Spring football is over for 2024, and we check in with Oliver Luck to dissect its future. … The NBA, NHL, and MLB take another shot at their regional sports network foe. … Front Office Sports Today explores Florida’s major sports betting news. … The Celtics give Boston yet another championship. … And U.S. Open champ Bryson DeChambeau wishes he could play in the Olympics.
—David Rumsey and Eric Fisher
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Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
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The latest spring football league just concluded its debut season, with some metrics pointing up and others trending slightly down.
The UFL, a merger of the former XFL and USFL, hosted its inaugural championship game in St. Louis on Sunday, as 27,396 fans watched the Birmingham Stallions beat the San Antonio Brahmas. That brought the league’s final Year 1 attendance total to 581,016, a per-game average of 13,512 across 43 regular-season and postseason contests. That’s lower than the XFL’s average of 14,703 fans per game in 2023. (The USFL didn’t have true home and road games last year, with the league’s eight teams playing in only four markets.)
On TV, though, the UFL saw a viewership boost over its old counterparts. The regular season averaged 816,000 viewers across Fox, ABC, and ESPN, good for a 30% increase over the XFL and USFL average in 2023. Both conference championship games drew more than one million viewers each, representing a 57% bump from the 748,000 average USFL/XFL playoff audience.
Changes Coming
Next year, Fox, a broadcast partner that owns 50% of the UFL, will be making a significant adjustment to its spring football TV schedule. The network will shift “many” UFL games from Sundays to Friday nights, Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said recently. The move will be made to accommodate incoming IndyCar Series race broadcasts, which Fox has acquired the rights to, starting in 2025. Whether that move impacts UFL ratings remains to be seen.
Expert Opinion
To take stock of the current spring football landscape, Front Office Sports checked in with a man that has plenty of experience in the space: Oliver Luck. The longtime sports executive was most recently the commissioner of the XFL in 2020, when it was under the ownership of Vince McMahon. Luck also was the president of NFL Europe in the ’90s when the former World League played spring games.
“You really need deep pockets,” Luck tells FOS, acknowledging the “spotty history” of spring leagues. “Because you’re going to lose some money in Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, probably into Years 4 and 5.” But if the finances are right, Luck sees plenty of ways that the NFL could benefit from rules, technology, and broadcast innovations. “There’s a whole universe out there of potential things that a spring league could serve as a little bit of a petri dish.”
One change Luck says the UFL should make is its start date, which this year was in late March. “I think one of the good things that the XFL did is we started the weekend after the Super Bowl,” he says. “And I always thought that people still had a football [mindset] going, because they were in that football mode.”
Better Together?
In the NFL Europe days, teams could allocate players to international clubs, a process Luck says most coaches and GMs seemed happy with. No spring league since has struck any such formal relationship with the NFL.
But finding a peaceful coexistence will be key for UFL—or any other entity looking to break into space. Luck says he met with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell twice during his time with the XFL to talk logistics. “That’s a fairly intricate dance,” Luck says. “Because we believed—and I’m sure that’s still the case today—that literally everybody who was playing in the XFL in 2020, the goal was to get into the NFL or have an opportunity to go to a training camp.”
The Lions recently signed Jake Bates, formerly a kicker with the UFL’s Michigan Panthers to a two-year contract. Moves like that will be key for the UFL moving forward, in addition to the NFL’s considering some spring football-led technology changes, as well as adopting a new kickoff rule from the old XFL.
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Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports
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The already-challenged prospect of Diamond Sports Group exiting bankruptcy without further complications has quickly gone out the window, as a new disclosure fight adds to the mounting pressures for the Bally Sports parent.
The regional sports network operator made an emergency motion before U.S. Bankruptcy Court for a discovery conference Tuesday to try to resolve further issues raised by MLB, the NBA, and the NHL. Building on previously stated concerns about the future viability of DSG, the leagues now have asked for copies of the company’s distribution contracts with key cable carriers such as Charter and Cox Communications, the prior deal with Comcast, as well as the post-bankruptcy deal it has with Amazon Prime Video, to help decide whether it will formally contest the reorganization.
Discovery requests such as this, even late in a bankruptcy reorganization, are not uncommon. But the drama in this situation has been heightened on two fronts. First, a hearing to approve DSG’s exit plan has already been postponed from June 18 to July 29, and Judge Christopher Lopez has not shown an eagerness for further delays—raising the time pressure of the situation. Second, the latest request from the leagues centers on highly sensitive cable distribution pacts, and many of the involved parties are reluctant to engage in any process that threatens the confidentiality terms of those agreements.
“The debtors would like to produce information necessary for the leagues to assess the feasibility of the debtors’ plan, but also not to wish to run afoul of applicable confidentiality provisions,” DSG said in a court filing. “This is especially true given the importance of the debtors’ relationships with the leagues, the distributors, and Amazon alike.”
