Well sports fans, you got your wish. Are you happy now?
Back in the early-to-mid 2010s, when the cable bundle still seemed to rule the world of entertainment, and particularly in the immediate aftermath of CBS and the outfit then known as Turner Sports teaming up to retain the former’s rights to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, a number of sports-focused media watchers wondered about the possibility of CBS and Turner’s then-owner, Time Warner, merging. From a sports perspective, it seemed to make sense: while Disney, Comcast, and Fox all had both broadcast and cable outlets to air sports, CBS had a broadcast network but its only suitable cable outlet was the poorly-distributed CBS Sports Network, while Turner had perhaps the best non-ESPN collection of sports rights on cable, but no broadcast network. I felt this was a simplistic, myopic analysis that didn’t take into account the whole picture of how well the two companies might fit together – most obviously, Time Warner-owned HBO and CBS-owned Showtime were the top two names in premium television networks, plus you’d have the separate news operations of CBS and CNN – and that became even more so when CBS re-merged with Viacom and picked up a real base of cable networks again, including Nickelodeon which has a long-standing competition with Warner-owned Cartoon Network, as well as reuniting with the Paramount movie studio, one of several major studios alongside Warner Bros. I actually thought Fox’s brief dalliance with buying Time Warner made more sense, even from a sports perspective.
Well, last week, the merger of the two companies closed, with the merged company having no trace of either company in its name, operating under the Skydance name inherited from the media company David Ellison originally picked up before buying first Paramount and now Warner Bros. Discovery. In most corners of the Internet, the reaction has generally been a sense of dread, partly over the prospect of lost jobs and draconian cost-cutting to pay down the massive debt the Ellison family has racked up in these transactions (not to mention the debt inherited from WBD), but also what some fear is the real purpose of the transaction: turning CNN into right-wing propaganda, once Bari Weiss, the person Ellison installed as head of CBS News who promptly pushed the division into being more conservative-friendly and less critical of Trump, gets her hands on it. Certainly Paramount Skydance was the only company interested in keeping WBD’s cable networks in the fold; WBD planned to split into separate companies for its studios and networks before Ellison began his hostile takeover attempt, and when WBD courted Netflix as an alternative, that transaction would have involved only the studios portion of the split. What might once have been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to a CBS-Warner merger, negotiating the potential merger of CBS News and CNN and the potential regulatory hurdles presented by it, not only wasn’t a problem for the Trump FCC and DOJ, but the whole reason why it happened.
Certainly there’s a case to be made that the combination of the companies makes more sense now, in an age where streaming has become more important, than it did last decade. Besides streaming services coming to fill the role that premium TV channels once did, Showtime’s fortunes have fallen so far that it’s essentially a brand within Paramount+ at this point; even the linear network is known as “Paramount+ with Showtime”. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network both only have a handful of shows still making new episodes each, with Nick’s lineup dominated by PAW Patrol in preschool hours and SpongeBob SquarePants the rest of the time, and Adult Swim now taking over CN’s slot more than half the time, thanks to the Checkered Past block of old CN originals – notably, shows originally oriented to kids – being classified as part of Adult Swim.
As for their streaming efforts themselves, Paramount+ and HBO Max are also-rans in streaming, perfunctory legacy-media attempts to copy Netflix that only add to the bloat of streaming services that make people wonder if the cable bundle was all that bad, and as the musical chairs of the streaming landscape played out both were particularly likely to be left without a seat when the music stopped, but both companies have considerable libraries of content and significant brands they can hope to monetize. In particular, with Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network joining forces, Disney might be the only legacy media company better positioned to target kids, and Skydance also controls the longtime rivals of Disney’s other big family-oriented brands, Star Trek for Star Wars and DC Comics for Marvel.
