SBJ Football: NFL may open up preseason games to streamers

To be clear, Team USA’s domination of the Fanatics Flag Football Classic is a good thing for the NFL. It’s proof there are viable flag football players outside of the league, and therefore it’s a signal to Olympic committees in other countries that it’s not necessarily a waste of time to pursue international championships in the discipline. That’s critical to hopes of flag staying in the Olympics over the long term.

NFL teams would be permitted to sell preseason game TV rights and original shows to streamers under a plan heading to owners for approval at next week’s league meeting, sources said. This is seen as a marginal but intriguing new asset for teams in the highly centralized NFL media ecosystem, where the league controls most everything of value. The NFL last season saw its best preseason viewership since 2018, averaging 2.2 million viewers a game for national broadcasts.

Today, most teams have relationships with local TV network affiliates, who typically enjoy “official partner” status and the exclusive broadcast of preseason games locally. This would expand possible buyers of those rights to include streamers, in the same fashion that Prime Video streams 21 Yankees games only in the NYC region. These NFL local TV rights tend to be priced in the low millions, sources say, though the biggest teams can do better.

Separately, these proposed rules also would allow teams to, in essence, buy the right from the NFL to distribute their preseason games beyond their home markets, sources said. Details, including how the fees would be determined, may be more forthcoming after an ownership vote. Sources also said they’ll be eager to hear more details on the new right to sell nongame productions, like coaches’ shows, to streamers, and whether the specific rules undermine the potential value.

All of these questions have been under the microscope amid a lengthy review of the NFL’s “internet resolution” and other policies that govern how teams and the league make money on the Internet, which has been ongoing since at least 2024 and is now complete, waiting for final owners’ approval.

The internet resolution dictates what intellectual property belongs to the NFL and what belongs to teams, and under what circumstances each entity can monetize it online. These rules often veer into extraordinary minutiae, but collectively, they are very important — they are the actual black-and-white text that determines, in practice, the extent to which the NFL is truly 32 separate businesses versus a single entity.

Of course, the league has built a nearly $25 billion business with a highly centralized model, and nobody is suggesting that goes away. But team revenues have not increased as quickly as league revenue has, and some believe that can be addressed by giving teams more rights without undermining league initiatives. The existing internet resolution is scheduled to expire March 31, so some kind of league vote is required. I expect to have more details of the changes after the vote.

“It’s been updated over the last couple decades, but with the continued shift to digital, they are even more opportunities for clubs to expand their digital businesses better engage their fans and develop new partners,” an NFL spokesperson said. “The changes being recommended are intended to do just that and a natural step as we continue to evolve our entire business to reflect the landscape we’re operating in.”

Sources say there is a solution to the long-simmering disagreement between the Commanders and the Ravens over their commercial rights in the Maryland suburbs, a dispute that rose to the highest levels of the NFL.

As part of the solution, the teams will now have NFL-designated “home marketing areas” that overlap in places, meaning they will both share the right to sell sponsorships, promote the team and engage in community relations programming where no other NFL team is allowed. The exact geography of the newly shared territory is still unclear, but the disagreement centered on Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, the two densely populated, wealthy Maryland communities that border Washington.

Historically, those counties have been in the Commanders’ HMA, but a couple of years ago, Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti proposed changes. He argued the limitations were limiting the Ravens’ business growth at a time of maximum popularity and on-field success.

Commanders owner Josh Harris fought that, arguing he had just bought the team at a price that reflected, on some small level, the lack of local competition on those regions. Harris rejected a preliminary league solution, fully overlapping territories in the same way the L.A. and N.Y. teams have.

The end result appears to be a partial victory for the Ravens, gaining more rights than they previously had. But it’s worth noting that this agreement came after the Commanders struck deals to build a new stadium in D.C. borders, nine miles to the west of Northwest Stadium. Sources said all parties agree on the final solution, which is coming to a vote of all 32 owners at the NFL annual meeting next week as part of a broader rewrite of various NFL commercial guidelines.

The debate raised interesting points in the unusual Baltimore-Washington corridor, where the Ravens and Commanders are the closest NFL neighbors that don’t actually share a stadium. On one hand, the Commanders have played in Prince George’s County for 29 years, and those two counties are economically and culturally more aligned with Washington than Baltimore. But parts of PG and Montgomery counties are fewer than 25 miles from the Ravens’ locker room, and no other team had such limited territory.

There’s been a small shift in the discourse around the NFL’s media contracts since my last newsletter, and it suggests the plot is becoming a bit more complicated than originally expected. It started a week ago on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” when PGA Tour CEO and former NFL top media dealmaker Brian Rolapp noted the tension between the “finite” supply of money in the market and the NFL’s desire to significantly increase the roughly 40% of that market it already gets.

Over the weekend, Sports Media Watch’s Jon Lewis said on the “Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch” that a huge escalation in NFL rights fees could even drive network parents, like Comcast, which owns NBC but drives most of its revenue in other business lines, to exit the TV business altogether. “I think that everything but the NFL, and frankly, maybe even for some networks, the NFL will get to a point where you look around and you say, ‘Yeah, I can pay this much money and do really well on television,” Lewis said. “But is that actually worth it? Maybe we just stop competing in television.”

On Monday, my former colleague, Puck’s John Ourand, led his excellent newsletter with the headline: “Is Goodell overplaying his hand?” He reported: “An interesting question has emerged among network observers and media analysts in recent weeks: What if the networks and streamers decide to just stand pat?”

