SBJ Unpacks: TGL continues providing ESPN a boost

The fourth match for TGL on Monday night was up 27% from Week 3 (a Tuesday airing) in the league's first meeting of Tiger Woods' and Rory McIlroy's teams, but down slightly from the comparable ESPN window on the same Monday night last year, which featured a Duke-Virginia Tech men’s hoops game.

ESPN drew 864,000 viewers in the 6:30pm ET window as Tiger Woods’ Jupiter Links beat Rory McIlroy’s Boston Common Golf in overtime. The match peaked at 1.1 million from 8:30-8:44pm ET in that OT window. TGL was up from 682,000 viewers in Week 3 (no Woods, no McIlroy), but down from Woods’ debut in Week 2 (1 million) and down from the TGL debut (919,000).

TGL is now averaging 874,000 viewers after four weeks. That’s up 33% compared to the comparable four college basketball games in the same windows last January (658,000 viewers for those games).

TGL also was well above another “new league” on Monday night, scoring more than 4x the audience for Unrivaled on TNT/truTV (Vinyl-Lunar Owls drew 134,000 in the 730pm ET window, while Roses-Laces drew 192,000 in the 8:45pm ET window).

ESPN and TGL will return to its Tuesday window in Week 5. The sides had to make a decision on an earlier window this week in order to get many players out to Pebble Beach for this week’s PGA Tour event. TGL is then back on Monday with a tripleheader on Presidents Day (Feb. 17). It alternates between Mondays and Tuesdays then the rest of the season.

As the talent and production crew rehearsed for a recent NFL playoff pregame show, Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks ducked into the control room at the network’s Los Angeles studio, making sure to quote his old boss properly.

Not long after launching Fox Sports around the network’s newly acquired NFL rights in 1994, then-president David Hill laid out what Shanks described as three “key rules” that would underlie the way the network produced sports:

Assume nothing. Less is more. Be cool.

Thirty years later, and nine years since Hill’s departure from Fox’s News Corp parent, his words remain above the door for all who come and go to see.

“His impact is still felt here daily,” Shanks said. “There’s probably not a day goes by that I don’t think, what would David do in this situation? He still really is our North Star here. Everything that we do here and how we present and how we treat people and the culture of this place all goes back to David.”

As founding architect of Sky Sports in the U.K. and Fox Sports in the U.S., Hill revolutionized the way sports television was presented on both sides of the Atlantic, doubling the number of cameras and emphasizing dramatic music and on-field sound as no one had before on live sporting events.

The results were both dramatic and practical, with perhaps none more important than his introduction of what became known as the “Fox Box,” an ever-present graphic that showed the score and time for the entirety of every game the network aired, an unprecedented practice when he first mandated it for Sky’s Premier League telecasts.

For that vast and enduring impact, Hill will receive Sports Business Journal’s Lifetime Achievement Award for 2025. He will be honored at the Sports Business Awards on May 21 in New York City.

“I was just getting into the business as a pup when he was basically revolutionizing American sports television,” Shanks said. “There’s before David, and then there’s after David. Like, BD and AD. That’s still how I think of sports television in this country.”

An acknowledged confidant to News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Hill built out a robust portfolio that began with the NFL, but soon included the NHL, Major League Baseball and NASCAR. With each addition, he pushed for innovation.

Some, such as the glowing puck, flopped mightily. But many, including a recast of the look and sound of NASCAR broadcasts and a slicker, more dramatic treatment of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game and World Series, endured.

He left Fox Sports for a broader EVP role at parent News Corp in 2012, departing the company in 2015 to launch a Fox-backed production company.

“He would inspire you to be your best and to always come up with something new,” Shanks said. “You definitely wanted to make him proud, because his affirmation of you was kind of everything. And he led by example. There was always an idea coming. You don’t know until you do it if it’s going to work. And you would have a lot of fun trying.”

Hill took an unlikely path to sports television’s pinnacle.

His first job was as a copy boy at the Sydney Daily Telegraph, where he landed one of two hard-to-secure apprenticeships on the reporting staff. After two years there, he jumped to television, where he found his calling as a reporter, anchor and documentarian.

