Pat McAfee will host an alternate broadcast of Super Bowl LXI; MLB proposes a shortened 154-game season; and a DAZN executive reiterates the company’s interest in national rights. Plus news on Mike Ditka, Skydance, CBS Sports Network and Netflix.
McAfee to host alternate broadcast of Super Bowl LXI
ESPN analyst Pat McAfee said Friday that he will host an alternate “Field Pass” broadcast of Super Bowl LXI in February, expected to take place on-site from SoFi Stadium. McAfee, who has hosted “Field Pass” altcasts of college football games in recent years, including the CFP National Championship, will also headline “Field Pass” altcasts of select “Monday Night Football” games, as previously reported by Andrew Marchand of The Athletic last month. The first of those matchups be Commanders-49ers a week from Monday.
McAfee recently began his first season as a member of “Monday Night Countdown,” working alongside Scott Van Pelt, Jason Kelce, Marcus Spears and Jason McCourty. He continues to work on “College GameDay” as an analyst and host his eponymous weekday talk program. McAfee’s deal with the network, which includes ESPN appearances and a show licensing fee, is “estimated at around $60 million per year,” per a report by Marchand.
ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky will be part of the NFL editions of the alternate broadcasts. Orlovsky, who regularly appears on “NFL Live” and other studio programming, called “Monday Night Football” as recently as last season as part of the network’s secondary booth for the now-defunct doubleheaders. McAfee is also bringing back the “Field Pass” broadcasts for the CFP and its National Championship.
McAfee joins a Super Bowl presentation that will include a variety of other broadcasts, including the traditional production with Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Lisa Salters and Laura Rutledge, which will air on ESPN, ABC, the ESPN App and Disney+. Peyton and Eli Manning will co-host an edition of the “ManningCast” for the game, which is produced in partnership with Omaha Productions.
MLB proposes 154-game season, new standalone broadcast window
Major League Baseball has proposed to shorten its regular season to 154 games and expand the Division Series to a best-of-seven format beginning in the 2029 season as part of its collective bargaining negotiations with the players union. The 2029 season would be the first of the league’s new media rights deals, assuming there are no extensive delays to next season due to a potential lockout.
As part of the proposal, higher-seeded playoff teams would also gain the ability to select their opponents in the Wild Card and Division Series rounds. The league would also create a scheduled off day on non-holiday Mondays each week, with the exception of “one or two games” that could be played in a national broadcast window. The teams that participate in the Monday game(s) would then have an off day on Thursday. That would presumably give the league additional standalone inventory to sell on the open market.
League spokesman Glen Caplin said in a statement that the weekly off day would be “good for player health” and added that shortening the regular season would allow the league to make “October even better for our fans.” The MLBPA said in a statement that it is reviewing the proposals, which are “contingent on players’ agreement to a salary cap.” Philadelphia Phillies 1B/OF Bryce Harper told MLB commissioner Rob Manfred last summer that players were “not scared to lose 162 games” if the league were to propose and not move off a salary cap, according to a report by Jeff Passan of ESPN.
MLB last held a 154-game regular season in 1960, after which the schedule expanded to its current 162-game iteration. The Division Series has always been a best-of-five format since becoming a yearly part of the postseason in 1995. The league recently completed its fourth season with the best-of-three Wild Card Series.
DAZN executive reiterates interest in national rights
DAZN will seek to use its acquisition of select local sports rights “as a launching pad to expand even more on the national level,” company SVP/strategy and business development Zander Berlinski told Sports Media Watch on Wednesday. Berlinski said that its expansion efforts will be partly impacted by the timeline in which the rights deals expire, but added that the streamer is “open to exploring anything and everything.” Berlinski did not cite any specific properties that could be of interest, but he did note that it would need “to make sense from an economic point of view as well.”
When asked what differentiates DAZN’s pitch to sports leagues from other media companies, Berlinski cited the company’s flexibility and dedication. “We are solely focused on making the best live sports experience for fans around the world, and so our engineers are focused on that,” Berlinski said. “And so if a team, a league wants to have a sports-focused experience from a product point of view, we think we provide the best platform in the world to do it.”
Earlier in the week, DAZN CEO/growth markets Pete Oliver told Sports Media Watch that while the company is aiming to acquire more regional rights to constitute a “national product,” it would have interest in national rights as well. “We are actually in active talks to try and bring more teams on,” Oliver said. “We’ll see what happens for the next baseball season, and then go from there.”
DAZN is entering the NBA season with exclusive or partial local rights to approximately one-third of the league’s teams. The brand has also rights to the NHL Kings, plus several other NHL teams and the MLB Yankees via deals with MSG Network, YES Network and Monumental Sports Network. Games will be available to stream via the DAZN App.
Plus: Mike Ditka, Skydance, Big 12 Conference, Netflix
- Former ESPN and NBC NFL analyst Mike Ditka passed away on Friday at the age of 86, his family announced. Ditka, best known for his NFL coaching career that included a Super Bowl title in the 1985 season, became a cultural icon synonymous with Chicago Bears and the game of football. Ditka worked for NBC Sports from 1993-97 as a studio/game analyst before returning to coaching with the Saints, after which he joined CBS Sports as a member of “The NFL Today” from 2000-04 and finally ESPN from 2004 to 2015, where he appeared on “Sunday NFL Countdown,” “Monday Night Countdown” and “SportsCenter.”
- Skydance Corporation chairman/CEO David Ellison confirmed in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the National Football League remains an investor in the company. The league held a stake in Paramount through its Skydance Sports joint venture, “significantly less” than the 10% share that the league took in ESPN by virtue of its equity deal that closed earlier this year. Ellison, who did not address the reported change-of-control provision, reiterated that the media conglomerate “anticipate[s] being in business with the NFL for the foreseeable future.” RedBird Capital founder and Skydance director Gerry Cardinale said at Bloomberg Screentime last week that it would be better for CBS to negotiate with the league “in a few years.”
- CBS Sports Network will air eight Big 12 Conference women’s basketball games this season under a sublicensing agreement with ESPN, according to a report by Matt Fortuna of Sports Business Journal. The cable sports channel will be one of three linear television networks broadcasting Big 12 women’s basketball this season, joining ESPN and Fox. The conference’s media rights deal with the latter two companies, a pact reportedly worth $2.28 billion over six years, continues through 2031.
- Netflix plans to impose layoffs that would affect “about 5% of employees and could be announced as early as next week,” per a report by Matthew Belloni of Puck. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said at Bloomberg Screentime last week that the company is “not growing as fast as I want us to,” comments made as the company’s stock has declined overall over the last year. The media conglomerate made the initial winning bid to acquire studio and streaming assets owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, but it ended up not closing the deal when Paramount delivered “a ‘company superior proposal.'”