On Ourand’s podcast Wednesday, Athletic writer Andrew Marchand said: “If they have to blow up their budgets, there’s going to be ramifications, be it not going for other rights or layoffs. Everything will be on the table because they just have to make up their money. They have parent companies.”

I’ve learned to not bet against the NFL getting its money. For a linear network, the downside risk of losing the NFL is too real and immediate for the league’s leverage to not ultimately carry the day. But if Ourand, Lewis and Marchand are saying this publicly, then analysts and negotiators are saying it privately: As bad as losing the NFL would surely be, there could be worse fates for a network in the late 2020s.

NFL owners will get an update next week in Phoenix on the state of media rights, though Goodell and Executive VP/Media Distribution Hans Schroeder won’t say much in front of the leaky full group of owners and exec. It’s possible we’ll hear about the status of the four-game mini-package, but one person suggested that Wednesday’s announcement of a game time for the Australia game without a distributor attached was an indication that deal is not ready yet.

Friday is the United Football League’s opening day, the seventh time in the last eight springs that a professional 11-on-11 tackle football league will give it a go. The new angle this year is Mike Repole, the UFL’s brash new co-owner (Read my SBJ cover story if you haven’t) who says he relishes the “1% chance” aspect of life and quickly relocated three-quarters of the UFL’s teams into smaller soccer-specific stadiums last offseason in pursuit of better fan experiences.

For those of you scoring at home, the benchmarks for the UFL are clear: Success requires meaningful improvement on the 2025 average TV viewership of 645,000 and live attendance of 12,163. I’d add another: Every franchise needs to average 10,000 fans per game. The “COVID game” look of the UFL’s sparsely attended matchups was a critical flaw.

If you’re tracking the league’s prospects this year, here’s a few dates on the UFL schedule to circle:

• Friday: Birmingham Stallions at Louisville Kings, 8pm ET, Fox. One of the league’s new cities and venues, Lynn Family Stadium, gets tested right out of the gates.
• April 3: DC Defenders at Columbus Aviators, 8pm ET, Fox. Another new city, Columbus, gets its home opener. It’s also an early look of the UFL’s strategy of hiring head coaches with local appeal. The Aviators are led by former Ohio State great Ted Ginn Jr.
• April 7: St. Louis Battlehawks at Dallas Renegades, 8pm ET, FS1. This is the third straight home game to start the season for Dallas, one of the teams that exchanged a much-larger stadium for a smaller venue. Also, it’s a Tuesday night, a challenge for the gate.
• April 30: St. Louis Battlehawks at Louisville Kings, 8pm, FS1. The rare Thursday game is to avoid the Kentucky Derby that weekend in Louisville, while also leveraging the crowds coming into town.
• Week 8 (May 15-May 17): All four games will be on network TV (two on Fox, two on ABC). Network/cable has been a major variable for UFL viewership. This needs to be a record-setting weekend.

A group of 28 NFL players have been in New York City since Tuesday for the second year of Bizweek, a program designed by retired Giants OL Justin Pugh and his business partners to help players improve their chances for post-career success. In coordination with the NFL and Syracuse, Bizweek brings the players to Nike’s NYC office, the New York Stock Exchange, the NFL office, real estate developer RXR and more.

The goal, Pugh said, is to teach players how to position themselves for success after their playing careers. “As I was figuring it out for myself, we wanted to know how we can send the elevator back down to send the next guy up?” said Pugh, who started a consultancy, Athletes & Us, with his business coach, Alex Yungvirt, to help retired athletes find “purpose and cash flow.”

Speakers include Michael Strahan, former Turner President and Horizon Sports & Experiences CEO David Levy and serial entrepreneur John Torrens. Organizers say the idea is to put more players in the right frame of mind, Pugh said. As Malcolm Jenkins told the group Wednesday: “Thinking about the transition begins the day you put the pads on, not the day you take them off.”

That means players should be considering about what’s next, even when they seem to have a long career left. That means knowing how to find the right people to help build a business career and make the most of your status as an active NFL player.

Some of the sessions help players understand how to evaluate investment opportunities, know when they need legal or other advice, and how to build networks. “Start reaching out to people now, when you don’t need a thing,” Pugh said. “Leverage your time playing football to bring them to a game, sign a jersey for their kids, do a Q&A for their nonprofit ... some of those things go a long way.”

• NFL owners are poised to award Super Bowl LXIII to Las Vegas at their annual meeting starting Sunday, marking the second time in five years that Allegiant Stadium will have hosted the game. Las Vegas received rave reviews in 2024 for its ample supply of event space and lodging and Allegiant Stadium’s capability to drive revenue.
• NFLPA President Jalen Reeves-Maybin defended the union’s election of JC Tretter as executive director on Monday, insisting the process wasn’t unfairly tilted toward Tretter and that multiple investigations cleared Tretter of any wrongdoing while he was the group’s president from 2020-24.
• Chiefs owner Clark Hunt discussed his family’s long history with pro soccer in the U.S., dating back to 1967 and the NASL’s Dallas Tornado at the Business of Soccer event, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp. Hunt’s brother, Dan, is the president of FC Dallas in MLS.
• Karp also writes about the Fanatics Flag Football event averaging around 650,000 viewers on Fox, on par with a regular-season college basketball game. But it found larger traction on social media.
• The Bills unveiled the design for their bison family statues that will sit in Family Circle Plaza in front of the team’s new $2.2 billion Highmark Stadium that opens later this year, reports SBJ’s Bret McCormick.
• McCormick also covers how the Commanders are building a real estate network in the NFL in this week’s SBJ Facilities newsletter.