Friday Dump 🥟 - CBS gets a facelift, Finalized NBA media deal, Celebrity golf tourney

Oh how we’ve missed you, Friday Dump 🥟 

Each Friday, we’ll breakdown 3 sports business stories that have caught our eye throughout the week. They will be assembled in the following format:

🔴 - Stories that make us stop, think, and question.

🟡 - Stories with a hint of risk and unpredictability.

🟢 - Stories that make us feel good to go and empowered.

You complete us.

🔴 CBS Sports has a new stepdad. To be honest, we’re pretty proud of ourselves we didn’t jump into this story months ago because the amount of back and forth and teasing behind this merger will make your head spin. On Sunday, it was announced that CBS Sports’ parent company, Paramount Global (which is controlled by National Amusements, a Shari Redstone family company) has reached an agreement on a merger deal with Skydance Media (founder and CEO is David Ellison — yes, the co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison’s son) worth more than $8B. The deal looks to merge a media company that has rights to the NFL, half of the men’s March Madness, several top college conferences, and the Masters. Let’s run through the details of this merger…

• We should probably get some things straight before moving forward, a closing deal between these two companies isn’t due until at least early 2025 and could take even longer. And there are 3 major steps to this transaction:

  • 1) Skydance Investor Group, made up of the Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners, will pay $2.4B in cash for National Amusements.

  • 2) Paramount Global will then merge with Skydance for $4.5B in a cash-and-stock deal

  • 3) $1.5B in capital will be added to Paramount’s balance sheet — all-in-all valuing the combined company at $28B (cha-ching!)

• With this agreement in place, Paramount now has a 45-day window to go and shop around this offer. If Paramount receives a juicier offer and takes it, Skydance will receive a $400M breakup fee.

• Before this agreement was made Paramount issued a company memo that they will move forward to reduce the size of our workforce 😔. The point being, they’d like to stay somewhat lean amid ongoing media disruption.

🟡 Ladies and gentlemen, we have a deal. Honestly, we’ve come too far not to provide all the updates (update #1, update #2, update #3, update #4) when it comes to the new NBA media rights deal. We’re not stopping now! And for good reason, because according to The Athletic, the NBA has agreed to media rights deals with NBC, Amazon Prime Video, and ABC/ESPN. The deal will be worth $76B over the course of 11 years. This is massive news for the league as ESPN will look to pay $2.6B (slightly less than the $2.7B it pays for their NFL rights) to keep the Finals on the network exclusively. NBC is expected to pay $2.5B per season and Amazon will pay $1.8B per year. To give you an idea, in the current agreement, ESPN and TNT pay a combined $2.6B over their 9-year agreement. Let’s review what the hell is going on…

• All the deals are in place, now we just need to wait until pen meets paper and we can all be on our merry way…

• …That is unless Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT have anything more to say about it 😬.

  • According to people familiar with the matter, WBD CEO David Zaslav, has made it known they have the power to match one of the three offers — more than likely they would target Amazon’s portion of the deal.

    • They will have ~5 days to match one of the offers — or wave bye bye to the NBA after a 40-year relationship.

    • If TNT doesn’t end up matching, we’ll be forced to mourn the final year of the ever-so popular pre and post-game show, Inside the NBA on TNT.

      • And with Charles Barkley claiming his retirement if TNT loses the rights, this might be the last year we get to enjoy him and his antics on live TV (even though we don’t really believe him 😉).

• Under the new NBA media deals, the regular season would feature national telecasts nearly 7 days a week with the proposed national TV schedule looking something like this once NFL games end:

  • Monday: Peacock

  • Tuesday: NBC

  • Wednesday: ESPN

  • Thursday: Amazon

  • Friday: ESPN/Amazon

  • Saturday: ESPN/Amazon

  • Sunday: NBC/ESPN

• To give you an idea, the current national TV schedule only telecasts 3 games per week after football concludes.

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🟢 Dog days of summer = celebrity golf in Tahoe. Every summer since 1990, NBC has put on a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe bringing together the biggest names in sports and entertainment called the American Century Championship. NBC decided to host this tournament to fill summer programming space after they lost MLB media rights. And each year the waiting list gets bigger and bigger. Less than 100 spots are available, and this year, 12 are taken by active NFL players or coaches. The tournament has gotten so popular that NBC has put their own analysts to work year-round to constantly look for new names. Ideally, names that are relevant and recognizable. Today, the celebs will officially tee off.

• The tournament now offers $750K in prize money (hmm wonder which celeb needs that), and is now a consistent money-maker for NBC.

• Steph Curry won the tournament last year, as a record 76,810 fans attended the three-day tournament which included a great round with an insane hole-in-one that averaged 1.4M viewers.

• Travis & Jason Kelce will be in attendance as well as Charles Barkley, Bobby Flay, Buffalo Bills QB Josh Allen, New York Jets QB Aaron Rodgers, and actors Miles Teller, Don Cheadle, and Ray Romano.

  • First-year participants are highlighted by Alex Rodriguez, Jaguars QB Trevor Lawrence, and Rob McElhenney.