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SBJ Media: Networks Brace For College Football Verdict


My daughter’s college, Holy Cross, sent out an email this morning that I was hoping I wouldn’t get: “We are shifting all learning to a remote model and we will allow only a very limited number of students to live on campus.”

 

NETWORKS PREPARE FOR THE WORST AS COLLEGE FOOTBALL DECISION LOOMS

  • Because of how much they pay in rights fees, everyone assumes that media companies are at the table for every big college sports decision. This week, however, executives from the networks that carry college sports are just as confused as I am about whether there’s going to be a football season.

  • Here’s the upshot: Most of my network sources expect the Big Ten and Pac-12 to cancel their football seasons this fall. They expect the conferences to explore the feasibility of completing the season in the spring. Right now, though, TV networks are not getting clear guidance about what will happen.

  • It’s hard to believe that just five days ago, the Big Ten released its football schedule on a BTN TV special that felt like a celebration of the conference. (An aside: I was relatively confident that my Terps would go 9-0 this year…) Today, networks had their legal teams poring over their college contracts to see what rebates might be coming. Finance teams started running every conceivable scenario to gauge the financial hit. Top network execs who have the best relationships reached out to their conference sources to trade information. All of this was happening while corporate bigwigs called to find out the latest. In short, nobody knows anything right now.

  • The dizzying day of news and rumors caused me to think back to five months ago, when ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit told a radio show that he’d “be shocked if we have NFL football this fall, if we have college football. I’ll be so surprised if that happens.” Herbstreit took a lot of grief for that comment (just look at the mentions on my tweet about it). I’m not sure we know any more now than Herbstreit did then.

 

 

MLB LOOKS TO FILL TONY PETITTI'S ROLE IN NEGOTIATION ROOM

  • The question I heard most frequently today: who’s running MLB media rights negotiations now that Deputy Commissioner Tony Petitti has left for a senior job at Activision Blizzard?

  • Petitti and Braves Chairman Terry McGuirk led MLB’s negotiations in renewing deals with Fox last fall and Turner, which is close to being finalized but hasn’t been announced yet. The next big renewal is with ESPN, and sources expect Executive VP/Strategy, Technology & Innovation Chris Marinak to take Petitti’s role in the negotiating room. MLB Executive VP/Global Media Chris Tully also is expected to play a bigger role in time. MLB will have Marinak and Executive VP/Business & Sales Noah Garden take over much of Petitti’s responsibilities.

  • Sandy Montag, a close friend and advisor of Petitti, said that the former MLB and CBS executive’s career history working with Sean McManus and Rob Manfred should suit him well as he tries to make Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick’s vision come to life. “It was a gut-wrenching decision for Tony that’s been going on for several months,” Montag said. "But the business opportunity here for the next five years was really too much to pass up.”

  • Petitti will remain based out of N.Y., working out of Activision’s East Coast offices. Why does the L.A.-based Kotick have half his team working out of N.Y.? “We’re a global league,” he said. “If you look at where you pick as a city to support a global league, most of the other traditional leagues have their principle presences in New York. We also wanted to be closer to Europe, and we wanted to be able to ensure that we had opportunities for people from our markets in China and Korea. In order to attract all the talent that we needed, we thought that was in New York. We’ll continue to have the headquarters of esports focused around New York.” 

 

CBS SEES AUDIENCE UPTICK FOR PGA CHAMPIONSHIP FINAL ROUND

  • CBS saw a year-over-year viewership increase for yesterday's final-round telecast of the PGA Championship, per SBD's Josh Carpenter. The network drew 5.15 million viewers for Collin Morikawa's win, which aired in primetime from S.F.'s TPC Harding Park, up slightly from 5.0 million viewers last year, when the event aired in May on the East Coast (Bethpage Black). Two years ago, CBS earned 8.5 million viewers for the final round of the PGA, which aired in mid-August and saw Tiger Woods attempting to chase down Brooks Koepka.

  • One of my favorite golf features comes via the site Classictvsports.com, which tracked every shot yesterday on CBS from Harding Park, with a final tally of 496 televised strokes from the final round. The telecast averaged 1.69 strokes per minute, "by far the highest" rate tracked by the blog for any golf major since the site started tracking the stat in 2014. The previous high was 1.41 for the 2017 Masters. For comparison, the 2019 PGA "had only 1.14 shots per minute." Golf outfit No Laying Up, which hasn't always been kind to CBS coverage, tweeted, "Credit where credit is due here. A crowded leaderboard is much more likely to wield more shots worthy of airing."

 

SPEED READS  

  • About 800 staffers have been laid off from WarnerMedia, according Variety’s Brian Steinberg. I’m told that the cuts are not impacting the News and Turner Sports divisions right now. The cuts mainly have hit Warner Bros. and HBO, and apparently has claimed HBO Sports President Peter Nelson, according to a report tonight from Awful Announcing’s Ben Koo.

  • I received a text message over the weekend from a friend who is an avid soccer fan. He wanted to make sure that I wrote about CBS’ coverage of the Champions’ League, which he found to be a pleasant surprise. “The CBSSN studio show out of London is really great.” I have to confess that I was not watching, so I took to Twitter to check him out. Lots of high profile people agreed with my friend, including Grant Wahl, World Soccer Talk and Derek Rae.

  • The most interesting part of NBC’s schedule of golf’s U.S. Amateur this week is the inclusion of exclusive coverage on Peacock, NBC’s streaming service. It’s not a lot of hours -- just an hour of live coverage from 6-7pm each night on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. But it’s clear to see how Peacock’s role will grow. Peacock also announced today that it will stream “The Dan Patrick Show” live from 9am-noon starting Aug. 24.

  • Yes, that was NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell and his brother, Oak View Group’s Dan Shell, in the front row of Dodger Stadium on Saturday. The two long-time Dodgers fans were represented by cardboard cutouts for the club's 5-4 loss to the Giants. Dan Shell: “Not helping Kershaw too much tonight but it’s the presence that counts. Go Dodgers!”

 

  • Well-liked TSN host Bob McKenzie officially is headed to semi-retirement. “Today is the last day of my working life as I have known it for more than 40 years – not as much the end of the road as it is a move into the slow land,” he wrote in a message posted on social media. “I’ve been talking about and planning semi-retirement for quite some time.” 

  • Shannon Terry is leaving ViacomCBS, the 247Sports Founder announced via Twitter. "If I learned anything from these past 25 years in digital media, the treasures of life come from our experiences; the relationships built, trials, and hard work to get to your destination and not the destination itself.” 

  • Twitter will live stream 10 regular-season WNBA games this season, marking the fourth year of their partnership. 

 

THE LAST WORD

  • Tonight’s last word goes to my friend and colleague Mark J. Burns, who got engaged Friday night to Laís Caroline. Burns and I appeared together on the SBJ First Look podcast Friday morning, just hours before he popped the question

 

  

 

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Something on the Media beat catch your eye? Tell us about it. Reach out to either me (jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com) or Austin Karp (akarp@sportsbusinessjournal.com) and we'll share the best of it. Also contributing to this newsletter is Thomas Leary (tleary@sportsbusinessdaily.com).