SBJ Unpacks: NFL's on-air standard for Tom Brady -- 'Egregiously critical'

Fox Sports analyst Tom Brady will not be punished for his comments criticizing NFL officials Sunday because he didn’t meet the threshold for action, NFL VP/Communications Brian McCarthy said.

“The concern would be if Tom was egregiously critical of officiating or called into question the integrity of an official or the crew,” McCarthy told SBJ today. “That did not occur in this instance.”

Those specific requirements for a rule violation – that he must be “egregiously” critical or question the integrity, not just the performance, of an official – had not previously been disclosed by the league. The rules, as explained with a slide shown to owners at an August meeting and reported by ESPN , only described an unqualified prohibition on criticism of officials or other clubs. These details make the rules far less restrictive than had previously been understood.

The NFL created the rule against Brady publicly criticizing officials or other teams in August, in response to some owners’ concerns about his possible conflicts of interest as minority owner of the Raiders. Brady acquired 5% of the Las Vegas Raiders in October.

He was commenting on officials’ decision to throw Lions DB Brian Branch out of the game after a high hit to Packers WR Bo Melton. Brady said: “I don’t love that call at all. I mean, obviously, it’s a penalty, but to me, that has to be serious intent in a game like this.”

However, quickly after that, Fox rules analyst Dean Blandino reported that intent is not necessary to throw someone out of the game, only a determination that Branch could have avoided the hit and didn’t. NFL SVP/Officiating Perry Fewell said that in again in a post-game pool report interview.

Editor’s note: This is the sixth and final profile in our 2024 Class of Champions: Pioneers & Innovators.

It was 1983 and Mike Aresco and his wife, Sharon, had just settled into one of the dozen tables at a tiny Italian restaurant in downtown Hartford, Conn., called Hot Tomato’s. Aresco was describing a newspaper article he’d read that morning about the Cleveland Indians when a man seated at the next table tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he was from Cleveland.

The eavesdropping was consequential. The man was Steve Saferin, an Ohio native who had just moved to the area for a job at the fledgling 24-hour sports network ESPN. The two couples became close friends. A year later, Aresco left private legal practice to join Saferin at ESPN, beginning what became an even more consequential 40-year career in sports.  

As an ESPN in-house lawyer and programmer, Aresco filled the first 24-7 sports network with programming, graduating from Australian Rules Football, tractor pulls and Denise Austin exercise shows in the early 1980s to more significant events, like college basketball and football. Aresco steered millions of viewers to midweek prime-time sports for the first time, and helped ESPN become a cable sports behemoth.  

He moved to CBS in 1996 and worked alongside CBS Sports President Sean McManus over the next 16 years, creating the wildly successful “SEC on CBS” college football package; carving out a specific spot in the college football calendar for the Army-Navy football game; and shepherding CBS’s relationship with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, including the $10.8 billion deal with Turner in 2010 that made every game of the tournament nationally viewable for the first time. 

“His reputation in the industry was flawless, universally respected, a thoughtful person and someone who, in my mind, didn’t have any hidden agendas,” said McManus, who recently retired. “He just proved to me to be an invaluable resource.”  

A second chance encounter over a meal led Aresco’s career in a very different direction. Randomly sitting next to South Florida Athletic Director Doug Woolard at the Big East’s annual preseason football clambake eventually resulted in the conference hiring Aresco in August 2012 as its commissioner, making him the first major conference commissioner hired from the broadcast world.

The divide between the Big East’s football- and basketball-focused schools soon broke the league apart, but Aresco helped salvage and form the remaining schools into the American Athletic Conference, and spent the next decade-plus guiding the AAC’s on-field success and stubborn off-field resistance against college sports’ established systems. 

“The strength of the American was down to two things,” said Southern Methodist University President Gerald Turner, who was actively involved in the American Athletic Conference’s affairs during SMU’s 10 years in the conference. “One, the schools, and two was Mike.” 

See also

Aresco’s four-decade-career ended when he retired in May. Instead of a victory lap, his final months were embroiled in College Football Playoff TV deal negotiations, fretting over the House settlement impact and preparing for another potential round of realignment chaos.  

His career arc followed the rise of college football as a media powerhouse, turning a primarily regional sport into a national one flush with cash that’s the second-most viewed in the U.S., behind only the NFL. The mountains of money created college football-driven turmoil and, because of industry inactivity and the NCAA’s relative abdication of authority, an imbalance between a booming business and the uncompensated athletes upon which the industry was built. 

