The NFL Week 5 Roundup | Eight Words

Uncomfortably sporting a black mock turtleneck beneath a form-fitting obsidian sport coat with an ill-shapen optic white pocket square practically screaming for friction slipping southward out of view by the minute, Warner Bros Discover CEO David Zaslav appeared at RBC’s Global TIMT Conference a week before Thanksgiving in 2022 to discuss the anemic health of the media market. He described with resign how ever-rising interest rates were slamming the heavily-leveraged company’s financials. He also made a flippant remark that would go on to haunt him for the next 18 months and ultimately cost him his reputation as a savvy dealmaker and his company its crown jewel in media rights to platform NBA games. “We don’t have to have the NBA,” David dismissed unconcerningly when pressed about TNT’s upcoming media rights expiration date in 2025. Whether out of unvarnished truth, unorthodox negotiating technique or pure arrogance, David’s remarks were met with abject surprise in the room as attendees could be seen looking down tapping furiously on their smartphones. Those same remarks, transmitted in real-time across town to NBA’s headquarters on 5th avenue, were received with contemptuous derision by League Commissioner Adam Silver. At the time, David thought nothing of the sentence and certainly didn’t think of its damning implications. Today TNT is embroiled in an ugly, acrimonious legal battle (with lawsuits and countersuits galore) with the very League it needs to keep the lights on. Let’s just put it this way: It’s never a good thing when NBA power forward, media multi-hyphenate and TNT’s most richly compensated superstar Charles Barkley mercilessly and relentlessly roasts and lambasts the Company, the strategy and the CEO on social media, in print and on other networks in one fell swoop. Dirty laundry for all to see and smell. That ill-shapen optic white pocket square had the right idea all along.

It all started out innocently and pleasantly enough in the Summer of 1987 when the NBA and Turner Networks energetically pronounced a two year agreement to split professional basketball games across the cable networks of TNT and TBS beginning with the 1988–1989 season. At a then cost of $100M ($266M today), the announcement was widely seen as an inspired gamechanger and inflection point in the media landscape in following viewers to where they were going. The late 1980s (and continuing well into the 1990s) witnessed an explosion in cable viewership, network proliferation and gravy train monthly fees to remain connected to segmented pop culture in ways broadcast networks could only dream. TNT, with its inception in 1988, was always envisioned as the dedicated sports outlet for its more general mass-programming focused sibling in TBS. And what better way to establish immediate prominence and credibility than with a sure fire bet on basketball, then basking in to the glow of the Showtime era in the LA Lakers and Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and the Celtics and a young sensation named Michael Jordan in Chicago. When basketball wasn’t in-season, TNT subsisted on sitcom and drama repeats alongside feature movie presentations enjoying so-called fourth-windowing. The NBA was thrilled with both TNT’s handling of the games and the ratings that quickly followed. The pairing was so successful in the ensuing years that sports media analysts conjectured that the symbiotic nature of their relationship allowed for the fostering and well-nurtured ecosystem for professional basketball to mushroom into behemoth it is today. Over the past three decades, eight total rights deals worth more than $31B (unadjusted for inflation) have been quickly and mutually consummated between the network and the League. And for most of that time the love was mutual. Until the plights of both partners began to violently diverge.

For the NBA, TNT was but one plank of many to aggressively expand the market for its signature games. CBS, Disney/ESPN and NBC each played their part in producing, packaging and televising the most youthful-skewing of major league sports to fans domestically and around the world. Since 1989, League revenues (broadcasting deals, sponsorships, gate receipts, merchandising, concessions, local media deals) zoomed from $400M to nearly $11B today as popularity and team values enjoyed parabolic returns. Household names including Shaq, Kobe and LeBron ornamented and fortified the league’s runway. For its part, TNT didn’t follow the same noteworthy path. Entrapped in the very ecosystem that allowed for explosive growth its very own early on, TNT is a victim (with all linear cable networks without exclusive content) of a cable landscape rapidly eroding, accelerated by customers abandoning pricey cable packages for more bespoke on-demand or curated offerings form the likes of Netflix, Hulu and others. With fewer customers paying monthly cable bills, TNT sees ever-shrinking fees paid by cable operators to the network which in turn affords fewer and fewer nice things. Advertisers scoffing at the network’s languishing audiences certainly buttress the doom loop. NBA rights have just as recently at last year officially become one of those unaffordable nice things.

