Ahead of Super Bowl LIX, owners of both the Eagles and Chiefs talked about the future of their home stadiums. For Philadelphia, those discussions are just beginning, while Kansas City is already in a more contentious situation.

This season’s AFC and NFC champions aren’t the only franchises with stadium questions, though. The Bears, Browns, and Commanders are also trying to finalize long-term plans for new venues. The Bills and Titans are currently building new stadiums, while the Jaguars and Panthers are starting major renovation projects.

Another team that can be added to the mix is the Broncos, whose lease at Empower Field at Mile High in downtown Denver expires in 2030. 

“We don’t [have a lot of time], actually,” Broncos president Damani Leech said during an interview with Front Office Sports in New Orleans. “It takes four years to build. You start to back that up, and we feel like, pretty soon, we need to figure out what we’re doing.”

The Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group bought the Broncos in 2022 for a then-record $4.65 billion. Controlling ownership has since been transferred from Walmart heir Rob Walton to his son-in-law Greg Penner. 

Denver’s owners funded a large portion of $100 million in stadium renovations in 2023 that included a giant new scoreboard. They have also paid more than $250,000 each of the last three years to install a grass playing surface during the season. On top of that, they are spending at least $175 million on a new training facility set to open in Englewood in 2026.

And now, they are exploring every avenue possible related to their stadium, which opened in 2001.

“All things are on the table, and we mean that sincerely,” Leech said. “So, [we are] actively studying what does a significant renovation look like, actively studying what does ‘new’ look like? Both in terms of design—sort of ‘the what’—but also ‘the where.’ Is it on the same side? Is it somewhere else in central Denver? Is it somewhere in the suburbs?”

An interesting part of the stadium process to follow will be how much public funding the Broncos seek, considering the Walton-Penner group’s widely reported net worth of more than $70 billion, and how much private funding the franchise’s owners have already spent on team infrastructure.

“We can extend the lease if we need to, but we really are very laser-focused on this, and trying to do what’s best, not just for the Broncos now, but for the next 30 years,” Leech said.

A record-setting Super Bowl LIX also represented a massive payday for Fox. 

The network said Wednesday that it reaped more than $800 million in gross advertising revenue across all platforms from the game, a figure that easily beats the roughly $700 million that CBS was estimated to have generated last year for Super Bowl LVIII and had been an industry high-water mark for the event. When Fox broadcast the Super Bowl two years ago, it pulled in about $650 million in gross ad revenue.

Fox’s largesse for Super Bowl LIX, however, comes as little surprise since the network went into the game having achieved an unprecedented $8 million for some 30-second advertising units. The event, won by the Eagles over the Chiefs 40–22, posted an average audience of 127.7 million that was the largest in U.S. television history. Those records were supplemented by a digital audience on Tubi, a tune-in for the five-hour pregame show, and the Kendrick Lamar halftime show, which all established new viewership marks, too.

The revenue figure also represents the latest dose of good news for Fox, which reported another solid financial quarter last week. Fox is also now in the midst of creating a new direct-to-consumer streaming service and saw Tubi gain a major dose of exposure with an average audience of 13.6 million during the game. 

“The clear winners Sunday night were the Eagles, the NFL, and Fox,” said company CEO and executive chair Lachlan Murdoch.

Luka Dončić’s first game as a Laker on Monday, one of the most highly anticipated debuts in NBA history, delivered in the ratings.

The Jazz-Lakers game delivered 2.01 million viewers on ESPN despite the 10:30 p.m. ET start and a blowout finish. Dončić played just 24 minutes and missed the entire fourth quarter as the Lakers led by as much as 34 points. The game peaked at 2.55 million viewers during the 11:15 p.m. quarter-hour, which was around the second quarter.

The viewership number is close to the 2.14 million viewers who watched the 2022 championship rematch between the Warriors and Celtics on Nov. 6, the most-watched NBA game on ESPN this year. That game tipped off at 7:30 p.m. ET. Nine games that were not exclusive to ESPN—whether simulcast with ABC, or airing purely on the network—have eclipsed that number this season.

The next nationally televised Lakers game is on Feb. 22 against the Nuggets, which will air on ABC. Three days later, Los Angeles hosts Dallas on TNT, the first time Dončić will play the team that shockingly traded him less than two weeks ago.

Dallas will likely be without Anthony Davis, the key piece it acquired back in the trade, who suffered an adductor injury in his first game with the team.

ESPN had originally flexed in Saturday’s game between the Lakers and Pacers as it was originally reported that the five-time All-Star was going to debut then. The network adjusted its Friday NBA schedule and Saturday college basketball schedule to fit the Lakers game, only for Los Angeles to change its tune and move Dončić’s debut to Monday.

To accommodate the Jazz-Lakers game, ESPN cut away from the second half of a men’s college basketball game between Houston and Baylor. The game was moved to ESPNU.

NBC’s programming and marketing push for the 2026 Winter Olympics has begun, and the network has two very powerful tools to boost awareness and revenue: the NFL and the NBA.

The countdown to the event, shared by the Italian cities of Milan and Cortina, formally started Wednesday, as NBC broadcast live from the event site for the Today show, and also announced the broad outlines of a programming plan that will include more total coverage than any prior Winter Olympics. The network is undoubtedly expecting a big resurgence for the Winter Olympics, mirroring last summer in Paris, after a 2022 event in Beijing that sank to record-low U.S. ratings. That’s particularly true as next year’s Games offer a much more favorable time-zone difference for U.S. viewers compared to the two prior Winter Olympics in Asia.

“Paris proved that the Olympics are back and remain an unrivaled media property,” said NBC Sports president Rick Cordella. “We expected Milan-Cortina to carry on that legacy. The time zone allows us to mimic our Paris programming and coverage strategy.”

The Olympics, however, will hardly be alone in NBC’s plans for a year from now. The opening ceremony next year will be Feb. 6, two days before the network also broadcasts Super Bowl LX from Santa Clara, Calif. That Olympics–Super Bowl combination is something that NBC previously had in 2018 and 2022, and purposely sought in its current NFL rights deal to also have in 2030. If NBC is able to renew its Olympics media rights that currently expire in 2032, the two-event confluence will additionally happen in 2034. 

The Super Bowl–Olympics combination, meanwhile, also allows NBC to mandate that many advertisers of one event also buy time in the other—a formula that helped the network generate nearly $1.5 billion in combined revenue from the pairing in 2022.

Even greater riches likely await NBC next year, particularly after Fox said Wednesday it generated more than $800 million from Super Bowl LIX alone. 

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There’s yet another major part of NBC’s early 2026 sports plan: coverage of the NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 15 in Los Angeles. The network gained the rights to the league’s midseason showcase as part of new, 11-year deals announced last summer with NBC, ESPN, and Amazon, and the All-Star Game will be a major part of NBC’s return to the NBA after a 23-year absence.

Such a confluence of major events within a matter of days on a single network is arguably unrivaled in sports broadcasting history. 

That situation, in turn, will be a major boost for NBC corporate parent Comcast. The company recently posted a historically strong quarter financially, but it is in the midst of significant change as it sees more lift from content programming instead of distribution and is also spinning off most of its cable networks.