Morgan Wick

In the Wake of the Disney-Charter Deal, What Networks are Living on Borrowed Time?

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Last month the Walt Disney Company and Charter Communications reached a landmark carriage agreement that included Charter dropping all but three of Disney’s general entertainment networks, including networks that were still airing original programming and, in the case of FXX, pretty popular original programming at that. As I wrote earlier this week, it’s a major landmark in the linear television bundle being refocused on what linear television is good at, live events such as sports and news, with other networks serving primarily as a platform to premiere content at designated times in advance of appearing on their true streaming-service home, as well as distinct brands to organize such content, while potentially serving as a stepping stone to such streaming services becoming the true heart of the cable bundle. It’s fair to wonder what other networks could be at risk of being dropped by providers if distributors insist on similar terms from the other major programmers.

Although I made my post a month after the whole thing went down, this post is surprisingly timely: earlier this week, after I made my post, S&P Global Market Intelligence put out a report listing the networks they see as being at risk from the major programmers if they end up taking similar deals to Disney-Charter. I actually think they’re way too pessimistic about some channels, but also overlook a number of channels that would seem to be very much at risk, in my view. I’m going to make my own analysis, separate from theirs, about which networks are relatively safe and which ones are at risk. To assist in this endeavor, I’m going to refer to this table from TVNewser showing how many viewers each network averaged in total day and primetime for 2022; for numbers in the 18-49 demo, I’ll be referring to this Variety article which contains more incomplete data, and only includes the top 50 networks across broadcast and cable in primetime. 

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How Charter Took On Disney’s 800-Pound Gorilla and Won – and Redefined the Cable Bundle in the Process

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For decades, carriage disputes have been a way of life for those still immersed in the cable bundle – a source of frustration as popular networks have been held hostage in staring contests between pay TV providers and major media companies, ending, inevitably, in rates going up for all customers. But what happened for ten and a half days at the start of September was unique, indeed unprecedented, in two different ways. First, this was the first time, at least in recent memory, a carriage dispute directly affected me. Second, and far more importantly, for all that these disputes have become more contentious over the years as providers have positioned themselves as trying to hold the line on increasing programming costs and keeping customers from paying for channels they don’t want, the company more responsible for both of those things than any other – Disney, and specifically ESPN – has been largely immune to such clashes, with cable providers too fearful of the blowback from losing the 800-pound gorilla in the sports world to risk losing it even for a moment. This, though, was the first time, possibly ever, that any major cable provider was willing to lose ESPN and the other Disney networks for as long as a week. And though the sides ended up making up just hours before a highly-anticipated Monday Night Football showdown, the much-anticipated debut (and, as it turned out, possible swan song) of Aaron Rodgers with the New York Jets, in the end Charter Communications and its Spectrum-branded services managed to win some significant concessions from Disney – concessions that could ultimately define the future of the cable bundle. 

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Cantonmetrics: 2024 Preliminary Nominees

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Offseason Snapshot | Senior/Coach/Contributor Semifinalists | All-Snub Team

Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and honors, and argue over which players are worthy of induction. 

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The 10 Worst Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Decisions

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For 16 years the Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch has been the most popular part of this blog, in various incarnations, by a significant margin, being most of the reason anyone pays attention to it at all and building a base of commenters with varying degrees of grasp on reality. This season, though, with the start of a new media contract, the extension of flexible scheduling to Monday and Thursday nights means the end of an era for the feature, no longer dedicated to figuring out what single game will be shown on Sunday night in a given week.

For all that my commenters appreciate my insight into flexible scheduling decisions, my record at predicting what the NFL will actually do has never been that great, certainly beyond the most obvious decisions. Part of this is because I’m often fumbling to grasp what the NFL is thinking, especially as they’ve increasingly clearly treated appeasing the Sunday afternoon packages as being of equal if not greater importance, and my philosophy in making picks has often not quite aligned with the league’s. But part of it is also that there have been more than a few times where the league has left me utterly dumbfounded, making decisions that remain inexplicable years later. As the Flex Schedule Watch enters a new era, here’s a look back at the most inexplicable flexing decisions the NFL has made over the 16-year history of this feature. These are based solely on the games the league went with for the Sunday night time slot, not any other flex scheduling decisions they may have made, though I may take a more critical eye at a decision if it left a marquee game in an afternoon time slot with limited distribution. Each week generally links to the first flex-schedule post I made after each decision where I react to each move I didn’t predict, with a link to the post with my final predictions, if different, in parenthesis.

