FOS PM: Trial Reveals NFL’s Big ‘If’ - Front Office Sports (2024)

An eight-person jury is deliberating the $21 billion NFL Sunday Ticket trial after closing arguments were made in a Los Angeles courtroom Wednesday.

At the heart of the lawsuit, originally filed in 2015, is that the league shouldn’t be allowed to sell all of its out-of-market games as a single package. New revelations from the case show that the league did consider an extreme alternative in ’17: selling those coveted broadcasts to various cable channels, not one single company. At the time, that was DirectTV. Now, YouTube pays $2 billion annually for the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket.

On Wednesday, plaintiffs presented a league memo titled “NFL New Frontier” from April 21, 2017, according to the Associated Press. In this alternate reality, CBS and Fox still would have broadcast regional games on Sunday afternoons. Instead of everything else going to Sunday Ticket, the remaining games would have been available on a variety of mainstream cable channels like FS1, ESPN, ESPN2, TBS, TNT, NFL Network, and CBS Sports Network.

All of those networks are owned by companies that already had NFL media rights (and still do currently), except for TBS and TNT. In 2017, those channels were owned by Time Warner, which was in the process of being acquired by AT&T, which had recently purchased DirectTV, then NFL Sunday Ticket’s rights holder, in ’15.

The memo stated that payments from Fox and CBS would drop 25% to $10 million per game, while the cable channels would pay $9 million per game. This was during the NFL’s previous media-rights deals, before agreeing to $110 billion deals that began last season.

Journey Isn’t Done

While it’s unknown how seriously the NFL considered its idea to kill Sunday Ticket in favor of multiple cable partners, the fact that the league took enough time and energy to create a proposal like that shows that team owners wanted to be prepared for all scenarios—perhaps in the wake of the lawsuit’s filing in 2015. The revelation follows a previous one from the case that the NFL shot down ESPN’s proposal to offer Sunday Ticket for $70, a huge drop from $350 YouTube TV subscribers paid in ’23, as it bid to potentially acquire the package’s rights.

For now, if the jury rules in favor of the plaintiffs, the NFL Sunday Ticket case is still likely far from over. The league will have the option of going to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and even the Supreme Court, if necessary.

The Jaguars have cleared one major hurdle this week, winning Jacksonville city council approval on $775 million of public money toward a large-scale renovation of EverBank Stadium. But that crucial political win now will lead to several other issues for the team that still need to be settled.

The council’s approval by a 14–1 vote with two abstentions and two absences provided an emphatic signal of the city’s desire to remain a big-league sports town, and mayor Donna Keegan (above, right) called the outcome “generational progress.” The Jaguars will pay $625 million in the project, plus cost overruns, in what is the largest single capital project in the history of Jacksonville.

Challenges and Questions Ahead

Several issues, however, relating to the planned development of what the team is calling the “Stadium of the Future” are still outstanding. Among them:

• Approval by NFL owners: The measure must also go before other NFL team owners, and that is slated to happen at fall meetings scheduled for Oct. 15–16 in Atlanta. The Jacksonville agreement calls for a 55% contribution from the public sector. That figure is lower than the taxpayer funds going into stadium projects in Buffalo and Tennessee, both in actual amount and percentage of overall development cost. Kansas lawmakers also recently approved a bonding measure that could cover 70% of a stadium development if the Chiefs move across the border from Missouri. But amid thorny political issues in other NFL markets such as Chicago, Jaguars executives said they don’t anticipate a problem with other owners and said they “look forward to getting this finalized.”
• Where to play in 2027? The deal calls for a renovated EverBank Stadium to reopen in 2028. But the year before, the team will need a new home while some of the more substantive construction work is done. After a prior consideration of Daytona International Speedway, the leading options now are Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, Fla., and Camping World Stadium in Orlando. Both facilities are within two hours of Jacksonville, and Jaguars owner Shad Khan (above, left) said he wants the temporary home to be “close enough for the fans.”
• What about London? The 30-year lease deal with Jacksonville includes a non-relocation provision, and it limits what the Jaguars can do in London. The team will still play there once a year, except when mandated by the league to play in an additional international game. But a regular presence by the team in London that began in 2013 and included two games last year in a league first will now have clear guardrails. For the ’27 season specifically, the Jaguars also have an option to play up to three games there, again due to the construction.

‘Organizational Failure’

Khan, meanwhile, also is still lamenting the Jaguars’ end to the 2023 season, in which an 8–3 start faded to a 9–8 final record, leaving the team out of the playoffs.

“I think it’s organizational failure that it happened,” he said. “All of these players that I talked to, it’s like, ‘How could this happen? What happened?’ For me, it’s really a cause for self-reflection and then something good to come out of it, because we just can’t have that this year. For us, winning now is the expectation.”