Cable View
While the tone of DSG in the latest filing was respectful and nuanced, Cox was more insistent in its appeal to the court. Responding to the motion Monday, Cox said the leagues’ “sweeping” discovery requests “risk significant competitive harm to Cox”—particularly around the subject of “most-favored nation provisions” that are common in the cable business and protect one carrier from having a much worse deal with a programmer than another carrier.
Instead, the distributor offered a more targeted form of discovery that included aggregated revenue on a historical and projected basis.
“Given the competitive sensitivity of the information and its impact on future business negotiations, Cox believes it essential that the information be aggregated across providers and markets,” the company said.
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The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the Seminole Tribe’s sports betting monopoly in Florida. The ruling is based on the idea that a sports bet occurs at the location of the server that processes the transaction, not where the bettor is located, and it could have implications in other states. Sports betting attorney Daniel Wallach joins the show to discuss the legal and economic implications of the decision.
🎧 Watch, listen, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify, and YouTube.
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5
Number of years between major pro league titles won by a Boston-area team, marking the second-longest stretch since the formation of the Patriots as an AFL franchise in 1960. The Celtics on Monday clinched their league-leading 18th NBA title, closing out the Mavericks in five games. The championship is the first for the area since February 2019, when the Patriots beat the Rams in Super Bowl LIII following the ’18 NFL season.
The now closed gap marked a major turn from the Tom Brady era with the Patriots of ’00–19, a period during which that team won six Super Bowls, MLB’s Red Sox won four World Series titles, the Celtics won the ’08 NBA Finals, and the NHL’s Bruins won the Stanley Cup in ’11—and the region collectively never went more than three years between any of those triumphs. The only longer drought for the area with all four teams in existence is the nearly 16-year stretch between the Celtics’ NBA title in 1986 and the Patriots’ win in Super Bowl XXXVI in February 2002.
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“I would love to represent the United States.”
—U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau, on not qualifying for the country’s Olympic golf team ahead of this summer’s Paris Games. Team USA’s qualified participants are Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Wyndham Clark, and Collin Morikawa. DeChambeau, now ranked No. 10 in the world, would be the second U.S. alternate, behind Patrick Cantlay.
With the U.S. Open victory, and top-10 finishes at the Masters and PGA Championship, DeChambeau likely would have made the U.S. team if LIV Golf was able to earn world ranking points. “Am I frustrated? Disappointed? Yeah, sure,” the golfer said Monday on The Pat McAfee Show. “But I made the choices that I made, and there’s consequences to that.” For now, the two-time major champion remains optimistic about the future. “Hopefully, one day, this game of golf will get figured out and come back together,” he said.
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On this day 48 years ago: MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn (above, left) voided salary-motivated trades of A’s star pitchers Rollie Fingers and Vida Blue to the Red Sox and Yankees, respectively, with outfielder Joe Rudi also part of the Boston proposed deal. A’s owner Charlie Finley (above, right), seeing much of his early ’70s dynasty already splintering and free agency in baseball imminently arriving, sought to take matters into his own hands. He essentially sold Fingers and Rudi for $1 million each and Blue for $1.5 million—with no players coming back the other way. Kuhn exercised his “best interests of baseball” powers, fearing that such deals would set a precedent for large-revenue clubs to just buy their way to success.
But that was merely the start of the wild story. Finley refused to take the players back and have them play in Oakland, and he sued MLB for $10 million, alleging a series of offenses including civil rights, restraint-of-trade, and antitrust violations. Finley ultimately lost the legal case two years later. In the meantime, though, the remaining A’s players revolted, upset with playing shorthanded, and were set to start forfeiting games unless the three players were reinstated, which they were by late June in 1976.
In many ways, though, it was the beginning of the end for the colorful Finley in MLB. Six key A’s players, including Fingers and Rudi, left as free agents after the 1976 season. A similar episode with Blue and an attempted sale to the Reds was similarly voided in ’77. An Oakland team that won five straight division titles between ’71 and ’75 fell to last place in ’77, finishing behind even the expansion Mariners. By ’80 and still not comfortable with baseball’s changing economic order, Finley sold the A’s to Walter Haas Jr. for $12.7 million. Today, there are all sorts of financially motivated trades in baseball, including last year’s salary purge by the Mets. But there remains a series of rules around such deals, and the league must approve every trade before it becomes official.
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- Lighten up, Mr. Earl: Nike just released a playful ad for the WNBA and its growing popularity with the tagline, “Glad you could join us.” Watch here.
- After the A’s voted to relocate, the Oakland B’s joined the Pioneer League this season and unveiled their new mascot, Scrappy the Possum, inspired by the opossum found in the A’s broadcast booth last season. Look here.
- With a few smart moves, you could supplement your income and afford that next vacation—without doing much extra “work.” Read more from FinanceBuzz to find a solution and take control of your finances today.*
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 | Barkley has always proved himself to be a master negotiator. |
 | The small number of matches are exclusively on the expensive streamer. |
 | The Commissioner’s Cup title game will be played at UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y. |
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