But this same shift has also obviated much of what made a CBS-Turner combination so appealing to sports fans to begin with. Sports entities increasingly see streaming services as their future, filling the role once held by cable networks if not taking primacy in their sports strategies. To the extent that linear networks still matter to sports entities beyond what streaming services they contribute to, they now value broadcast networks and their nominal reach for free into every household much more than cable networks that are dependent on the dying cable bundle, even though those broadcast networks are still very much dependent on retransmission consent fees from bundle subscribers and, increasingly, subsidies from the hope that rights obtained for broadcast networks can prop up co-owned streaming services. Not for nothing did NBC obtain rights to the NBA where all games on the broadcast network would be exclusive to Peacock, with the then-co-owned USA only getting involved with the WNBA, and then spin off USA and almost all their other cable networks to a separate company. That’s why I thought that TNT’s loss of the NBA would sign the death warrant of at least TNT Sports if not the whole company, because TNT already had the significant disadvantage of not having a broadcast network and was now losing their marquee sports programming. Now the most likely impact of a combined CBS-TNT sports division on most sports rights is for TNT’s rights to be increasingly shared with CBS, which both the NHL and NASCAR have publicly spoken about the possibility of, more than the other way around. Skydance has already announced that all of the company’s sports operations will be placed under CBS Sports head David Berson while letting go of TNT Sports head Luis Silberwasser, signaling that if both divisions are brought under a unified brand, it’ll probably be CBS’s.
(As an aside, I could argue that a Fox-WBD merger made even more sense relative to a CBS combination, at least from a sports perspective, than it did in 2014, though the fears of turning CNN into right-wing propaganda would be all the greater. Because Fox only consists of those assets Disney couldn’t acquire back in the day because the Murdochs didn’t want to engage in the streaming wars, its only streaming efforts are the FAST service Tubi and the Fox One service that’s just a direct-to-consumer distribution of Fox’s linear networks. Fox and WBD had come to have the complementary assets CBS and Time Warner had back in the day: Fox has a broadcast network, WBD a general-purpose streaming service.)
Then again, there’s also a reason NBC relaunched NBCSN as a linear outlet to simulcast events supposedly exclusive to Peacock on cable providers that offer Peacock with their subscription. The cable bundle was a boon to sports fans not only because millions of dollars in sports rights fees were being subsidized by non-sports fans, but because it was a one-stop shop for almost the entire universe of sports. Now as sports rights splinter to more and more separate streaming services, sports fans are likely to lament the demise of the cable bundle as much for the lack of convenience as the increased expense. YouTube TV has taken to positioning itself as a clearinghouse for sports rights regardless of how it’s distributed, and while you generally can’t rely on it alone, it does greatly increase the convenience of being able to watch sporting events that would otherwise be exclusive to Peacock or the ESPN app. Positioning the former Turner networks in that role, as a more convenient way to access rights primarily held by Paramount+ or HBO Max, isn’t completely analogous just because of how broadly distributed they are, but it does at least point to what role they might have within Skydance going forward.
In any case, any serious shuffling of sports rights between CBS and the Turner networks is unlikely to happen on as large a scale as fans might imagine in the near term. Deals between cable networks that carry sports and distributors still tend to be conditioned on including certain particular sports events exclusively, which is why NFL Network still carries about seven games a year. TNT’s most valuable sports rights, that would be most attractive for CBS to air, are also probably the rights that are most difficult to extricate without drastically lowering rights fees for TNT and TBS. In particular, I would not expect much if any postseason baseball on CBS under the current contract, as that’s probably doing a lot of heavy lifting for TBS’ deals with distributors. TNT is trickier, as their deals were historically driven by NBA rights, but reports late in 2024 suggested that WBD might have been able to convince Comcast and Charter to pay roughly the same rate for TNT without the NBA than with it, though reports conflicted. But it wouldn’t surprise me if those rates were conditioned on TNT retaining exclusivity to a very heavy chunk of the potpourri of rights they picked up to replace the NBA. Skydance is reportedly “poring over” their distribution contracts to determine what rights might move from one side of the company to the other, but the answer might be disappointing to sports fans.
