NFL Owners Meetings, Previewing 2025 Masters

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1:03Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. This is the business of sports. The business of sports can be intimidating or hard for a startup to break into. We really appreciate when our owners are actually there, you know, with us through the journey. Teams, ours especially, have been very intentional to diversify at all levels of the company. I think we're in the golden years for the NFL and college football. Our demographic reach has continued to expand. This is going to be really unlocking the streaming platform for sports fans. Sports valuations are rising. We'll see when they peak. You don't have to be the best in your sport to make a whole ton of money.

1:44Bloomberg Business of Sports from Bloomberg Radio. This is the Bloomberg Business of Sports, where we explore the big money issues in the world of sports. I'm Michael Barr, along with my colleagues Damian Sassauer and Vanessa Perdomo. Scarlett Fu is on assignment. Coming up on the show with the Masters coming up next weekend, we'll talk a little golf with Ann Liguori. She has covered dozens of golf championships and tournaments, including 26 Masters. We'll get her take on the state of the game heading into this year's Masters. It's the first time Roy McIlroy is actually coming into this Masters.

2:19First time in a long time, what, with two wins? And he won at Pebble Beach a couple months ago. He wanted the players. Even though he was not his best off the tee, get the Houston Open, he was tied for fifth. So he's playing really, really well. Plus, we'll check in on a company looking to lead the way in the business of college sports in the age of NIL. We'll hear a conversation with Learfield president and CEO Cole Gahegan. All that and more straight ahead on the Bloomberg business of sports. But first, we're a step closer to another NFL season. Believe that? Bloomberg U.S. sports business reporter Randall Williams went to Florida to be our fly on the wall for this year's NFL annual meeting with league owners.

3:04He joins us now from the road to tell us a little about what he heard and saw. Randall, old friend, old buddy, old pal, welcome back to the Bloomberg Business of Sports. As always, thank you for having me, Mr. Barr. Oh, man, it's like, hey, could be seeing some flag football and we could see a league. Absolutely. NFL is considering starting a pro flag football league, both men's and women's as soon as next year. That's very fast. As soon as next year. How is that actually possible? I don't know. Transparency, I mean, I figured that they would have started this near the Olympics or around that time.

3:43But if you think about the commitment from the dollars perspective of flag football, in my mind, you don't necessarily need as much as, let's say, a WNBA team. because, you know, WNBA teams, you have to build a stadium, you have to have facilities, all of these different things. And I think you definitely need the same thing for women's and men's flag football. But I don't know that owners would be in the business of building brand new stadiums or brand new facilities for these pro black football teams. That doesn't mean that they won't, but I don't know that it makes sense. So, Randall, talk to us a little bit.

4:16They're talking about both a men's and a women's flag football league, right? And so I know there's a lot of big names. You've got Mark Lazarus Avenue. You've got CAA doing some partnership with an investor. You've got Serena Williams, right? So talk to us a little bit about what you think the value of a flag football team may very well be and what comp would you use? Would you use like Paddle and some of these recent prices that are going on or some of these club golf teams? I'm just curious to hear what you think is an appropriate comp for trying to value these franchises. Well, it's too early to be determined in large part because you just don't know the structure of the league.

4:56These proposals from these groups all look different. And I made an attempt to pin down a lot of these things. And I did find out a lot of details. It was like the structure of some of these proposals that the league is looking to partner with. Because the bottom line is the NFL wants to operate this with someone. They don't want to do it by themselves. They want someone to come in and help. And so you have all these groups who are like, yes, let's absolutely do business. But the exact business model, whether it's six, eight, 10, 12 teams is still to be determined. And from the financial side of things, you know, what does it look like for Serena Williams?

5:31Because, you know, her husband, her husband has a bid. Serena wants to buy a team. And so those two things are a little separate. You have TKO who's in there, who I think could do an incredible job because of the fact that, you know, they have the UFC. They have the WWE. And if you've ever been to one of those live experiences, I can only imagine what that would be like with flag football. And then you have everybody else. Of course, Ice Cube, who's the owner of the Big Three. There's a lot of different groups and there's four more out there, I think. But it's to be determined. I think that flag football could potentially be a huge business someday for the NFL, because if you think about it from a calendar perspective, like football ends in February and then you have March Madness and then you have the WNBA that starts.