“College sports and television are intrinsically linked,” said former ESPN executive Steve Bornstein. “It’s clearly a double-edged sword, what has happened with media and sports.” 

Other things were on Aresco’s mind, though, on one of his final working days at the AAC office in Irving, Texas, earlier this year. He swiveled around in his desk chair and pointed at dozens of framed photos, rattling off the story of each; a litany of AAC accomplishments, details and names, the pictures showing smiles, hugs, trophies lifted in the air. The fate of college sports is fuzzy; the strength of these memories and relationships as Aresco moves into his next phase is not. 

“That’s what college sports can be,” he said. “You got to care, though. I would just hope people think I cared. I really cared. If you care about something, it really takes on a different complexion.” 

Origins

That Aresco turned toward a life in sports was no surprise to those who watched him grow up in Middletown, Conn. His idyllic childhood in an Italian family revolved around playing sandlot baseball, listening to the New York Yankees or Notre Dame football games on the radio, and spending summers riding bikes, crabbing and fishing with family at a cottage on the Long Island Sound.  

He was a decent high school athlete and smart as a whip, ending up at Tufts University, where he played baseball, was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a master’s in international relations. He later got a law degree from the University of Connecticut while substitute teaching. Aresco claims a photographic memory and might have ended up a CIA “cold warrior,” or a teacher or a lawyer in the U.S. attorney’s office in Hartford, but landed in private law practice. 

Aresco remained passionately interested in sports, and meeting Saferin led him to a role in the legal department at ESPN, a 6-year-old cable network with only 75 employees. Aresco was interviewed by ESPN’s head of legal, Andy Brilliant, who was wearing a T-shirt. Aresco got the job, becoming one of three lawyers at ESPN. He could write contracts but proved a capable negotiator, too, and in late 1988 he moved over to the programming department. Aresco programmed college football for ESPN, but roughly 20 other sports, too.   

“Most lawyers I meet don’t really want to be lawyers,” said Bornstein. “They want to be dealmakers, and that was the opportunity presented for him.” 

Traditionally, sports were televised solely on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. But ESPN needed programming seven nights a week, so it made unchallenged space for itself by creating programming such as “Thursday Night Football,” which Aresco helped invent.  

“We were still trying to convince people that moving games for ESPN was worth it,” said longtime friend Tom Odjakjian, who met Aresco in ESPN’s programming department and later worked for him at the Big East and AAC. “Mike is very proud of convincing people to play on Thursdays or play at night.”   

These early deals with the College Football Association (a 60-plus school media rights pool), conference commissioners, athletic directors, and coaches established Aresco’s hefty Rolodex. He had what he called “a capacity for friendship,” and was notably loquacious. 

“You couldn’t just pick up the phone and call Mike, because you were in for a 30-minute conversation easily,” ESPN President, Content Burke Magnus said, grinning. 

By the early 1990s, TV networks’ role in the college sports ecosystem was growing exponentially, offering exposure and increasingly large amounts of money to individual conferences. This strained a college sports world that hadn’t changed in decades. The Bowl Coalition — the earliest seed of what eventually became the College Football Playoff — was created. And the Southwest Conference imploded in 1996, birthing the Big 12. Conference championship games were created. 

“That was the beginning of the new era in terms of college football, and to some extent, college sports in general,” said Karl Benson, a former conference commissioner who has known Aresco for more than three decades.  

In the Eye

CBS Sports lost its CFA, NBA and NFL TV deals between 1990 and 1993, so when McManus was made CBS Sports president in late 1996, he was hell-bent on re-establishing the network as a sports titan. He inherited a staff that included Aresco, who had been hired a few months earlier by McManus’ predecessor to lead CBS Sports’ college programming effort.  

“As I got to know him, it soon became evident that nobody had better relationships in the college community than Mike had,” McManus said. “He was our go-to guy in that area, and really entirely had that responsibility for us.” 

Over the next 16 years, Aresco was central to securing a protected Saturday in December for the Army-Navy game, raising its profile (see story, Page 25), as well as negotiating the groundbreaking CBS-Turner NCAA Tournament deal in 2010 (see story, Page 26).  

Aresco’s biggest contribution to CBS Sports, and college football, was the creation of “SEC on CBS,” an idea he suggested in McManus’ office one day in 1998. CBS and the SEC negotiated a national deal that year that began in 2001 (paying the conference roughly $40 million annually). At a time when conferences spread their rights across several networks for maximum exposure, the SEC, by committing to CBS, became for years the only conference with a guaranteed game on national television each week in the same time slot, Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET. Aresco picked each week’s matchup. 