(Technically flexible scheduling for Sunday Night Football has existed for 17 seasons, but a) this blog didn’t exist for most of 2006 and b) there actually were tentative games that first season, but they weren’t publicized. They were apparently reported at some point, but I’m not sure I’d have a quibble with any of the resulting flex decisions; the only real eyebrow-raising one for me is Week 14, more for Fox inexplicably protecting Giants-Panthers over Saints-Cowboys, and I’m only looking at the choices the league made with the options they had. The original tentative that week was Pats-Dolphins, 8-3 v. 5-6 when the decision had to be made, which isn’t great but normally wouldn’t be flex-out material, but I might still have predicted a flex with Saints-Cowboys available, especially considering what happened to the same Pats-Dolphins matchup a few years later.) 

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Building a College Football Super League, Part III: Replacing FBS

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Yesterday we identified the schools that might form a super league and suggested that a 32-team league would strike the best balance between maximizing the value of the schools selected and ensuring a) that Clemson would be among the schools selected, minimizing the possibility that the best team in what’s left of FBS would be able to claim to be the “true” national champion and reducing the incentive for fans to simply declare FBS their college football competition of choice, and b) in turn, convincing Notre Dame that they need to surrender their independence and join the league to maintain their relevance, rather than lending their brand name and relevance to FBS. But there were some tight margins in selecting the last few teams, and we had to stretch a bit to pick Clemson and Notre Dame’s rival Stanford. So whoever’s forming this league could conceivably decide it’s worth it to expand it a bit and remove the stress over justifiably picking those teams, and once they start going down that path it won’t be long before they’ve reached the point of eliminating FBS as a threat to the league’s claim to be the undisputed top tier of college football entirely. It would effectively take less inspiration from the European super league and more from the Premier League, which was effectively a secession of the existing top flight of English football from the established Football League. What schools would that involve? I’m going to try to keep the analysis to a minimum for this post, but I’m not sure I succeeded. 

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Building a College Football Super League, Part II: Selecting the Teams

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Having laid out how I’m going to measure the value of schools when choosing them for a super league, it’s time to actually select the teams. I originally intended not to say a lot and just take the teams, and later on that’s what I’ll do, but I started out expounding at length about why certain teams were being selected or turning up on the list when they did, and ended up saying so much that I ended up breaking it into two parts. This part will cover what I imagine to be the smallest possible league, and we’ll look at larger league sizes tomorrow.

We’ll start with the eight schools most commonly cited as being among college football’s “blue bloods”, listed in order of their value after the academics step:

  1. Texas
  2. Michigan
  3. Notre Dame
  4. Ohio State
  5. Nebraska
  6. Alabama
  7. Oklahoma
  8. USC

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Building a College Football Super League, Part I: Measuring the Value

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I: INTRODUCTION

Earlier this past month, the Pac-12 effectively imploded as a result of its inability to secure a sufficiently attractive media rights deal in the aftermath of USC and UCLA’s departure to the Big Ten, with three schools departing to the Big 12 and two to the Big Ten in a single day. This does mitigate one of the problems with the USC and UCLA move by giving them West Coast partners to play and making them less isolated in that way, but it makes most of the others worse. There are still no schools in the Big Ten between Nebraska and Los Angeles, and we’re now looking at conferences 18, 20, or even more schools in size, with no real steps to make them feel like actual conferences and no real guarantee of a clear conference champion with every conference moving to go without divisions and simply send their top two teams to the conference championship game – only a scheduling and TV rights alliance promising the ability of teams to play the most valuable schools in the conference in football fairly regularly and to earn TV rights fees partly based off of the association with those schools. With an effectively national conference and no divisions, the Big Ten is making its Midwest and Eastern teams in non-revenue sports make the long trek west, or vice versa, all the more often, and to travel decent distances within the West.

It all had the effect of turning my thoughts back towards my wondering what might have been if college football’s biggest schools had decided to leave the auspices of the NCAA and formed a “super league” – whether a relatively modest secession of just the most valuable schools, or a full-fledged split of FBS itself taking most of the Power 5 with it as the Knight Commission proposed – and my desire to create a more robust means of determining what schools might join such a league than I engaged in at the start of the year. The dawning start of the college football season in earnest is as good a time as any to present my more rigorous findings. This post will document my attempt to find a formula to measure the viability of teams for a super league; the next post will attempt to actually identify the teams, and a future post may explore how this affects the conferences for the schools left behind and in other sports. 

