The NFL’s Ratings Slump & PGA Tour’s New Swing

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1:35Andrew Marchand:Congratulations! You made the varsity podcast. My name is John Arand, and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. Well, Andrew Marchand returns to the pod today to hit on all the sports media news. Andrew, as you all know, writes for The Athletic and hosts a twice-weekly podcast at andrewmarchand.com. So we're going to talk about the NFL, of course, and Joe Buck's new contract at the ESPN. But Andrew also had Brian Rolap on his pod, so we're going to talk about the media fortunes for the PGA Tour. But before we get to Andrew, today is Sunday, September 27th, and I want to spend a little more time on Ted Leonsis.

2:10Andrew Marchand:Ted was my guest on this very podcast last week. It was Ted's very first interview since being unanimously elected as chairman of the NHL's Board of Governors. Now, Ted bought the Capitals back in 1999 and is one of the longest tenured owners in the league. He also now owns the Wizards, the Mystics, Capital One Arena, where all three teams play. Now, Gary Bettman has been the league's commissioner since 1993, and he reiterated last week that he's not looking to leave. He still has an iron grip on the sport. But one of Leonsis' responsibilities, surely, is going to be to set up a process to pick Bettman's successor.

2:48Andrew Marchand:Of course, there's nothing imminent. Then there's expansion. Again, nothing is happening right now. But when we spoke last week, Ted made it clear that he supports the idea of adding teams to the league. Okay, now, let's get right to Andrew Marchand. Andrew Marchand returning to the pod. Thank you very much. Let's get right into it. where this is going to be week three of the NFL season. Before we start talking about sort of the on-air talent and J.J. Watt and getting back into Tony Romo and the percentages there, what surprised you from a media sense NFL through the first two weeks? What have you taken notice of?

3:30I'd say maybe the ratings are kind of a little bit difficult to understand because of the new format that they've come. Are they up? Are they down? So I think that's been, you know, the NFL, we've gotten used to every year. The ratings are just up. I think that might become more of a story as we go forward. They usually front load their schedule. I mean, the schedule is always good overall. So that's one thing that's been probably a little bit surprising. You know, I'm curious to see where we go with the streamers. Netflix has five games this year. They had the second game of the season. It did pretty well.

4:09Where are we going with that long term in terms of how much streaming people are going to have to do to watch their NFL games? So those are a couple of things.

4:18Andrew Marchand:I want to talk about that Netflix game. I know it was a couple of weeks ago, but Netflix had their very first baseball game to lead off MLB season. And that was when we had Burt Kreischer shirtless in the Bay in San Francisco. It took a lot of steps. They went heavy on entertainment. And it didn't look and feel like a typical baseball game. But then Netflix just had a game coming out of Australia, Rams 49ers, that if you sit down and watched it, even from the pregame show, It just felt like a broadcast football game. It's almost like they learned not to – I'm not quite sure if they learned not to dive into the entertainment so much or if the NFL said, don't dive into the entertainment so much.

5:11Andrew Marchand:We kind of know what works. Yeah, I think Netflix learned a lot. I think Gabe Spitzer and their team, I think they looked at – they've kind of grown as they've gone forward now. And I agree with you. Look, I thought they made a good decision. They signed Noah Eagle up for a few seasons now. He's still doing NBC, but he's their main play-by-player. And, you know, he's quickly, he's not even 30 yet, but he's quickly put himself on that upper echelon of NFL play-by-player. So you have a lot of credibility there. And I thought Luke Keekly was a good move. Now, you could love Luke Keekly, you could not love Luke Keekly.

5:48You know, there are people who always have opinions about everybody. I think the thing that stood out, though, is he was very informed. I think he has a lot of room where you could see him growing in that role. Is he the funniest guy? Maybe a little vanilla, but a lot of knowledge, a lot of insight. And especially your Nesson audience knows him from his BC days. He's just one of the smarter people in the NFL. So I thought that was a good hire, and I thought he did well. So I think that's where you start. and the production is done by NBC. Yeah, but before you get to production,

6:26Andrew Marchand:I just want to stick on Luke Kuechly real quick because I think he was a perfect example of Netflix getting into actual the game. I mean, Luke Kuechly was talking about the A gap and the B gap and he was doing football terms that I've been watching football for more than 50 years. I didn't understand a couple of them here and there. And that to me was Netflix just saying like, you know, we're going to cover this like a pretty hardcore football game. And we have found that more than just the hardcore fans will tune in. It doesn't matter who's calling it. Well, because these big digital players, the streamers, have so much money, sometimes they think they're smarter than everybody, as if the networks and the cable companies are a bunch of idiots and have no idea what they're doing, and they've been doing it for a long time and they're just sitting around.