“It turned out to be one of the most successful broadcast packages ever from a network perspective,” said Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti, who worked alongside McManus and Aresco at CBS Sports.  

The creation of the Bowl Championship Series in 1998 helped, too. Fans in Oregon needed to know what was happening in Louisiana, Michigan or Florida. College football became a national sport. Play-by-play announcer Verne Lundquist moved to the 3:30 SEC games in 2000 and became one of the most recognizable voices in college football. It wasn’t long before “SEC on CBS” became appointment viewing. 

“The imperfections of the BCS were actually part of its beauty and what helped elevate the SEC,” said CBS producer Craig Silver, who worked on “SEC on CBS” for its entirety. “Certainly, by October, it was almost a one-and-done scenario. You had to keep winning.”

And the SEC did, claiming the national title each year from 2006 to 2012. The SEC-CBS deal was renewed in 2008 for 15 years and $825 million, an arrangement that became increasingly financially lopsided over time in the network’s favor. It initially looked like CBS would lose the SEC in ’08, but Aresco’s tight relationship with then-SEC Commissioner Mike Slive, with whom he would smoke cigars on the infamous back porch of Slive’s Birmingham home, proved consequential. Slive recognized that CBS, at Aresco’s urging, had transformed the SEC from a regional conference into a national brand synonymous with college football might.  

“Part of the reason why the SEC did the deal is they had belief in CBS Sports,” said McManus, “but in Mike Aresco also.”

Big East bust-up

Maybe Aresco was ready to try something different when he showed up at the Big East clambake in late summer 2012 and fortuitously sat next to Woolard. The league’s commissioner had resigned; Woolard said to Aresco, “We need someone like you. Would you be interested?’”  

Aresco was intrigued, but didn’t take the opportunity seriously. After several interviews, it was clear this was serious, and the idea grew on him. Aresco wanted to know if he could lead.  

“I thought [the Big East] was a good opportunity,” he said. “I didn’t know it’d get as bad as it was.” 

In August 2012, Aresco was hired as commissioner of the Big East, a conference built on basketball whose fracturing symbolized the college sports power shift to football. Five schools were halfway gone when Aresco started, and Rutgers soon followed them out the door to the Big Ten, suing the Big East to leave earlier. Tim Pernetti, who first met Aresco in the 1990s as a sports programmer at ABC and succeeded him this year as AAC commissioner, was then the AD at Rutgers.  

“Put yourself in Mike’s shoes,” Pernetti said. “He gets the job in August 2012, and two and a half months later, I called him to tell him we’re leaving the conference for the Big Ten. It was a tough call to make because of my relationship. But you know what his reaction was? He congratulated me.” 

The Big East’s basketball-focused seven private schools left, too, in December 2012, taking the conference name and the right to use Madison Square Garden for the Big East basketball tournaments, without paying exit fees. Complex negotiations ended with Aresco’s nameless conference keeping the league office in Providence, R.I., the conference staff and more than $100 million. 

“I woke up one morning and realized we had nothing,” Aresco said. “The writers were saying, ‘They’re finished.’” 

A brutal four months ensued of 24-7 phone calls with athletic directors and conference commissioners, conference staff and university presidents, including Southern Methodist’s Turner, who became close friends with Aresco through the ordeal. SMU had just joined the Big East for the 2013-14 season, and like Aresco, wasn’t getting what it had signed up for.  

“We were so happy to have that opportunity, and then it just started falling apart,” Turner said.  

The new league needed an identity. A list with more than 200 name possibilities was whittled down. The group avoided any brand including a number, finally landing on “American,” in part because of its generic flexibility.  

In parallel, Aresco pursued a media deal with ESPN. Aresco’s former employer had all the leverage, but he got Magnus, then ESPN’s senior vice president of college sports programming, back to the negotiating table. The resulting seven-year, $126 million deal reflected the wobbly state of the American, but significantly increased exposure for the league’s schools. Aresco knew that if the AAC stabilized and found success, he could improve upon the deal later in the decade.  

“You just had to put a valuation on what you had in front of you, and take Mike at face [value] in terms of his representations of how they were going to grow and build,” Magnus said. “The ability to trust what he was saying was easier than somebody that was a complete outsider.” 

The P6 campaign

Within the AAC’s first year of existence, Central Florida beat Baylor in the Fiesta Bowl and UConn won both the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball championships (the first of three straight titles for UConn’s women). Aresco’s message to the schools that unabashedly wanted to move up: “The best conference is the one you’re in. Just build it. It’ll help you, it’ll help us, it’ll help everybody in the conference.” 

