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  • 🏈 NFL Playoff Picture Is Sharp and Clear

🏈 NFL Playoff Picture Is Sharp and Clear

The NFL Catches a Few Breaks Over the Weekend, Vince McMahon and the Saudi Public Investment Fund Are a Match Made in Hell, Amazon's TNF Ratings Were Objectively Crap

The National Football League owns January.

The National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League are in the midst of their interminable regular seasons. College football has one last gasp and then will go away. College basketball is now at least into conference play, but there are still a lot of games no one really cares about.

Not so the NFL. Plenty of this weekend's games had significant playoff implications. And from here on, every NFL game will see one playoff team's dreams quashed.

There are few challengers for "the best time on the American sports calendar" that can seriously threaten January and the NFL Playoffs.

In the email today:

1) The final playoff tally from the cancellation of the Bills/Bengals game can now be counted. The biggest winner, of course, is Damar Hamlin. 🙏

2) World Wrestling Entertainment is reportedly on the sale block, and a leading contender is the same sportswashing bunch responsible for LIV Golf. 🤼‍♀️

3) Amazon's Thursday Night Football ratings finished far behind last season's for the same product as the monolith's first campaign broadcasting games skidded to the finish line. 📺

It's another packed slate today, so let's get into it.

1) THE NFL'S DECISION NOT TO RESUME THE BILLS/BENGALS GAME DID NOT CREATE REAL CHAOS 🏈

When the NFL decided that the Bills and the Bengals would never resume their game from a week ago, it left the league open to second-guessing and some criticism.

In the end, though, the NFL probably considers itself very fortunate that form largely held over the weekend.

Particularly, the Kansas City Chiefs hammering the Las Vegas Raiders and the Buffalo Bills beating the New England Patriots kept the league from hearing too many gripes from the Bengals.

  • The Bengals still had things to play for in Week 17, but after that game was cancelled the wins by the Chiefs and the Bills left all three teams in the same place they were before Week 17 began.

  • The only remaining complication the league could face is a possible neutral site AFC Championship game, necessary because the Bills beat the Chiefs in Week 6 and, if they had beaten the Bengals in the abandoned game, would have claimed the top seed via that tiebreaker.

  • Even when the league loses, though, sometimes it wins at the same time. A neutral site game will not only be (probably) more even in terms of the point spread — it brings a lot of fun conjecture to where the game might be played. The Raiders have already tossed their hat in the ring.

How much revenue could be generated by a Chiefs/Bills tilt for a trip to the Super Bowl held at a neutral site in Las Vegas, where the desert sands are made of gold?

And perhaps above all, the league made the objectively correct decision in cancelling Bills/Bengals and, to now, paid little-to-no price for it.

Maybe the league got lucky...but then again, we've always found that the more correct decisions we make, the luckier we get. Except that parlay on Sunday.

2) VINCE McMAHON AND THE SAUDI PUBLIC INVESTMENT FUND MAY BE ON A COLLISION COURSE 🤼‍♀️

We reported late last week that Vince McMahon, recently the deposed king of his own World Wrestling Entertainment empire due to scandal perhaps of his own doing, had re-emerged to oversee a possible sale of WWE.

If McMahon was particularly concerned about the optics of his abrupt return and how this sale goes down, there are reportedly "safe" suitors — you could do a lot worse than selling out to the likes of Disney or Comcast.

But this is Vince McMahon. "A lot worse" is where he collects his mail.

Sweet Baby Jesus. You will recall that the Saudi Public Investment Fund ("PIF") is the same lovable cadre of scoundrels currently trying to destabilize (end?) the PGA Tour with LIV Golf.

If the PIF was coming to this possible endeavor with the goal of making things right by WWE's performers and/or "cleaning up the mess," it might be possible to overlook some of the inherent difficulty presented by the PIF's involvement in sports or, in this case, anything resembling sports.

That's not the PIF's bag, though. As reported by Michael McCarthy and A.J. Perez for Front Office Sports:

  • "If PIF makes a run at WWE, it will bring up again the question of whether Saudi Arabia is trying to 'sports wash' away its history of human rights abuses and treatment of women."

  • The killing -- on American soil -- of respected Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi for his stated dissent against the Saudi ruling regime in 2018 has never left the American media consciousness.

  • Along those lines, it is an open question whether the Saudis will find willing media partners to broadcast WWE if the PIF acquires it, insofar as LIV Golf still does not have a broadcast partner.

No one here is naive enough to believe that McMahon is going to take anything less than every dollar he can extract from selling his company.