6:11But there is for football, you have like a six month break that can be filled with these flag football leagues. And I don't know that it goes the whole summer or the whole spring. We'll have to see. But there's a huge business opportunity. And I think the NFL is trying to capitalize on it. Well, Randall, I understand doing a women's league, right? I mean, you've got smaller schools who have women's teams. I mean, it's being adopted by a lot of high schools, certainly in the New York area, sort of Long Island, New Jersey, et cetera. But but here's what I don't understand. Why would the NFL want to have a men's flag football league?

6:38I mean, wouldn't that sort of creep in on its existing product? Wouldn't it, you know, maybe potentially if you have people who want to play, you know, injuries? I'm just thinking out loud here. I mean, like, why a men's league? I mean, women's make sense. But, you know what I mean? I hear you. And I think what you're saying is funny. It's like, you know, the men should be the tougher guys that play the tackle football. But the reality is when you think about the Olympics, you know, the Olympics is going to be, I think it's five on five. It's not traditional seven on seven like you see at some of these high school tournaments.

7:08And you do, there is a possibility that NFL players will be playing in the Olympics. It's still tear a ligament, man. I mean, you know, a hard cut the wrong way. You know, I mean, these are guys, that's what I'm saying. Like, it's just not making so much sense to me, at least on the men's side. That's true. But if you've ever watched the flag football game, it's completely different. Like, it's drastically different. And so I think the NFL does want to have an opportunity. Which one do I think will do better? I think the women's will do 10 times better. because you're going to have fans who have that exact perspective that you just did and say, well, if you're so good at this, then you should be playing in the NFL, the actual league, the tackle league.

7:44And for the women's, I think there's a tremendous opportunity because you have people like Diana Flores, who has been a trailblazer for the men's. You'd be hard pressed going up to someone on the street or even someone who loves the game of football through and through and is able to name a men's flag football player. It's just a little different. Well, Roger Goodell, he is saying that the Olympics, that's a critical moment for us. And they are hoping the NFL to have the Olympic debut of flag football at the Los Angeles games in 2028. Is that realistically possible? It's going to be in those games.

8:24What is still yet to be determined, and he mentioned that the NFL and the NFLPA are hoping to work out a deal to allow NFL players to play. But what does it look like for some of these regular flag football players who have been training and competing for Team USA that aren't NFL players? What does the selection process look like for the average Joes that are going to be playing against the NFL players? Obviously, from the NFL's perspective, this is like a dream team scenario where you could have someone like Lamar Jackson, Justin Jefferson, Jamar Chase, maybe Tyree Kill, like really unguardable fantasy football level lineups on the offense and defensive side of the ball.

9:06But at the same time, do those guys understand the same? Do they understand the flag football game the same way that they understand the NFL game? I'm not so sure. It's something that they're going to have to figure out. And USA football is going to have to jump into and be a problem solver. I don't really know if they need to know the rules as much because of how dominant they'd probably be against other countries. The one thing that's interesting, and to Damien's point about why do a men's league, but does it then create that problem of the UFL, of the XFL? This is an actual viable property maybe that people would watch if the NFL is the one putting it on instead of some other outside property?

9:48I think that they would operate if they get the right partner that it won't compete against itself because what they're attempting to do from the grassroots level, of course, you know, the NFL and college football go on at the same time. And ideally, if enough schools and the NCAA gets behind this and they back this that, you know, in four years, they're hoping to have women's flag football as a collegiate sport. And I think men's will come along someday, too. But from the women's angle, you have all the momentum building up right now from the high school level to the college level. And then, of course, these pro these pro leagues are coming from the men's angle.

10:24I'm not so sure. I'm a little cautious as to if a consumer would watch men's flag football the same way that they would watch women's flag football. Because, like, if you think about it from a position perspective, you have I'll use the two receivers that I just named, Justin Jefferson and Jamar Chase. And let's just say a guy's name is, you know, Jerry Jackson or something. And he's a receiver that plays flag football. Well, he's going to be compared constantly to be like, oh, yeah, but you play the flag league. Whereas with women's, you're starting with a clean slate. Let's shift gears here.

10:57Earlier this week, you were in Palm Beach, Florida. And it wasn't like you were at Mar-a-Lago talking tariffs with Trump. You were at the NFL annual meeting. And my goodness, it wasn't far. Come out of there. We had the tush push never got banned. We got some replay assist, right? The chain gangs are getting banned or maybe they're, you know, getting cast off to the side. I don't know. And then there's a change to the kickoff rule. I mean, what what stood out for you the most? What was the vibe on the ground? I was like, I'll tell you, like there was not a lot of finance stuff happening. There were some stadium proposals.