Nonetheless, here are some of the things that might happen over the next couple of years as a result of CBS and TNT joining forces. This is entirely speculative on my part, so I’ve rated each item on a scale of 1 to 10 as an indication of how likely each one is. Ratings below 5 are actually more likely than not not to happen; I bring them up merely as possibilities if the circumstances break down right. Which of these things happen, which don’t, and how they end up happening, could be both bellwethers for how the integration of the units progress and actively determine the integrated unit’s fate.
- 2027: UFC cards begin airing on TNT, truTV, and/or HBO (10). The UFC has been most aggressive about playing up the potential impact of the Paramount-WBD merger on where their events air, and in an investor call in March, Paramount explicitly said that its deal with the UFC gives it flexibility to air cards on TNT. This year, three UFC cards have aired on CBS: a weird combination of the last hour of prelims and the first hour of the main card of UFC 326 and 327, and the full main card of UFC 332. Everything else has aired on Paramount+, be they numbered events, Fight Night cards, or other miscellaneous things. The question then becomes what sort of events Skydance and the UFC want to air on TNT: do they continue to spotlight main cards of numbered events like they have with CBS, or do they promote the Fight Night cards and make the numbered events more premium and restricted to the streaming service, as was the case under the previous deal with ESPN? And while the scuttlebutt has been about airing UFC events on TNT, the UFC might provide the best opportunity under the merger for the return of live sports to the HBO linear network. Would that be something the parties want to consider? The question of exactly how many cards get promoted to linear, specifically TNT, and which cards make the move, may be the biggest indicator of how Skydance sees TNT going forward.
- June 2027: The new season of The Ultimate Fighter airs on TNT (8). Traditionally, The Ultimate Fighter was the centerpiece of the UFC’s original deal with Spike TV, and continued to be a linear staple on FS1 under the UFC’s Fox deal. But when the UFC moved to ESPN, TUF was presented primarily on ESPN+, not any of its linear networks, and by the time UFC reached its Paramount deal, Spike TV had become the very different Paramount Network and TUF would similarly become restricted to Paramount+. The fact that TUF was made primarily streaming-only even when ESPN not only offered its own linear networks that might have taken on the franchise, but also FX where the show aired in its first season under the Fox deal, makes me wonder if the UFC simply sees TUF as a primarily streaming-focused franchise from now on, but TNT probably provides the best opportunity to showcase TUF on a general entertainment network where it fits into their plans. This year’s season streamed new episodes on Tuesdays from mid-June into late August; TNT could air new episodes just about any time of year if it kept that day of the week, but that particular time frame would roughly coincide with the NHL offseason.
- 2027 or later: CBS airs selected US men’s and/or women’s soccer national team games (4). When Fox had rights to USMNT and USWMT games before the current TNT deal, the only times I saw any games from that deal airing on the Fox broadcast network were women’s friendlies and qualifiers on weekend afternoons. I would imagine that if Skydance and US Soccer want to integrate CBS into the TNT deal, they might want to follow a similar strategy, but CBS’ schedule on weekends is more crowded, with one factor in particular potentially getting in the way outside football season and March Madness. On the other hand, as entertainment programming on linear television collapses, perhaps by 2029 CBS is willing to give up some primetime windows for US men’s national team qualifiers. Certainly CBS has been significantly slower than competitors to embrace airing sports on weeknights as opposed to entertainment programming, although the sports from TNT’s slate that make the most sense to air on CBS primetime might also be some of the least likely to leave TNT.
- March 2027 or later: TNT starts airing some NWSL games (8). The most recent agreement between the NWSL and CBS was announced to include 10 regular season and three postseason games on CBS, 20 regular season games on CBS Sports Network, and 5 regular season games on any CBS platform. This past season, CBS scheduled 14 games across regular season and postseason for the broadcast network, and 25 games on CBS Sports Network. At minimum, CBS should have flexibility to put at least a handful of regular season games on TNT and/or truTV, and going forward both they and the league itself may want to move the entire CBSSN slate to TNT – unless a quirk of the CBSSN games suggests more reluctance on CBS’ part (more on that later).