7:21They haven't thought of all these innovative aspects that you can do in coverage. And I'm not saying you shouldn't try new things and try to be different, but ultimately people are going to watch Netflix, NFL games because of the NFL, not because of some gimmick, not because of somebody taking off a shirt, not because of the halftime show where they had Beyonce or was it between games. That's going to probably bring in some people. But ultimately, it's going to be because of the game. I think you look at who's done that the best, Amazon Prime Video on Thursday Night Football, they just seamlessly made a very good hires.

7:58Again, are Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit, is that a great team? No. But it's a very credible team in terms of Al Michaels. He's at the end, but legendary voice, probably the best NFL voice of all time. Kirk Herbstreit, not an NFL guy. probably not great on the NFL, but credible for all his years in college, and then the pregame show with Krista Thompson and company it's a good show so I think they did a good job Kaylee Hartung as well on the sideline, I think they've done the best job of just making it so it's about the game and not about Amazon Prime Video doing the game, I think Netflix fell into that trap a little bit early of it's Netflix doing the game as opposed to, no, it's an NFL game on Netflix and the viewer has no choice.

8:48That's where we have to watch it.

8:50Andrew Marchand:I don't want to name names here, but a lot of people describe you in sort of similar terms. Like, you know, you have this big contract at The Athletic and you think you're smarter than everybody else. Andrew, is that true? Is that true? Well, first of all, you need to name names. Okay. Number one, I mean, people are tuning in for this This podcast and viewing this as a nationwide television show. People want names. So name some names and I'll answer your questions. But I don't respond to unnamed sources. All right. Good. Fair enough. Fair enough. And I also want to hit on one thing. I feel like that was a better answer than you gave.

9:25You recently had Nick Khan on and he turned the tables on you in terms of Puck's, you know, maybe deals that they might be. And I felt like my answer to your queries were better than what you answered. because you were kind of humming a humming a when Nick turned the tables on you.

9:41Andrew Marchand:Nick asked me a question about Redbird potentially taking an investment in Puck and nothing. It was all rumor and conjecture then. And you know I never respond to rumors and conjecture, Andrew. But you're citing sources asking me questions. Unnamed sources making untrue representations about me. So I don't reply to that. Let's get on to the ratings because I do think that the ratings are going to be a big story because they started out down. Usually how they start is how they end. It's always hard to sort of come back from that. The good news for the NFL is that it is still by far the number one entertainment property for television.

10:29Andrew Marchand:And nothing comes close to it. So if it's down and it's still getting more than 20 million viewers for some of the games, I'd like to be down like that. But the bad news for the NFL is that they have spent the past several years and it's changed the way that they've counted viewers going down. I don't want to bore everybody, but out of home, they're adding more. the NFL benefited from that and so all you heard from the NFL for years is like oh look at our ratings look at and there was another tweak now and it's like oh well there's a tweak so that's why it's down it's uh it's uh uh ratings on a day-to-day basis I generally take a look at how it performs against its competition and the NFL is still number one by far yeah I tend to agree with you in terms of overall I think it's basically ego uh that's gonna yeah you don't want to be going down.

11:27Obviously, that's not the direction. But I say this all the time. There's the NFL, and then there's sports. Maybe college football is kind of close. NBA, you can have some games. And then Kaitlin Clark comes out of nowhere every once in a while. But they're still not really attracting NFL numbers. I mean, this past weekend, it was close to 30 million. and that's unheard of. For a regular season game. For a regular season game, week two. And so when you look at it, to me, there's no real issue besides the headlines don't look good. If there's a headline out there, NFL ratings down, they don't want that.

12:14I mean, it's an accurate headline. Does it give the context of really what's going on in the TV landscape and how the ratings and how Nielsen compiles the ratings changes. And so, yeah, they got a little bit of an uplift in recent years. And now maybe they're going to see a downturn this year because of another shift. Yeah, but that's ego. I think what really matters is when you go to the negotiating table and you talk to the networks and when they do their next contracts, I don't think if they're in the range they're in now, Now they're going to do just fine.