11:25A lot of this meeting was rule changes. And the reality is I'll start with the tush push. The tush push, of course, they're trying to work out the rules, but they just did not have enough votes straight up. There was like when you have to get one of these things passed, you have to have 24 votes. And that's a lot. That's a lot. And if you listen to what some of these coaches are saying, there are some coaches who aren't against it. I mean, their philosophy is that if you don't want the Eagles to run it, don't let them get to fourth and two or fourth and one or third and one. Like that's that's what the opposition's viewpoint is.

11:55On the kickoff rule, you have the kickoff or the touchback moving from the 30 to the 35. I understand that they're trying to make more kickoff returns. At the same time, you're going to get to a point where like in 15 to 20 yards, people are going to be in field goal range. And I guess the NFL is 100 percent not in they're not opposed to scoring. But at some point, like it's like, geez, like the logo is right there. And Damien, you remember, and Michael, you remember, and I'm sure Vanessa, you do too, a time where the touchback was on the 20. So now that it's on the 35, obviously offenses are going to have a tremendous advantage for that.

12:36And you're going to see a lot more kickoffs being returned or trying to be returned because no one wants to start on the 35. But the replay assist, yes, they shifted that again, but they're not going to be doing they're not going to be throwing flags from from New York, which is a good thing. I think that that would frustrate fans if a roughing the passer wasn't called and all of a sudden you have a flag being put down. It would just complicate the game a bit. And I'm kind of glad that they didn't do that one. I think I hit on everything, didn't I? Oh, the chain game. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The chain gang, yes.

13:09The NFL tested this during the preseason last year. They ultimately decided to delay it. Now, especially after that Josh Allen play in the AFC championship game, they're going away with the chain gang. You know, it's a little prehistoric. But I do think that, you know, the chain gang is also going to be standing on the sidelines as a backup if the electronic system doesn't work. We're going to find out how it all operates in the fall. Randall Williams, our very own. man thank you so much for joining us on the bloomberg business of sports i love talking football flag football chain gang i'm telling you i'm putting my i'm gonna try out for one of these women's flag football before they have a college system built out like why not see i want you absolutely can't we'll put a whole bloomberg chili response exactly right yes thanks again up next we turn to the world of college sports and a firm looking to the future of college sports marketing.

14:03For my colleagues, Damian Sassauer and Vanessa Perdomo, I'm Michael Barr. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business of Sports from Bloomberg Radio around the world.

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15:20This is Bloomberg Business of Sports from Bloomberg Radio. This is the Bloomberg Business of Sports, where we explore the big money issues in the world of sports. I'm Michael Barr, along with my colleagues Damian Sassauer and Vanessa Perdomo. Still to come, we'll talk with longtime sports journalist Ann Liguori to preview the Masters next week. But first, we wanted to check in on the world of college sports as we wrap up March Madness. Learfield is a leading sports marketing firm with a special focus on college sports. The landscape has changed a lot recently with NIL and more. Our own Vanessa Bernomo recently sat down with Learfield president and CEO Cole Gahagan.

16:03Let's take a listen to that conversation. Cole, give us a little, you know, rundown of what Learfield is. You're a leader of commercial opportunities for college sports. Tell me what that means and give us some background on what it is you do for the college sports landscape. That descriptive phrase can mean a whole lot. So I'll try and add to it a bit that helps to contextualize all that we do. First thing that I'll tell you, Vanessa, is that I often refer to Learfield when people ask and aren't familiar with our industry or aren't familiar with the company. I often refer to Learfield as the largest, most influential company in college athletics that you've never heard of.

16:37It's mostly because we do a good bit in the commercial space in college sports, but we're very largely behind the scenes. We're not a consumer facing brand that most people are aware of. And yet there's so much that we do in drive in and around college sports. We have five operating business units. We have the largest licensing agency in all of college athletics that oversees sort of the licensing ecosystem. So every single time a hoodie or a hat or a product that has a school's brand on it sells in the market, whether that's at a retail or whether that's online, chances are that CLC, our collegiate licensing court licensing agency, oversees the reconciliation of that product, everybody making what they should make and the reporting being clear.

17:18So we sort of oversee the licensing ecosystem in a big way in college athletics. Our business sidearm oversees the vast majority of official athletic sites and mobile apps in college sports. Paculan, our ticketing technology company, powers the vast majority of ticketing operations in college sports. And I think the business that we're most known for is our multimedia rights operation, which is the commercialization of athletics departments. Or said differently, the majority of schools outsource the commercialization of their athletics department to companies like Learfield. And we happen to be the largest in the space, which means we work with brand partners and sponsors on their behalf to help grow the revenues at the athletics department through sponsorships.

