Protect The Asset

The field doubles to 24 in 2027-28, and the slate jumps to 23 games, the majority of which will be on campus vs. neutral sites. ESPN remains the exclusive rights holder through 2032, and this add-on is worth an additional $1.7 billion. That works out to $345 million per year on top of the $1.3 billion already in place, but ESPN only nets out $205 million more after a $140 million rebate tied to conference title games going away. Ultimately, they more than doubled the inventory and sold the extra games at a discount. Stay tuned for this week’s Clubhouse, where our resident NCAA expert Matthew Jester will surely spit some fire.

Liberty Media’s John Malone has traded the votes that control Formula 1, dropping his voting power from 48% to 3% after outside parties made unsolicited offers for his high-vote shares. This is a beast of an asset with some of the greatest IP on Earth. $FWONK ( ▼ 0.91% ) closed Monday at $108.01, right at all-time high levels.

Under Armour $UAA ( ▼ 2.0% ) has been stuck around $5 billion in annual revenue for close to a decade and this quarter it lost $400,000 on $1.2 billion in sales. In the past year, Steph Curry ended his 12-year partnership (and took Curry Brand to Li-Ning), Kelsey Plum walked, and Dwayne Johnson ended the decade-long Project Rock partnership. My diagnosis is that UA finds itself in the messy middle: too premium to be a discount brand, yet too broad to belong to anyone. I made a similar point about media in New Kids On The Block – things get diluted when you try to appease the full spectrum, and when the biggest faces leave, the super fans do too.

The NBA is in year two of its 11-year, $76 billion deal with Disney, NBC, and Amazon. With 170 million Americans tuning in, year one hit a 24-year viewership high, and the Knicks-Spurs Finals averaged 20.6 million viewers, which was the best since 1998. All of that only compounds if the stars can stay on the floor…

“Our friends at P3 said it best. The business of basketball is in conflict with player health.” On October 28, 79 NBA players were on injury reports, about 15% of the league. With a game increasingly built around violent braking, teams need to be all in on preventative care when it comes to player health.

When I talked through this with P3 founder Dr. Marcus Elliott, he pointed out that the teams left standing late in the playoffs are invariably those whose superstars stayed healthy, and that at any given time one-third to 40% of the stars are injured. Players are on $300 million contracts, $80 million a year is coming, and a $76 billion media cycle forces an answer to his question: how do you protect that investment?

That’s about 7.4 million per episode (so far), nearly 3x what the PGA Tour’s inaugural Creator Classic did in total on YouTube.

The death of conference championship games is a sad casualty of CFP expansion. I’ll miss them dearly.