Latest news with #AwfulAnnouncing.com
NBC Sports
3 days ago
- Sport
- NBC Sports
Report: College Football Playoff will require injury reports
Decades before gambling became legalized in most American jurisdictions, the NFL combatted illegal gambling by introducing injury reports. More than seven years into the era of BET! BET! BET!, college football is taking baby steps toward eliminating secrecy. According to Brett McMurphy of via Sean Keeley of the College Football Playoff will begin requiring teams to provide player availability reports. The SEC adopted the same rule in 2024. Frankly, every conference should require it. It's not about competitive advantage. It's about inside information. More specifically, it's about eliminating it. It's about ensuring that there will be no benefit to seeking it, by giving money to those who have it. It's one of the biggest risks of legalized gambling. Material non-public information. It has real value. Requiring teams to make basic disclosures eliminates some of it. While it's far from perfect, it's better than nothing. And if it's good enough for the College Football Playoff, it should be good enough for all of college football.
NBC Sports
3 days ago
- Business
- NBC Sports
All NFL broadcast partners (except Amazon) file legal brief supporting NFL in Sunday Ticket appeal
As the one-year anniversary approaches for a stunning verdict that found the NFL's Sunday Ticket package to be a violation of federal antitrust laws, the case remains pending on appeal. The plaintiffs are challenging the trial court's decision to scrap a $4.7 billion verdict (which would have been tripled, if upheld), and the league continues to defend Sunday Ticket pricing as perfectly permissible. Via Daniel Kaplan of the NFL's various broadcast partners (except for Amazon) have submitted a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the league should be permitted to do the very thing that resulted in the finding that it violated the federal antitrust laws. In reality (I believe) CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN/ABC/Disney acted more as friends of the league than friends of the court. The case arises from allegations that the NFL required DirecTV to charge a premium fee for out-of-market broadcasts in order to deter customers from choosing the ability to watch any game over the 'free' games made available on their local CBS and Fox affiliates. And the evidence at trial was clear enough to get a jury to find that, yes, the NFL violated the rights of consumers by making it artificially expensive to get access to ALL games. The decision of CBS and Fox to file a brief isn't surprising; they're the two networks most directly impacted by Sunday Ticket pricing. The only plausible explanations for Disney and NBC to join in the brief are, in my view, these: (1) either network could eventually have a Sunday afternoon package (NBC had one through 1998); and/or (2) they wanted to be good partners. The more intriguing question is why Amazon didn't join the party? If arguing to a federal appeals court that the league should be allowed to require a higher price for Sunday Ticket in order to protect the Sunday afternoon broadcast rights packages amounts to being a good partner, choosing not to lock arms with the good partners arguably constitutes being a bad partner. Ultimately, the networks could be advancing a bad argument. They, along with the league, are basically claiming that making Sunday Ticket (and thus all games) readily available to all consumers would cause chaos. To that, I say this: So what? If it's an antitrust violation for 32 independent businesses to come together and require DirecTV (and now YouTube) to charge an artificially high price in order to protect other financial interests, the business reason for doing it doesn't matter. It's for every business that operates in the USA to not breach our nation's antitrust laws. Arguments like 'it will be harder if we comply' or 'we won't make as much money if we comply' don't matter. In the Sunday Ticket case, a jury found that 32 independent businesses combined to prevent the provider of out-of-market games from charging whatever it wanted to charge for the product, in order to protect the relationships with CBS and Fox. One persistent argument is that the best solution — all games available to all customers on all Sundays — won't work if/when networks have to share feeds to ensure proper distribution of the games across broadcast, cable, and/or streaming platforms. 'Broadcasters would never share feeds with direct competitors,' the media companies explained in their brief. Never say never. Especially since we can think of one at least one way that broadcasters would share feeds in order to ensure that all games will be available to all customers for a competitive and affordable price — the broadcasters will do it if the NFL tells them to do it. More specifically, if sharing feeds is part of the price to pay for having a rights package, it will happen. And if that results in less profit for the NFL and/or the networks, so be it. Plenty of businesses could make a lot more money than they're currently making if they didn't have to worry about the federal antitrust laws. Last year, a jury found that this is what the NFL has done. It's astounding, frankly, for the NFL to essentially argue that it should be allowed to keep violating the antitrust laws in order to keep making as much money as the NFL currently makes from its full slate of Sunday afternoon products, thanks to the sweet spot between getting the most it can from CBS and Fox and the most it can from Sunday Ticket. That's basically the argument. Compliance with the law would impact profits. Even if that's true (and it probably isn't), that's the NFL's problem to solve if/when the courts give all consumers something they've been denied for more than 30 years. The ability to watch any, some, or all out-of-market games at an affordable price.