- Spring 2027: Augusta National Golf Club announces that this will be ESPN’s last year airing first- and second-round coverage of the Masters, with coverage moving to TNT in 2028 (6). ESPN clearly greatly values its relationship with the Masters, promoting it as a centerpiece of its spring lineup with extensive coverage leading up to its official window, and Augusta National seems to like its relationship with ESPN as well, but ESPN’s coverage may be on flimsier ground than most people realize. The only ESPN personalities that show up on its Masters coverage are Scott Van Pelt and Curtis Strange in Butler Cabin, and Michael Eaves handling post-round interviews; pretty much all the actual coverage is handled by the same CBS personalities that handle weekend coverage, including Jim Nantz at 18. Which gives the impression that ESPN only airs weekday coverage of the Masters not only because CBS doesn’t have a linear cable outlet of its own, but because if CBS aired it on the broadcast network it would go too late in the day for affiliates to be comfortable with, pre-empting local news. Augusta National famously awards Masters rights on a year-to-year basis with money being of little to no concern thanks to their wealthy membership, and CBS is a partner that they have a much longer history with than ESPN, so if CBS tells them that they want to bring all the coverage under one roof by making use of their spiffy new cable network, Augusta National might be receptive to the pitch. ESPN could maintain some relationship with Augusta National with extensive highlight rights, SVP and Strange continuing to present highlights on location, and perhaps a lesser tournament or two on the course.
- April 2028: Ernie Johnson hosts TNT’s coverage of its first Masters (4). Charles Barkley has indicated that this year could be his and Johnson’s last on Inside the NBA, and while Barkley’s history suggests that should be taken with a grain of salt, it’s worth noting that Inside, a show that isn’t even on TNT or its sister networks anymore, is about all that Johnson does for them anymore. So if he does step away from Inside after this season, by the following April it’ll have been nearly a year since he’s done any work. But I could see the Masters, which takes place in his home state, as a bucket-list item for Johnson such that he’d lobby his bosses to take a similar role to Van Pelt’s even if just for one year. Johnson could also contribute to the main CBS coverage even if he doesn’t host it; after joining CBS in 2000, Dick Enberg presented closing thoughts at the Masters even as Jim Nantz continued to host most of the coverage and helmed the Butler Cabin presentation, and I could see Johnson adopting a similar role.
- Spring 2027: TNT and/or truTV become part of an expansion of CBS’ Big3 coverage (6). Since hooking up with CBS on a series of year-to-year deals, the Big3 has hopped between various different platforms to show games not airing on CBS broadcast. That included an agreement with Vice Sports in 2025, but this past season’s non-CBS games were streamed on YouTube. It’s hard to tell if the Big3 hasn’t been popular enough for the non-Big3-controlled platforms they’ve tried to put games on, or if the problem has been the platforms themselves, but TNT has had success with its coverage of Unrivaled 3-on-3 women’s basketball, and while that involves active WNBA players, CBS clearly has seen enough value in the Big3 to stick with it for seven seasons now. Perhaps it’s worth seeing if the Big3 can provide value to TNT or at least truTV. (For the record, I don’t expect any Unrivaled coverage to show up on CBS unless they’re willing to move their championship to a weekend afternoon.)
- May 2027: CBS adopts TNT’s NBA theme for its WNBA coverage (2). CBS’ WNBA theme is not great, but the TNT theme might both clash with CBS’ aesthetics and doesn’t align very well timewise with CBS’ intro.
