We had an editor at Sports Illustrated’s website who was an apostle of lists and predictions. The data always backed him up, and he had an expression for what such content meant for the site’s traffic: Rank ’em and bank ’em.
The rank is obvious; the bank referred to page views. Stories and staffers come and go in the world of editorial and the world gets increasingly complicated daily. But list columns and pieces remain forever popular, from power rankings to mock drafts to predictions.
The latter is why I’m here. I haven’t done many prediction columns in this space since joining The Athletic, but I thought it would be interesting at the beginning of 2024 to offer some thoughts on what will happen this year in sports media. Check back in December to see how I did.
1. Tom Brady will be in Fox’s booth for Week 1 of the NFL season
Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch announced in May 2022 that Brady had agreed to join Fox Sports as its lead NFL analyst when he retired from the NFL. The deal was for 10 years and included serving as “an ambassador for us, particularly with respect to client and promotional initiatives,” in the words of Murdoch.
Advertisement
Given Brady’s varied interests (owning two production studios and sports ownership) there has been obvious speculation over whether he would ultimately make it to the booth. What else is hanging over this? Well, Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen have developed into a first-rate NFL team. But I think Brady will be on the job come September, confirming what he said in Feb. 2023. That’s the belief of Fox Sports football people as well. Brady has been talking about broadcasting a lot lately on his own platforms, so that’s another tell of sorts. Olsen’s interest in the Carolina Panthers’ head-coaching job, also gives you an indicator that Brady is on the way.
Do I think Brady will be at Fox for 10 years? I’d bet heavily against it. But I do think he’ll do a first season and see how it goes. You either fall in love with the travel, the camaraderie of the crew and the prep work, or you decide it’s not for you. Brady will know the answer after Year 1.
2. Brady will draw good reviews for his work as an analyst
I think Brady will be better than conventional wisdom might suggest, especially as the season goes along. He was never Charles Barkley in open press conferences — measured and calculated — but this is the case for most famous NFL quarterbacks. There are a lot of different ways to be an effective game analyst: Tony Romo is different than Peyton Manning, who is different than Troy Aikman, who is different than Charles Davis. Brady’s lead producer and director have 60 years of experience between them and sideline reporters with a ton of broadcast miles. It’s an effective group that will help him. He’ll also be the beneficiary of players and coaches being candid with him. The first couple of games will likely be mixed for him — everyone is going to have an opinion on him as a broadcaster — but I bet by Week 9-10, he’s a decent listen.
3. The Olympics rebound
The last two Olympic Games were a viewership disaster. The Beijing Olympics in February 2022 were the least-watched Games in prime time on NBC ever, averaging 10.7 million viewers per night on television, with that number rising slightly to 11.4 million including all other viewing platforms. Tokyo in the summer of 2021 was the previous lowest average with 15.1 million TV viewers in prime time.
Advertisement
NBC was admittedly dealt a terrible hand for a broadcaster heading into Beijing, including an American public that disapproved of the politics and human rights abuses in China, a global pandemic, an Asia-based Games with not-ideal time windows and Olympic fatigue given the Tokyo Games wrapped up just six months prior. A mess, in short.
But now comes Paris in 2024 with its beautiful backdrops (I mean, the venue for beach volleyball is the Champ de Mars, the park located at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in the center of Paris). The time zone isn’t perfect — six hours ahead of Eastern Time — but it’s much more viewer-friendly than Beijing. I think this Olympic pops.
4. The NBA gets a shade under a 50 percent increase for its media-rights deals
The NBA’s current agreement with ESPN and Warner Bros Discovery expires at the end of the 2024-25 season. By that time, the league will have been paid a combined $24 billion for the contracts. Like most people who write about this stuff, I believe everything sets up for the NBA to add media partners beyond ESPN/Disney and WBD/Turner, both of whom I predict will continue with the league with less inventory from previous years.
I think Amazon Prime Video will become a media partner, given their interest in expanding their sports portfolio. Would Apple be interested in a small share of the rights as opposed to owning everything as they do with MLS and what they hoped with the Pac-12? I’ll bet no, but one thing is for sure: The NBA needs big streaming companies as a long-term media partner given the economics. NBCUniversal has interest in the NBA, and the NBA has made clear that they want more broadcast exposure, which NBC can offer.
How that works with Peacock would be key. Can NBA inventory increase the Peacock subscriber base? I’m skeptical. I don’t see it working for NBC unless they get a signature event on the NBA calendar. While another legacy brand with reach would be valuable for the NBA, the NBA is so core to ESPN that I think they’d increase their bid to prevent the NBA Finals from being shared.
Advertisement
Experts such as Michael Nathanson, co-founder of the research firm MoffettNathanson, believe it is only a matter of time before Netflix gets into sports, and the NBA would fit into its global aspirations. So I think it plays out as WBD, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video and let’s take a long shot flyer and say Netflix gets in, though NBC as the fourth partner would be your better play at the betting window.
