Colin Cowherd Podcast - Dodgers/Cubs Tokyo Opener, Caitlin Clark’s Massive Impact, College Football Playoff Changes

it's very wonky, but I always get tremendous feedback. Michael, and I want to start with something that's kind of fascinating to me, and I don't know the answer on ninety percent of these questions. So we have added at Fox the Cubs Dodgers opening series in Tokyo, obviously driven by two things Sho Hee o Tani and the remarkable success of those brains. Those are big baseball brands. Throw

the Yankees in. They're probably the three biggest brands. But it's interesting when I see that, I wonder how Fox management thinks. Does Fox look at it and say, listen, we're not gonna make money on this. I mean to do a remote expensive to go to Tokyo's all diffootball game. But it kicks off our baseball season, which we had such a just a remarkable national legue, playoffs in the World Series. I mean it just baseball. Probably the best baseball ratings in a decade in terms of outside of

the CUB season overall performance. So is this something that a company looks at and says, hey, listen, great momentum, let's keep it going, biggest brands, We're going to lose some money on this, it's just good for the business. Or can you go into a series and it can be viable? And I'm just I'm this is again so wonky in this probably private information, but give me the most honest answer you can.

They're a cornerstone of the Fox network and we value that relationship tremendously, and we want to look for ways to be creative partners, be innovative partners, and over a one hundred and sixty two game regular season, you know, I think that means looking for novel, exciting different locations to have a game. And over the last couple of seasons that has meant Field of Dreams. It's meant rick Woodfield in Birmingham, Alabama, a great tribute either the Negro

leagues last year. This year it's going to mean Bristol Motor Speedway. We'll do a baseball game within the interior of a NASCAR racetrack. It has meant London, and now this year for us, it's going to mean Tokyo. And I'm like, we can make a dollar on those two games. I think it's a great way to start the season. It's a great way to bring some excitement and novelty

to what is a very long regular season. I think not just we at Fox, but everybody in the Commissioner's office is looking for ways all the time to develop tent polls and develop sort of interesting events for the regular season. This is a great way to start it, and we want to send that message that it's an important season for US. It's a milestone season. This is

an incredibly important partner. We value the relationship enormously and we want to start the season in kind of a fun, exciting novelty and particularly acknowledge the intense popularity of the game in Japan, Like clearly we're sending the right team there, and I think it's going to be a great way to start out the season.

Now it's more international, not really a face of the league Baseball and when the kind of regional networks were sold at Fox, they don't have the same gravitas, they don't have the same economic pull and what it's created through no fault of anybody is the haves and the have nots. There's a bigger gap there. Well, that's not necessarily bad for a television network because the best teams are Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, the two New York teams. The cub has made a huge pick up with Kyle Tucker.

So it's interesting. I don't know the health of the sport, you know, you and I that's not our concern. But there is a moment now where it does it not feel like baseball? Through through Otani driving up the I five, Soto actually leaving the Yankees going to the Mets, which makes them a villain to half of New York, does it not feel like baseball? Is probably the healthiest it's been from a television product since the Cubs year.

on regional sports network revenue. But it's always been true that in baseball, brands make stars, right, And you could sort of contrast that to the NBA, where I would say in the NBA, stars make brands. Like a player like Steph Curry can go to the Warriors and take a franchise that was always sort of an afterthought in that league and turn them into the most valuable franchise in that league. That's Lebron going to Cleveland, it's Curry

going to the Warriors. That's a pretty well established dynamic in basketball, whereas in baseball it's really hard to become a national star unless you're playing for one of the big brands, right. I mean that's true going back to Roberto Clemente.

esque fascinating. But you consider that stuff right when as Fox, you consider how the player makes the brand, when you schedule games based on player movement.

capable of developing superstars and national household names. And we're probably headed to another season where the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Phillies, the Braves, the Mets are going to be ninety plus win teams and all going to get into the postseason. And so in the regular season you have that advantage that were the benefit of CRUs to the

bigger markets and the bigger payroll teams. And yet the postseason acts as a little bit of a leveler and an equalizer where Baseball has created this format in which yes, those big payroll, big market teams get in, but they also get in alongside Arizona, alongside Cleveland. A team can get into the tournament and get hot and get to the World Series. So you've got a little bit of an imbalance in the regular season that we do try

to take advantage of. But then that equalizes a little bit in the postseason and you can end up with the World Series that is Dodgers Yankees, or you can end up with the World Series that we had two

years ago, which was Diamondbacks Rangers. When the World Series is Diamondbacks Rangers, that's obviously not optimal for our ratings in the short term, but I think it creates a perception of competitive backs balance and a belief across all the fan bases that they do have a chance to get journaman and maybe get to the World Series, even if their payroll is one hundred million dollars less than a Dodger payroll or a Yankee payroll. And I think that's a quality that's unique to baseball.

