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As part of an interview with the social media account Flushing It, DeChambeau addressed his uncertain contract status with LIV Golf with a roundhouse kick.

“It’s where I want to be, but ultimately, it’s got to make sense for everybody,” DeChambeau said. “Because I could just do YouTube golf and be totally fine as well.”

Bryson’s comments came in the aftermath of the most significant piece of LIV Golf news of the 2025 offseason: Brooks Koepka’s announcement that he would be leaving the league to spend more time with his family, and perhaps to return to golf on the PGA Tour. The cause of Koepka’s departure from the league is not believed to be related to a contract dispute — according to several reports, the five-time major champ still had time remaining on his initial LIV deal — but it sparked a series of discussions about the contract status of the other LIV stars, DeChambeau chief among them.

The two-time U.S. Open winner is perhaps LIV’s biggest success story, a star player whose defection has coincided with a meteoric rise in his own popularity and public image. Of course, much of that growth is due to DeChambeau’s prolific exploits on YouTube, where he has gained 2.5 million subscribers (as of this writing) and has become the face of golf in new media — but LIV has also played a role, too, greasing the skids for the enigmatic pro to build his own platform and audience while still competing professionally.

“LIV gave me the economic viability to do these things — to be able to keep doing YouTube and growing YouTube,” DeChambeau said in early 2025.

But now, as the calendar flips to 2026, it might be said that DeChambeau has at least as much value to LIV as the other way around. From LIV’s perspective, DeChambeau’s superstardom and megaphone make him indispensable: He is a star player who moves the needle for a league that needs to move it. But from DeChambeau’s view, LIV might not be as necessary: The league’s money is valuable, but thanks to his exploits on YouTube, DeChambeau can have a platform, a voice and an income without LIV.

In other words, as DeChambeau put it to Flushing It, the price must be right.

But what is the price? Well, long before his next LIV contract was a source of palace intrigue, DeChambeau gave us a glimpse into the economics of his YouTube account via an early 2025 interview with the Joe Pompliano Show.

“What’s funny is, and I can say this, I’ve invested over $1 million in YouTube,” DeChambeau said. “Creating a company, and being able to effectively distribute the AdSense revenue and all this extra stuff, and it’s what I want to do, it’s what I care about.”

DeChambeau went on to say that he has hired “double-digit” employees to join his content creation apparatus, Regecy, which helps to ideate, produce and execute the social media ideas that wind up on his channel.

“Am I making money off it right now? I’m not,” DeChambeau said. “And that’s the cool part about it. I hope people can see that I’m doing this because there’s a genuine interest in growing the game of golf. I genuinely care, man. I genuinely care about growing the game.”

Does that mean DeChambeau’s YouTube exploits are losing him money? Well, not exactly. YouTube’s economics are based on a grand bargain: an ad revenue share between the platform and the creator. This means that for every dollar a YouTube video earns, YouTube takes roughly 45 cents and the creator roughly 55 cents. Revenue is paid out based on video performance, usually around $1-5 per thousand views. If we take the middle of those rates for DeChambeau’s videos, or $3 per thousand views, we can extrapolate that a one-off viral hit like Bryson’s Break 50 video with Stephen Curry has earned him more than $20,500 (and counting).

But the good thing about YouTube content? It compounds over time. Well-executed viral videos continue to accumulate views, which means they continue to make money. So if Bryson’s account continued to generate in the neighborhood of 20 million views per month across all of his videos, as it did in 2024, and if those videos each earned a rate of $3 per thousand views, then Bryson’s account would have earned a hefty chunk of change at the end of the year — perhaps as much as $800,000.

And that’s before any of the other moneymaking levers pulled by famous YouTube stars every day — strategies like brand partnerships and targeted ads and in-video promotions that can amount to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, for stars of DeChambeau’s 2.5 million-subscriber ilk. (And yes, that’s not counting the role DeChambeau’s fame as a tournament golfer plays in sponsor discussions — though it can be assumed that it helps DeChambeau’s bottom line.) In other words, it isn’t hard to see a world where DeChambeau’s status as a YouTube megacelebrity (and golfing superstar) helps launch a content business worth close to the $45 million valuation raised by Good Good Golf in March 2025.

What that all means for LIV’s negotiations with DeChambeau isn’t yet clear. Perhaps DeChambeau was merely exercising his god-given right to leverage when he threatened to leave LIV for YouTube, at which point his threats read more like an effort to add a handful of extra zeroes to his next Crushers contract. But perhaps DeChambeau wasn’t kidding about becoming a full-time YouTube golfer — and a part-time tournament player — should LIV’s final offer not meet his needs. That would read as one of the most astonishing developments in this strange period in pro golf, even by DeChambeau’s own maverick standards.

Could a player of DeChambeau’s stardom plausibly leave professional golf for YouTube? It’s too soon to say. But it seems clear the next Bryson DeChambeau LIV negotiation will center around a first-of-its-kind binary in the golf world: either a very big Golden Ticket … or the whole damn chocolate factory.

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***

The final round of the 1997 Masters began with a prophecy.

“There’s a new era about to dawn on the most magical setting in golf,” Jim Nantz said, his voice set under a shot of the flowering azaleas of Amen Corner. “Today, all of Augusta’s records are in danger, as 21-year-old Tiger Woods is poised to make history in the final round of the Masters.”

Nantz’s line might have sounded like hyperbole to those watching from their living rooms that spring, but we know today that it was one of the understatements of Nantz’s career. A new era was dawning at Augusta National … and everywhere else in golf. A bolt of lightning was preparing to jolt the game as we knew it, and his name was Tiger Woods.

By the time the sun rose over a gloomy Augusta National on that Masters Sunday, talk of Woods’ record-setting dominance largely had been contained to the golf course. Woods held a nine-shot lead at the tournament’s 54-hole mark, good enough to tie the tournament record with 18 holes still to play. But back at the CBS Sports compound, whispers had started about the records in play far beyond Augusta, Ga.

“It was really all that anybody in the world was talking about on Saturday night,” Sean McManus, then in his first year as chairman of CBS Sports, told me last year. “I was totally nervous we were going to screw something up.”

McManus knew intuitively what the rest of the world needed days to figure out: Tiger Woods was a magnet. His story, his age, his stupefying talent, his trademark red shirt, his mighty lash of a swing — all of it entranced the sports world in a Dave Loggins-orchestrated siren song. Nobody could look away, and if that was true, then McManus was in for a good weekend.