Realignment’s shadow loomed over the American from Day 1. The first big scare came in 2016, when the Big 12 requested schools interested in joining the conference to apply for membership; several from the AAC did. The Big 12 didn’t expand that year, but the near-miss ignited a pugnacious internal fire in Aresco that burned the remainder of his time at the league: The Power Five should be the Power Six, including the AAC.   

“The one thing that [Mike] was for the conference, from the first day all the way through, was aspirational,” said LeslieAnne Wade, a longtime public relations pro who worked with Aresco at CBS and consulted the AAC. “That resonated and became the feeling and is still the feeling for every single person that works there, for every university that comes in, for every coach. They don’t feel like they’re the G5 at all.” 

At the American’s 2017 football media day, Aresco wore a “P6” pin on his jacket lapel. He routinely spoke publicly about the campaign, calling journalists and spreading the AAC’s message over social media. In Aresco, the AAC had an unwavering loyalist. That he would shamelessly go to bat publicly for his league, in some cases calling out rival conference commissioners with whom he’d been friends for years, was no surprise.  

“If you’re Mike’s friend, you’re his best friend,” said Silver. “If you were in his circle, you were part of his family.” 

Others in the commissioners’ meetings understood what Aresco was doing, but over the years, it gradually grew tiresome. Eyes rolled.  

“It was a little annoying for both ends of the spectrum,” Turner said. “It was clear we weren’t going to knock down the whole wall between the G5 and the P5. And besides that, there were four or five of us [in the AAC] that really thought our destiny was in the P5.” 

One of those was UCF, which after beating Auburn in the 2017 Peach Bowl to complete an undefeated season, took a tongue-in-cheek page out of Aresco’s playbook and declared themselves national champions, despite being shut out of the CFP.  

“It was unlikely there would ever be a P6, but Mike didn’t give up,” said outgoing CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock. “He was so loyal to his schools, and that’s a point in his favor.” 

A new era

The billion-dollar deal that ESPN struck with Aresco and the AAC in 2019 — innovative because of how much AAC action would be streamed on the newly launched ESPN+ — was the massive upgrade over the league’s initial deal that Aresco had promised, and a relative triumph.  

“It just blew all the other Group of Five conferences out of the water,” Benson said of the deal. “And his whole Power Six campaign had to have been helpful in those negotiations.” 

Houston reached the 2021 men’s Final Four, but that was the AAC’s zenith. By the time Cincinnati finally cracked the CFP glass ceiling late that year — becoming the first non-power conference school to play in the playoff semifinals — the Bearcats, along with Houston and UCF, had already announced they were headed to the Big 12.  

SMU followed, announcing it would join the ACC. Aresco and Turner, close friends who’d shared so many phone calls trying to outmaneuver college sports’ uncertainties, shared one more, this time with a sadder tinge.  

“I would not have wanted him to hear it from anybody else,” Turner said.  

Those defections, along with NIL and transfer portal-related roster turnover, knocked back the AAC. It was becoming impossible to build something lasting.  

Aresco announced his retirement in December 2023.  

Since June, Aresco has received offers to consult a bowl game and a Power Four school, but declined. He helped Pernetti during the AAC leadership transition, and still reads Sports Business Journal and D1 Ticker each morning, but that’s the extent of his involvement in college sports. He merely watched from afar as the Pac-12 tried unsuccessfully to poach several AAC schools this summer.

Instead, Aresco spends much of his time traveling with his wife, reading some of his several hundred books about Gen. George Custer or keeping up with laundry.   

“It just feels like it never ends,” he said, laughing. 

Retirement is an adjustment for someone who spent 40 years on the front line of monumental change in the sports media and college sports worlds. Aresco had a substantial impact on the businesses of ESPN and CBS Sports, raising college sports’ profile in both places.  

“That’s what makes his career really remarkable when you have that kind of longevity through all that change,” Petitti said.

Had Aresco retired in 2012 after CBS, his career would have been noteworthy. But the last third of his career ended up the most unexpected and impressive. Aresco wanted to prove to himself that he could lead, and with the tenacity, resilience and optimism he showed at the helm of the American, he did. 

“He was a master at insightful anticipation and understanding of a moving target. That’s Mike Aresco to me,” said Navy AD Chet Gladchuk. “He had to be reactionary in so much of his leadership career. But his insights, his ability to anticipate, his comprehensive understanding of a moving target, made him a bona fide leader in the industry.”