I'll give you an example. I think, and this is again, this is not a revelation that we're becoming more of an event society. Due to the social platforms, we're a distracted society. It's more frenetic TikTok. It's harder to get people's attention. But I look at Fox and we have the World Cup an event, ANFL event, college football event, indie racing an event. This is really smart to me,

This is really smart programming. I think Death Valley is Monday through Friday league programming hockey, NBA, to some degree Baseball as well, that it's very difficult to grab the attention in non event times. We are becoming. Olympics still rates World Cup clearly, Dana White, Saturday Night Fight Cards still rate that. It looks like it has been very intentional by Fox, that you've been about you've been ahead of this, that you are thinking about how the culturally

we become more an event society. Now, is this coincidence or is this stuff you and Shanks and all the big wigs talk about.

But we're not really defined by the eight thousand hours. We're defined by the Super Bowl, and we're defined by Freddie Freeman hitting a Grand Slam in Game one of the World Series and the World Cup Final, the moments that are really resonant and memorable, and that's what we're selling to our advertisers. That's also what we're selling to our audience, that we are a place that you can come and share an experience with somebody that's important to you.

And we talk a lot about the social connectivity of sports and how that sort of underlies our entire business. But we want to be a place where you can come and share an experience and maybe have a memory with somebody that matters to you that you have for the rest of your life. And to have that, you really do have to be focused on the big events, the Super Bowls, the World Series, the things that might create a lifetime memory. And now that for us, that

also means the Indy five hundred. You know, we want to continue to look at ways to develop events that could potentially create a once in a lifetime memory for somebody.

and relationships. We have a streaming venture coming up. Relationships with YouTube. Fox News is obviously a juggernaut in an industry that is regressing. But The New York Times still makes money in newspapers, and Delta and Southwest Airlines in that in the aviation field, which has been under great financial duress many times in my life, they're still industry leaders. You can make money in industries that shrink. How do we view cable now? I mean, I've said this to you.

I'm sixty, Michael. I can't give cable up because I like college football and I'm not giving it up. And it's and by the way, I also like news and politics, so I'm not giving it up. I mean it's like, I like streaming, but if I want to watch you know, political stuff live CNBC, Fox Business Channel, that's that's. As I get older, I kind of watch news, sports and politics more. How do you view cable? How viable is it? Is it a five year runway, eight, ten or three?

certainly viable, very profitable. It's funny we we have a lot of conversations in this business about cable as a declining part of the business. Sometime it's put in even more negative terms than declining, and yet when companies like ours come out with their quarterly earnings, you often find that it's still the cable networks that are driving a

huge percentage of the earnings. Right Like WBD owner Brothers Discovery, they just had their most recent earnings call, and on that call, it was all the traditional linear cable networks that are driving billions and billions of dollars in earnings for a company that is still varies significantly in debt and trying to climb out of that debt, and their cable earnings are a powerful engine to try to get them out of that situation. So the earnings on the

cable side are still extremely significant. It may not be a growing part of the business, but it's still a very profitable part of the business. I do think there's been in the sports world a little bit of a movement toward taking some of the best events from cable and putting them back on the podcast where you potentially have more reach. And I think there's something special about being on broadcast. But the idea that cable is going to disappear, cease to exist, stop being profitable, I think

that's a long way away. You know, you still have tens of millions of people who are comfortable with the cable bundle. Maybe there's some inertia in play there. They like the ease of use, they like knowing where to find everything. They like knowing that your show if they're a Direct TV subscriber is on Channel two nineteen, and they know where they can find Monday night football. They

know where they can find the NBA Playoffs. There's a simplicity to it that is really compelling, and I think, particularly for older consumers that grew up with cable, they're not moving away from it anytime soon. I think we're a long way from the end of the bundle.