But as it turned out, McManus was wrong. He wasn’t in for a good weekend. Not even close.

He was in for the best weekend of his golf life. Woods’ Sunday coronation at Augusta National — a 12-shot, record-setting, sport-reorienting, planet-shaking victory — became the most-watched golf telecast in history, with 22 million average viewers tuning in to see Woods lap the field en route to the green jacket.

Nobody could believe the numbers when they first arrived, but nobody needed much time to figure out what they meant, either: a transformational star had arrived in golf. Every TV network, every major corporation with sponsorship dollars and, yes, every sports fan on earth suddenly wanted a piece of golf. The strange phenomenon of Sunday’s viewership explosion at the Masters was only the beginning. The Tiger Effect was upon us.

The Tiger Effect, quantified

The nearly three decades that have followed Tiger Woods since that Sunday have charted the course of modern golf history: 82 professional wins, 15 major titles, a dozen sport-changing moments, a handful of unthinkable stumbles and one of the improbable comebacks the sports world has ever seen.

But over time, perhaps the best evidence of Tiger Woods’ greatness has been reduced to a phrase — a three-word rejoinder used to explain the transformative role Woods played in the business of golf: the Tiger Effect.

What is this phenomenon? It has many meanings … and one bottom line: cash. In honor of Woods’ 50th birthday, I wanted to see if I could parse through the clichés to calculate the dollars and cents Woods organically brought into pro golf.

What I found is that the financial significance of Tiger Woods is both overwhelming and impressively slippery. The Tiger Effect can be measured in sponsorship dollars — more than 90 percent of Woods’ estimated $1.3 billion net worth is tied to revenue sources other than his $121 million in on-course earnings. It can be measured in tournament purses, which Woods helped double twice in his heyday. It can be measured in golf’s TV ratings, which exploded throughout Woods’ career and still spike with his appearances today (ask the PNC Championship, which desperately missed Tiger and his son, Charlie, last week). And, yes, it can even be measured in the pockets of his opponents, who sat downstream of Woods’ greatness and, according to one analysis, more than doubled their earnings as a result.

So, what does it all amount to? Let’s start with the easy stuff: the Tiger Effect as measured in Tiger’s own bank account.

Tiger, Inc.

Even among mega-rich superstar athletes, Tiger Woods is in rarefied air.

According to Forbes, Woods is one of only three billionaire athletes ever, alongside Michael Jordan and LeBron James. There are many ways of subdividing Woods’ vast wealth — his compound in Jupiter, Fla.; his jet; his yacht (famously named Privacy); his sprawling tentacles of business interests, including a new clothing line named Sun Day Red — the vast majority of which has come from his off-course pursuits. According to the PGA Tour, Woods’ career on-course earnings are $120,999,126, or just 9.3 percent of his overall net worth.

As for the rest of his wealth? The bulk of it comes from his sponsorships, including Nike, whose 27-year relationship with Woods paid him approximately $500 million, according to estimates based on reported contract details. While Woods’ Nike partnership ended in 2024, he still collects annual checks from other sponsors like TaylorMade, Bridgestone, Monster Energy, 2K Sports and Rolex, and draws revenue from investments like Sun Day Red; TGR Design, his burgeoning golf course design firm; TMRW Sports, the investment group behind the TGL, and more.

And though he has recorded only a handful of starts over the last few years, Woods hasn’t stopped collecting from the PGA Tour, either. He received a $100 million equity payment as part of the Tour’s new player equity program in 2024, and has pocketed approximately $45 million from the Player Impact Program — an initiative designed to pay PGA Tour players based on their popularity, which Woods won each year of its existence despite rarely competing. (According to tax filings, Woods also pocketed nearly $30 million in compensation from the PGA Tour in 2024 for his roles on various boards.)

“All of sport — and all of sports business — hinges on heroes and champions,” says Rick Burton, a professor of sports marketing at Syracuse University. “Fan avidity is driven by something [Nike Founder Phil Knight] said one time: We want to see the impossible made real.”

Woods’ $45 million paycheck for being famous certainly fits the “impossible made real” category, but even addressing his money in plain terms sells the full story short. Perhaps the most overlooked slice of Woods’ fortune is the soft power it has allowed him to wield in the late stages of his playing career. In 2022, Woods declined what would have amounted to the largest contract in pro sports history — a reported “high nine-figures” offer from LIV CEO Greg Norman that solidified the Tour’s upper hand even as LIV poured billions into the golf landscape. Meanwhile, Woods’ foundation, which helps children in low-income communities, crossed the $1 billion revenue threshold in 2023, according to Money in Sport.

“Tiger transcended the sport in the ways that Michael Jordan did,” Burton said. “He became bigger than the game itself. He became pop culture. Everyone everywhere wondered what Tiger was up to, not only his success on the course, but in everything he did. The impact of that was massive.”

The ‘new era’ in golf

A decade ago, a researcher named Roger Pielke had an idea.

He wanted to figure out how much money Tiger Woods had earned … for his opponents.

It is, of course, difficult to quantify the effect of one great player on a sport, but Pielke thought he had a winning strategy. He calculated the rate of purse increases over the years preceding Woods’ arrival in golf, and then he calculated the rate of purse increases in the decade following Woods’ arrival. If golf wanted to understand “the Tiger Effect,” the easiest way was to follow the money.

What Pielke found was astonishing: PGA Tour payouts increased at a rate three times as fast in the Tiger Woods era as in the era preceding it. Over the course of a decade, Woods had more than doubled the size of his opponents’ earnings … and won nearly $100 million on the course himself.

Pielke’s findings were widely publicized at the time, particularly his assertion that Woods’ rise correlated with an extra $30 million in the pockets of rivals Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh, but they didn’t address the market forces causing the spike in earnings: TV ratings.

According to an analysis of publicly available TV ratings reviewed by GOLF.com, Woods didn’t just move the TV ratings needle — he bent it. Compared with events he didn’t play, Woods’ participation drove viewership increases of at least 60 percent in 20 of his 22 professional seasons (excluding only his injury-shortened 2014 and 2020 campaigns). During his peak years, the numbers were even more staggering: events he competed in delivered twice as much viewership as those he didn’t in seven of his first 14 seasons, and three times as much viewership during his epic 2008 season. Put simply, for more than half of his prime, Woods’ presence at a tournament meant twice as many people watching.

