I was fascinated by the ESPN-NFL deal that recently got announced. If you missed it, the crux of it is that ESPN received the NFL Network and everything that goes with it (games, Redzone etc.) in exchange for 10 percent (!!) of its business.
So the trade was …
ESPN: Receives NFL Network and associated content.
NFL: Receives 10 percent of a $30 billion company.
From everything I’ve read, this seems like a good deal and makes sense for both parties.
I don’t follow the NFL closely enough to agree or disagree with that, but I do have a number of thoughts about how this affects the media landscape and specifically the effect is has on the future of golf.
Welcome to the members-only portion of today’s newsletter. I hope you both enjoy it and find it to be valuable to your golf and/or personal life.
1. You can spin this however you want to spin it, but the true reality of the situation is that ESPN now has not only an interest in maintaining a perfect-gentleman view of the NFL but also now has literal owners of its company whose job it is to do this very thing.
The NFL wants to protect the NFL, and it is very difficult to envision any meaningful (negative) journalism — take the Ray Rice story from several years ago — getting done at the Worldwide Leader.
2. One narrative undergirding all of this is something that has been true of ESPN (and most places) for a while now: The traditional non-TV digital media business model does not work in sports. Not at that scale.
This could be a book (and has been the subject of several), but when information is as ubiquitous as it is, building a business around advertising attached to this information is extremely difficult. I am thinking of ESPN.com and ESPN Radio and honestly most of ESPN that isn’t live sports.
This was much easier for ESPN back in the 1990s when it didn’t have competitors. Now though? You can get what you get at ESPN almost anywhere else, which means everything has become a race to the bottom as it relates to advertising.
This is why when you get on any news site, there are more ads than words on the articles. I hate that this is true, but it is unquestionably true.
3. This is also why leagues sell their inventory of games for billions. It’s why CBS, NBC and Golf Channel pay $800 million a year for the rights to broadcast the PGA Tour. Because all the other stuff is “easy” to replicate but you can’t copy live sports.
4. I think it used to make more sense that the companies that broadcast the events also spent time analyzing and riffing on them. Now though? When the revenue is slanted so heavily toward the broadcasting portion and so little toward the commentary portion?
I don’t know that it does.
Because the incentives for businesses to create meaningful content are not there. The incentives at places like ESPN are increasingly to simply not rock the boat of the leagues they are broadcasting. This has been true for a while and is even more true now after a deal like this one.
5. I experienced this firsthand at CBS Sports. I received a hand slap or two annually for something I said on Twitter or something I wrote or a GIF I made or whatever. And I was acting fairly conservatively. I don’t blame CBS — anyone who popped me was doing so because they were protecting something much more valuable (TV rights and their associated contracts) than the stupid stuff I was doing.
I say that only to point out that if this is true at CBS Sports, then it is certainly true other places as well.
6. This is a signal that small shops matter and will matter more in the future. They are the truth tellers. This is self serving (obviously), but it’s also true. And you can say that most of this is stupid because “it’s just sports,” which I am on board with, but also we should talk about how NLU was the catalyst for a lot of changes as it relates to the way the PGA Tour was presented on CBS Sports, which is a lot better now than it used to be.
You know who was hesitant to critique CBS Sports? Any of the traditional media outlets who may have been in line to broadcast the PGA Tour in the future.
7. Medium-to-large sized media companies are desperate because many of them are trying to retrofit their broken business models for what the landscape looks like in 2025.
Golf Digest makes sense if its staff is the size of The Fried Egg. It may not make sense if it’s the size Golf Digest was in the 1990s.
It also might not make sense for ESPN.com and ESPN to be connected other than for the former to serve as a marketing arm for the latter (which is maybe all it is?).
Because the latter is clearly subsidizing the former, and when that is true then the former is not going to receive the attention it needs to thrive. It is going to be increasingly marginalized to the point of not mattering at all over the long arc.
8. Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe there can be some cohesion between digital and linear, but I think the shackles that these monstrous contracts bring about for the digital side will only make for more No Laying Ups and Fried Eggs. Places that are not bound by what leagues think or say about them. Advertising dollars will go where the attention is, and that seems like a quick downward spiral for the ESPN.coms and NBCs of the world.
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