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three of those companies, maybe two. Like everything else. You know, you know how the world works, right, people gobble up smaller companies. And I look at streaming. Everybody has Netflix first, in better rates, better production, cash heavy, asset heavy. They're fine. I look at Disney. It still feels a little wobbly where they're now churning a profit, but they lose seven hundred thousand subs on their on their plus, so I mean it's it's still not quite there. Amazon's fine. They

have a revenue, a reservoir. Amazon has a reservoir of money. It's a It's the retail giant globally, right or at least domestically. But I wonder when you look at streamers, there was this thought five years ago streaming winds, everything else loses. And I look at it today and I see a lot of red, and I see a lot of people watching television. There was a sense five years ago streamers were taking over the world. At some point,

you have to make a profit. Do you do you still feel like the dread of we're all under this streaming dark cloud and it's about ready to strike us down.

to seven years are Netflix and I think us. You know, I think we've been able to navigate that as well as anyone because we didn't over invest in what I would call an independent streaming platform. We remained committed to the cable bundle. Were still committed to the cable bundle. And I think being patient and not getting into that

streaming arms race has served a really well. Streaming means a couple different things, right, and we sometimes talk about it as if it's a monolith, as if it's all one.

useduld be called HBO Max. And then the third type of streaming is streaming that sort of replicates your cable bundle like Hulu Live and YouTube TV and a place where you can go to get a package of networks, but rather than it being delivered via a cable in the back of your TV set, it comes through your in home Wi Fi. So I think when we talk about streaming, we have to be careful to define what kind of streaming are we talking about. We are getting

ready to go into the direct to consumer business. Our chairman Blachlan Murdoch has been very open about saying we intend to have a direct to consumer offering ready by this coming football season. It changes the way that we think about certain aspects of how we program. We now have to think in terms of having twelve month a year strength so that we can keep a subscriber dialed

into us all year. But I think we're really comfortable with the way we've managed this evolution, and I don't think that we're in a situation where streaming is necessarily going to take over everything. I mean, I think there will be a continued incremental migration of some properties or fractions of properties moving to exclusive streaming. But I think we're also seeing a lot of success in properties staying on broadcast, and that's the NFL. We talked about the

World Series ratings being at a seven year high. We have done this deal with IndyCar where we're now going to put every IndyCar race on broadcast and try to

take advantage of the power of the broadcast platform. And I think what they're what we're finding is that there is a path to coexistence, right that we want to have strong, viable broadcast television I think there are very compelling reasons why that's important, not just for sports, but it's just important for communities to have strong broadcast TV.

I don't think the cable bundle is going away anytime soon, and I think there's still room for streaming to continue to grow its audience and to add more exclusive sports rights. But I think it's a little simplistic, and I think there've been some lazy takes out there suggesting that everything is going to go to streaming. Not everything is going to go to streaming. And when it goes to streaming,

as I say, that means different things. That can mean that you are going to a huge tech company, or you're going to streaming, but you're still within the Fox family, or the NBCU family, the Paramount family, or it just means that fifteen to twenty percent of your audience is watching via a bundle of networks that's delivered via the Internet rather than delivered via cable. But I never bought into that more apocalyptic idea that the entire business is

going to streaming and we're all doomed. There's a migration there and there will be a new equilibrium, and I think we're getting close to it already.

you know the old cliche content is king. It really is true. Like if you have good content and good games I watch. I think it's interesting. You know, my love for college football, and so I like all the new moves. I like NIL though it's imperfect. I like transfer portal, though again there needs to be you know, there needs to be a fence around in a little bit. And I like the convergence of Texas Oklahoma to the SEC and the PAC twelve schools, four of them going

to the Big Ten. So last year is the first year. The ratings were a bit disappointing, although I do think the first round matchups were choppy. I tend to think we're a bit hyperbolic as media critics on things like things take time to work themselves out. I think it'll be better in the second year when you schedule college football and you do this every year Big Ten. It feels obvious to me that Michigan and Ohio State are

the number one in two brands. If I said, now you have Oregon and the marketing machine of Phil Knight, big market Washington Penn State USC, although it feels again like it's underachieving. If you take Michigan and Ohio State out, what brand moves the needle in the Big Ten that maybe I would be surprised? Is there a definitive third I would guess Penn State? And is there a game or a team that would surprise me?