A move to sports put him behind the camera, as producer of a weekly anthology show where boss Kerry Packer became his mentor. When Packer asked him to liven up the network’s traditional, staid cricket broadcasts, Hill’s creativity was unleashed. He added new camera angles, buried microphones in fields and introduced an animated duck that traditionalists abhorred.

It was a dry run for the way Hill would approach sports telecasts on far larger stages.

When Murdoch placed a massive bet on Britain’s first satellite TV company with the launch of Sky Television in 1988, he recruited Hill to build and run its sports division from London. Three years later, Hill negotiated a deal that proved  foundational, landing Premier League rights for the pay-TV service.

Knowing he’d have to distinguish his Premier League broadcasts from the telecasts viewers had been getting for free, Hill upgraded them mightily, deploying 18 cameras rather than the standard 10, and placing a premium on sound.

The Premier League also was where Hill hatched the innovation that changed sports television on both sides of the Atlantic. Frustrated after tuning into a Chelsea match one Sunday afternoon and waiting 20 minutes to hear the first mention of the score or how far into the match they were, Hill decreed that it would never happen again.

From that day forward, all games on every network he was associated with would feature an ever-present graphic with the score and a running clock.

The Home Depot continues to invest in soccer marketing assets in advance of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America, signing a multiyear sponsorship agreement with U.S. Soccer. In addition to being designated the official home improvement retailer of the federation's 27 national teams, The Home Depot also becomes a supporting level partner of the forthcoming Arthur M. Blank U.S. Soccer National Training Center in the company’s hometown of Atlanta. Blank, who donated $50 million toward the project, co-founded The Home Depot in 1978.  

The Home Depot’s deal with U.S. Soccer, which was announced this morning in a ceremony at the training center site, follows the brand linking up with FIFA as an official supporter of the 2026 World Cup last month. Supporter-level deals with FIFA for 2026 are said to be valued in the mid-eight-figure range. 

Specific terms of The Home Depot’s deal with U.S. Soccer were not disclosed. The Home Depot’s sports marketing agency of record, Octagon, represented the brand in negotiations with the federation. The brand is U.S. Soccer’s 17th current corporate partner and the 10th it has signed since bringing its commercial rights in-housein 2023. 

U.S. Soccer sponsors

• AT&T

• Allstate

• Anheuser-Busch (Michelob Ultra)

• Bank of America*

• Coca-Cola*

• Deloitte

• Haleon*

• Henkel*

• Home Depot*

• Jim Beam*

• Marriott Bonvoy*

• New York Life*

• Nike

• TicketMaster*

• Truly*

• Visa

• Volkswagen

* - New sponsor since U.S. Soccer brought its commercial rights in house in 2023.

The Chiefs-Bills thriller on Sunday marked the most-watched AFC Championship game on record, as CBS drew 57.7 million viewers for the showdown, per Nielsen data. That tops the prior record of 55.5 million set last year by Chiefs-Ravens. The last Chiefs-Bills matchup in the AFC title game, also in primetime on CBS in 2021, drew 41.8 million (the COVID season, where audience numbers saw a direct impact from that). Chiefs-Bills this year is also the best for any NFC or AFC title game since 57.6 million for Giants-49ers in primetime on Fox in 2012. Chiefs-Bills is slightly better than the 56.7 million for 49ers-Lions in primetime on Fox last year.

Earlier on Sunday, the Eagles’ 55-23 throttling of the Commanders on Fox drew 44.2 million viewers, marking the least-watched NFC title game since Rams-Saints drew 44.1 million in 2019 (before Nielsen was adding out-of-home metrics). Eagles-Commanders is well below the Chiefs-Ravens afternoon AFC title game last year.

The Texas Rangers have formed a new business entity called Rangers Sports Media & Entertainment Company, and Neil Leibman is leaving his role as team president and COO to oversee it.

Leibman will serve as chairman of the new company and have oversight of both Rangers Sports Network, which will produce and distribute broadcasts of the team’s games locally, as well as REV Entertainment, which launched in 2021 as the team’s official sports and entertainment partner.

REV Entertainment also serves as the booking agent for Globe Life Field, the Rangers’ home ballpark since 2020, and Choctaw Stadium, where the team played from 1994 through 2019.

