As every Varsity reader recognizes, there’s no bigger story in sports media than the NFL’s ongoing rights negotiations—and Guggenheim Securities analyst Mike Morris spends his days disentangling all the rumors, regulatory posturing, and the league’s gamesmanship to determine how this multibillion-dollar saga will eventually resolve itself. Of course, in the handful of months since Mike first appeared on the Varsity podcast, scrutiny from the F.C.C. and a D.O.J. investigation have added a new wrinkle to the drama, and Roger Goodell’s fantasy of signing new deals before the 2026 season opener increasingly seems like a long shot.

In our latest conversion—which will appear on tomorrow’s episode of The Varsity (the podcast), but I’m breaking out early for loyal Varsity (the private email) subscribers—we discussed how the calculus has changed for the Shield and its media partners over the past few months, YouTube’s burgeoning relationship with the NFL, how the league has transformed the sports rights landscape, and much, much more. As always, this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

John Ourand: We spoke a couple of months ago and went deep into the NFL media rights situation. It doesn’t seem like much has changed since then. Where do things stand now?

Mike Morris: I agree—we haven’t seen a ton of progress, at least on the financial side. When we last spoke, we were at the early stage of the NFL potentially reopening its contracts with current media partners, starting most likely with Paramount, which has a change-of-control provision following its merger with Skydance last fall. That seemed like it might be the first domino, but we haven’t really heard anything since then. The potential for regulatory intervention is a stumbling block, although it’s not a hurdle that’s too high to overcome. But that’s probably slowed the wheels a bit on the NFL reaching new agreements before the 2026 season.

We’ve both heard that the NFL wanted new deals in place by September. Right now, that feels like a heavy lift. How likely is that timeline?

At this point, I’d be surprised if it gets done before the start of the 2026 season. It’s not impossible, because what the NFL seems to be pursuing is more of an extension of existing rights under new terms than a wholesale renegotiation—selling back its option to reopen after the 2029-30 season in exchange for higher fees. To the extent that doesn’t change who has which packages, I think that could get done before the season.

But the broadcast partners aren’t powerless here. Most of them have large enough packages that there isn’t much fear of a disruptive outside bidder. Add the legal uncertainty, and I think it becomes harder to get those deals done before the start of the season. And ultimately, I don’t know that it would benefit the NFL, the most powerful entity in media, which is going to see significant increases in media revenue regardless of whether the path is early renewals or competitive bidding at the end of the existing contracts.

What I’m hearing from D.C. isn’t a push to eliminate the antitrust exemption, but to add more consumer-friendly levers—like letting an Eagles fan, for instance, subscribe only to Eagles games rather than all of Sunday Ticket. I do think there are some levers that Congress can pull that could make it look a lot different than it does today.

I don’t disagree. But there’s the potential to create a complication in the name of helping, and it’s not going to be helpful. Regarding the Eagles fan example you just laid out—if you made individual team games available à la carte, the league would just price them in a way that makes the full package look attractive anyway. Say a single Eagles game costs $12.99—five games a month is $65, five months a season, and you’re basically back to where you started. And the question of where you draw the line—individual team, division, conference—gets complicated quickly. What are you ultimately achieving for the consumer?

Can a broadcast network live without the NFL? At what point does the price get too high?

Can you survive without the NFL? Yes. There are valuable media businesses that don’t have NFL rights—Netflix is a great example. But if you’re one of the existing partners and your revenue is partly predicated on offering that high-affinity product, losing it would be the single most significant change to your business from one contract. You’d charge less, cut costs elsewhere, and potentially become significantly less relevant.

Even with all the fears about cord-cutting, the amount of subscription revenue alone that’s spent in the United States on video is somewhere in excess of $200 billion annually, and it’s growing. So I still think the NFL is trying to look at the affinity for their product, and saying, If we’re getting $11 billion now, and there’s $200 billion coming at the top of the funnel, are we worth more? I think the answer is yes. So they raise their rates and the entire ecosystem evolves to figure out how they extract the money to pay for those rights, and then use those rights to grow their business more broadly.

