Colin Cowherd Podcast - Caitlin Clark’s Star Power, Ohtani Big For Dodgers Or Baseball? Most Powerful NFL Brands, The Future Of Sports On Cable TV

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And Michael Mulvahill, the President of Insights and Analytics at Fox across the Board, is one of those powerful guys. But he's so disarming first of all, and second of all, he's got I mean, it's a perfect title, Insights and Analytics, and there's so many things. I don't really talk a ton about my industry. If I do, Michael's the guy at Fox that I talk to. So there's a kind of a myriad of topics here. Let's start with something

we've never seen before. Caitlin Clark. Now, years ago, when Tiger Woods came into golf, there was this sense that, oh, golf ratings are going to explode, And my takeaway was, no, when Tiger leaves. I mean, three million people take up golf a year and three million people quit. It's hard, But there are these Caitlin Clark, Michael Jordan figures in our life that are just unique and spectacular. Women's ratings

have been growing. Do you see Caitlin Clark as the creator of a new reality, or to some degree she's just a spectacular unicorn with her style, tenacity and excellence for multiple years.

I think what we're seeing is the payoff of literally over fifty years of Title Mind and the way that that's changed the way that girls have access to sports, and the way that both men and women think about women's athletics. And it's brought us to this moment where college basketball ratings on the women's side are up sixty percent across all networks, and Caitlin Clark's game on Sunday against Ohio State did almost three and a half million viewers.

And I think your question is the right one. You know, what does this mean going forward and is Caitlin at Unicorn And I don't think she is, you know, I think that what she is is she's at the four front of an evolution in the skill level that we see in women's basketball and the players that are coming up behind her, whether that's Page Beckers who's coming back for another year at Connecticut or Juju Watkins who has several years to go at Southern cal and obviously they'll

be part of the Big Ten next year. I think she's just on the leading edge of a new generation of players that are elevating the game. I think Tiger Woods is an interesting precedent as well. I think you could even go back as far as the nineteen eighties NBA where Magic and then Jordan entered the league and they were at a skill level that we hadn't seen before, but they just represented an evolution of the game that

then continued even after they had moved on. So I think on once Caitlin moves on to the WNBA, I'm not sure that we'll see viewership at the collegiate level. That's exactly what we're seeing this year, But I don't think it's a reset back to where we were five years ago. Either, I think a a permanent step forward has happened, and we're still going to see some pretty strong interest in the future.

came from four different leagues. It's too much. It's a turnstyle when you add the transfer portal to the one and done. If I can't name three duke starters, but I can name two Iowa women's starters, that tells you what's happening. I would argue the G League.

He's Jalen Green.

will be on broadcast. The men's national title game will be on cable. That makes a big difference. If Caitlyn gets to the championship game, and plays a big brand name school. I don't know that that necessarily means that the women's game is going to outrate the men's, but I do think that margin is going to be tighter than ever. And I think you're right. I mean, I think a lot of what we see on the women's side, we're seeing elements that we used to associate with men's

college basketball decades ago. What I mean by that is that you've got stars who play four years. Caitlyn Clark could have chosen to come back and play a fifth year. The nucleus of top teams stays together longer, you can build rivalries. If Caitlin Clark plays Angel Reese in this year's tournament, again, there's a carryover effect from Sparis Treament, and that's become really, really rare on the men's side.

And I do think that's a little bit And look, we're obviously very invested in men's college basketball too, so we only wanted to do well. But I do think that there are some well established handicaps on the men's side that we don't necessarily see on the women's side, and it helps contribute to that closing of the gap.

to baseball and Joe a Otani. So a friend of mine went to a Padre spring training game.

But now you're talking to the Dodgers the LA market. This guy is, you know, six ' five Hollywood looks, and he's a power hitter. You know, there's a Paul Bunyan quality. We love our Mark mcguires and our Aaron Judge, Reggie Jackson generationally, we do you know, Johnny Bench, We.

a long time. For whatever combination of reasons, it tends not to work that way in baseball, and sho Hey Otani was never really able to eleve the brand of the Angels, even playing alongside Mike Chobt. He's got an argument is every day layer at right. So now moving to the Dodgers, you're moving into that environment where the brand helps make the stars.

