Don’t miss Monday’s Sports Business Journal magazine, which has my profile of retired 49ers/Browns CEO Carmen Policy on the cover. It was a ton of fun to hear all the war stories from some of the Niners’ greats, NFL owners and execs who watched Policy’s career up close.
Brian Rolapp is one of a number of significant departures from the NFL exec ranks in 2025. Getty Images
At least eight people with the title of vice president or higher in business roles have left the NFL in the last six months. Why? No one factor can explain all the departures, but sources tell me it’s a “fair question to ask” at a time when the league appears to be firing on all cylinders. Much of it revolves around perceived challenges in professional advancement, with limited formal promotions and something of a logjam in titles at the levels just below Commissioner Roger Goodell’s C-suite.
Note this: The last formal promotion cycle for vice presidents to senior VPs was in September 2022. The last time any sitting senior VPs were promoted to executive VP was more than six years ago, in March 2019. Meanwhile, insiders say, it was always clear the league was looking externally for fresh faces in the recent searches for new executive VP-level roles (general counsel, chief financial officer and head of HR).
Other sources suggested that an ultra-lean approach to league HQ staffing was a factor to frustration among the most ambitious staffers. Even at a time of unprecedented largesse, team owners ask pointed questions about league staff headcount. Also, there’s the NFLPA collective bargaining agreement that shares revenues almost evenly with players but makes all expenses the league’s problem. So that means if you have a business proposal that costs $10 million to implement, it needs to generate $20 million to break even. (They call that CBA math.)
No one’s calling it a crisis. Obviously, some of these departures are retirements (Howard Katz), and others are for especially prominent new gigs in sports (Brian Rolapp). But the turnover has been noticed.
The NFL’s not the only place to see turnover, said Excel Search and Advisory President Chad Biagini. After a post-pandemic period when stability seemed to be the main goal, sports execs are now looking for good opportunities elsewhere and finding them.
“We’re seeing as similar trend across the broader sports industry, where in the past people traditionally stayed with some of the biggest, most recognized brands in sports, because if they left it was hard to get back into bigger brands,” Biagini said. “Today, we’re seeing a market where those same brands value creative career paths and experience at faster paced, more entrepreneurial environments.”
In 2024, CBS Sports brought "The NFL Today" on location for the first time in the regular season when it distributed Chiefs-Bills to the entire country. NFL-TODAY-COWHER
For the second time this season, there’s a Sunday afternoon game this week with truly national distribution, a phenomenon we’ll see more often as the league pulls inventory from the usual windows to create new prime-time and experimental broadcasts.
CBS only has one game in the 4:25pm ET window on Sunday, Chiefs at Bills, following a similar situation in Week 2 when Fox only had Chiefs-Eagles in the late window. “It happens two to four times a year, but probably more frequently due in part to the fact there’s just fewer games total on Sunday afternoons,” said NFL VP/Broadcast Planning Mike North.
Let me explain why this is so interesting to me: For decades, the NFL has understood that you maximize Sunday afternoon viewership by regionalizing coverage of several games, while emphasizing the best one as a “Game of the Week” that goes to most -- but usually not all -- of the country via CBS and Fox’ alternating doubleheader. Yes, the star matchup drives the headline ratings, but fundamentally the league is still banking on local fan bases. (That is, they know NFL viewership in New Orleans is always best for the Saints, and is always best in Cincinnati for the Bengals, even if there’s a heavyweight matchup involving other teams, too.)
But geography isn’t what it used to be when it comes to fandom. Video games and social media have broken the local ties quite a bit, at least with younger generations. Ask any 12-year-old about their NFL preferences. Has that trend gone so far that the NFL actually gets more viewers with a national game?
Not quite, North said. “Home markets still matter,” he said, saying that this week’s 4pm window on CBS would probably get more eyeballs overall if it were regionalized with other games. But it’s not by a huge margin, he said, and allowing the heavyweight Chiefs-Bills tilt to have a window to itself has other benefits (such as allowing fans to watch their home teams at 1pm and then watch the national game.)
“More games would probably make for better viewership, but by how much? And if it’s only a couple of percentage points, maybe we’re better off deploying it in a different window,” North said. “It’s not just maximizing for CBS in Week 9. It’s to maximize the viewership of all partners in all weeks.”
Fans who wish their team was 7-1 like the Colts are wondering if their owners should be more like Carlie Irsay-Gordon. Getty Images
A deceptively simple question in pro sports: What makes a good owner? We know ownership influences competitive results, but exactly how it does, and exactly how much blame or credit to assign to an owner in any given situation is a very squishy concept.
That’s why it’s so interesting to see the coverage and social media buzz around Colts principal owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon in her first season taking over for her father, Jim Irsay. Irsay-Gordon is doing one of the most visible, unconventional things any owner has done in a long time: don a headset on the sideline to listen first-hand to the live game communications. Her team is also winning big. That means people love it, and wonder if maybe other owners would be wise to do the same. Now, to be clear, if the Colts were 3-4, the headset thing might come off very differently. But they’re 7-1.
For most of my adult life, the prevailing attitude among sports fans has been that owners should generally open their wallets, shut up and get out of the way. Too many teams have seen owners get impatient, get emotional and forget their own shortcomings. (I can’t stop thinking about Dan Snyder and Albert Haynesworth.) Indeed, that skepticism around “micromanaging” drove a lot of the reaction when people outside of Indianapolis noticed what Irsay-Gordon’s done for years.
But Irsay-Gordon might be steering the pendulum back in favor of owners who roll up their sleeves. At least as long as the Colts keep winning.
Meanwhile, Jones keeps doing what he does best
Speaking of owners, Jerry Jones made the Wall Street Journal for his day job. He’s invested $1 billion into Comstock Resources, which is taking over a plot of rural eastern Texas where Jones claims there is “$100 billion present value in gas out there.”
“That’s why I’m talking to you on the telephone rather than trying to fix our defense with the Dallas Cowboys,” he told the Journal. Click through; it’s worth a read to see what he’s got in mind for our energy-hungry world.
Lululemon obtained an NFL license and is launching an apparel and accessories collection including the marks of all 32 clubs for sale on Fanatics and NFL retail channels. The collection will not appear in Lululemon’s retail locations.
Former HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg joins host Austin Karp on this week’s SBJ Sports Media Podcast to discuss the future of the in-season version of “Hard Knocks.”
CBS’s NFL coverage in October was its best in 10 years, capped off with 25.3 million viewers on Sunday for the Broncos’ blowout of the Cowboys in the national window, notes SBJ’s Josh Carpenter. For the month, CBS’s telecasts averaged just over 19 million viewers.
ESPN’s third annual Funday Football animated alt-cast will feature Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. for the Eagles-Chargers “Monday Night Football” game on Dec. 8, reports SBJ’s Joe Lemire.
Clark Construction Group and D.A. Everett Construction Group will build the $800 million Bank of America Stadium renovations set to start in 2026, writes SBJ’s Bret McCormick.