These shifts correlated with enormous downstream changes in the economics of golf, where the price of TV rights agreements multiplied twice in the early stages of Woods’ career — and where total PGA Tour prize money multiplied right along with it. According to statements from former PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem and a GOLF.com analysis of PGA Tour purse sizes, total PGA Tour prize money ballooned from $70 million in 1996 (pre-Tiger) to $135 million in 1999, and doubled again to roughly $280 million in 2008. (Total PGA Tour prize money doubled a fourth time in the Tiger Era in 2025, jumping to at least $565 million.)

These changes altered the mechanics of professional golf, and also altered golf’s standing in the greater sports hierarchy. For the first time, golf proved it could grow at rates comparable to other major sports leagues, which allowed the sport to grow its TV contracts (and, by extension, its prize funds) accordingly.

Tiger’s impact on TV was felt during his time away from golf in the mid-2010s, when his absence from the sport resulted in an 18-percent ratings drop between 2013 and 2018.

“In our business plan, we did not assume any golfer was going to be as dominant as Tiger had been in the past,” former CBS chairman Sean McManus said on the day he signed a modest TV rights expansion with the PGA Tour in 2011, a nod to the role Woods had played in previous TV rights negotiations.

In the end, Pielke estimated the Tiger Effect had collectively helped players earn an extra $1.6 billion in prize money — to say nothing of the untold sums offered in endorsement deals and sponsorships.

In 2021, a quarter-century after Woods’ debut, Rory McIlroy summarized Tiger’s importance to the sport rather nicely:

“We should pay tribute to him every day for being on the PGA Tour and what he’s done for golf.”

‘A win for the ages!’

By the time Woods approached the 18th green on Masters Sunday 1997, Jim Nantz’s prophecy had come to fruition.

Woods had a 12-shot lead, the largest in Masters history. He was just 21 years old, the youngest winner in Masters history. He was, by his birthright, the first Black, Asian and mixed-race player to win the green jacket. A new era in golf had arrived.

As Woods tapped in his two-putt to clinch the tournament and the record, Nantz delivered the punchline.

“A win for the ages!”

It was a fitting sentiment, and not only for Woods. On that Sunday in Augusta, Ga., Woods flipped an entire sport on its head — welcoming scores of new fans, a generation of new players and a new playbook in the economics of the rock and stick.

The palpable effect of those changes is felt every day in professional golf. We see it in the creation of new tours, ever-larger TV contracts, a never-ending list of Fortune 100 sponsors and the generation of pros who will never know life with a winner’s check of less than $1 million.

But there also are ways Woods affected the game that will never find their way into a statistical analysis or Nielsen chart — changes too obvious to ignore and yet too subtle to measure. You can sense the Tiger Effect when you walk the range on Sunday at a big event and see the steely-eyed stares of the twentysomething stars of the next generation — the same twentysomethings who once watched Tiger dominate Sunday afternoons wearing the same impervious confidence.

You can see it in the number of world top-10 players still wearing a Nike swoosh, despite the company’s significantly reduced golf presence in the 2020s. You can understand by scanning the PGA Tour’s money list, which shows Woods’ net-positive effect on golf manifesting in today’s stars earning one-fifth of his career income in just a single season, as Scottie Scheffler did in 2025.

And you can feel it at your own local course, anywhere in the world, where golf just means something more than it did three decades ago. (The latest numbers from the National Golf Foundation back it up, finding that golf is currently welcoming the largest and most diverse group of players in its history.)

“I always joke with Tim Finchem, if it weren’t for Tiger, we wouldn’t be paying as much money as we were paying for TV rights,” McManus said. “But it’s true that if it weren’t for Tiger, we wouldn’t have all of this.”

In the end, maybe the best way to measure the Tiger Effect is to imagine golf without him.

And if you can’t?

Well, that might be the point.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.

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It wasn’t that Wagner was a stranger to these parts before arriving in Pinehurst — Wagner had played in two U.S. Opens, in 2004 and 2007, before arriving at the national championship as a broadcaster in 2024. Before joining Golf Channel in 2020, he’d been a successful PGA Tour player for more than a decade, earning $12.5 million on the course and winning three times.

But it wasn’t until that U.S. Open at Pinehurst, weeks after the launch of his now-infamous on-course segments at Golf Channel, that Wagner transformed from a TV analyst into an internet sensation.

He stuck out on the range, wearing a light-blue NBC Sports polo over his six-foot-three frame, his jet-black mustache glistening in the sun. And, because he stuck out, it wasn’t long before the well-wishers arrived. Fellow broadcasters first, then fellow media members, and before long, players and caddies.

It had been a dizzying few weeks for Wagner in the lead-up to that U.S. Open. First, at the Players Championship, Golf Channel had announced plans for Wagner to try out a new content idea: “acting out” the biggest golf stories of the day. At the time, it seemed as though Wagner would be utilizing his playing pedigree to take fans deeper into the biggest shots and moments. But a different outcome had materialized by Friday afternoon.

After a few days of flubbed chips and goofy laughs, cameras captured Wagner heaving golf balls into a bank along the left side of the 7th hole at TPC Sawgrass with a crow-hop. One viral video led to another, and then another, and then, finally, to Tuesday at Pinehurst, when every person he encountered shared the same sentiment with a grin.

“Thanks for the laugh.”

Two years later, that Tuesday at Pinehurst stands out as the moment everything changed for Wagner.

After two years of viral hits on Golf Channel, sources confirmed that CBS had hired Wagner as the network’s No. 3 “walking reporter” behind veteran walker Mark Immelman and industry legend Dottie Pepper.

Wagner’s ascension at CBS ends an offseason of transition for the network following the retirement of longtime analyst Ian Baker-Finch. Baker-Finch’s spot in the CBS “super booth” will be filled by former No. 2 walking reporter Colt Knost, who moves upstairs after five years as an on-course analyst for the network, and Knost’s spot on the course will be filled by Wagner. According to the same sources, Wagner will not continue in his viral role on Live From, though he could reprise segments in a similar style for CBS.

News

For CBS, the previous sentence is the only case it needs to justify Wagner’s hiring. Most viewers know of Wagner in late 2025 solely for his social media escapades, which is to say they know him principally as a form of comedic relief. Wagner won’t do much to dispute those accusations: His hiring at CBS would not have been possible without the viral, on-course segments that have dominated social media over the last two years, and hell, he certainly looks the part. His stocky, mustached build gives him the general appearance of a newsman from the 1970s, while his penchant for hosel-adjacent short-game shots is unmatched in the current (or former) golf media. CBS won’t dispute the value of Wagner’s comedic timing, either: Laughter can be medicine during the dull hours of a mid-July PGA Tour telecast, and Wagner’s ability to create viral moments works in a media environment increasingly dominated by “personalities.”

