During a tumultuous 2024, there were inevitably winners and losers in the sports media world. Caitlin Clark, Time magazine’s Athlete of the Year, was the year’s biggest winner, shaping viewership trends across women’s basketball. Other winners and losers emanate from the year’s juiciest corporate soap opera: The NBA’s $77 billion decision to shift its U.S. media rights to incumbent Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon Prime Video—while leaving 40-year incumbent TNT Sports out in the cold. With two weeks to go before the new year, here are my winners and losers for 2024.
Winners
1. Caitlin Clark: From college to the pros, Clark was the single biggest star in sports this year. She’s also proving to be the biggest needle-mover for TV ratings since Tiger Woods. Iowa’s women’s March Madness final vs. South Carolina averaged an astonishing 18.9 million viewers—outdrawing the men’s final for the first time ever. Her last playoff game as an Indiana Fever rookie pulled a record 2.5 million viewers on ESPN, making it the most-watched WNBA game ever on cable.
As sports media consultant LeslieAnne Wade notes, the WNBA Rookie of the Year is one of the few female athletes who can beat men head-to-head in TV ratings. She could have written her own ticket to play in the Unrivaled women’s hoops league. But Clark is also becoming a political football in the culture wars.
2. NBC Sports: Mark Lazarus & Co. were on a heater all year. The glittering Paris Olympics averaged 30.6 million viewers in the U.S. across NBCUniversal platforms, up a staggering 82% from the 2021 Tokyo Games. That made Paris the most-watched, most-successful Olympics since London in 2012. Look for Scott Hanson’s Gold Zone to be a staple of future games. Then the Peacock network signed an 11-year contract worth $2.5 billion a year to bring back NBA coverage for the first time in 23 years. If they can work out a deal with composer John Tesh, expect to hear plenty of “Roundball Rock” next season.
3. Stephen A. Smith: The star of ESPN’s First Take put Skip Bayless and FS1’s floundering Undisputed out of their misery, cementing his status as the king of weekday morning TV. His autobiography, Straight Shooter: A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes, became a New York Times best-seller. He grew his owned and operated YouTube show to 972,000 subscribers.
Now he’s poised to become the first $100 million man in ESPN history. Smith is currently hammering out a contract extension with ESPN bosses Burke Magnus and Jimmy Pitaro to the tune of five years and $20 million per year, say sources. My guess is he gets it—as well as a shot at Monday Night Countdown.
4. Amazon Prime Video: The giant streamer continues to grow the once-derided Thursday Night Football franchise into a powerhouse. TNF is averaging 13.51 million viewers, up 12% over the same point last year and up 41% from Prime’s first exclusive season in 2022. Oh, did we mention Prime scored an 11-year deal with the NBA worth $1.8 billion a year?
Amazon was so important that the league dropped TNT and Warner Bros. Discovery after a 40-year Turner partnership to target Prime’s 200-million-plus subscribers. As NBA commissioner Adam Silver noted, “Prime Video’s massive subscriber base will dramatically expand our ability to reach our fans in new and innovative ways.”
5. Omaha Productions: Peyton Manning’s fast-growing company has become the go-to creative partner for ESPN and the NFL. First, there’s the ManningCast, the most popular alternative broadcast in sports media. But it also produced Pat McAfee’s MegaCast as well Full Court Press: a four-part series on ESPN+ about women’s college basketball stars Caitlin Clark, Kamilla Cardoso, and Kiki Rice. On the NFL front, the Manning brothers and Omaha created the “Pro Bowl Games” for the second straight season as well as Receiver on Netflix. And Eli Manning’s “Chad Powers” skit on Eli’s Places is being adapted into a scripted comedy on Hulu with breakout star Glen Powell.
Losers
1. Skip Bayless: When Fox lured Bayless away from ESPN in 2016, it was spun as a triumph. Rupert Murdoch scion James Murdoch reached out to backslap Fox’s big new hire. FS1 even posted Bayless billboards around Bristol to crow about his defection. Eight years later, it all turned to ashes. Once Shannon Sharpe left FS1, Bayless floundered.
With his low-rated Undisputed struggling to capture 50,000 daily viewers, FS1 pulled the plug on him and his $8 million salary. What’s next? Good question. ESPN already shut the door on a reunion with their former morning star, telling me: “We are set with the current First Take rotation, and wish Skip the best on his future endeavors.” At 73 years old, it’s worth asking whether anybody wants Bayless. Or whether his long and lucrative run as the enfant terrible of sports TV is finally over.
2. Cable TV bundle: Let’s pour one out for the declining cable bundle as streaming gains ground, says media consultant Jim Williams. The crumbling cable model could drop to 50 million U.S. homes within five years from a high of 100 million. “The only thing left holding the bundle together today is sports,” former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller told CNBC. “There is nothing any of the networks can do about it. The only question now is how far does it fall and how fast, and is there a bottom. And I don’t know if there’s a bottom.”
3. Warner Bros. Discovery: CEO David Zaslav’s boast that he didn’t need the NBA came back to bite him in the ass as The Association decided to end its 40-year relationship with TNT and split its U.S. media rights between incumbent ABC/ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. Along the way, TNT’s own Charles Barkley ripped his bosses as “fools” and “clowns” for bungling negotiations. But give WBD credit: It had the guts to take the NBA to court. In the process, it salvaged international and digital NBA rights. It also used the rights fees saved on the NBA to expand into college football and basketball, cut a last-minute deal with ESPN to save Inside the NBA, and secured a critical carriage deal with Comcast. As of now, they’re getting close to the same carriage fees—without paying billions annually for the NBA starting next year. Could WBD be the comeback story of the year in 2025?
4. Venu Sports: I was skeptical about this ambitious streaming venture by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery from the jump. My fears were well-founded. The stillborn streamer, originally nicknamed “Spulu,” is in limbo after a legal challenge by FuboTV. First, a federal judge blocked its planned Aug. 23 launch. Then the same judge denied Disney, Fox, and WBD’s motion to dismiss the suit. Patrick Crakes, the ex-Fox exec turned media consultant, named Fubo his biggest “winner” for countering Venu in court, while Williams dubs Fox a “loser” for sitting out the streaming wars. With ESPN preparing for its “Flagship” direct-to-consumer launch in 2025, the question now is whether there’s a need for Venu—other than giving Fox a playing card in the streaming wars.
5. Samantha Ponder: She had what could be described as the ideal job at ESPN: host of Sunday NFL Countdown. That once-a-week gig gave her a high-profile role with ESPN’s biggest property. It made her the heir to Chris “Boomer” Berman as the network’s premier NFL host. Given the longevity of other NFL pregame show hosts like James Brown (CBS) and Curt Menefee (Fox), she seemed to have good job security. But ESPN threw Ponder a curveball when it shockingly dumped her, Robert Griffin III, and Zach Lowe for budgetary reasons this year. Mike Greenberg took her place on Countdown. The show hasn’t missed a beat. Ponder has kept a low profile ever since.