Things didn’t turn out exactly as Aresco expected, but that’s not unusual. On the morning of his fateful dinner at Hot Tomato’s in 1983, the newsstand was sold out of all three New York newspapers that he typically bought. So, he settled for a Boston Globe and read an article about the Cleveland Indians instead.  

The complex and fluctuating sale of the T'Wolves officially went to arbitration today, with a decision not expected until December and a resolution potentially not occurring until deep into 2025. 

At issue is a tiered sales process that contractually allowed prospective owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez to purchase 80% of the T'Wolves for $1.5B through a trio of payments over a three-year period. T'Wolves owner Glen Taylor eventually voided the sale on March 28 , claiming that Lore and Rodriguez missed a series of deadlines, including a March 27 date to pay a final installment of $600M. 

The entrepreneur Lore and the former baseball player Rodriguez refute that they missed the deadlines and instead claim they were in full compliance with the contract, which contained a built-in 90-day extension past March 27 if they met all their scheduled obligations. A panel of three arbitrators -- one chosen by Taylor, one chosen by Lore/Rodriguez and a third independent -- will hear arguments through the end of this week on whether Lore and Rodriguez lived up to the sale contract. By contract, the panel has 30 days to reach a binding decision , although the arbitrators could request more time.

The three arbitrators, who will meet this entire week in Minneapolis, are Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Kathleen Blatz (chosen by Taylor), Joseph Slights III of the business law firm Wilson Sonsini (chosen by Lore/Rodriguez) and retired Hennepin County District Court judge Thomas Fraser (neutral).

Should Taylor prevail, the team (now valued at roughly $3B) would remain in his control. If Lore and Rodriguez prevail, they will seek official league approval of the sale, which could leak months into next year. Lore and Rodriguez -- who have so far paid roughly $600M for 36% of the team -- have recently partnered with billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg , former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt and Dyal Homecourt Partners to raise $950M in capital. That money has been placed in escrow, and if their purchase of the final 44% of the franchise is eventually approved by the NBA’s Board of Governors, Lore/Rodriguez will seek to buy out Taylor’s remaining 20% stake.

The NBA league office has no role in the arbitration process and will only become involved if Lore and Rodriquez receive a favorable ruling and seek league approval for the sale. It would take 23 votes from the board of governors for the purchase to be greenlit, and an intriguing sidebar would be Taylor’s longstanding relationship with Commissioner Adam Silver as well as his now open desire to remain as T-Wolves owner long term. 

In late March, after rescinding the sale to Lore and Rodriquez -- Taylor, 83, told the AP: “We went through the process, and I spent a lot of time. We’ve got a really good team, we’ve got a lot of good things going for us, I enjoy it and I’m healthy enough to do this. I don’t need the money, so I think I’ll just keep running it and enjoy it. I like my coach. I like my staff. This way everybody gets to keep their jobs, and I’ll be happy.”

Lore and Rodriguez’s collective response was that Taylor -- in the midst of a Timberwolves playoff run last March -- had cold feet, with one factor being rising valuations leaguewide, where the Suns were sold for $4B and the Mavericks for $3.5B over the past two seasons.

“ We have fulfilled our obligations, have all necessary funding and are fully committed to closing our purchase of the team as soon as the NBA completes its approval process,” Lore and Rodriguez said in a statement last March. “Glen Taylor’s statement is an unfortunate case of seller’s remorse that is short sighted and disruptive to the team and the fans during an historic winning season.”  

Schools and leagues are working to get a head start on House settlement-related paperwork, and the Big 12 is toward the front of the pack.

League sources told Sports Business Journal the Big 12 circulated a name, image and likeness agreement template to its schools in recent weeks that would effectively spell out, among other things, terms, services, payments and the timing of payments to athletes.

The template, which remains in its infancy and could undergo significant changes, was also created to allow each school to format it related to its varying needs, like, for example, whether athletes would sign over their NIL rights exclusively or non-exclusively to the university.

Sources told SBJ the document is currently rather unwieldy at around 20 pages and staffers are working to parse down the information to be more digestible.

“It's not going to be short, even if we pare it down,” one Big 12 source told SBJ. “You're just going to have to be like a real estate agent — ‘This means this. This means this, and this is what you're interested in.’”