Shohei Otani. I think it's great for the Dodgers. I think their home games this year will take on a little bit of the feel of what Laker games feel like when the Lakers are good, where it's got that celebrity wattage and just the field that comes with a big event in LA and that's going to be amazing. All that said, you know, the reality is that the baseball postseason, more than any other sport, has a high degree of randomness. And the Dodgers might have one of

the best everyday lineups that we've seen in years. They could go out and win one hundred and fifteen games, and still when we get to October, we're going to be holding our breath to see if they can win three out of five and get to the next round, then four out of seven and get to the World Series. You just don't have that confidence that, even when you have a super team, that they're necessarily going to advance. And that's just sort of a byproduct of the construction

of the baseball postseason. So I think it's a big deal. I think it's great for this city, But as a part of the company that's the rights holder to the World Series and has been for a long time, I think we have to sort of moderate our expectations for what Otani can mean, because it's just the nature of baseball that you still have a reasonable chance that no matter how good the big brands are, there's still a path for Arizona and Texas and smaller market teams that

win eighty seven games to get to the World Series. Yeah.

FS one show. It's just sort of a radio TV combo. Right, It's a simulcast play the hits, and so I do about sixty five percent of NFL. It's the hit and during the Alabama and Georgia dominance. And I love college football. I think you know that I scaled back for about eight to ten years. I felt the sport was very regional, and I had said continually, you have to have USC, Texas, Michigan. They have to win two. This past year, although USC wasn't good it felt much broader, and so I increased

significantly my college football talk. My guess is I will double it this year based on taking the four biggest brands of the West into the Midwest, Texas, Oklahoma into the best conference or you know, depending on the year and the teams the SEC as a company. It has been suggested to me, because the ratings were up this year in college football, that it could take a precipitous jump this year and really stabilize and confirm it is the second most watched sport in America. So A is

it now clearly? And BDU suspect that's where we're going with a convergence of big brands and new conferences.

broadcast TV. I think Fox has been self serving for me to say this, but I think we've been an important player in that because we've moved our best games to noon, which means you now have great games at noon, great games at three thirty, and great games at primetime, and so it creates a better day of college football and you're seeing more times than with the sport. I actually think right now, and I'm like you, I've went through a period where maybe it was a little bit

bearished on college football, really preferred NFL Sundays. I don't think there are any better days in sports now than college football Saturdays, because you have so many games, so much available to watch, so much able to bet on if you're a person who's inclined to take a little action on some of these games. And I think every college football Saturday is now really on par or even better than the Thursday and Friday of the first weekend of March Madness, which you just think of as a

feast of all days sports viewing and sports betting. So I think college football is an incredibly healthy place. The expansion in the Big Ten, you know what it means for us, And this is what you were alluding to earlier. Now you've got Ohio State Oregon as a game that's on the schedule next year. USC Michigan is a game that's on the schedule next year. You're going to have these interregional rivalries and huge games that weren't previously possible.

I would imagine most of the people listening aren't aware of this. But the way that college football games give a signed across the networks is that we literally go through a draft, right So in the ten draft box has the number one pick, take Ohio State Michigan. The networks take turns drafting, and that's how the games are assigned, which is a little bit different than the NFL. You still do that, Yeah, yeah, it's one of the most interesting ectors. When are you doing that?

go till six, seventh, eighth, ninth. I mean, at the depth of quality games, the number of games that I would feel comfortable putting in a Fox noon window, which is our showcase window. There are at least forty, if not fifty games like that. I would imagine that. I would imagine that in the Disney offices. When the ESPN folks look at the SEC schedule now that they've got Oklahoma and Texas coming on board, they probably feel the

same way. I mean, the depth of great games in those two conferences is just extraordinary, I think, And look, I understand people have there there's a lot of complexity around NIL and now there's the possible unionization of college athletes, and there are a lot of like important issues playing out in the collegiate space. But I think, just in terms of a television product, college football's never been stronger, and I think it's going to be even stronger this fall.

fill your stadium. So I've always thought the Niners were undervalued as an NFL market. San Francisco's obviously a big city, and I do wonder about Pittsburgh that was so dominant for years, but it's a small city relative to other big markets. So if I said to you six best if Fox could pick and now these days you guys share AFC NFC, if I said to you, all things considered, market brand quarterback, can you unveil like the top six or seven picks in this league.

some team could step into and become that third marquee brand. Certainly, it's been Dallas for a long time now, Kansas City's right alongside them. I think when we talk about our schedule and when we talked to the league about what we would like to have for next season, Dallas and Kansas City very clearly have separated themselves from the rest of the league. And then there are a number of teams that have the potential to become that third marquee team.

Philadelphia definitely is one. Philadelphia was a holding penalty away from sending the Super Bowl to overtime two seasons ago. They obviously struggled second half of this season, but that's a big brand. They've got exciting star players. The market of Philadelphia, it's not only is it one of the biggest cities in the country, but it rates extremely well. Philadelphia contributes more viewers to our national viewership than any

other city. So if Philly can bounce back from that tough second half that they had last year, they're definitely eligible to become that third big brand. I think you're right about San Francisco. San Francisco's another team was very close to winning a championship. Deep and talented on both sides of the ball, fun to watch. They play that kind of positionless offense that I think is very watchable and just fun. So San Francisco is another one. Still

a lot of built in following for the Packers. They looked a lot better in December than they did in September, which is what they to be, so they have the potential to step up. I think Buffalo is a giant.