TNT officials knew they had a terrible math problem on their hands as they approached their exclusive negotiating window with the NBA last winter. Coming off of a $12.62B/9 year deal, they knew landing a new agreement would be (1) non-negotiable and (2) more expensive. The only question for the latter: to what magnitude. In an era when neighboring leagues in the NFL, MLB and NHL were commanding — and receiving — nosebleed deal value surge pricing (because live sports is the sole remaining entertainment option to reliably draw eyeballs in a fractured landscape), the NBA as the last major league to undergo rights renegotiations knew it had the pricing power and vice grip to squeeze walk-up customers of every last penny from their bank accounts. The NBA intended to wield its clout. Which is what feared TNT the worst. With a network bank account barely scraping by and a parent company in Warner Bros Discovery leaden by a staggering $41B in debt, the outlook was bleak. All TNT leaders had to fall back on was the goodwill engendered in its fostering of the League’s games over the decades. But that goodwill disappeared in an instant the moment CEO David Zaslav opened his mouth at that November 2022 conference in New York. Curt words have long tails. And so, poking for all the coins under the couch cushions, foraging for lost $20 bills in winter jackets and raking the fountains at the local mall, TNT figured it could afford — at most — $1.8B annually. The problems began to mount just as soon as negotiations began in earnest in New York in December. TNT currently has rights to the NBA’s so-called B-package. The package consists of 100 regular season games, NBA All-Star week programming and Conference playoffs. It’s a wide-ranging offering that TNT has monetized to great length. The NBA was very vocal about concerns the League had outgrown its cable-stayed partner; that TNT’s reach simply wasn’t good enough anymore. TNT negotiators countered with the long arms of the MAX streaming service. Still not compelling, retorted the NBA. Ratings were down across the board on TNT in a media landscape where tune-in for other sports (even baseball!) were powerfully headed in the opposite direction. It was at that point that TNT leaders knew, yes, they had a money problem. But worse, they had an infrastructure problem. A problem no amount of money could solve. Because of this, TNT and the NBA quietly exited their exclusive negotiating window this past Spring without a deal and TNT’s much ballyhooed B-package went to market.

The results were immediate and just to the NBA’s liking. Ever since learning of David Zaslav’s transgression in 2022, officials with NBC were doing happy dances at the mere prospect of hosting NBA games on their air once more. It was NBC, after all, who partnered with the NBA (for the prime A-package) so successfully during the heady Michael Jordan era in the 1990s and rode the ratings momentum to the bank so handsomely. The broadcaster lost those rights to Disney/ABC in 2002 after seriously miscalculating the League’s value and balking at a then-not-unreasonable package cost increase. But David’s remarks at the conference cracked opened the door where backchannel whispers with the NBA started practically the next day. So by the time the League’s negotiating window with TNT was winding down to irreconcilable differences, the League knew NBC in its back pocket was its ace card on the river. NBC telegraphed a $28B/11-year deal was in play, nearly doubling what TNT was paying. Further, NBC brought the heft of its broadcast airwaves in linear NBC (very much in fashion again), its stable of cable networks and its Peacock streaming service which would go on to garner rave review for its handling of the Paris Olympics. Bigger reach, wider audience, a much stronger balance sheet and a doubling of rights fees. An operatic aria to the League’s ears. The telegraphed deal was brought to life and inked on paper this past Summer. With the deal’s closing, TNT was officially iced out. Disney/ESPN retained it’s A-package ($29B) AND Amazon snagged a new C-package ($20B) offering Thursday night games and other bells and whistles through its streaming Prime service.

TNT, naked, knew it had to do something. Anything. Frantic calls were made to David to see how the damage cold be repaired. Could TNT counter, as it had the contractual right to do? And if so, at what cost to a parent Company in Warner Bros Discover who enterprise value remained just a fraction of Disney, Comcast/NBC and Amazon. David along with TNT leaders opted for the road less taken. It was to be a bold choice and a risky one at that. Armed with contractually-guaranteed matching rights, TNT chose to match Amazon’s cheaper $20B C-Package offer which amounts to, you guessed it, $1.8B/11 years. It took the NBA just 48 hours to reject the network’s offer claiming “it wasn’t a match.” The League asserted TNT only held rights to matching competing offers for the B-package it held, it couldn’t bargain dial for donuts and bargain basement shop. Further, even if its contract spelled out that it could do so (which it doesn’t), airing games on TNT and streaming on MAX didn’t even come close to approximating Amazon’s Prime-only strategy. And finally, the escrow account. Amazon agreed to place $5.5B in an escrow account from which the NBA could draw its rights fees from. A guarantee of payment, in essence. As of July, TNT’s parent company only had $3.4B in cash on hand; and that’s to fund all the cable networks and a mainline movie studio. Which it to say nothing of servicing $41B in debt, much less paying it off. All TNT could counter was a Letter of Credit from a syndicate of banks. Hence, no match.