It's a strange time, then, when all of us on the "anyone but the Saudis" side of the fence is stuck hoping that the likes of Disney and Comcast, greedy American corporations in their own rights, will ride in on a white horse and keep the PIF from claiming another prize.

3) AMAZON'S THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL RATINGS DOWN A WHOPPING 41% FROM LAST SEASON 📺

We followed Jeff Bezos' Thursday Night Football gambit with serious interest at the outset of the NFL season. Then, if we're being honest, it sort of fell off our radar.

Well, according to Daniel Frankel of nexttv.com, what we missed was a slow drift toward diminished irrelevance or, as Frankel cleverly called it, "Streaming Off a Cliff."

The lowlights are plentiful.

  • Amazon Prime Video only managed to draw an average of 9.6 million viewers per game this season, down 41% from the 16.2 million viewers who watched TNF games on (depending on the week) Fox, NFL Network, Amazon and local outlets last season.

  • The 9.6 million viewers per week is the lowest number the NFL has ever seen in the entire time it has offered the TNF package to broadcast outlets in 2014.

  • In the "well, that's not a great look" category, Amazon tried to downplay just how bad its product performed by claiming that, if you take out a Christmas Saturday 2021 game that the NFL included in the TNF ratings numbers, the true 2021 TNF average is 13.1 million viewers per game, meaning the drop-off is *only* 28%.

No matter how Amazon wants to spin this situation, though, a billion dollars is an awful lot of money to pay for the privilege of effectively depriving millions of NFL fans from the opportunity to watch the only games the league plays on Thursday nights.

It is exceedingly rare to see Jeff Bezos fail at anything. Even Bezos, though, would have a pretty difficult time convincing us that Season One of TNF on Amazon Prime was anything resembling a success.

Kyle: I'll have an only barely marginal alt take here, but I think the results are more mixed. There was never the expectation - despite the gaper delay that was Week 1 - that TNF ratings on a paywalled streaming service would match that of broadcast TV or cable. Despite the hand-wringing from streaming types-- cable "cord-cutters" still have access to either free broadcast TV or streaming bundles like YouTubeTV, which had allowed them to continue watching TNF games prior to this season. Meaning, the pool for potential viewers was always going to be lower this season (Prime subs only). The question was how much smaller would the audience be. The NFL now gets to make the calculation as to whether more of these streaming-only deals and the money derived from them is worth the lack of audience and promotion that, still, regular TV broadcasts bring with it. Don't sleep on the the top of funnel awareness that network broadcasts, backed by local news talking heads on the same network, and other cross-promotion, still bring to the NFL.

JOB LEAD OF THE DAY 💰

It has taken us awhile to get to Creative Artists Agency, one of the heaviest hitters in all of sport, but here we are.

This job is a Partnership Strategy Professional position with CAA based in New York. The primary goal of the position appears to be this: "Build and maintain deep relationships with our sports property clients to surface their most exciting, sponsorable assets, audience insights, history and heritage as well as their success stories."

Three to five years' experience "in a consultative, sports marketing role" is a requirement. The salary is not listed, but in truth, if you have any interest in working in this field, we cannot think of a more prominent place to go than CAA.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON? 😎

  • We can't believe it either, but we have lived long enough to see Erin Andrews go from sports' "it girl" to sort of a Karen. 😳

  • The iffy vibe around United States soccer these days isn't helped at all by Taylor Twellman's departure from ESPN. 📺

  • Here's more of a feel-good story: Damar Hamlin's #3 Buffalo Bills jersey was recently noted to be Fanatics' biggest seller across all sports. ℨ

  • Additionally, the Bills/Bengals game (and the coverage of Hamlin's injury) became the most-watched game in ESPN's history. 🏈

  • As NBA defenses continue to, um, work their way into game shape, sportsbooks are having to adjust overs up...way up. 🏀

  • New York, unsurprisingly, set the new record for sports betting handle in 2022, approaching a staggering $16 billion. 💵

  • Former Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar lost his team-affiliated radio job due to a ceremonial, proceeds-to-charity bet he made once sports gambling became legal in Ohio. 🎙

  • The NFL had 19 of the top 20 highest-rated broadcasts in 2022, with the only outlier being President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on March 1 -- which happened a week after Russia invaded Ukraine. 🏈

  • The Los Angeles Dodgers will eat $22.5 million in salary to rid themselves of Trevor Bauer. ⚾️

  • The "hockey players are the toughest athletes" trope gained more validity given Winnipeg Jets defenseman Blake Wheeler's decision to play through a ruptured testicle. 🏒

WHAT TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR BEFORE THE NEXT SEND 👁️

This email was compiled today by the Raising Stake staff. Jason and Kyle contributed. Images from Getty.

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