The Big 12’s circulating of this potential template comes after Judge Claudia Wilken granted preliminary approval of the House settlement last month. The proposed settlement would grant schools the ability to share revenue directly with athletes, along with creating a system that would provide the NCAA and a third-party entity with some level of oversight over the payment of players.

Schools around the country are largely planning for a world in which athletes may well sign multiple agreements with each institution. Those contracts could entail but aren’t limited to agreements related to House payments, scholarships and NIL that would be based on fair market value.

“Are you going to commingle the scholarship agreement with the House payment? Are you going to keep those two separate?,” posited a second Big 12 source. “I don't think you're going to see institutions all do it one way or the other.”

The larger hope among administrators is the settlement will show enough progress to Congress that it might step in to create some kind of wider national NIL standard that would circumvent the patchwork of state laws that currently govern the matter.

College sports leaders also desire congressional help in creating an antitrust carve out that would allow athletes to collectively bargain without being deemed employees (federal law does not allow non-employees to collectively bargain).

Opponents of the settlement, however, argue its implementation would functionally create a collective bargaining agreement without the input of the athletes.

“We oppose the settlement, and the conferences and the schools have done a masterful job of throwing out breadcrumbs for the media long before the settlement was actually made public and analyzed,” said Ramogi Huma, executive director of the National College Players Association. “There’s a lot of cheerleading around [it] right now, but the reality is that this would be terrible for athletes.”

The Big 12, for its efforts, is working to get ahead of the curve.

When the vivid blue logo of FanDuel replaced the now familiar, but still out-of-place red of Bally Sports on the screens and studio sets of the 16 Diamond-owned RSNs last week, it got me thinking back to the heady ambitions -- and seemingly sound logic -- behind the deal that preceded it.

Constructed through a flurry of acquisitions by prominent hedge fund investor Soo Kim, Bally introduced itself as the latest, splashy entrant to the U.S. sports betting fray in the second half of 2020. That November, it announced a 10-year, $85 million deal to put its sportsbook brand on 21 RSNs that then held the rights to 41 MLB, NBA and NHL teams. 

At the time, only 11 states that combined to make up less than 20% of the over-21 U.S. population allowed legal online sports betting. Bally said it would launch its sportsbook app in four of them by Q1 in 2021. But only two of those, Indiana and Iowa, had Bally RSNs.

The plan was to launch the sportsbook in more states as they legalized, using the reach of the RSNs to build up the brand where the map matched up -- Bally Sports Detroit when Michigan opened at the start of 2021, for example -- and local TV stations owned by Diamond parent Sinclair when it didn’t.

We’ll never know whether that strategy was on point, or fatally premature. Yes, there were vast gaps in the overlay between the states that were early legalizers and the markets in Diamond’s footprint. But those gaps filled in over time. The greater hurdles were that Bally wasn’t capitalized well enough to expand into states as they legalized or to keep its sportsbook product competitive as others improved.

Bally Sports had its brand on RSNs in Michigan, Arizona, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee and North Carolina when those states launched. But the Bally sportsbook wasn’t licensed in any of them. Today, the Bally Bet app is live in 10 states, but only four of those have a Diamond-operated RSN.

Can FanDuel do better?

The map that FanDuel inherits is a far better match to its vast footprint than it was to Bally’s spotty one. Its app is live in 10 states in which it will now have its brand on an RSN -- Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Iowa, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana. Those RSNs hold rights to eight NBA teams, six NHL teams and three MLB teams, with the potential to recapture some teams it has jettisoned.

Diamond now has five fewer RSNs and rights to about half as many teams as it did in 2020, largely a product of the bankruptcy reorganization that led it to break with a handful of NBA and NHL teams and as many as 11 MLB clubs, with the final number to be determined in the coming months .

That diminishes the value. But FanDuel almost certainly won’t pay as much as Bally committed to -- albeit in part through stock warrants that turned out to be worthless. And there still is the likelihood that the map match will continue to improve.

Diamond has RSNs in several of the states likely to fall next, including Missouri, Georgia, Minnesota and Wisconsin. It’s also in Florida, where what is now an exclusive arrangement with the Seminole tribe eventually could open to other operators. And it’s in the two great white whale states, California and Texas, though its rights picture is a mess in the latter, where the only team deal it still has in place is with the Spurs. 

That all went into the calculus when FanDuel was reviewing the package, which it also considered in 2020, when Bally chased away all comers with its all-in bid.

“The RSN marketplace obviously has some challenges in the business model, much like much of linear television,” said Mike Raffensperger, president of sports at FanDuel Group. “That said, the rights are and will remain unbelievably powerful. When you think about viewing sports in this country, it is through regional sports networks for many, if not most, sports fans. We just thought it was a powerful asset.