The two parties have been locked in an unsightly stalemate ever since. TNT sued the League just another 48 hours after the NBA rejected its “match” complaining of contractual malfeasance and adopting poison pills in Amazon’s C-Package as a pretext for excluding the network from consideration among a myriad of other allegations. To some, it reads and tastes of sour grapes. The League promptly countersued claiming the match was, in fact, a counteroffer. And that the time and place for counteroffers has long since passed. The good news, if it can be considered as such, is that the parties and the presiding judge have all agreed to expedited proceedings which should see the conclusion of this wrangling (likely in a financial settlement) in Spring 2025, just as the basketball regular season is winding down. And TNT airs its final games. Which leaves the League counting dollar bills — and there are plenty — in the aftermath of its landmark $76B overall mega-platform rights deals with Disney, NBC and Amazon. TNT, meanwhile, takes its hat-in-hand and begins to strategize on coalescing around NCAA, NHL and wrestling next year. As it does so, it worries about life without the NBA and if the Leagues its still in business with will opt to follow the NBA’s lead and cash bigger checks elsewhere. At the same time, it also worries about whatever David Zaslav might say next.

While David might not need the NBA (and won’t have it beginning in 2025), we here in the League must have our football. Week 5 proves why the games we must have can prove so fun and reaffirming yet others so frustrating and head-scratching at the same time. The week began last Thursday with a maxim as old as time: In Kirk We Trust. The Bucs traveled to Atlanta having just hammered the Eagles and were looking for another pickup with the Falcons. The Bucs ended up needing a pick-me-up instead. Underlining the impressive renewal QB Baker Mayfield is leading for TB, his Bucs admirably led well into the 3rd quarter. The 4th quarter of the high-scoring game is when ATL QB Kirk Cousins really turned on the jets and forced OT, despite a screwball comedy of errors including a blocked field goal, fumble and an INT. Kirk came away from it all with a career-record 509 yards spanning 42/58 c/atts and 4 TDs. Just a heroic showout that upset the applecart and the Bucs, 36–30. And speaking of Jets, London witnessed an ailing Aaron Rodgers doing for the Gang Green just what the team’s 2–3 record suggests. It certainly doesn’t help to be playing the lossless Vikings and the formidable DEF the squad brings to bare, home, away or across the Atlantic. While Aaron struggles with his receivers and his o-line grapples with how to protect him, Jets coach Robert Saleh just added the ‘Open to Work’ decal on his LinkedIn profile pic. The team owner fired him this morning. Life in the NFL, as is said.

Over in Cinci, QB Joe Burrow finally had that locomotive game (30/39 392 yds 5TDs) he’d been promising after an unwieldy, unpleasant 1–3 start to the season. Unfortunately for Joe, the team’s DEF couldn’t quite meet the moment as has become the norm this season. What would have otherwise been a blowout ended up in a 38–41 OT loss to the Ravens who provided another well-lit stage for QB Lamar Jackson to shine brightly alongside trusty Derrick Henry. After a wobbly start to the season, the City Birds are back and rest atop the AFC North. Out in Landover, rookie QB Jayden Daniels is allowing WAS fans to breathe again. His commanding ability to string together forceful offensive wins (four in a row now) is causing rubbernecking across the League. He looks to be developing into the real deal at such an embryonic stage in his career; a development a long time coming for the Commanders. Now some will say that the team hasn’t really been pressure-tested yet as they point to this week’s matchup with the lowly Brownies, a game that resulted in a CLE 13–34 drubbing. But in the NFL, there are no shades of winning. WAS: case rested. AS for the Browns, what to do with troubled and sinking Deshaun Watson. 230 million, fully guaranteed, unanswered questions.

In our Round Robin this week, we see continued malaise in Los Angeles where the injury-riddled team sinks to 1–4 in a game at SoFi that allowed GB QB Jordan Love to find his footing. A packers 24–19 victory resulted. Up at Levi’s Stadium, the 49ers continue to discover just how much RB Christian McCaffrey means to the team. His presence means the difference between after-game cheers and post-game autopsies. Those autopsies are uncharacteristically stacking up for the former NFC Champs this season and another one was added to the pile with the Cards 24–23 upset of the team on Sunday. The upset of the week, however, was unquestionably Big Blue over the Hawks, 29–20. Just when you thought the NY book had been shuttered on Daniel Jones, he goes on and displays flashes of panacea, forcing a rewrite scribbled in pencil. He and his Giants managed to clip Seattle down to more pedestrian levels and in doing so buying the team precious time but, crucially, an unaltered and likely losing trajectory. The Bills continue to lose games they should be winning (this time to the hot Texans) as the Jags won a game everyone presumed they’d lose (to the mighty Joe Flacco and his Colts). This means that JAX is no longer the League’s only winless team though that’s hardly a compliment; more an embarrassment for Indy. Finally, the Cowboys threw another L to Steel City as possible trouble brews in NOLA with QB Derek Carr exiting last night’s game with an oblique injury. So much for spoiling the Chiefs and their spotless record thus far this season. See? The rich just keep getting richer.