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Cantonmetrics: 2024 Senior/Coach/Contributor (Semi)finalists

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Offseason Snapshot | All-Snub Team

This month the Pro Football Hall of Fame began the process of naming its class of 2024. The Senior Committee, tasked with choosing players who last played over 25 years ago, and the Coach/Contributor Committee, tasked with choosing persons who made their mark on football in capacities other than as a player (with coaches required to be retired at least five years), each named lists of at least 25 semifinalists, and this Thursday they further narrowed the field to 12… semifinalists (more on that in a bit). Next month the Senior Committee will choose three finalists while the Coach/Contributor committee will name one, which will move directly to the final stage of consideration in January where the full selection committee will vote up-or-down to induct each candidate into the Hall of Fame. As such most of these candidates won’t be inducted this year and some may never be inducted at all, but we can still see who the Hall of Fame voters consider most worthy among the candidates in each category, who might be likely to be chosen by the committees in future years, and look at the relevant honors and argue over who should be inducted. 

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Who Could Lead the Charge in Returning Local Sports to Broadcast Television?

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Last night I talked about how teams are dealing with the collapse of the regional sports network market and how teams with expiring deals with the collapsing Bally Sports and AT&T Sportsnet groups – the Phoenix Suns, the Vegas Golden Knights, and the Utah Jazz – are embracing broadcast television as the way to reach a broad segment of fans, coupled with direct-to-consumer products to reach fans without access to linear television stations otherwise. Given all the other developments happening in the space there’s no guarantee that this model will triumph, especially with Rob Manfred still committed to MLB trying to take over rights to as many teams as he can, but it’s certainly a promising approach for a subset of teams. But what station groups are best positioned to take advantage of the situation and potentially pick up rights for teams whose deals are expiring or being shaken up by the ongoing proceedings, and where might teams looking for a new home end up? How much will teams embrace this approach compared to finding new RSN homes or returning to their current ones? 

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Plotting the Future of Local Sports Distribution – By Returning to Its Past?

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When we look back, we may find that the end of the age of the regional sports network came very slowly, and then all at once.

That’s not to say that the age of the RSN is actually over, of course. Only two RSN groups are in serious trouble: Bally Sports and its parent Diamond Sports Group with its ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, and AT&T Sportsnet, which will be shut down by new parent Warner Bros. Discovery at the end of baseball season. Other RSNs and RSN groups continue to be profitable, and even within those groups there are RSNs that won’t be shut down entirely; Diamond has made payments to all but three MLB teams it has rights to for the rest of the season, and the Root Sports network in the Pacific Northwest, majority-owned by the Seattle Mariners, will not only remain extant but possibly remain operated by WBD. The problems with those two groups are that Sinclair overpaid for the former Fox Sports RSNs and didn’t have much of a plan to deal with the collapse of the cable bundle, not helped by Major League Baseball and its commissioner Rob Manfred deciding to play hardball with direct-to-consumer streaming rights, that Discovery may not have even wanted to inherit the RSNs (and for a while I wasn’t even completely certain they had) when they took WarnerMedia off of AT&T’s hands, and both of them ran into newly emboldened cable operators dropping them left and right, with RSNs all but disappearing from Dish Network and most streaming TV providers. The former Fox RSNs no longer benefitted from being lumped in with the rest of Fox’s networks, and AT&T and WBD never put any real effort into lumping their RSNs in with their national cable networks, while the move to WBD meant those RSNs were no longer co-owned with a distributor that could effectively subsidize the network. The NBC Sports RSNs have the benefit of other networks to bundle with and Comcast providing guaranteed carriage, so they’re in nowhere near as bad a shape.

And yet, should the Bally Sports networks completely collapse, the only RSN in the entire country that wouldn’t be at least partially owned by at least one of the teams it carries would be NBC Sports California in northern California – assuming that network even survives the pending move of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas. The Bally networks account for around half the US teams in the three major sports that provide content to RSNs, so even if its problems can be attributed to Sinclair’s mismanagement the fate of the Bally RSNs would effectively determine the fate of the RSN market as a whole, and their collapse would mark the point where it became clear that RSNs are no longer a license to print money and can only sustain themselves under specific economic circumstances, be they some combination of being owned by a team, owned by a distributor, or owned by a company able and willing to bundle them with other popular cable networks. And just because other RSNs are doing fine financially now doesn’t mean they’ll continue to be; cord-cutting is continuing apace, weakening the revenue streams for other RSNs (MSG was reportedly already flirting with bankruptcy itself this spring), and with potentially over half the teams in each league caught up in the proceedings, what they do now will help set the path for everyone else. Do they simply take over their existing RSN, or start a new one? Do the leagues take over the RSNs and use them to transition to a new streaming-focused distribution model? Or do teams and leagues rediscover a technology that’s been largely ignored for the last few decades but could be perfect for this new era? 

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