- May-June 2027: The Roland Garros men’s and women’s finals – only – air on CBS (6). An underrated obstacle to summer weekend afternoon sports events moving to CBS is that CBS is the home of golf for most of the summer. CBS has golf every weekend from the Masters until mid-June, and then again in four out of five weekends in July, and I have my doubts that they can easily swap tournaments around at this point. Even swapping tournaments around with NBC in the longer term under current deals could be tricky depending on the structure of the contracts and what other commitments the networks have; CBS is still airing a Friday-Saturday finish in its first tournament of the year to accommodate the AFC Championship because it was awarded that tournament before the NFL extended its season an extra week instead of just trading that tournament to NBC.
This is going to be a bigger factor when we talk about NASCAR (and is the main obstacle to putting US Soccer matches on CBS), but for the moment, even if Skydance wanted to air weekend coverage of Roland Garros on CBS and distributors and the FFT were on board, they probably can’t, at least in the afternoon; even besides CBS’ golf commitments, the final of the UEFA Champions League coincides with the middle weekend of the tournament. The championship matches, however, are another matter, as those start at 9 AM ET, well before any golf coverage; the question then becomes how easily they fit in with network and affiliate schedules. The main reason CBS has never aired a pre-preshow for its NFL coverage on its broadcast network, unlike Fox, is because it airs Sunday Morning and Face the Nation starting at 9 AM ET on Sundays and continuing into the 11 AM hour, and those shows are practically institutions; CBS would have to figure out how to move them around for a week.- CBS airs other Roland Garros coverage in the second week, or possibly beyond (2). NBC was infamous for tape-delaying its weekday Roland Garros and Wimbledon coverage outside the Eastern Time Zone to protect Today, but CBS’ morning shows have long been less important than at ABC or NBC, and CBS Mornings doesn’t run for four hours like Today. The bigger obstacle is that CBS both programs more and has more popular shows in daytime than the other networks, between The Price is Right, Let’s Make a Deal, and three of the four soap operas still airing on broadcast television. The temptation is to air Roland Garros’ primetime men’s match at 2 PM ET, but between that pre-empting CBS’ daytime lineup, potentially pre-empting local news, and disappearing for the semifinals (or at least the women’s semifinals), that may be a non-starter. What may actually be more viable is a regular window starting at 9 AM ET, giving CBS two hours that are normally controlled by affiliates and allowing it to air at least one women’s semifinal, but that could require bringing back NBC’s tape delay tactics, which might not be worth it.
- TNT adopts CBS’ old US Open theme for its Roland Garros coverage (3). TNT’s existing theme is perfectly fine, and I wasn’t a fan of “Centre Court” when CBS used it on the US Open, but that may have partly been because CBS consistently misused it, and it could actually work surprisingly well without even having to change much if any of the graphics package or intro.
- June 2027: The Stanley Cup Final airs on CBS (4). It surprised me to see speculation that this year’s Stanley Cup Final could find its way onto a broadcast network as a result of a merger that hadn’t closed when the season started. That seemed like awfully short notice to me, and the Stanley Cup Final is a big enough event to potentially be tied to TNT’s contracts with distributors, and indeed might be the biggest sporting event the TNT network has left (with some caveats surrounding the expansion of their College Football Playoff sublicense). But the fact that TNT’s deal with the NHL predates losing the NBA, and that TNT only has the Stanley Cup Final every other year, could mitigate in favor of Skydance being relatively clear to move the Final to broadcast, and certainly both they and the NHL seem to want to do it.
- July-August 2027: CBS airs one NASCAR race (7). Here’s where the impact of CBS’ golf schedule really makes itself felt. Except for the week of the Open Championship July 17-18, CBS has golf every weekend from the Fourth of July until August 8. That almost exactly coincides with TNT’s portion of the NASCAR schedule, which starts the same week and ends a week earlier. All of TNT’s races air on Sundays, and while most of them are in primetime, the Brickyard 400, probably the crown jewel of its schedule, is not, nor does it coincide with the one week where CBS isn’t airing golf. Moreover, at least this season, one of TNT’s races aired at 6 PM ET, which would cut it close with the end of golf coverage. TNT has a mostly different slate of races next year compared to this year, including two races in California that you’d think would be more likely to air late, but TNT had a race in California this year that started at 3:30 PM ET, and this year’s race at Naval Base Coronado near San Diego started at 4 PM ET. If all of the races on TNT’s slate aired at the same time they did this year, the only one in primetime would be the one at Atlanta – which happens to fall in the week of the Open Championship, when CBS would be free to air an afternoon race.