NBC has the primetime window. Because we have that noon window, it's almost inevitable that Oregon is just not likely to be as impactful to us as schools that are in the Eastern and Central time zone. I think again, I don't know that this falls under the heading of surprising, but I think every year we look at Nebraska as a sleeping giant, and we hope for Nebraska to get close to the kind of success that they had when you and I were kids. We had them on a

Friday night last year. They got off to a pretty good start to their season. They hosted Illinois in a Friday night game. That game did over four million viewers. That's terrific for a Friday night. That sort of hints at what Nebraska could be if they ever got close to the kind of success that they had years ago under Tom Osborne. So certainly Michigan, Ohio State at the top, Penn State next for us because we had that early window.

Oregon and SC obviously also very important, but their home games are going to be in later windows, and Nebraska kind of lurking as the brand that you always hope might sort of reawaken and drive the kind of viewership that they once did.

just what the schedule makers give you. What do you say to the critics of Ohio State that say, hey, man, you're killing us. We need night games. You can't just keep going back and forth to us. What would you say to the critics, Well, the.

six consecutive weekends to finish the season. So that wasn't by design. It was sort of just a product of circumstance. And I do understand the frustration that some Buckeye fans may have felt at the end of last year. I want to back up a little and try to put into some context the way that we see the scheduling of the games and the deal that we have with the Big Ten. Right what's the most significant thing that's

happening in college sports right now? I mean, I think obviously the most significant development and the most positive development, is that the athletes are moving closer and closer to

being fairly compensated. Right Athletes are getting paid. And you know, when I see a story that Carson Beck is in Miami and he's making over four million dollars and he's driving a Lamborghini, like, my knee jerk reaction to that is that's awesome, because we have decades of history in college sports where the athletes that drive all the value were not being compensated appropriately and coaches were getting rich.

Media executives were getting rich. Everybody was making a lot of money except for the athletes that actually drive the value. And so we're now finally in a position where the players, the young men and increasingly young women, who really drive the value of these properties, are getting paid the way

that they should get paid. And whatever complexity comes with that that makes a coach's job harder or makes the environment maybe a little bit more challenging, all those challenges are secondary to the right of the athletes to maximize their earnings. I mean, I very very strongly believe that. And so, as in any labor market, right, top talent

is going to follow top compensation. And as the athletes are getting paid more commensurate with their market value, there's more and more pressure on the conferences and more and more pressure on the schools to maximize revenue so that they can go out and get the best talent. That brings us to the media rights. The Big Ten is the best compensated conference in the country in terms of

media rights. The reason they're the best compensated conference in the country is because they have multiple partners, because they have a deal with US and with CBS and with NBC, I think that's what enables the Big Ten to realize more media revenue than the SEC, which is obviously the other power conference in college football, and they've gone exclusively

with Disney. So by having multiple media partners, it sort of creates a requirement for US to have a designated window, for CBS to have a designated window, for c to have a designated window, for US to apportion those games

out via a draft. We don't have the freedom that Disney has to just put the best games wherever they want to on the SEC side, And when you have multiple partners and the games are being scheduled via a draft, you're going to get to some inefficiencies like Ohio State playing a bunch of games in a row at the same time, or a frustration that Penn State fans had when they had a home game last year that a lot of their fans wanted to be in primetime as the white out it was a big new game. Instead,

their fans were extremely vocal. I heard a lot about it, right, But those are all things that are connected to macximizing revenue for the conference, therefore maximizing revenue for the schools, therefore maximizing revenue for the players, and that's the most important thing, making sure that the kids are compensated in the right way, and that the schools can go out and get the talent that they need to compete for a national championship, which is why I think we now

have a situation where at the very very highest level, that handful of schools that are going to compete for a national championship in football every year. The Big Ten is just as good as the SEC, and may even be pulling ahead a little bit. And it's because of that revenue generation that's largely tied to the media rights.