NBC Sports
03-06-2025
- Business
- NBC Sports
Report: ESPN acquisition of NFL Media is "progressing"
One of these days, ESPN will buy NFL Media. The deal has been in the works for months. Last May, it was close to being done. And then it wasn't. Negotiations finally resumed in February. Now, Andrew Marchand of (via Brandon Contes of reports that the deal is progressing. 'There is optimism on both sides,' Marchand said on his podcast. 'Nothing is completed as of yet. If you're ESPN, you want to do that deal because you have your direct-to-consumer. Fantasy is a big aspect of it. They could be the official home of fantasy football, which you can put that NFL logo on everything, and that helps you.' The key is this. The people who run the show want to dump the asset. 'The NFL owners, they want to do this,' Marchand said. 'They've been trying to unload NFL Media for a while it feels like a good thing for ESPN to have that further relationship with the NFL going forward.' The league seemingly spent much of 2024 cutting costs at the in-house network, ditching an evening studio show for a much cheaper all-remote program and bizarrely moving a popular morning show from New York to L.A., where it starts each weekday at 5:00 a.m. local time. Marchand previously reported that the deal will include a price tag in the range of $2 billion. Whatever the number, it'll likely be more than the property is worth, because that's the power the NFL has. There's a strategic reason for ESPN to overpay. It will cement the company's status as a broadcast partner beyond 2029, when all deals will be up for bid — and when one of the existing networks that televise NFL games could find itself without a chair.
NBC Sports
30-05-2025
- Politics
- NBC Sports
Could the NFL draft eventually go away?
For years, I was as brainwashed as anyone by the NFL's version of the sorting hat. The draft was the ultimate offseason experience. The great bastion of hope for a brighter, for every NFL team. Then, during the lockout, NFL Players Association attorney Jeffrey Kessler explained that, in the absence of a league-wide union, the draft is an antitrust violation. At first, I didn't want to hear it. Over time, I started to like the sound of it. As explained in one of the 100-plus essays in Playmakers, the draft is fundamentally anti-American. Thirty-two independent businesses come together and control the entire labor market, parsing out employees based on a system under which the most inept of them get dibs on the best of the players. My 86-the-draft take has been dubbed derisively as a 'crusade' by others in the media, whose relevance and income are coincidentally tied to its ongoing existence. And I've come to accept the simple reality that, over the past decade, the draft has become too big to die. Understandably, then, I nearly fell out of my chair this morning when Peter King (making a return for the full two hours of PFT Live) suggested that the draft could go away in our lifetime. Personally, I don't buy it — but I like the sound of it. The folks at typed up the key quotes so I didn't have to. Peter's broader point is that, if the draft would at some point go away, the NFL would come up with something to replace the draft. And that thing would become as big, if no bigger. At some point, I'll lay out my idea for how talent would be distributed in a way other than rewarding the worst teams with the best players. Maybe this weekend, when things will be slow. If things will ever be slow again. For now, I won't rule out the possibility that the draft will die. While the NFL enjoys an antitrust exemption by virtue of its multi-employer bargaining unit, the current chief executive could tuck an elimination of that law in the next iteration of the big, beautiful bill. Or maybe the union would shut down in the face of the next lockout, and not settle the ensuing antitrust litigation. However it may play out, it's not impossible. Peter thinks it's very possible. And while that will rile up many who are under the honor-and-a-privilege spell, the NFL would find a way to make a post-draft existence work — and to make whatever replaces it the league's biggest offseason event.
NBC Sports
25-05-2025
- Sport
- NBC Sports
Jim Nantz believes Chiefs-Cowboys will set viewership records (and he's right)
It's one thing for a bozo like me to say it. It's quite another when it comes from the guy who will be calling the game. Appearing this week on Rich Eisen's show, lead CBS play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz expressed a belief that the Thanksgiving game between the Chiefs and Cowboys will establish a new standard for regular-season NFL football. 'K.C. and Dallas, to put those two gigantic brands together on the most-watched day of the regular season in the NFL, it's gonna set records,' Nantz said, via 'That's not what I'm out for it to do. I just hope it's a great football game. It will be a wonderful matchup to call on Thanksgiving. K.C. at Dallas, it's the game we wanted.' It's hardly a stretch. The Cowboys are America's legacy team. The Chiefs are the flavor of a month of Sundays. Put them together, and the record won't just be broken. It'll be shattered. Especially on Thanksgiving. Three years ago, 42.1 million watched the Cowboys beat the Giants, 28-20. That's the current record. And seven of the top nine games happened on Thanksgiving. The other two? The 1990 Monday night game between the 10-1 Giants and 10-1 49ers, and the 1985 Dolphins-Bears Monday night showdown that gave Chicago its only loss of the year. The NFL could have dropped any Cowboys game on Thanksgiving and generated a huge number. By giving the captive audience a game involving two destination teams, the league wants — and will get — its biggest regular-season audience ever. Our guess is that it will be at least 45 million, if not 50 million. Especially since Nielsen rolled out earlier this year some new kind of technique for measuring out-of-home viewership.