12:52Andrew Marchand:Yeah, exactly. If they drop 30%, then that's kind of a red flag. But the thing about the NFL and the reason why it's going to see an increase in what it's getting, the reason why it already gets$110 billion from the TV networks is because these networks can, within 10%, guess pretty accurately how many people are going to watch each game. And that's not just the NFL, that's college football. That's very rarely are they surprised by, oh boy, that got a lot more than we expected or a lot less. It's always within a certain area and that works out. I want to go to something that you've been covering pretty hard.

13:35Andrew Marchand:JJ Watt in the number one booth at CBS, who had a great column on that in the Athletic after week one. And then the knock-on effects at CBS with the Iron Eagle booth and everything else. Give me your sort of how you think they've been faring this season, because it could have been chaos with Tony Romo having his problems and not being in the booth. Yeah, so we still don't know yet if Tony Romo will return. Most of the indications I think both of us have reported, it doesn't seem like he will. So J.J. Watt is in that number one booth with Jim Nance. And when you think about these number one booths, I mean, these are big money jobs.

14:20Tony Romo is still owed$72 million over the next four seasons, including this year. He's still getting paid. And so there could be a fight if they do let him go in terms of what happened with the OWI for that money. So Tom Brady's contract, as I reported years ago, is for$375 million. and so you can go on and on with these deals. So this is a big money job, a lot of attention. Jim Nance and J.J. Watt, there's been sort of a disconnect so far. There was the video that went kind of viral, social media where J.J. Watt was talking about Mike McCarthy and getting a game ball and then Jim Nance said the same thing, was apparently not listening.

15:09and you saw that and that was very stark but there were other, you know, when I watched there were other times where one time J.J. Watt was talking about a herky-jerky offense kind of making a joke saying that's a technical term and just Nance didn't say anything to it and when the play-by-play person does not acknowledge a joke or when you're being a little sarcastic, it kind of falls flat with the audience and if you watched last year with Ian Eagle it didn't. There's a very good repartee between Eagle and Watt that we haven't seen yet with Nance and Watt. Eagle and Watt came out of the gate very fast.

15:47This has been a slow start for Nance and Watt two weeks in. I think Watt can do it. I think he's a student of doing this and works at it. I think when you look at his credentials it's not everything but if we talk about who's doing these games it's the Tom Brady's, you know, considered the greatest of all time. It's Troy Aikman, Hall of Famer. You have Chris Collinsworth who sort of worked his way up as a, you know, very good player, but not a great player. But for the most part, you have the stars on Monday Football. You have the Manning brothers as well. And so, you know, that's what you generally see.

16:28Even Netflix, Luke Keekly might not be as big a name, but he is a Hall of, just into the Hall theme. So that's pretty good. And so JJ Watt has the pedigree for the position. Now it's a question of, you know, how good is he at the job? And when you compare him, especially last year to, you know, his work with Eagle and now with Nance.

16:50Andrew Marchand:ESPN, ABC has the Superbowl this year coming up. CBS has it the following year. are there uh what would you describe it red flag beige flag uh with that number one booth if you were david burson overseeing cbs sports are you are you energized by sort of the the prospects of how uh that number one booth nance and watt are going to develop i don't think i'm energized yet i think i would have been energized if you know, David Burson, let's just go back a little bit. Tony Romo gets his huge contract in right before the pandemic in 2020, uh, largely because ESPN's Monday Night Football was a mess and Jimmy Pitaro wanted to fix that and was going hard after Tony Romo.

17:40So Romo gets that contract. It also was right before the league negotiations with the networks to redo their deals. Uh, CBS wanted to have Romo on their side at that point, three years in, he was considered the next John Madden. So you have that as why Romo got into that position. And Nance and Romo at that point were kind of looked at maybe the next iteration of Summerall and Madden. They went backwards. So last year, Burson made a very smart move. He moved J.J. Watt, someone he thought could be a potential number one, into that second booth, moved Charles Davis, first to a lesser booth for the NFL, and now as a top booth in college football.

18:28And so you had Ian Eagle and J.J. Watt. They did very well. So you have that. So I would be energized by that group. So far, Nance and Watt, not as energized. It hasn't been as good. So I don't know your flags, beige flag, red flag. I'd say... I'm trying to appeal to our Gen Z audience with the flag colors, Andrew. Isn't it yellow flag is what I think you're going for? What's a beige flag? What is a beige flag? I think yellow flag is what I mean.