Of the new company, Leibman said, “It will be owned by the Rangers, so it’s all going in one pocket.”

The team has been loosely operating under the structure for the last two months after a decision primarily from owner Ray Davis.

In January, the Rangers announced that their direct-to-consumer streaming home would be Victory+ via owner APMC. The newly formed RSN will be available within Rangers TV territory through select broadcast platforms.

Jim Cochrane, who has been in the Texas front office for 28 years, has been promoted to Rangers EVP and Chief Business Officer. Cochrane will oversee all business revenue areas for the franchise, with additional responsibilities including marketing and ballpark operations. 

A season of experimentation amid a new, expanded College Football Playoff format delivered ESPN lower viewership compared to past iterations, even with the marquee names Ohio State and Notre Dame in the championship (the title game was down 12% year-over-year).

But with a new experience for colleges, fans and brands alike -- combined with extenuating circumstances, like heavy competing coverage of California wildfires and a presidential inauguration -- the CFP and ESPN are not yet looking to shake things up.

ESPN presented viewership data to the CFP Management Committee before the championship game, and sources with knowledge of that presentation told SBJ that the general sentiment among the group was that there was no commitment to any substantive schedule changes in Year 2 of the expanded CFP.

There was little appetite at this time to bring the first round up to Heisman week (also Army-Navy Week). In fact, for the first-round games on TNT Sports that went up against NFL regular-season games on broadcast TV, sources noted ESPN data in the presentation showed it was the NFL that may have lost a more noticeable share of audience by competing with the CFP (meaning the loss of audience for the two afternoon CFP first-round games was not as bad as expected).

As for the semifinals -- down 15% YOY-- which were later in January and held on separate nights for the first time (Thursday and Friday), there also was no concerted movement among CFP stakeholders to change how those games fall on the schedule just yet. 

While conference commissioners and CFP execs got the presentation before the lower CFP National Championship numbers, there were also mitigating factors in Year 1 for that title match, as the event had to compete for eyeballs with inauguration day coverage (networks like Fox News, Newsmax and other cable/broadcast networks saw elevated numbers for news in prime time).

Patience can also be explained by looked at ESPN's non-CFP bowl game numbers this season, which clearly showed a strong appetite for postseason college football. ESPN had its strongest non-CFP bowl average since the 2019-20 season.

Experts see CFP numbers as positive

Media rights consultants also advise against sounding the alarm, referencing the growing decline in linear TV audiences overall. One expert referenced increased audience share going to places like YouTube and Netflix, where programming isn't measured with a traditional Nielsen metric (Netflix's NFL doubleheader being the exception).

“All of Disney combined for streaming and linear is like 2.5% [of the TV watching universe in the U.S]. Getting 20-30 million people to watch something is a big deal, and the fact that [the CFP is] down is missing the point,” added the consultant.

ESPN beginning with the 2026 season starts a six-year extension with the CFP. As part of the extension, starting with that season's title game in January 2027, ESPN will simulcast the CFP Championship on ABC, which is another factor very likely to increase viewership. The new ESPN deal, which will run through 2031-32, also has a “look-in” provision that would allow revenue and formats to be reexamined in 2028 -- or sooner should there be “material realignment.”

“ESPN has lost [around] 30% of their subscriber base over the last few years,” noted another media consultant. “It would seem obvious [to use ABC], like what they did with the NFL and 'MNF.' But ultimately, it comes down to the matchup and whether it’s a high-quality game or not. I would imagine there’ll be some tweaks next year, but going forward under the new ESPN extension, you may be looking at 14 or 16 [teams]. Going head up against the NFL doesn’t seem sensible to me.”

After the meeting between the CFP and its behemoth media partner, it doesn’t seem apparent that any major changes to the media windows will change -- after all, the championship is scheduled for Monday Jan. 19 next year -- also MLK Day.

And the CFP Championship itself continues to grow as a tentpole event on the sports calendar. My boss Abe Madkour dished on his CFP experiences in Atlanta in SBJ this week, writing in part, "The CFP must get more engrained with mainstream culture and build more year-round brand recognition."