📡 The Business of the Booth

Commentators have become the icing for the sports viewing cake

After another wonderful year of football, we’re left with one more game to watch two weeks from now. You guessed it! The Super Bowl! The biggest live TV event each year. Where commercials cost millions of dollars for ad space during the game, where each of us consumes thousands of calories (mostly in carbs & fats), and even where your significant other or friend who hates sports sits down to “watch” the game (obvi for the food and halftime show…but at least they’re there for you!).

Now, we’ve all sat down to watch a game with our eyes (idk how else you’d watch a game, but we’ll digress) — but for many of us, we’ve never played these sports at a high enough level to understand what we’re looking for. Which is why we rely on our ears to hear what these announcers and commentators are saying about the game. The details behind the strategy of a formation, understanding the situation of a game and how a team should be thinking/acting, how players succeed on the field and what led to their success, etc. Behind those voices we hear through the TV are usually a combination of: 1) play-by-play announcers 2) color commentators 3) sideline reporters and within the last few years, 4) rules analysts.

In this post we’ll look to highlight voices #1 and #2 within the NFL. How they’ve become so important, how media companies view these announcers, and the amount of money being poured in to their skills as a result.

What makes a play-by-play announcer and color commentator good?

• Oh you started off with an extremely subjective question? Nice work! Fortunately, I know exactly what people love so I feel I’m qualified enough to answer this 😉 . Overall, in some combination, a typical fan enjoys the following characteristics from a commentator:

  • Intelligence: a deep understanding of the game so the viewer knows they can rely on them to pick out the small details.

  • Passion: a sense from the viewer that they enjoy what they’re doing and can hear the excitement and importance in a big play or moment in a game.

  • Conciseness: the viewer also wants to take in the sounds of the crowd and stadium (i.e. rambling from announcers can get pretty boring).

  • Casual Conversation: not everyone knows all the details of plays and schemes, so dumbing it down for normal people to understand can be extremely useful.

Now that we know what to look for, why are these positions so important?

• We can’t bring up the importance of these positions without mentioning the NFL’s current media rights deals. Over the next ten years, the NFL is guaranteed $125.5 billion ($3.9 billion per team) in TV money 🤑 (see Table 1)…and that could end up increasing:

  • Ahead of the 2023 season, the NFL made a deal with Google (7-years, worth $14 billion) to broadcast Sunday Ticket on YouTubeTV for residential rights (think for personal use or your home only).

  • PLUS the NFL opted to continue doing business with DirecTV to broadcast Sunday Ticket to commercial establishments (i.e. bars, hotels, restaurants, etc.). Which should be another $150-200 million/year through 2029.

• However, if the NFL’s ratings continue to climb, its rights become more valuable than these latest media agreements. Because the NFL employs top-tier negotiators, they have the option to pull out of their existing deals with Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC after 2029, and with ESPN after 2030 (dust off those bidding cards media conglomerates!). To be honest, this could easily become reality.

  • And if it does become reality, what will media companies do to help bolster their bidding? (That’s right little Miss Sally in the back! 🙋🏻‍♀️) You want to make sure your product is as good as any of your competitors, which means these media companies will want top tier performance from their talent (studio members, announcers, commentators, etc.) to enhance their product.

Alright we get it, the talent seems to have a ton of leverage. But give us some examples.

• In 2020, a domino effect occurred starting with CBS’ Tony Romo and in 2022, we saw an unprecedented amount of musical chairs in the NFL broadcasting realm:

  • (2020) Tony Romo signed a 10-year deal worth $180 million with CBS to be paired with Jim Nantz for the long haul.

  • In 2022, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman left Fox for ESPN for a major payday.

    • Joe Buck: 5-year deal worth $75 million.

    • Troy Aikman: 5-year deal worth $93 million.

  • Fox replaced their former #1 Team (Buck and Aikman) with their #2 Team at the time, Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen.

    • And just a few months later, Fox agreed to a deal with Tom Brady for 10-years worth $375 million to replace Greg Olsen for the 2024 season.

    • This move will potentially drop Olsen to the #2 Team, if he doesn’t decide to leave for a competitor. That’s a huge blow to him personally, as the #2 commentator’s salary drops by around 70% from $10 million to $3 million per year.

  • Amazon snatched Al Michaels from NBC and hired college football commentating legend, Kirk Herbstreit. And let’s just say those two weren’t too cheap either.

  • At NBC, Cris Collinsworth stayed in the primetime Sunday Night booth while Mike Tirico slid right on in to replace Al Michaels.

Where could this all lead next?

• Star-hunting is the best way forward for these networks. Olsen just put together an objectively great season as the #1 color commentator on Fox, but for the last two years he knew the inevitable was coming. Tom Brady’s hotness would come swooping in and take away his dream girl. But if these networks want to continue doing business with the NFL, they’ll need to pimp themselves out as much as possible and bring in the stars — even if we’re barely seeing their pretty faces.

• …But viewers value quality. However, star-hunting won’t mean much to the fan if the commentators are not good at their job and bringing value to the game. It’s a classic game of tug of war between the networks (what’s good for business) and the viewers (what’s good for content). Ideally, networks want to catch the big fish, but it’s not realistic to think the big fish will always be the best tasting.

• Powdering those cheeks for upcoming media rights deals. We’ve talked about it in previous posts, but upcoming sports media rights deals is like a beauty pageant 💁🏻‍♀️. We know it’s mostly about the money, but networks will need to do everything they can to doll up their shows to ensure to the league that they bring in the best possible ROI for the long haul.

• NFL making linear TV relevant. At least for now, the NFL holds all the cards and is keeping linear TV afloat with the massive number of viewers they get each Sunday. But for the next 5+ years, the NFL will be weighing the pros/cons of linear TV. Maybe they want to branch more into streaming services if that’s where most subscribers (cough, money, cough) are. Maybe there will be more opportunities for networks to establish themselves as the “Fantasy Football network” or “Gambling Network” where announcing and play-by-play are noticeably different than what we see in today’s games.

Quick Hitters

• ✂️ You’ve probably seen the TikToks or IG Reels of T-Swift sporting a fluffy Chiefs #87 jacket in the playoffs. Well, those jackets are custom made by Kristin Juszczyk, wife of San Francisco 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk. And my goodness, this woman is talented with the scissors and fabric because she was just granted a license to use NFL marks in her men’s and women’s apparel designs. Oh and did we mention it will be the Chiefs vs. 49ers in the Super Bowl?! Swift vs. Juszczyk?! (I’ll shut up before I get cancelled).

• 🥦 Tom Brady is officially merging his wellness company, TB12, and his apparel venture, Brady Brand, with sportswear company, NoBull. He will now become the second largest shareholder in the company behind BodyArmor co-founder, Mike Repole. The move positions NoBull to widen its scope as it aims to become a complete wellness company, with expertise in nutrition, apparel, performance, etc.

• 🧢 Flutter, the parent company of FanDuel, started trading shares on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday and closed the first day of trading up 0.24%. The Ireland-based company recently said that its 2023 revenue rose by 25% to ~$12 billion, and that it captured 43% of gross U.S. sports betting revenue in the critical October-December period (usually when all major sports play).

• 📓 If you tuned into our recent edition of the Friday Dump, you would have read the issues Sports Illustrated is facing with its current owners. Just yesterday, it was reported, the SI union filed a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) complaint against The Arena Group (publisher of SI) alleging the mass layoffs that took place two weeks ago was the product of “union-busting.” The SI union believes Arena targeted employees who were active in the union, stating that even though their collective bargaining agreement requires a 90-day notice in advance of a closure or layoffs— “a handful” of employees “were immediately let go.” 🫣