But the real upside of Wagner’s hiring at CBS has little to do with his current standing as a golf media chucklehead. Perhaps Wagner’s finest moment as a broadcaster arrived a year before anyone knew him as a TV talking head: His multi-minute monologue lambasting PGA Tour leadership and its messaging after the astonishing PGA Tour/PIF merger of June 6, 2023. Wagner will be entering a job defined above all by his ability to communicate his thoughts and feelings honestly, and in a sports TV world often more concerned about the athletes than the audience, Wagner’s ability to access his candor represents a potential goldmine for CBS.

Of course, it’s possible you didn’t know that. One of the chief pitfalls of social media is its tendency to flatten our perspective of the world around us. In an environment built upon attention-sucking algorithms and bite-sized pieces of content, we have been engineered to see people on social media as two-dimensional caricatures.

Wagner’s biggest opportunity and steepest challenge at CBS will be transforming from the former to the latter — and though CBS won’t say it, they’re betting he will.

***

On Sunday evening at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst in 2024, I found Johnson Wagner on the brink of changing hearts and minds. The championship had ended long before, and now, as he stood in the darkness next to the 18th green, Wagner was due to deliver the last of his on-course segments for the week.

It’d been another week of lung-piercing disasters for Wagner at the national championship. His Golf Channel co-hosts could hardly suppress their laughter as the latest laugh-track of flubbed chips and dinked putts rolled across the screen — and Wagner couldn’t, either. He took the week in stride, watching as his social media following multiplied under his own misfortune.

Now, on Sunday, it was time for the granddaddy of ’em all: Wagner’s attempt to recreate Bryson DeChambeau’s impossible shot from the greenside bunker on the 18th hole to win the U.S. Open. As the crew waited, I watched as one cameraman alerted another — who stood atop the Pinehurst clubhouse, some 100 yards away — to be on high alert for a ball in his direction. Soon, DeChambeau arrived in a cart clutching the trophy, and the cameras lit up.

After a short preamble and some goading by DeChambeau, Wagner reached for his wedge and settled into the sand. A few seconds later, he splashed out of the dirt and watched as his ball soared into the sky, landed on the cement putting surface and came to rest three feet from the flag … inside of DeChambeau’s own mark from just hours earlier.

I’d like to think Wagner was surprised as his ball settled, ending his week with one last viral video — this time as the U.S. Open hero.

But maybe that was just me.

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“At 20 years of age the Will reigns; at 30 the Wit;” Franklin wrote under the pseudonym ‘Poor Richard Saunders.’ “And at 40 the Judgment.” 

Two hundred and eighty-five years later, the LPGA’s 40-year-old commissioner Craig Kessler hopes Franklin’s words hold.

Above any job title or talking point, Kessler’s age is the most fitting analogy for the battle he hopes to wage as the newly minted chief executive of the LPGA. As one of the youngest leaders of any major sports league on earth, Kessler enters the LPGA credibly capable of dragging the tour to the bleeding edge of innovation and growth. But, at 40 years old, he hopes to navigate those changes without harming the golf business as it has always been: TV rights and title sponsorships and hospitality tents and goodwill.

This is Kessler’s greatest advantage and sincerest threat as the leader of the LPGA: He is old enough to remember the good old days — and young enough to know what comes after them. Now, in a moment defined by systemic upheaval, it is Kessler’s job to decide what stays and what goes.

And the best way to understand that struggle? Kessler says it starts in the living room.

“In my generation, you put on the TV, and if you didn’t like what was on, you waited until the top half or the bottom half of the hour to see the next episode,” Kessler told GOLF.com on Monday during a media day promoting next month’s Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions. “I’ve got three boys — they’re 6, 8 and 10. I’ve watched the way they consume content, and it is so different from my generation. They sit there with an Apple TV remote, and if they don’t like something, within six seconds, they hit next and go on to whatever they want to watch.”

It’s in those six seconds that Kessler has come to understand the world of women’s golf. If the previous generation of sports-watchers was defined by those who would wait for the bottom of the hour, the next generation will be represented by those who won’t wait until the bottom of the minute.  

“Watching how the future generation of LPGA athletes are consuming media and entertainment has been completely eye-opening for me,” Kessler said. “We’re thinking about winning our share of the attention economy, and we are making the right moves in the right way in order to succeed.”

Kessler is not alone in this sentiment. The “attention economy” has been adopted by many in the sports ruling class in 2025 as an acknowledgement of the times. We are living in an era of mass distraction, when multi-billion-dollar social media companies are funded on the premise of endless scrolls and engaged time. The shift can be best understood in economic terms: Now, for the first time, people are not the customer but the product; the more attention earned, the greater the profit.

For the sports leagues competing within the “attention economy,” the downstream shifts have been equally tectonic. To sports executives of the modern era, the ultimate currency is not trophies or wins but seconds of attention won, and the competitors are not “other leagues” but internet behemoths like TikTok and Instagram. The old way of doing business is still quite valuable — in their rawest form, sports TV deals and sponsorships are selling a captive audience — but the wave of new media options has also created a brand-new way of doing business.

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This presents an unusual opportunity for sports organizations like the LPGA, which are not bound solely to our traditional understanding of attention as “hours on network television.” For Kessler’s LPGA, attention could mean an expanded TV rights partnership with a major partner (Kessler’s biggest win as commissioner to date is a major partnership with FM to deliver expanded LPGA television hours in 2026). But it could also mean growth in a social media world whose algorithms are primed to boost individuals living interesting lives, visiting beautiful places, and interacting with famous people — three things prevalent almost every week on the LPGA.

“I think the most critical theme is giving fans a chance to understand our athletes, both inside the ropes and also outside of the ropes,” Kessler said. “Fans crave not just watching their favorite athletes compete, but also understanding who they are as people. What are they doing in their free time? What do they eat? What do they watch? Who do they hang out with? What are they wearing? And some of the biggest stars in sports have found a way to cut through and show both their competitive side and also their real-life personalities.”

