime season wins on the volume and consistency of its meat and potatoes comedies, the inability for them to actually create more than one block of them at any given time is a signpost that in a world of hard choices, they’ve made theirs. And it comes right down to the reality check that at least for five months a year nothing else but football can provide the kind of scale for them to have a shot at continuing it.
Belloni-via-Ourand also took note on how the network’s new braintrust are calling upon their friends in high places and income brackets to try to tip the scales–along with another similarly challenged and ideologically aligned comrade-in-arms:
Fox…pays $2.3 billion a year for NFL rights, and that’s not including its hefty production costs. (Tom Brady alone makes $37.5 million a year to smile and look pretty in the broadcast booth.) Fox’s total content spend was estimated at $8.1 billion in 2024, though it rose to $9.2 billion in 2025 because of the Super Bowl. So the NFL gobbles up more than a quarter of what Fox spends on all its content each year—for a few hours of programming on Sunday afternoons.
Both David Ellison and the Murdochs seem to be fighting back, or at least their favorite Trump official is fighting on behalf of their respective conservative media empires. Brendan Carr, the F.C.C. chair, said this week on Fox News—where else?— that he’s “looking into” the antitrust exemption that allows the NFL to do league-wide TV deals only if it protects customer access. If the league continues to shift games from “free” TV to paywalled streaming services, Carr might pounce, and “there could be actions at other portions of the government, and Congress as well,” he warned. It’s not hard to see who would benefit from those kinds of “actions.”
As if on cue, THE ATHLETIC’s Andrew Marchand and Mark Puleo dropped this update yesterday on how the Empire is trying to strike back:
The NFL defended how fans are able to watch its games amid reports on Thursday that the Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether the league has engaged in anticompetitive tactics through its media rights deal and is overcharging customers. “With over 87% of our games on free, broadcast television, including 100% of games in the markets of the competing teams, the NFL has for decades put our fans front and center in how we distribute our content,” a league spokesperson said. “The 2025 season was our most viewed since 1989 and reflects the strength of the NFL distribution model and its wide availability to all fans.” News of the Justice Department investigation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
And yep, PUCK was out in front of how that WSJ reporting is being augmented by those with the keys to that kingdom:
Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal warned in an editorial yesterday that team owners “should consider the backlash building against the antitrust exemption they retain from another era.” Goodell, the missive continued, “thinks he can get more money from Big Tech’s streaming services than he can from his longtime TV partners. That would hurt the networks, especially local stations, that rely on the NFL for ad revenue.” And Fox News is giving airtime to an amusing poll showing that majorities of both sports fans (72 percent) and non-fans (60 percent) think big sporting events should be required to stay on broadcast TV. The results may be accurate—of course people prefer “free,” though they probably aren’t familiar with the retrans fees CBS and Fox receive from distributors that are then passed on to consumers—but they also reinforce Carr’s position, which is also the Murdoch and Ellison position: Watch your step, Roger.
All well and good when it comes to spin, but the substance suggests that this is all once more example of little more than saber-rattling to try and divert attention from the fact that the relentless pursuit of power and control augmented by an obsession to control the narrative still costs thousands of people their livelihoods, if not their lives. What applies to a war zone also applies to a gridiron.
Bravo to Belloni and his team for connecting the dots and at least trying to make this a bipartisan issue that will bear watching in the coming months. Now if we can somehow work on that price point, maybe I’ll tone down my own ‘tude in the process.
Until next time…