Friday Dump 🥟 - Inflated viewers, ESPN loves CFP, Welcome back EA's NCAA football

Back at it for the Friday Dump 🥟

Each Friday, we’ll breakdown 3 sports business stories that have caught our eye throughout the week and 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.

And. Here. We. Go.

🔴 Viewership numbers are starting to get a little fishy. Yayy we did it again! We broke another Super Bowl viewership record! But I swear, almost every week we’re making a comment on how, “this game broke this viewership record” or “this tournament brought in an x% increase in viewers over the last # of years” (the x is always a ridiculous number…for the clicks, of course). All this research and writing is making us wonder, is the population increasing dramatically? Are more of us glued to live sports each year? Or can something else be explained as to why we’re consistently seeing new viewership records being broken each year? Let’s see if we can parse this out a bit…

• We’ll focus on the NFL for today…NFL games are averaging ~17.5 million viewers this season across TV and streaming platforms (excluding international games). That’s roughly an 8% increase from last year.

  • Monday Night Football is up 24% over last year, thanks to more games being shown on ABC.

  • Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime is up 23%.

  • Sunday Night Football on NBC is averaging 21.8 million viewers, which is the highest number of viewers since 2015.

• (Kinda strange right?) And to make matters even weirder in July 2023, according to Nielsen, broadcast viewing decreased by 5.4% and cable viewing by 12.5% year-over-year (see Table 1).

• So…what gives? Look no further than the combination of more accurate tallying of out-of-home (OOH) viewership (think bars, restaurants, watch parties, etc.) and the implementation of alternative telecasts (Nickelodeon Super Bowl broadcast, the ManningCast, etc.).

🟡 The worldwide leader owns college. I’m sure all of our readers remember our January 9th post, which touched on the financial implications and media rights deals coming up for the new 12-team College Football Playoff (CFP). Well funny we mention that…according to The Athletic, ESPN and the CFP are in agreement on a six-year, $7.8 billion extension that will make the network the home of the tournament through the 2031-32 season. In the interim, ESPN has two years remaining on its current deal, which has an average payment of $608 million per year— making the new arrangement worth a little more than 2x the value of the current contract. Go ahead and add the entire CFP to your skinny sports bundle, because these networks are cleaning up.

• But when it comes to college football competing networks, Fox is really the only one. They were reported to have major interest in bidding for the CFP.

  • Fox is home to the Big Ten conference, rights to some Big 12 & Pac 12 conference games, the Big Noon Kickoff pregame show, and the Mountain West conference.

• Take a bow Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, and Jimmy Pitaro, CEO of ESPN, (Disney owns ESPN just FYI if you want to sound smart…or if you don’t read any news whatsoever), because this news joins the list of amazing moves this duo has made in the last few months:

  • Negotiated a deal with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery to include ESPN in a new skinny sports bundle.

  • Partnered with Penn Entertainment to launch their sports gambling app, ESPN Bet.

  • Put themselves in position to control nearly all Division I college sports championships, outside of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which is televised by CBS and TNT.

  • Already started the process of taking ESPN direct-to-consumer within the next couple years.

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🟢 EA Sports is back in the game. After 10 long, grueling years for college football video game fanatics, EA Sports just launched their teaser trailer for their NCAA Football 25 video game 🥳. Why did this video game decide to take a decade off? Oh and why are we talking about video games? Great questions…

• History lesson: EA Sports found itself at the center of a lawsuit with former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon and the NCAA after he saw his “likeness” (i.e. right of publicity) used in their NCAA Basketball 09 game — all without his consent. O’Bannon eventually won his lawsuit against the NCAA, and this caused EA to cease production of the game. The last edition of the football game ended up being NCAA Football 14 😢.

• Because of O’Bannon’s victory against the NCAA as well as the Supreme Court ruling to ultimately side with NCAA players, it started a process where college athletes could cash in on their name, image, and likeness (NIL) starting in July 2021.

• After the rule change, EA Sports hinted of the return of the game and now we finally have some clarity…with a tiny, little, minor case of retribution?