If you’re sensing a theme in Kessler’s thinking, you’re correct. The ideas he’s hoping to implement at the LPGA aren’t exactly beamed in from a StarLink satellite through ChatGPT; they’re adapted from the old-school sports marketing playbook for modern times. And in a world where an audience can be built and cultivated without the help of a major TV network, Kessler’s ideas reflect a flexibility to win on any terms.

Will these ideas amount to a meaningful change in the business of women’s professional golf? It’s too early to say. The original rules governing sports popularity haven’t changed — big stars competing on big stages in events that matter — and the LPGA still has its work cut out to those ends.

But these are unusual times in pro sports. Large audiences have never been cheaper, easier or more accessible to reach in human history. Soon, content generated by artificial intelligence could lower the barrier even further — and yes, Kessler has ideas about that, too.

“I think AI is going to fuel the desire more than ever before for human connection,” he said. “Events like the Tournament of Champions perfectly feed into our innate desire that has evolved over millions of years for human connection.”

There is little debate that the LPGA requires a clear vision and good judgment.

The 40-year-old leader of women’s golf certainly has the former. As for the latter?

Well, maybe Poor Richard can testify.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.

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On Wednesday morning, YouTube TV announced that it would introduce a sports-specific cable package, allowing consumers to cut back on cable costs while still receiving the sports programming at the center of those packages.

According to YouTube, the new package will be offered to customers at a cost below the company’s current “base plan” price of $82.99 — though the exact price has not been disclosed. The sports package will be debuted in “early 2026,” and will provide access to broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and cable networks showcasing sports programming (ESPN networks, Fox Sports, NBC Sports Network, and USA Sports/Golf Channel).

The new sports bundle will be part of plans to bring 10 “genre-specific packages” to consumers in the new year. The sports bundle comes after years of crowing from sports fans in support of such an endeavor — and follows years of complaints from consumers who felt they were paying for cable channels they did not consume.

The announcement follows a bruising fall for YouTube TV that saw the cable provider lose a handful of NFL and college football games — and a chunk of its business — to a protracted “carriage fight” with ESPN and Disney. At the conclusion of that battle, YouTube TV vowed to work to win back customer trust, and the genre-specific packages appear to be the first effort to those ends.

The economics of cable TV have long made a sports-specific “bundle” a difficult proposition. Sports networks like ESPN cost a fortune for cable providers like YouTube TV (nearly $10 per month, per customer, according to the most recent estimates) and ESPN’s owners at Disney have been keen to ensure that cable providers include all Disney programming under one package, making it hard for providers to siphon off smaller, genre-specific portions of programming.

In many ways, however, the rigidity of the traditional cable structure contributed to the format’s decline, as larger and larger audiences continued to “cut the cord” in favor of sports-specific, piecemeal solutions that proved cheaper than a traditional cable bill.

For golf fans, the new YouTube TV bundle offers an all-access pass to golf programming, providing coverage of LIV Golf, the PGA Tour, and each of the major championships under agreements with NBC, CBS, ESPN, Golf Channel, USA, and Fox.

For those TV customers who are “single-issue” viewers — in other words, those who watch only sports programming — the news is good: The same TV access will be available in the next few months… and it’ll cost less for you to watch.

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The post Is pro golf one of the few ‘AI-proof’ bets? This Hollywood legend thinks so appeared first on Golf.

The post Is pro golf one of the few ‘AI-proof’ bets? This Hollywood legend thinks so appeared first on Golf.

If you’d like to know why live sports are a sound investment, all you have to do is reach into your pocket.

“At one point, Tiger talked about how the first time he won, people were clapping; [but the] second time he won, phones were up and people were screaming,” Emanuel said, illustrating his broader point by pointing to the cell phone near his left hand.

“That’s because of that thing,” he said. “You want to show how great your life is. And also because that thing detaches you, you want a place where you can have a great experience with other people.”

This was Emanuel’s opening salvo in a fascinating interview on the Invest Like The Best podcast in which Emanuel discussed, among other topics, why the sports world presents one of the world’s few “AI-proof” investments.

Among those who know him, Emanuel is perhaps best understood as a human lightning rod. In one life, he was a hugely successful Hollywood agent who served as the inspiration for Entourage‘s Ari Gold. In another, he was the prolific investor and entertainment executive behind the Hollywood superagency Endeavor. Then, in 2016, he began a third life as a sports owner, purchasing a majority ownership stake in the UFC for $4.2 billion — a perceived overpay for which he was roundly mocked.

It wasn’t long before Emanuel was the one laughing. Under his leadership, the UFC compounded its revenue from $15 million in 2003 to more than $1.3 billion in 2023.

While Emanuel’s cutthroat style and his dealings with the Saudi Public Investment Fund haven’t endeared him to everybody, his institutional understanding of events and media at the helm of the UFC has proved fairly bulletproof. Emanuel oversaw the UFC’s ingenious streaming-and-cable deal with ESPN, correctly timing the decline of the cable TV model and providing a blueprint for sports leagues in the streaming age. Later, he spearheaded a frenzied push into the U.A.E.-based Covid “bubble” that made the UFC the lone pro sports league active during the early oughts of the pandemic, turbocharging an already explosive period of growth.

Now Emanuel’s attention is turned toward the looming specter of artificial intelligence, and by its potentially revolutionary effects upon the business he knows best.

In the revolution promised by AI evangelists like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the world is hurtling towards “artificial general intelligence,” or “AGI” — a phenomenon in which AI becomes smart enough to replace most human work. If researchers manage to create AGI in Altman and Amodei’s image, it will prove powerful enough to alter the economy as we know it: lowering the cost of goods and services, trimming the time and difficulty of white-collar work and dramatically expanding access to leisure.

“AI is going to be … big. Which I think is a proper conclusion,” Emanuel said. “There are a lot of smart people spending a lot of money at it, and they’re smarter than me. The Netherlands just moved to a four-day work week. Drive times are now 11-4 across America. Hotel bookings on Thursdays are way up — and there’s a lot more data points to this. The weekend starts on Thursday now, and we’re in 2025. Maybe in 2027 it starts on Wednesday.”

If the AI evangelists are right, media is primed to witness an enormous transformation. In a world where AGI can produce infinite content for almost nothing, and where people have more time than ever to consume it, media companies will have to reimagine their efforts to win attention. Either the gap will be filled by those who can create enormous amounts of unique content from existing intellectual property, attracting attention away from the infinite vastness of AI-generated content on future social media platforms, as executives like Paramount/CBS chair David Ellison have suggested. Or, as executives like Emanuel have suggested, the gap will be filled by those who create things that AI can’t replicate — things so ontologically different from our digital world that even the smartest computers cannot threaten them.

