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Premier Lacrosse League founder and legendary former lacrosse player Paul Rabil praised ESPN executive Burke Magnus for his support of the sport.
Rabil spoke to Front Office Sports editor-in-chief Dan Roberts on a recent episode of Portfolio Players. He explained how Magnus, who led ESPN’s programming department when the PLL did its first rights deal with the network four years ago, has been an advocate for the sport.
“Burke’s been a champion of lacrosse for 28 years,” Rabil said.
“He was a part of the team that structured and continues to help advise on the structuring of college lacrosse and the NCAA Final Four and ACC Network. He was the president of programming when we did our first deal with them in 2022. [He’s] just a steward of the game. But, he’s also not giving out any favors. Numbers have supported college lacrosse, to the tune of the investment that ESPN had given it, and there was a story to be told about what we could do based on those numbers to grow professional leagues with all the marketing tactics and strategies and deployment of capital that we had in place.”
In an interview with FOS earlier this week, Magnus explained that he’s “always been a big fan” of lacrosse—his kids played it growing up in Connecticut, and his father, who passed away last year at 93 years old, played at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s. Rabil played there as well.
“When we were talking about doing a deal, Paul came to New York, and my dad came to dinner, and it was hilarious to watch these two guys, who were separated in age by 40-50 years, have a conversation about lacrosse,” Magnus said.
The PLL’s inaugural season was in 2019. The league’s first TV rights deal was with NBC Sports and lasted through 2021.
Magnus acknowledged that he “never quite necessarily believed” that lacrosse would translate to the professional level. He still met with Rabil and his brother, Mike, who works in the PLL’s business operations, after being impressed with what they’d built over the course of several years.
“They had a couple years under their belt operating the league, and they were on NBC doing a really interesting job, and they changed the game around to make it faster and have a smaller field than the collegiate game,” Magnus said. “I was like, ‘You know, if anyone can take a real serious run at this, it’s Paul and Mike. They are really smart guys with boundless energy. They had a bunch of serious equity investors. It caught my attention.”
The way the calendar works, spring and summer sports have extra opportunities for visibility on ESPN platforms. The fall has wall-to-wall football. Men’s and women’s college basketball wind down in March, while the NBA regular season ends in April and the playoffs finish out in June. In the spring, ESPN has worked to grow college baseball, softball, and lacrosse.
Magnus said that when it came to picking new properties to elevate on ESPN, he looked at it as a mix of “art and science.” He would evaluate underlying metrics and try to put sports in the best position to succeed on the network.
“You look for opportunities where you’re not being disruptive to other things. If lacrosse was a fall sport, we would’ve made a different decision,” Magnus said. “There would be no open time slots in the midst of all the football and NBA and everything else. The fact that it’s primarily in the summer gives us a lot of open air space to try and take fliers.”
Magnus moved from leading programming to becoming ESPN’s president of content in 2023. Last year, the PLL worked with Magnus’s successor, Roz Durant, on a new five-year rights agreement.