“We’re very cognizant of the fact that not the entire Diamond footprint is in a sports betting state. That’s OK. We do have some confidence that over time, the map will continue to expand, and so we’re building a brand presence and building FanDuel’s base in anticipation of that.”

A different kind of deal

FanDuel’s deal differs from Bally’s in a few important ways. Though Raffensperger would not discuss financials, it’s clear FanDuel will pay less than Bally did annually. Importantly, rather than turning over equity, it will receive equity, with an option to buy up to 5% of Diamond if it emerges from bankruptcy.

The deal also includes content sharing. FanDuel will gain far broader distribution for "Up & Adams" and "Run It Back," morning shows featuring hosts Kay Adams and Michelle Beadle that haven’t found much traction on FanDuel TV, which, in spite of its rebrand , is still mostly a hangout for horse bettors. That’s also good for Diamond, which should see its morning audience grow at a low cost.

There’s also an upside for FanDuel if it helps drive Diamond’s OTT offerings. You can expect to see promos that target bettors with OTT subscription offers, similar to those that FanDuel used to get its customers to sign up for YouTube TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket and NBA League Pass.

While those all offer upside, the core of the deal lies in the team rights. The most avid MLB, NBA and NHL fans watch regular-season games, which typically air on RSNs. While not all avid fans are sports bettors, they are far more likely to bet than casuals. And nearly all FanDuel bettors are avid sports fans.

Beginning last week, viewers in 10 legal betting states saw FanDuel’s logo at the bottom of the screen, for every minute of the game, as they watched their local -- or at least their closest -- NBA and NHL teams play. Perhaps more importantly, they also saw the FanDuel logo during pregame shows, when most were making their bets. As much as in-game betting is growing, that is still the time most FanDuel bettors build their parlays.

“The activity of our customers is a hockey stick as it gets closer to the start of the game and, yes, that still matters,” Raffensperger said. “We’re very invested in the live betting experience. ... But the pregame moments and time really matter. And that’s just another benefit that we felt from having a deeper relationship with Diamond Sports.”

What is the ROI?

When assessing the value of Diamond RSN naming rights, FanDuel considered two metrics: media value and commercial value. The media value is as you’d expect it to be -- a hefty helping of minutes with clear brand exposure on programming that those who bet, or are predisposed to bet, likely will be watching. The commercial value is the lift FanDuel has seen in betting on games when it has gotten similar exposure, such as in markets where it has its logo courtside. Or with teams that it sponsors, where it can promote a sign-up offer before a game or an odds boost between innings.

“We look at what we have observed in the past,” Raffensperger said. “What kind of incrementality do we see in customer trial on that sporting event, or what do we see in our customer engagement or market share on those events where we have a more fulsome presence? You can start to triangulate a little what we think the commercial uplift from this will be.”

One of the things FanDuel can’t triangulate is the portfolio of deals that will remain when Diamond emerges from bankruptcy -- if it does emerge, which seems likely. The track record for RSNs in MLB markets that don’t air MLB games isn’t great. Diamond also has lost two of the three NBA teams in Texas.

But it remains to be seen whether the teams that have pivoted to other models will find success in them and stick with them.

“We’re watching it very closely,” Raffensperger said. “I’m very cognizant of the fact that baseball is an open question. And, yeah, ultimately the overall scope and scale of the deal will be dictated by where things land in baseball. That said, I’ve been really impressed with the Diamond team. They’ve made a ton of progress on their carriage agreements with the NBA and NHL. And I’m encouraged by the lane of travel and the conversations they’re having with the MLB teams.”

Imagine a coach with multiple championship rings, revered for building strong team cultures and molding some of the game’s greatest players. You might picture John Wooden, Phil Jackson or even Coach K. But this description equally fits South Carolina Gamecocks coaching legend Dawn Staley.

And there’s a reason to reconsider female coaches: It’s good business. 

Per Forbes , women are more effective than men across “all leadership measures.” Leadership Circle research suggests that, as managers, women show up more effectively than male peers at every level and age group; The Ready-Now Leaders report from the Conference Board found that organizations with at least 30% of leadership roles held by women are 12 times more likely to land in the top 20% in terms of financial performance.