17:57sponsorships, brand associations, media and content that we create on behalf of our partners and our schools. So that's sort of the biggest business unit of the five that we have. And the last one is our Amplify business that oversees outsource ticket sales and donor and development for a lot of our school partners. So as you can tell, we do a good bit in college athletics. We have a number of services we provide universities. And as a byproduct of that, we're sort of at the center of most things that happen commercially in the business of college sports. Yeah, there's a lot there. There's a lot there, which is really interesting.

18:35You know, you came into this business being CEO in 2020, and then everything changes about a year later, right, where College Athletics starts allowing NIL deals. And I'm curious how that changed your business. Obviously, I'm assuming it helped and got a lot bigger, but how was that for you guys and how did it change everything? Well, if you go back even further than just July 1st of 2021, which is when NIL went into effect, to your point, we've in our company experienced nothing but pretty radical change over the last four or five years. There's sort of three big seminal moments that represent those periods of change.

19:12One, of course, was a seminal moment for every single human on planet Earth, which was the pandemic. And when you're a sports media and technology company that operates in the rights world like we do, it was a pretty disruptive time during COVID. We had games that didn't play. We had games that played without fans. We had shortened seasons. So to your point about coming in at a pretty wild time of radical change, the first big chapter of that was certainly COVID. The second chapter, as you pointed out, was an IL going into effect on July 1 of 2021. Now, what's interesting about that is that will be an evergreen chapter that will never change.

19:47And the third chapter is one that perhaps is not as well known. But in 2023, we went through a pretty sizable restructuring of our balance sheet, one of the largest out-of-court restructurings in history, was a hugely successful recapitalization for our company, and has put us on a path of success since then. So we really have had, Vanessa, these three big chapters of change over the last few years. And one of the things that's interesting, as you sort of look back on that journey, is that we had our own sort of self-driven episode of change while all of that was playing out, which was modernization of our business.

20:26My remit when I came in and took over the company from our board at the time was very simple. It was integrate the business, which as many conglomerates find themselves in these types of situations, we had sort of an incongruent operation with business units that weren't talking to each other and weren't working sort of hand in glove to drive enterprise value. And at the same time, we had to modernize the business. The second remit was to take a 50-year-old operation, if you will, particularly in that multimedia rights space, and to figure out how we evolve it to now power commercialization in college for the next 50 years.

21:03And that was really my remit at the time. So we had started, independent of those three sort of chapters that I mentioned, we had already started this revolution of our business. And that became data centric and it became media and digital product centric, particularly for our multimedia rights business. And the reason that I share that with you is because it really serves as the foundation for what we can go do now around NIL. What I mean by that is when we started this journey of modernizing the business around data and media, we knew two things. We knew anything that we would do to create value for our school partners and for brands had to be rooted in the principle of fan connectivity.

21:50We had to know who our fans were. We had to have an ability to reach them and we had to have an ability to engage them once we were able to reach them. And that was what led to us building Fanbase, which is now the largest data platform in all of college sports. We have 107 million known fans, collegiate fans, and we can now talk to those fans on a 24-hour a day, seven day, seven day a week basis. And then we built Learfield Studios, our digital media and content organization. And to put it into context over the last several years, how quickly we've built that in fiscal 24, our fiscal year 24 that ended last June 30, we had delivered 1.2 billion impressions through Learfield Studios and our ability to connect with those fans.

22:35And so the reason I say all of that is to say we were fortunate to start to build that foundation that has now served NIL in a big way before July 1, 2021 happened, so that when the NIL era came about, we had the infrastructure and the products in the market to now go deliver value for student athletes, for brands, and for universities. Because as you know, or I'm guessing that you probably know and have maybe seen, the bulk of what we're doing in commercialization of NIL these days is social media influencing and content that we create in partnership with student athletes and brands. So I felt it was really important to kind of lay that context because that foundation is what is really going to propel this continued exponential growth of NIL opportunities in the years ahead.

23:25I think that's so interesting. I mean, yeah, it's like you got ahead of the curve before or even really knowing what this landscape was going to be. And I find that to be so, so interesting. One of the things also there that you guys, you know, that I'm thinking of, you know, what you're doing in that space is a lot of these big schools that you work with. And, you know, they have their own, you know, NIL managers. They have NIL collectives and things like that. And how do you work with schools individually, programs individually, you know, players individually? with all those different facets going on?