Enter: Live sports. Emanuel has always had an intuition for the special power of a crowd. Some of it stems from his memory of Tiger Woods. The community that comes from watching Woods compete, and the social capital that comes from capturing and sharing that experience with others? In Emanuel’s telling, that’s the kind of experience that AI can’t replicate.

“That just bodes well for music, live sports, live events,” he said. “This is status.”

And, as Emanuel knows all too well, where status exists, so does profit.

“We’re social animals,” Emanuel said. “You’re coming to a UFC fight, you’re a social guy. What are you gonna do? You’re gonna watch a lot of content — David Ellison’s conclusion — there’s gonna be more content than ever, and it costs zero. You’re going to be going to concerts, going to stand-up, going to live events. The value of that is just [two thumbs in the air] because there’s only so much of it. So that’s my whole bet.”

Of course, Emanuel’s thinking is just that — a bet. There’s no telling if we’ll reach the world of AGI promised by the AI evangelists (who themselves have a financial incentive to believe in such optimistic arguments), just as there’s no telling that live events will be a value add in a world with more free time. Emanuel’s hypothesis rests upon the success of a series of other hypotheses.

In many ways, this is a microcosm of the moment for the largest economic bet of the post-Internet world. The range of outcomes still possible for AI is far broader than either its evangelists or its critics would like to admit, while the scale of the progress already achieved remains opaque. Are our current chatbots already forging a more efficient world, or are they merely helping a legion of white-collar workers achieve active voice in their email correspondence? Is AI the technology that will prove smarter than human civilization, or is it too stupid to trust the answers it gives to even simple questions? Your answers to these questions — and your beliefs about what those answers mean — depend largely upon the orientation of your financial portfolio and your willingness to trust many of the same executives responsible for the proliferation of modern social media.

The possible and the political are difficult to untangle, which is part of what makes AI so divisive. To the skeptics, it’s outrageous to live as if AI will become as revolutionary as its creators envision; to the optimists, it’s outrageous not to.

It’s this chasm that creates an opportunity for executives like Ari Emanuel. And right now, his money is on live events.

“I don’t know how to write an algorithm, I don’t know how to build a datacenter, I’m not in the chips business,” Emanuel said. “I just know how to create great live events, and live is the opposite bet of AI.”

You can watch Emanuel’s full Invest Like The Best interview at the link below.

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The post Colt Knost opens up on CBS tower promotion, TV goals, criticism appeared first on Golf.

The post Colt Knost opens up on CBS tower promotion, TV goals, criticism appeared first on Golf.

It asks him to visit three of the most beautiful golf courses on earth each year: Augusta National, Riviera and Pebble Beach. It requires his presence at two majors and at least two-thirds of the meaningful golf events on the calendar. It sees him traverse from the corrugated steel city of the Phoenix Open to the treeless expanse of the Scottish Open, and just about every golf setting in between.

But if you want to know what makes Colt Knost qualified to be the kind of professional golf broadcaster promoted to CBS’s “super tower” on Wednesday morning — if you want to understand why he gets to fly to all the pretty and important places in the golf world just to talk about them — you really ought to ask him about somewhere else. Somewhere … less revered.

The John Deere.

“John Deere week is, like, a sneaky favorite of mine, and it’s honestly because of one restaurant there,” Knost says with a chuckle. “It’s called Duck City. And, I mean, the chef — Chef Jeremy — who has been there forever, he took it over from his dad, Chef Charles. I mean, it looks like player dining every time you walk in there.”

Duck City is a special place to Knost, and his daily 7 p.m. table is one of the rhythms of the yearly schedule that keeps his personal golf world spinning (to say nothing of Duck City’s famed Veal Jalapeno — Knost’s favorite). But his certainty in singling out John Deere week over all of the glorious places listed above? That’s the special sauce.

“It surprises everyone,” Knost said. “It’s not the greatest field in the world, but every year we turn it into such a fun week.”

In most ways, the work of a successful sports television analyst is perspective. Emerson said a man is measured “by the angle at which he looks at objects,” and if that’s true, then a good sports TV voice is measured by his acuteness, his separation from the bland bromides and listless axioms — “boy, he’s a great driver of the golf ball” — that have filled the hours of golf telecasts since the beginning of time.

In other words, the work of a successful sports TV voice requires the skill to visit Augusta National but the willingness to single out the John Deere.

On Wednesday morning, Knost’s acuteness was recognized in the form of a promotion from his bosses at CBS. He will join the “super tower” with Frank Nobilo, Trevor Immelman and Jim Nantz in 2026, replacing the retired Ian Baker-Finch. The new job is Knost’s third since joining golf media after a successful career as a touring pro, the latest in a meteoric rise from a golfer with a good sense of humor to one of the narrators of pro golf.

Knost admits he is a work in progress as a broadcaster, but the lessons that have colored in the lines of his first years in the booth show plenty of promise.

“I remember, after the first couple tournaments I did as a tryout, [legendary CBS Sports producer Jim Rikhoff] sent me this awesome text basically saying, ‘Look, we hired you because of who you are and because of who we know, and I want you to be that way on air.'”

The throughline of Rikhoff’s message?

“If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, but you can’t be somebody different,” Knost remembers. He took it to heart.

He learned quickly that it can be hard to be your most honest self before an audience of a few million TV-watchers. Criticism circulates quickly, even when it’s warranted.

“Charles Barkley is one of my broadcasting heroes, and he said it best,” Knost said. “He told me, ‘you can praise these guys 90 percent of the time, and they’ll never call and say thanks, but the second you criticize them, they’re gonna call you and wear you out. You just got to be prepared for it.'”

It’s an added challenge for Knost. When Barkley criticizes hoopers, he’s largely talking about men one-third his age; when Knost criticizes golfers, he’s often talking about his friends.

How does he manage? The honest answer is that it’s hard. The lines in sports television are difficult to navigate for every former athlete, even if the core requirements of honesty and objectivity are clear. Knost is expected to speak with candor within milliseconds of witnessing decisions that decide fortunes and legacies. Sometimes those decisions are mistakes, and it is his job to say so.

“It’s never anything personal against them,” Knost said. “But if a player ever has an issue with something I said, I’m always happy to talk about it.”