5. Women’s college volleyball continues to soar in viewership interest
Worth reading is Chantel Jennings and Nicole Auerbach’s excellent explainer piece on the NCAA reaching an eight-year agreement with ESPN to televise 40 college sports championships each year, including the marquee Division-I women’s basketball tournament. One of the conditions of that new contract includes guarantees that the national championship games in women’s basketball, women’s volleyball and women’s gymnastics will be broadcast on ABC each year.
I have been writing for many years now that women’s college volleyball is a big growth play. Smart sports-specific media companies will get in now, and those that are in (such as ESPN and the Big Ten Network) are sitting on profits if they play it right. This was the first year women’s college volleyball got great programming windows, and look at the result: The championship match between Texas and Nebraska — the first NCAA volleyball championship to be broadcast on ABC — set a TV viewership record for women’s college volleyball, averaging 1.7 million viewers. (That match was played on a Sunday in December against NFL programming.) The telecast was up 115 percent over last year’s championship match’s viewership of 786,000. ESPN said female viewership was up 151 percent from 2022 and made up 51 percent of the audience.
What else? Fox got 1.659 million viewers for regionalized coverage of Wisconsin-Minnesota and Ohio State-Michigan when they ran it adjacent to NFL coverage. In August, Nebraska volleyball drew a crowd of 92,003 when they hosted the University of Nebraska-Omaha inside Memorial Stadium. That’s the largest crowd to ever witness a women’s sporting event in the United States. Keep your eye on this sport.
6. There will be another sports outlet that uses AI-generated content for sports coverage — and they won’t stop when discovered
I’m stealing this one from Chad Finn of The Boston Globe, who predicted this on a recent podcast we did. You are probably aware of Futurism’s reporting on Sports Illustrated publishing articles by fake, AI-generated writers and the fallout from that, including from the rightfully outraged human staff. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper company, was excoriated for its attempts to use artificial intelligence to automate high school sports coverage across the country.
In an industry that continues to hemorrhage jobs and with human labor often being the first thing as part of any cost-cutting exercise, it seems inevitable that some publishing type is going to simply live with the fallout in exchange for cost savings.
7. Laura Rutledge re-signs with ESPN and gets promised some prominent NFL roles
Rutledge’s contract is up this summer, and she’ll get interest outside of ESPN given how many hours she has logged as a skilled host and reporter on the NFL and college football. I think ESPN management, which has let some very talented young staffers depart before, is smart enough to understand that in Rutledge, just 35, they have someone who can host top NFL or college football shows as they head deeper into their contracts, including Super Bowls in 2027 and 2031.
GO DEEPER
Laura Rutledge Q&A: On her rise at ESPN, reporting on the NFL vs. college, and more
There is a fascinating viewership race going on between CBS and Fox for the most-watched window on television in 2023. Heading into Sunday, CBS narrowly led Fox in the 4:25 p.m. ET Sunday window for viewership during the 2023 NFL season. CBS games have averaged 24.992 million viewers. Fox’s games have averaged 24.930 million.
Advertisement
Fox has owned this window forever and likely will win out this year given they had the Dallas Cowboys at Washington Commanders and Los Angeles Rams at San Francisco 49ers in the late window on Sunday, but it’s been a great inside baseball race to watch. CBS really benefitted this year from the schedule now allotting them NFC games.
The NHL’s Winter Classic was swallowed up by the College Football Playoff: The Vegas Golden Knights-Seattle Kraken game averaged 1.1 million viewers across TNT and truTV, the lowest viewership number ever for the event by 300,000. The last hour of the game ran head-to-head with the Michigan-Alabama college football semifinal.
One bit of good news for WBD: The NHL on TNT is up 17 percent over last year.
— Per Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal: Of the top 100 most-watched telecasts in the U.S. in 2023, the NFL had 93 of them. Karp said that figure easily breaks the NFL’s prior record of 82 set in 2022. The NFL also had 24 of the top 25 spots in 2023. (Karp said the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was No. 23.)
— Fox Sports NFL reporter Pam Oliver got the long profile treatment from the L.A. Times.
— Curt Menefee has been named co-host of FOX 5’s Good Day New York.” He will co-host the program Tuesday-Friday from 7-10 a.m. ET and remain co-host of Fox NFL Sunday during the NFL season.
Former Sports Illustrated staffers Mark Mravic and Alexander Wolff are the co-editors of an upcoming anthology of the work of the late soccer writer, Grant Wahl. The book, “World Class,” will come out June 4.
Hot off the presses, here’s the NFL television schedule for wild-card weekend.
GO DEEPER
NFL wild-card matchups, schedule and playoff bracket
(Top photo of Tom Brady: Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)