Yet more than 90% of men’s sports teams and 49% of women’s teams have male head coaches; at the youth level, only 26% of head coaches are women. A male coach is highest paid in nearly every major sport. Female coaches make 45 cents on the dollar relative to male peers, a gap that hasn’t budged in years. And as a former collegiate coach, I attest that these are no hollow statistics: after 10 years, I made a third as much as my male counterparts — arguably working harder because our program had fewer resources. I have peers who’ve navigated entire careers — from youth sports through professional levels — without encountering a female coach. That’s a problem. 

Theoretically, Title IX ensures that athletics are even in opportunity — meaning that the legion of female athletes graduating into the workforce take more of the available jobs yet are still led by men. We know that women who play sports become women who lead — but those leadership opportunities don't exist. So how do we invest more in female coaches — and how can that create those opportunities? 

While women’s sports surge in popularity, female coaches are also left behind in pay. The lion’s share of sponsorship dollars flow to players, leagues, and properties, and those dollars are well earned. But there are so many Dawn  Staleys , present and future, with the leadership and earning potential to become Coach Ks. And there’s so much opportunity for the industry, sponsors, and female coaches themselves — if their achievements draw recognition and investment accordingly.

Once the industry adjusts our approach to sports investment – placing greater priority on the female coaches who are central to the growth of all aspects of sports — the entire ecosystem will thrive. 

But it takes an entire ecosystem to move an ecosystem. Leaders across multiple sectors must collaborate to create progress.

Academic institutions

In the U.S., women hold just 4 in 10 head coaching positions at the college level, a share that’s remained flat for decades — making every female leader a minority in her own sport. And women are leaving college coaching at an all-time high rate — particularly aspiring mothers, because the industry is not conducive in opportunity or pay.

Athletic administrators: stop assuming your systems are working — and start evaluating those systems the same way you measure other revenue-generating tactics. Paying female coaches at the same rate as male counterparts would allow more women to stay on this career path; creating new systems offering more resources would enable female leaders to engage new audiences — who will invest more time and money into academic and athletic programs. 

Media

Consider how the story of Erin Matson — one of the most renowned U.S. field hockey players ever — inspires a new generation of coaches. Or how the story of  Tomekia  Reed — a single mom whose resilience influences her team — empowers other moms in their career paths. But these stories aren’t widely known, as media continually under-index on women’s sports, covering only one or two female coaches’ stories.

Media: Pull back the curtain and give fans an inside look at the lifestyle, work, and sacrifices female coaches and their families make to bring us inspiring entertainment. Be part of the growing excitement, and share in the growing investment that is flowing to women’s sports at every level.

Brands

Currently, female coaches see little to no brand investment. But companies of all stripes can influence more female leaders’ trajectory with real dollars and pay equity. For instance, Staley’s partnership with  Oofos , a footwear company specializing in recovery sandals for athletes. Or the Female Coaching Network’s WHOOP collaboration, creating a community for 52 coaches representing 15 countries and 19 sports at the Paris Olympics. Or Ally, proving their power to address disparities and improve the financial trajectory of people’s lives.

Female coaches, as the leaders and public faces of teams, represent an untapped but highly cost-effective investment focus that support leadership development — while boosting exposure and fan engagement. Authentic integration between brands and well-known leaders enables companies and coaches alike to promote equity and empowerment.

Investing in female coaches is good business because having women as mentors and leaders matters. Women in leadership inspires more women who see themselves as leaders; women coaching boys and men encourages them to see the value of female leaders. If sports are a microcosm of society, change the trajectory for female coaches and use it as a blueprint for growing female leaders across industries.

Emily Jo Roberts is director of women’s coaches and executives at Wasserman.

• Fox is sold out of Super Bowl ad inventory, executives announced during the company’s fiscal first quarter earnings call Monday morning, reports SBJ's Mollie Cahillane.

• The Braves ranked No. 1 among MLB teams for overall guest experience, concessions, and non-game entertainment, per MLB’s 2024 Voice of the Consumer Program, writes SBJ's Mike Mazzeo.

• The state of Hawai’i approved Aloha Halawa District Partners (AHDP) on Oct. 31 as the preferred development partner for the 98-acre New Aloha Stadium Entertainment District, notes SBJ's Bret McCormick.

• TMRW Sports' multiyear deal with Fastbreak.ai will see the tech company manage TGL’s schedule beginning with its 2026 season, with TMRW Sports making a strategic investment in Fastbreak, reports SBJ's Rob Schaefer.

• Researchers at Penn found that the special mud MLB rubs on all of its game balls does, in fact, enhance friction and ensure pitchers have a consistent grip, writes SBJ's Joe Lemire.