Evidently, it’s working. Knost’s jump into the CBS booth is his third promotion in half a decade working in golf TV. His responsibilities will expand from covering one group to covering the entire field. His dream of one day ascending into the highest office in golf television, lead analyst, just received a jolt.

“Look, there’s the resume factor,” Knost says, acknowledging golf’s long-standing tradition of hiring only major champions for the lead analyst role. “But I think I could absolutely do it one day.”

Knost isn’t a major winner, not unless you’re counting U.S. Amateurs, but he’s okay with that. If he gets the lead analyst job one day, it won’t be because his brain can approximate a major-winner. It’ll be precisely because it can’t — because Knost sees things that some major winners don’t.

Like Duck City at the John Deere.

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The post Made-for-TV golf matches need a boost. Here are some ideas appeared first on Golf.

The post Made-for-TV golf matches need a boost. Here are some ideas appeared first on Golf.

The Skins Game had some strong moments following the footsteps of its predecessors, including The Match and last year’s The Showdown. But like many things in the golf world, the event also drew criticism from fans who found the format stale and competition uninspiring. 

The book was closed on the Skins Game by 1 p.m. or so ET, but the genre of made-for-TV events is here to stay. So what would the GOLF.com team do to spruce up the fun? We dive in below.

James Colgan, news and features editor (@jamescolgan26): Well, Sean, we finally did it: We’re fixing television by bringing back the written word. 

Sean Zak, senior writer (@sean_zak): Hahaha, yeah… 

James: In all seriousness, I assembled us here because I wanted a chance to talk about the Skins Game. I thought the broadcast was … solid! And that’s certainly better than nothing for Black Friday morning. But I don’t think it’s offensive to say the experience didn’t exactly blow my socks off. Before we set our chainsaws to anything, let’s practice a little holiday cheer: What was something you liked about Amazon’s golf debut?

Sean: I liked that we gave up on using AirPods. All four players were mic’d up but not one of them knew what the broadcast booth was saying. They were just playing, with Xander electing to be the foil to Tommy Fleetwood’s easy cool, to egg on Shane Lowry against Keegan Bradley, to grab the mic from Colt Knost at times. As much as it’s nice to have broadcasters occasionally communicating back and forth with players, I think letting the players just be the players simplified it a lot … so long as you have a Xander pulling some strings himself. 

James: And I’ll say this: I enjoyed the broadcast team. Andrew Catalon is preposterously underrated as a golf broadcaster, and Colt Knost earned his Thanksgiving leftovers after handling an enormous load as the telecast’s on-course analyst (and hoofing it for all 18 holes!).

Sean: To me, that’s what a lot of made-for-TV golf productions have been. Some good actors! Some half-relevant golf. A lot of internal hype about what’s different this time around. But count ‘em up. We’ve seen a lot of iterations in recent memory. 

James: Yeah, I think it’s important to remember that made-for-TV golf did recently reinvent the wheel for golf on television. A lot of people forget that drone tracers and mic’d players and on-course interviews were pipe dreams in the golf world when The Match arrived on the scene seven years ago. Now, in no small part thanks to made-for-TV golf, they are a part of our everyday experience. 

Sean: True and accurate as that reminder is … I do think the form hasn’t exactly leapt forward as much as it has inched forward. Which, I guess, is why we’re chatting right now. 

James: Yes! So I’ve tasked us each with bringing three innovations YOU would enact that’d launch us forward in golf TV. I’ll let you start.

Sean: I wouldn’t call it an innovation by any means, but simply getting and staying on brand with what the event is or at least want to be feels so crucial to gathering meaningful attention. By that I mean, do not let Peter Jacobsen tell me that Keegan Bradley is treating putts in this event like he treats putts at the Masters; there isn’t a golf fan on the planet who is ready to walk down that path of belief, so make sure the message stays on message. Knost’s interviews were friendly and light-hearted, which matched the mood of the players. But then there also was the competing notion, which was shared at times, that these pros will do anything to beat each other. I mean, Tommy Fleetwood ripped into town from Dubai and raced back home, without enough time for a practice round. This ain’t cuttin’ teeth! 

So, in short, please make it about one thing and keep it about that one thing. That just might be enough to bring some focused meaning to those five hours we’ll spend together. 

James: I always think about golf TV in terms of three buckets: The diehard fan, the median fan and the casual fan. I think made-for-TV golf has figured out the casual fan. In made-for-TV golf’s mind, the casual golf fan is a facsimile of the average American: They want funny jokes and cool visuals and players competing for lots of dough. That’s how you get the Skins Game.

I’m less sure that made-for-TV golf has figured out the diehard or even the median golf fan. How does tuning in make you smarter? How do you learn something about playing the game from the pros? How does it take you DEEPER into the lives of pro golfers? 

In some ways, this should be the easiest place for made-for-TV golf to experiment: There is OODLES of time between the tee and green on every hole and only a handful of players. Why not throw in a swing instructor? Or bring back some version of Ken Brown’s “Brownie Points” segment? Or source swing tips from the players watching at home? These are just three top-of-mind ideas, but I think anything catering to the diehards will catch on. Sean, what’s your second fix?

Sean: I was going to suggest something like that! The roving nature of Knost felt ever-present, which is good, but I also felt myself wanting to learn more. When Keegan Bradley is talking about trying to hit this long-iron fade, and Xander Schauffele is chiding him for trying to hit a long-iron fade, it would be great to see a broadcast force Keegan to explain that for the viewer in with as much detail as possible. I’ve had Xander and Tommy give me instruction tips before — this is their expertise! Forcing them to share it, in the moment, as they size up a shot, feels perfectly fair given the amount of money they’re receiving.

James: My second shift is simple: Why does this video have to be live? I know we’re prisoners of the moment here, and there are some intrinsic advantages to live competition, but why not follow in the footsteps of the Internet Invitational and hire editors who can craft a story that moves? I heard Knost loud and clear when he pointed out on X that the Black Friday air date made it hard for the broadcast to lure interesting guests — so why not experiment with a different filming date that is polished for TV to air on Black Friday? 