I think what's interesting with Buffalo is that not only is it the quality of the team and the quality of Josh Allen, but there's just a culture around that team and the idea of the Bills and Buffalo being a super passionate football city that has been at the doorstep of a championship a couple times and just never

quite got there. There, They've got a little bit of that Chicagos of the NFL feeling, right where if they the big game, that becomes an enormous national story, and you could probably put Detroit in that category.

So Cable obviously has been eroding for several years, for about a decade, talked about for about six seven years, but you know, about ten years ago people started. People within the industry didn't talk about it publicly. They try to keep it secret, but it started happening. But yet the ability by Fox to team with YouTube create streaming

eventually here is stemming some of the losses. My show, for instance, we were up twenty five or something percent this year, and cable is eroding, and I'm gonna throw something at you. It's theoretical, and Michael just literally take a pinata to it if it's crazy. But I've made this argument that if TikTok, because of government regulations, was regulated to a level that only two things could be on it, culinary stuff and pet stuff, and it lost

seventy percent of its audience. But culinary and pet videos where all that was allowed or all that flourished, that it would be an incredibly dynamic platform for those two right industries. Well, television now cable TV is sports and politics, Linear TV sports and politics. So people say cable's dying, and I'm like, no, yes it is, but it's overwhelming.

We don't share it with anybody. We share it with Trump and Biden for five Otherwise, television's now dominated by the industry I grew up in, so that as the platform may be dissolving or shrinking or regressing, it's now wholly owned by two factors, of which it should be noted, Fox, between politics and sports, is well suited to flourish. So when you look at the cable erosion, they've been talking about newspaper erosion forever. New York Times is more powerful

than ever in my opinion. Mean, they bought the Athletic which was for four or five hundred million dollars. I don't know how to position it or if you can talk about it too much, But what do you make of the cable erosion? But some of those losses appear to me beings are stemmed by sports gambling, the increased dominance of sports by YouTube and relationships. Talk me through how you view that.

to mean to sports rights going forward? I think if you want to understand our business, a good place to start is to simply understand that for the entire time that you and I have been doing what we do, sports content has in some way been subsidized by non sports fan who pay for cable TV, and so for the last forty years, while media has changed incalculably, what we've always seen in sports is a rising number of PATV subscribers, more people paying for content, and so the

pool of money available to us in sports has just grown and grown and grown. Nobody our age or younger, has ever really known what it means to be in a contracting sports economy. Well, now, because of that what you're describing where people are getting out of the cable bundle, entertainment viewers are figuring out that they can get the content they want from streaming platforms, and so fewer and

fewer non sports fans are paying for sports content. That era of subsidization is either coming to an end or it's already over, and that pool that we have to pay for sports rights is going to contract, and it forces all of us to be a little bit more disciplined in our deal making and in the way that

we consider rights opportunities. But what's also interesting there is that as that number of people that are subscribing to cable TV shrinks and it goes from nearly one hundred million to now closer to seventy million, you know, I believe that most of the people that are getting out of the sports, that are getting out of the PayTV bundle, they're not really big sports fans. They're people who are

subscribing to cable for entertainment content. Now they're getting their entertainment content from Netflix and from Prime Video, Disney Plus. And what that means is that your number of cable subscribers is going down, the revenue associated with those subscribers is going down. And yet because those people that are leaving the bundle aren't sports fans, the people that are left behind are spending more of their time on sports

and on twenty four hour news. And so here we are for this year to date, FS one viewership is up seven percent, right, may not sound like a lot, but when you're in an environment of declining subscribers, to have any growth is pretty noteworthy. Your show is growing, Nick Wright show is growing. We see shows on ESPN still growing. If you talk about live events, NFL, college football, we talked about women's basketball earlier. NASCAR has been up the last couple of weeks. There's a lot out there

that's growing. And so sort of the paradox of it is that the viewership for sports in many many cases is going up, and yet because that subscriber base as eroding, the revenue associated with sports TV is going down. And so there's a little bit of a decoupling between popularity

and revenue generation. And I think it's very confusing to people because you're constantly reading about record ratings for the Super Bowl, record ratings for college football, and yet we and companies like ours don't necessarily have the same The revenue streams that we draw on to make these deals aren't as powerful as they were even just a couple

of years ago. So that's a transformational change. It's I think it's it's a major adjustment for people who do what I do and who have only ever known and expanding sports economy, and it's going to affect all of us, right.