- August 2027: TNT and truTV air additional UEFA Champions League matches over and above what CBS Sports Network has aired (3). This week was a UEFA Champions League matchday. Tuesday’s slate included Atletico Madrid vs. Manchester United, plus Arsenal, Barcelona, Inter Milan, and Bayern Munich in action in the 3 PM ET window. CBS Sports Network aired RB Leipzig vs. PSV. Similarly, Wednesday’s main window saw Manchester City vs. PSG and Roma vs. Real Madrid, with Aston Villa also in action to boot, and CBSSN not only went with Bodo vs. Dortmund, in the early window that had only two matches, it aired the match that didn’t involve Liverpool. This is probably the worst sign for any thought that Skydance might treat the former Turner networks as outlets for programming currently reserved for Paramount+. When it comes to putting Champions League matches on its linear cable network, CBS seems to actively shy away from matches involving marquee teams, pushing people to sign up for and watch the most attractive matches of the league stage on Paramount+. (This might also impact any ideas one might have about what might happen with CBS’ other international soccer rights, such as Serie A.) Maybe the more highly distributed and Nielsen-rated TNT and truTV would be more worth showcasing the best matches, but if so, where does that leave CBS Sports Network itself?
- August 2027 and beyond: CBS Sports Network starts being merged into truTV, if it isn’t merged all at once (4). This one is tricky. For a time it seemed like media companies wanted to play cable network musical chairs, rebranding low-rated networks in hopes of finding a format that stuck, and then as cord-cutting took off it seemed like companies, or at least Comcast, were more willing to shut down channels entirely, even if they aired sports. The 2023 Disney-Charter deal seemed to presage taking this to an extreme, but no one else followed suit, and Comcast seemed to signal a new strategy of just spinning off cable networks and getting them off the books. None of Skydance’s predecessor companies have really engaged in any of these strategies (the Viacom portion of the CBS/Viacom merger particularly stuck out like a sore thumb for having a bunch of low-rated spinoff channels no one cared about), but the merger is going to force them to look at potentially redundant channels and figure out what their roles are, and even more than HBO/Showtime or Nickelodeon/Cartoon Network, it’s hard to find a channel potentially more under the microscope than CBS Sports Network.
Pretty much from the instant it became the third/fourth channel of the March Madness deal, Turner/TNT Sports has tried to find ways to make truTV more of a sports destination, but it’s had little in the way of exclusive live sports unless TNT and/or TBS are busy with other things. In 2024 the company made its biggest push in that direction to date by having truTV simulcast sports airing on TNT or TBS when it didn’t have anything else to show, and introduced additional sports programming to the lineup. But that programming seems to have disappeared, and truTV is back to consisting mostly of Impractical Jokers reruns when not simulcasting or being the main outlet for TNT Sports events.
The question facing Skydance is, if the “T-nets” are their preferred cable sports outlet going forward, what sort of future does CBS Sports Network have? Does Skydance want to make one more push in the direction of turning truTV into a sports-focused channel by using the infrastructure built up by CBSSN? Perhaps move Boomer and Gio to truTV along with other CBS Sports Network talk programming? Maybe turn truTV into the new CBS Sports Network? Perhaps CBSSN doesn’t have to shut down entirely, but be turned into an avenue for linear distribution of the CBS Sports HQ or Golazo Network FAST channels.