as I've said, Taylor Swift and tennis shoes. It is just a once in a generation. It's Tiger Woods, the golf, it's Shoeo Todi. It's like, oh, it's an event. Every game's an event. Is the WNBA a viable TV product? Or is it we have a once in a generation talent? Obviously the WNBA would not allow you to just buy

a Caitland Clark package. But is she powerful enough because she could have a twelve to fifteen year run here, Michael, is she powerful enough a singular star with a little bit of a magic Larry Bird quality because of Angel Reees? That absolutely helps sort as a story we could follow us Americans. We love our stories, we love the journey. Reese is part of this. Is that over the next fifteen years going to be a viable TV product? Or do we just have a megastar? And that's all it is?

WNBA viewership last year. You know, I think when we looked at Indiana Fever games versus all other WNBA games last year, the Caitlin Clark games were doing triple the viewership of the rest of the league, and that is a Tiger Woods level of impact. I don't know that there's ever been anybody in Team sports, even Michael Jordan, where you would look at their games and see them doing triple the average of the rest of the league.

So I do think a big part of it is that once in a lifetime phenomenon of Caitlin Clark, and we should just acknowledge the obvious and make it clear that she is plainly the driving force behind the growth of the league. But at the same time, if God forbid, Kaylyn Clark had a career ending injury, she were out of the league. If Kaitlyn Clark just were taken out of the equation, I still think the WNBA would be on a growth trajectory, and it wouldn't be the kind

of exponential growth that we saw last year. But this is a product that was moving forward pretty steadily prior to Caitlin. And even now, if you look at the collegiate level, yes, seeing growth, ESPN seeing some growth. You've still got this next generation of superstars. That's Gugi Watkins here in LA, it's Page Becker's in Connecticut right Like, we're still seeing progress post Caitlin. And it makes me think that, like, obviously she's the catalyst, She's what drives

the explosion of interest. I think sometimes we overstate the idea that it's more than Caitlin. But there was a growth curve there before, yes, and I think it would continue even if we were somehow in a post Kaitlin.

it's not always great for all things domestic. Is that when I watch these women's basketball players go to the pros early they played four years Caitlyn Clark was a three year So I heard about her when she was a sophomore junior. It's a national story. She's a phenom as a senior, and so what's happening. This is the way people forget that you ing and Tim Duncan and you know Chris Paul's I mean, Michael Jordan didn't come out after his freshman year. People forget it was at

Carolina and didn't win a title. And so women's basketball is a lot like men's college basketball was in nineteen eighty eight. Is that the stars stayed and I had a story and there were rivalries, Burden Magic, and then they went to the draft and I had heard of them, and then I followed them in the NBA. And so I'm with you on this, Caitlyn's part of it, But I think as NBA has gotten more international, the domestic component to women's basketball actually fortifies their growth. Like sometimes

it's a distracted as society. Michael, I want to follow simple stories and watch in Iowa and U con Baylor. It's real easy I can follow. Yeah, the journey's easy for me to follow. So maybe I'm wrong on that, but that's just how it works for me.

be familiar. When a player moves from the collegiate level to the professional level, whether that's basketball or football, it's incredibly helpful for the fan, the viewer to have two or three years of history of getting to know this player. So I agree. I mean, that's absolutely true of Kaitlin Clark, But I was like you and you can watch the w NBA Draft and you know, you do know Angel Reese and you know Cameron Brink and you've seen them

play in the tournament. And to give some credit to a competitor, you know, the job that ESPN is done

in growing the women's collegiate tournament is extraordinary. You know, we like to think that we're just as powerful as they are in women's basketball during the regular season, but you know, the growth that the women's tournament has enjoyed is incredible, and there's absolutely a direct connection between the success of that tournament and then the success that you saw last year in the WNBA ratings.

getting better. Netflix is a content giant, so I tend to think they get content. They get documentaries, they get films, they get specials, but that doesn't necessarily mean they get sports. And I have been disappointed with Netflix attempts at sports events. This is where I think networks are excellent. I think our production values at Fox are second to none. I think NBCCBS these are tiffany experiences. These are tremendous production experiences. I mean the Super Bowl. I mean Fox will go

eight hours live or seven hours live. But commercials to production, they make you cry, they make you laugh. The Jimmy John it's an aipiece. It's just spectacular. I would argue that if a Netflix came in and said, all right, we are buying a bigger NFL package, I would argue they would be better served to say, hey, Fox, can you produce it? You're really good at this production thing. I'm just telling you, as a consumer, all companies do

things well. I don't think these streamers understand the value and how hard TV production is. So I mean that's just my take as a consumer. Tell me I'm wrong, lay it out, fire holes in this, But I still think network television has a role in sports, even with streamers.