It affects what's available to spend on rights, it affects what's available to spend on talent, it affects people like me right, like, we all are going to have to sort of redemonstrate and re establish our value because we can't just rely on the rising tide of growing cable revenue. So that's kind of a long explanation, but that's probably as best as I can put in.

bit on the NBA. I mean, right now, Bang for the Buck are women's It's basketball is the best value in the world of what ratings to you know, what we paid for it doesn't that just come down to like any business, I don't want to simplify it, but I'm a simple guy that you just have to make more prudent choices, you've got to let stuff go. I mean like baseball is a great example. Like if we're losing one hundred and twenty million, we just can't do

that anymore. We'll just take fewer game. Doesn't it come down to just choice. We're not getting out of the sports business, but we may just get out of some of the sports businesses.

You know, we certainly we were born to do football, right. Sports was created when we got the rights to the NFL starting with the nineteen ninety four season, and I don't think we've ever really moved off the idea that our identity is wrapped up in the game of football, and that's very much where we want to be. You know, just recently we did an analysis where we found that a majority of sports viewing across the entire calendar year

is now viewing of football. Right, So, across the twelve months of the year, I think fifty two percent of all sports viewing is NFL college football, and you can throw a little bit of spring football in there too. I think when we talk about the power of sports on television, what we're often really talking about is the power of football. Right Football has become sort of a stand in for the strength of the sports business in general.

So from our perspective, we really identify with football. That's what we build our brand on, very much aligned with the fortunes of the game. What's good for football is kind of good for Fox, and that's probably where our investments are going to continue to be predominantly. And again that doesn't mean that there aren't other sports that aren't incredibly valuable, but I think another company might value them differently than we would.

just don't add live like we do here in the States. Right. So the players come over, they bring a family member to they sleep, they play basketball, they train their very far. They're very mature. I think European kids, you know, they smoke a little earlier than ours. They drink with their parents when they're fifteen. It's a different lifestyle, of different culture. My mom told me a lot about that. As a

British mother, I wonder about the NBA. I think international sports make the sports better, but not necessarily from a rating standpoint, as viable to the networks, Like I think the NBA. The ability for Wenby at seven to four to come down. He's got handles, he can break a guy off the dribble and hit a three chet Hongren. It's insane. I mean, these guys were all back to

the basket guys ten years ago, twelve years ago. Is it possible that the globalization of sports, though it could be good for revenue and shoe sales and the aesthetic. The quality is not necessarily great for domestic ratings.

the Iowah haw Guys for four years. Yeah, and we just know that brand, and we know that conference. You sort of know what it represents. And when she when Caitlin Clark goes to the professional level, she brings the benefit of those four years of playing for a really well known American university with her. So I wonder about

that too. You know, we're not that far off from an era of basketball that will be post Lebron and post Steph and the dominant players, it seems are going to largely be players who learned the game and grew up outside of the United States, And as I say, I'm not taking a position that that's necessarily bad for the game, but I think it's an open question. It's going to be fascinating to see how accepting broad American audiences are to.

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your timetable? If Shanks comes to you and says, hey, listen, we're negotiating this college football. Because so much of our business is fluid, how far do you look in advance?

of the NFL contract. Right Like, this is the first year of what could be as much as an eleven year deal. And I don't know that it's really beneficial for us to try to anticipate what's going to happen beyond that. But we are trying to think about what might happen on a three year horizon, a five year horizon, especially as a lot of viewing is moving two streaming platforms and maybe more sports rights will be going to

streaming platforms. So I would say we're typically thinking in a window of anywhere from the next three days to maybe the next five to seven years, and beyond that. Somebody smarter than me can think about what the future beyond seven years looks like. And it's hard enough just trying to figure out next season.

We're going to kind of push in the direction I don't think a fourteen to sixteen team playoff eliminate most of the bowls make December in the first week of January because it's kind of been a dead time in college football. You play the Big Ten Championship game, then we all sit around and watch the Sun Bowl. I got nothing against Elpaso. I've been there three times, but it's like this is there's a wide open spot real

estate here. People are on vacation, you know, people are home, like they're just sitting at home for weeks in December early January. Is it possible looking ahead, this college football playoff will not be twelve teams. It could be sixteen, multiple buys, twenty four or do you think the framework of twelve feels like the future or the near future.

So I think there are logistical challenges just in landing a twelve teen playoff maybe aren't widely appreciated, and they're only going to become more difficult as you add more teams. But just in terms of you know, viewership, potential, public interest, competitive intrigue, for lack of a better word, like the idea of going to a sixteen team playoff, I think there's certainly enough the interest to support it.