I’ve set August as the decision point because of the start of the European soccer season and UEFA Champions League, but the main question governing whether or not this can or will happen is whether or not CBSSN’s college sports rights can be ported to TNT and/or truTV. Most of those rights are to Group of Six conferences, and do not generally appear to be available on Paramount+. While ESPN, NBCUniversal, Fox, and WBD have embraced direct-to-consumer services as outlets for sports programming on their cable networks, CBS doesn’t seem to have ever done so. That raises the question of whether CBS’ contractual deals with those conferences allow them to be streamed on general-purpose streaming services, which might be a requirement to move them to truTV. It may also represent a conscious strategic decision on CBS’ part to keep some fans tied to the cable bundle; while UEFA Champions League matches on CBSSN are simulcast on Paramount+, NWSL games are not, despite CBS expanding its agreement with the NWSL just last year. That raises the question of whether or not CBS even wants to put those matches on TNT or truTV if that means simulcasting them on Paramount+ and/or HBO Max, and it’s probably going to be CBS personnel making those calls.
(As for any college rights going the other way, given the circumstances under which TNT picked up Big 12 and Big East rights, I’m skeptical that you’ll see anything from either of those conferences on CBS under their current contracts.) - August-September 2027: Parts of the FIBA Basketball World Cup air on CBS (1). The problem with this is very simple: next year’s FIBA Basketball World Cup ends on September 12, which is not only an NFL Sunday but the first one after Labor Day, so probably Week 1 when CBS and the league would want to make a big splash with the start of the regular season, so probably not a late-afternoon-only singleheader like when COVID pushed the Masters into football season. The best-case scenario is that, with the event in Qatar, the final is scheduled similarly to when the soccer World Cup was held there, in the morning in the US, leading in to the NFL Today, but as with Roland Garros that runs into the problem of bumping CBS’ Sunday morning news programming. The rating for this possibility only takes into account CBS airing the final for this particular event, not whether CBS would be willing to air matches from earlier in the tournament without having the final, and not whether, if TNT’s agreement with FIBA continues going forward, they lean on FIBA to change the scheduling of future World Cups to accommodate CBS.
- August 2027-March 2028: TNT Sports’ college football and basketball programming adopt CBS’ existing graphics and music. A new graphics package, designed to provide a unified presentation across CBS and TNT, begins rolling out either during the NFL playoffs or at Super Bowl LXII, and makes its debut on college basketball for March Madness (6). Basically, I’m imagining the visual integration of CBS and TNT Sports to play out similarly to how Comcast integrated NBC Sports with its existing Versus network. Versus adopted NBC’s existing graphics package for its college football (and possibly NHL) coverage in the fall after the merger closed, then rebranded to NBC Sports Network as a new graphics package rolled out for the Winter Classic. NBC seemingly rolled out a new graphics package for the playoffs this year instead of waiting for the Super Bowl partly as a result of the backlash to CBS and Fox’s graphics packages, and ESPN did them one better and rolled out a new graphics package at the start of their Super Bowl season, so it would be logical for CBS to do something similar, but just last year CBS bailed out of the NFL graphics package they rolled out at Super Bowl LVIII and this year rolled a version of the new NFL package out for college football, so I think they’re going to want to get their money’s worth by stretching out those packages as much as possible before introducing new ones. (Now Fox, I wouldn’t blame them for rolling out a new graphics package at the start of their Super Bowl year.)
- December 2027-January 2028: CBS airs College Football Playoff games (3). I’d imagine CBS wouldn’t want to air the CFP games TNT picked up last year, which saw Ole Miss and Oregon blow Tulane and James Madison off the field, but it’s unlikely that TNT gets shafted with two games involving Group of Six teams again given the changes to the selection process, and TNT gets rights to quarterfinal and semifinal games starting this year, which are more likely to avoid the NFL and could involve fairly prominent matchups given the fixed windows for quarterfinal games like the Rose Bowl. The bigger problems are a) the likelihood that TNT gets thrown sacrificial lamb games that go against the NFL and b) the degree to which TNT’s carriage fees are tied into their CFP sublicense, complicating their ability to move those games to CBS. If carriage fee concerns kill the prospect of moving any sports from the TNT network to CBS, it might be the CFP. And if the CFP could move to CBS, would they want to take over production of the games and have their own announcers call them, instead of having ESPN personnel call them with ESPN graphics?