Could ESPN walk away from the NFL and go all in on the Big Ten and SEC? How big a risk would that be?

Pretty massive. College football is the second-most-popular sport in America, and it’s still dwarfed by the NFL. There’s just no reasonable substitute for the NFL when it comes to getting the same reach and unique audience at one point in time. An average NBA game draws roughly one-tenth the audience of an average NFL game—and college football is closer, but you’re probably getting a lot of the same viewers rather than expanding your reach.

There’s also a structural issue: College football doesn’t want to put all its eggs in one basket any more than the NFL does. If ESPN went all in on college football as an anti-NFL play, it would shut down its own partnership expansion opportunities and limit its bidding leverage in future rounds. I just don’t see that as the path.

Does Amazon want more NFL games, or are they content with Thursday Night Football?

Of all the streamers, Amazon has leaned most heavily into traditional packages. Thursday Night Football is a much more robust and typical package than what YouTube or Netflix has done, and their NBA deal follows the same model. Amazon seems to feel validated by investing in the traditional paradigm, which makes sense given their advertising platform ambitions—they’re at an earlier stage of advertising growth than Google, for example, so live sports supercharges that.

If anyone were going to bid for a second package—which could cost around $6 billion a year in the next round—Amazon would be the most likely candidate. But I’d put it at less than 50-50. And the opportunity for Amazon to take a second package isn’t going to happen in the near term, because no existing rights holder is going to open up their deal to give it away.

YouTube is reportedly the likely home for a five-game NFL package, possibly in front of the paywall. What do you make of YouTube’s interest in the NFL, and how can we see that start to manifest itself?

YouTube is arguably the largest media property measured by time spent, and they have two existing NFL relationships: Sunday Ticket directly, and games indirectly through YouTube TV. The five-game concept is the NFL’s sweet spot for drawing in new streaming partners—if you add smaller packages now, when you reopen the big deals in three or four years, you might have seven bidders instead of five. In front of the paywall, YouTube would almost certainly lose money. But they’re on a steep advertising growth curve, and this would be massively premium inventory. If it were behind a paywall, that would be a vehicle for them to try to broaden their appeal and drive users.

Do streamers actually need to turn a profit on sports rights, or can they treat it as a loss leader the way broadcasters did for decades?

I think it’s a want, not a need. Now, do they want to make a profit off this? I think the answer is absolutely yes. The idea that Google or Amazon is comfortable losing money indefinitely with no long-term plan is wrong. But if you’re Google or Amazon, a loss of a few hundred million dollars a year barely registers against your overall profit base, which gives you more runway to take calculated risks. You can say, We know this loses money now, but over five years we expect more subscribers, deeper advertising partnerships, and expanded adoption of our other products.

On NFL Draft coverage: “Can you pass it along to whoever produces the NFL Draft for ESPN that their all-but-spoiling of picks is one of the worst running gimmicks in live sports coverage? ESPN pans to the player who’s been selected once the pick is in but before it’s actually announced by Goodell, and it then has its analysts discuss said player and why they’d be a fit on that specific team. I’m sure they think it makes their other analysts look smart, as if the average viewer is thinking, ‘Wow, Kiper really saw that one coming.’ But it just ruins what should be an authentic live moment. If people want to seek out picks as soon as they’ve been submitted to the league, there’s approximately 3,000 insiders on social media that they can turn to.” —A Varsity subscriber

On NBC nicknames: “I liked listening to your podcast with Jon Miller, if only to hear his nicknames. NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel is a ‘quiet assassin.’ Marketing execs Jenny Storms and Lyndsay Signor are ‘secret weapons.’ And, of course, Mike Tirico is ‘the single greatest sportscaster ever.’” —A media executive

See you Thursday,
John