18:58Andrew Marchand:It's like, yeah, it's so-so, I think, you know. Is that a thing? All right. Well, I'm going to say yellow. Like, I think I'd be yielding yellow flag, not a red flag. It's not like this can't work. It's not a green flag. Like, we got this. It's a yellow flag. A yellow flag. A beige flag, as you might say. All right. Well, I was trying to figure out what a beige flag is. That's why I kept talking. I was like, what is a beige flag? Maybe that's a thing. I could be wrong. I don't know. The kids are going to love this.

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20:47Andrew Marchand:That looks like Mindy. I'm Erin Moriarty, and from 48 Hours, this is The Woman in the Woods. I have never wanted to be wrong like this in my whole entire life. Follow and listen to The Woman in the Woods wherever you get your podcasts. You and I get together. We always talk about the NFL rights. In fact, when I'm on your pod, I love that. what are we at 4.0 or 5.0 on our right for nfl yeah nfl i want to talk to you projection 4.0 andrewarshan.com i don't want to talk about the rights here because nothing really has happened for the last time you've been on uh but i want to talk about the booths because you do have this has this has the appearance of al michael's fine swan song final season uh you have kirk herbstreet's contract is coming up.

21:40Andrew Marchand:You have Troy Aikman's contract is up at the end of this season. Tony Romo is out there. You have Greg Olson's contract is up at Fox. How do you see this movement? What's this offseason going to be like in terms of top tier NFL talent? Yeah, we could have a lot of movement. I think I reported in The Athletic, Joe Buck re-signed with an extension six years for around$108 million. If you weren't aware of that, yep, I said$108 million to call NFL games for Joe Buck. So pretty good for Joe. That's six years. ESPN's plan as of right now, things can change. So I'm always hesitant to report stuff like this, but is to wait until after the Super Bowl, which they have, Buck and Aikman will call it, to decide if they can come to an agreement with Aikman or do they move on.

22:35And then I think we've been looking at this for a few years. Greg Olson, to me, has put himself in a position where if you have a number one job, you'd have to be crazy not to look at Greg Olson. He was not a Hall of Famer, but an excellent player, great college career, and a great NFL career, just not a Hall of Famer. but he kind of that Collinsworth has built himself up. I think you watch a Greg Olson game. You feel the passion, the information. He's just excellent. So I think if they weren't to bring back Troy Aikman, I think Greg Olson, somebody I think would be high on the list. This isn't something that I've heard or anything, but it's an idea I had.

23:22So I'm just saying this is total speculation. The Mannings have a big contract, and Omaha Productions, Peyton Manning's company, has a big contract with ESPN. But those ratings have been down. The idea of splitting up, well, first off, for big games, having Joe Buck with Peyton Manning and Eli Manning, I think that's kind of an appealing booth if you could do that. I mean, you just listen to when it's just the two of them, the Mannings, it's pretty good, the insight that they bring. and then they don't they're only working 11 weeks out of the season right now let's just say um you know some some weeks you just have peyton it's a peyton week when some weeks it's an eli week it's a little gimmicky but i actually think it could work i'd be different and be pretty smart uh so that is something i would consider and then i look let's just also say this and this is very important troikman could come back i mean that's the they've solidified that booth um you know they They went early with Buck.

24:21Buck wanted to go early. They did do that. I think Aikman, I think he was on Richard Deitch's podcast. I think he'd be willing to do something now, it sounds like to me, but they're now going to wait. I've been told he doesn't want Tom Brady money. So Troy Aikman makes$18 million a year. Tom Brady makes$37.5. There's some stock in there. So when Fox is doing a little better, it goes up even more.

24:46Andrew Marchand:uh in fact if i can interrupt you for a second when troy ackman did his most recent deal i think it's like 18 million and one cent he wanted it to be more than what tony romo was making at uh i didn't know that one cent thing i don't know what it is it's more than one cent but he wanted it to be more than romo so the idea that he's not looking now with tom brady as as the uh as a a comp is uh is interesting to me well i don't know if look i think you have to look at Brady's number, but I don't think that from what I understand that he wants Brady money. It's not, hey, give me 37 and a half million.