- January and April-May 2028: CBS airs the Winter Classic and maybe a handful of Stanley Cup Playoff games (8). My expectation is that this is all the hockey CBS gets out of the current TNT/NHL deal. The Winter Classic was created to be a New Year’s Day showcase for the league on NBC, and has felt like it’s had less reason for being since moving to TNT and exhausting most of the most impressive sites it could have gone to. Most Winter Classics on TNT have been in cold-weather baseball stadiums, including past hosts Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, but the 2026 Winter Classic was held in Miami, hardly a winter destination. Returning to broadcast, with New Year’s Day 2028 falling on a Saturday (although it would need to negotiate TNT’s CFP windows), could help return the Winter Classic to its former glory. The Stanley Cup Playoffs could be harder to extricate from TNT, and once again CBS’ weekend daytime schedule is dominated by golf in the spring and summer, meaning the best place to air playoff hockey might be Saturday primetime. TNT gets the second choice of conference finals so if CBS were to air a conference final game it would probably be fairly weak and likely involve any Canadian team that made it to that point, but at least a Saturday night window would correspond with the Canadian tradition of Saturday night hockey.
- April 2028 and beyond: The Final Fours that had been allocated to TBS under the current contract return to CBS (7). This was a provision borne of CBS and Turner being separate companies at the time that seems less necessary now. I would imagine both Skydance and the NCAA would want this, and as with the Stanley Cup Final only having the Final Four every other year would have limited TBS’ various parent companies’ ability to tie subscriber fees to it (which is why I expect the fortunes of TBS in particular to be tied more to baseball), but it’s still some of the most prominent programming TNT Sports has.
- September 2028 or later: Brian Anderson joins CBS’ roster of NFL play-by-play commentators (5). BA might be the most prominent personality to work primarily for one company or the other that would be of use to the other. Ian Eagle and Kevin Harlan, CBS’ #2 and #3 NFL broadcasters, seem like the smart bets to eventually replace Al Michaels on Thursday Night Football, as both have existing relationships with Amazon calling NBA games. I would imagine whoever gets the job to either stay at or move up to #2, with a knock-on effect opening up a job somewhere in the order. I could see Anderson either being slotted in at #3, or if CBS is high enough on Andrew Catalon, #4. This would take Anderson away from his Brewers duties on September weekends, and if Skydance keeps the baseball playoffs, they’d have to negotiate Anderson’s absence from the NFL the way Fox has to negotiate the absence of their baseball commentators during the postseason, which keeps the chances of this happening low. The latter problem could mean that Anderson primarily works in weeks without byes when CBS has six or seven games going.
As with when TNT lost rights to the NBA, however, what will really determine the future of sports on the former Turner networks will be what happens when a heavyweight trio of rights held by TNT – the NHL, MLB, and the sublicense agreement with ESPN for the College Football Playoff – come up for renewal in 2028. Making matters worse, what will now loom over those negotiations for the combined company is the prospect of the NFL opting out of its own TV deals a year or two later, which could well be existential for Skydance’s linear assets. And all that has to play out against the backdrop of the massive amounts of debt Skydance has racked up to finance all these acquisitions. All of which means that not only will Skydance have a hard time justifying keeping any of the three packages coming up for renewal in 2028, but a lot of the rights TNT picked up to backfill for the loss of the NBA may not only not be renewed, but reportedly may end up offloaded onto other partners early similarly to what Fox did with the US Open golf rights during the pandemic. And it all makes for a situation that might be worth a post of its own. Stay tuned.