or than a worldwide tech platform can be. And I think one of the reasons that it's so important for major sports to remain on over the air broadcast television is because of that role broadcasters play. You and I are both in southern California, right we just lived through the LA wildfires. On the night that the wildfires happened. If you look at TV ratings here in LA, people who had power and were able to watch TV that night, they chose local news over national news by a margin

of almost ten to one. When something really serious, when there's a serious emergency that happens in a community, people go to their local broadcasters. That was true out here. That's when a hurricane threatens the Gulf Coast. It's probably true in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina last night and today.

People rely on local broadcasts. And so if the viability of local broadcast television is dependent in part on those stations having marquee sports sports that will keep people subscribed to a cable bundle or that will keep advertisers coming to that station. I think it's incredibly important that we keep as much high profile sports as we can, or at least keep a significant percentage of high profile sports on broadcast, because broadcast and local journalism really matters a lot.

And I think there's something very pro consumer about making sure that big sports events stay on broadcast TV, not exclusively, but predominantly. And I think a lot of the power of sports that we have talked about from time to time is that it does bring communities together. It brings

people together. It matters to a city when the Philadelphia Eagles do a sixty rating for the Super Bowl or a fifty for the NFC Championship game, meaning that literally fifty percent of the market is tuned in that can

only happen on broadcast TV. So I do think there are unique qualities to free over the air broadcasts that as an industry, we need to acknowledge that there's real value there and that there's something special there that has to be protected not just for the benefit of the leagues, but for the benefit of the communities that these broadcasters serve. So that's me on my soapbox about podcasting wife, it was like the quality of production. Just to get to

the other part. I think Amazon's production of Thursday night Football is awesome, right, and.

will be viewing of sports. Over fifty percent of our viewing is going to be viewing of the NFL. If we don't do a great job on the NFL, if we don't do a great job producing it, we don't do a great job selling it, we don't hire the

right talent, we don't have a company. And I think that is very different from some of these other companies you're describing, where I think Amazon does a great job with Thursday Night Football, The reality is that the revenue that they generate from Thursday Night football represents a tiny, tiny fraction of one percent of the revenue that Amazon will do this year. Same thing is true with Netflix.

You know, Apple has a more limited sports presence, but obviously, like the revenue that they generate from sports is just infinitesimal compared to their overall business. At a company like Fox, NBC, Disney, CBS, sports just means more. It means more to our bottom line, It means more to our very existence as a company. We have to be great at production because if we fail at this, we fail as a company. If the big tech platforms fail at producing live sports, they don't

fail as a company. It doesn't really matter that much to the future health of Amazon or of Apple. And again I do think they produce the events really well, but you just can't deny that it's a bigger portion of our business. It's a higher priority for us company, and it affects the people that work here, it affects our shareholders, it affects every part of what we do. That we have to be excellent at game production. There's just more of a mandate and a necessity at a place like this.

these companies are relevant. I mean, they're obviously incredibly relevant to the culture at large. They don't necessarily need that live they want the live sports relationships. But Apple doesn't need live sports rights to demonstrate that they matter in this culture and in this country. Amazon doesn't either. Netflix at this point certainly doesn't. We do, and I would say the other broadcast networks do too. We need the

NFL to insulate us against being irrelevant. And the companies in the legacy world that are sort of on the outside looking in when it comes to the NFL, they would immediately gain relevance by having it, and by not having it, they have to look for other ways to

demonstrate that they actually matter in the culture. So I think that's where the importance of marquee sports rights is a little bit different in our legacy broadcasting, cable driven world than it is in the world of tech giants that are worth a trillion dollars whether they have live sports or not.

put it on the schedule to be less inconsiderate. They are more considerate this time. And Michael, you know, I just think highly of you and I really do appreciate you taking the time.