Joining me right now is my friend John Orand from Puck News.

John, for my money, is the best sports media and best sports business reporter and columnist and podcaster out there.

His podcast is called The Varsity with John Orand.

You can follow John on X on Twitter at Orand underscore Puck.

So I had to reach out to you this huge NFL network ESPN deal.

It seems like there's a lot to it.

So I'll just let you start with describing it because I think a lot of us don't really know why this

happened and what the details are.

Well, this is going to be the strangest conversation that we've had, Kevin, because there are so

many tentacles to this. I don't even know where to start.

Tell me about the deal.

It's a kind of a crazy deal. A league is taking an equity interest. It's owning 10% of one of

networks that carries its games. It's a fascinating deal. I don't have in front of me exactly what

that 10% stake is worth. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask that, of course, yeah.

And, but it, you know, like, it's in the billions of dollars, of course, I mean, it's way up there.

And, uh, um, for, so let me guess. I mean, it's way up there.

And so let me just go through, actually, the motivations for doing this.

And the NFL for four years, I think, has had its media networks up on the block,

trying to sell them.

And the main reason for the NFL doing this is because every time I come on, we talk about the cable business, and it's imploding, and it's continuing to implode.

And you've seen NFL network go from, you know, 70 million homes to, I think it's probably, you know, closer to 40 million homes right now.

And the NFL, the shield, it never wants to be associated with a declining property.

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