Sean: That would cure one of the things that ailed this broadcast: how frequently producers had to dump the audio for five seconds because they brought in a Grade-A cusser like Shane Lowry. I think my final innovation is also a hat-tip to YouTube Golf: get two-man teams to band together and take on the world — i.e., get Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas to say “We’re in” for win-or-go-home matches, as many as you want to do, against other notable duos. JT and Spieth vs. Sam Burns and Scottie Scheffler. Winner takes on Xander Schauffele and Collin Morikawa. Winner of that takes on Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood, or — gasp! — Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton. These events are often organized via interest from a sponsor, the desires of one or two TV execs — this one felt like a Things Chad Mumm Really Likes production — and involve whichever pros are around, vaguely interested and available. If two players showed some genuine zest for trying to hold (and retain) the championship belt, I could start to envision a longer runway. (Footnote: This stems entirely from JT and Spieth being endlessly entertaining against Tiger Woods and McIlroy a couple years back.)

James: My third fix is also pretty simple: Better venues. Truly great golf courses are what elevate the U.S. Open every year, but there are dozens of truly great golf courses that don’t possess the infrastructure to host a major event (and dozens more with truly crazy visuals that also add to the fun). Make those courses the centerpiece of the experience in the same way as the pros. Star power can’t only be found on the OWGR!

Zak: I’m with you there. Panther National is a rollicking time, but it’s just not that relatable (yet) because it’s not known. I can’t go play it. You can’t, either. But that’s a completely different can of worms that complicates things. Panther National’s private, wide-open nature is exactly what helped it host this enterprise. I’m not sure what Southern course is the perfect setting for future Black Friday matches, but it needs to have plenty of space to make this dream-like production come to fruition. 

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“I think the focus will be to create events that really matter,” Rolapp said. “Competition should be easy to follow. The regular season and postseason should be connected in a way that builds towards the Tour Championship in a way that all sports fans can understand.”

Rolapp was providing his first glimpse at his unified theory for the PGA Tour — one involving a new word for pro golf: Scarcity.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how Rolapp’s vision for scarcity will look. Will it involve the continuation of the PGA Tour fall season, which falls directly outside of Rolapp’s description, but continues to add events with title sponsors signed to multi-year contracts? How about a streamlined regular season? Does the Tour of the future welcome fewer players, or no cuts?

Three months after those first words from Rolapp, though, we do know one thing about scarcity in pro golf: It’s going to give us a lot more television.

On Monday morning, Golf Channel released the rosters for the dueling teams taking part in the first-ever Golf Channel Games — a primetime, first-of-its-kind, made-for-TV golf skills competition featuring teams led by Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy. The Games will be played three weeks after the return of The Skins Game, a primetime, made-for-TV match between Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele, Keegan Bradley and Tommy Fleetwood. Those two events will set the stage for the return of golf’s ultimate primetime, made-for-TV product, the second season of the simulator golf league named TGL, which will begin on Dec. 28. And those are each to say nothing of the on-again, off-again, made-for-TV golf series known as The Match, or the new golf tour dedicated to reinventing golf on TV, LIV.

Everywhere you look, somebody is selling golf on television, and those sales pitches are looking less and less like 72 holes of tournament golf.

The big idea underpinning each of these new golf ventures is one that Rolapp, once the point person for the NFL’s media rights, knows well: Money in sports runs through television. The best way to make a buck, if you’re Golf Channel or the TGL or the Skins Game, is to air on a major network to major ratings. But the conceit responsible for making money on television from these events is slightly less ironclad: That people, particularly casual golf fans already beleaguered by the slog of the golf regular season, will tune in to watch.

News

In some ways, it’s easy to understand why this new golf silly season might appeal to someone of Rolapp’s sensibilities. At the NFL, Rolapp learned the value of a season that lasts 20 weeks but never truly ends. He saw how non-traditional football content (the Senior Bowl, the combine, the draft, free agency, training camp, the preseason) could keep the NFL at the center of the sports world’s collective consciousness even when games were months away. He learned that television was a vessel for experimentation with the end goal of capturing attention.

But this new vision of golf requires something the NFL does not often worry about: Attention from the broader sports world.

This is a concern evidenced by The Match’s slow slide from a “golf event” into a “celebrity event featuring golf”: Even if the best players are on television, and even if they’re playing in a highly marketable format, there is no guarantee that fans will care enough to watch. And even if fans do tune in to watch, there’s no guarantee you’ve built something that they will continue to watch each year (like any of the events on the non-traditional football calendar).

None of this is to say that the people behind any of these events shouldn’t bother. The TGL was a success far beyond most projections in its inaugural season, and returns for year two with a legitimate reason for optimism. Merely it is to say that the game of making money from television depends upon people watching, and when it comes to made-for-TV golf gambits, audiences are far from a guarantee. (The Tour, it should be noted, possesses the ability to reject such televised overtures under its media rights regulations, and often collects a fee in exchange for signing over media rights.)

One way to ensure people are watching is to provide a sense of scarcity — to make those at home feel like they’re missing out by not watching. This is Rolapp’s idea, however it manifests. But in the winter of 2025, how does scarcity actually look?

It looks like golf made for TV — an abundance of it.

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The post The secret truth of the ESPN-YouTube TV feud appeared first on Golf.

The post The secret truth of the ESPN-YouTube TV feud appeared first on Golf.

“ESPN is trying to make us think this is YouTube TV’s fault, when they’re actually just trying to add new subscribers to their new standalone DTC app,” a now-viral post from the X account @JoshOnAir reads. “Unbelievable. Don’t fall for it people. ESPN / Disney are the worst.”

@JoshOnAir’s opinion was parroted in a handful of viral posts that only seemed to gain steam over the weekend, as consumers missed out on three days’ worth of college and pro football on ESPN networks. It was easy to understand the frustration: Sports fans were missing out despite their role as dutifully paying customers, while the suits at YouTube TV and Disney haggled over shekels in a stalemate with no end date in sight.

Before long, the arguments fell across familiar political lines: Greedy corporations exploiting the common man, profits stolen with little concern for consumers, and the continued enshittification of yet another valued institution.

But there was a problem. These arguments were largely … untrue. The stalemate between ESPN and YouTube TV wasn’t about ESPN’s efforts to remove itself from cable TV, but about ESPN’s still considerable desire to remain on cable. The network was holding onto an inconvenient secret about its business, and the showdown with YouTube TV provided a glimpse behind the curtain.

——

More than any show or talking head, ESPN’s success can be traced back to a single holy grail: For every viewer who tunes in, ESPN gets paid twice.

First, advertisers pay ESPN for the right to air commercials, and second, cable providers pay ESPN for the right to air the network. This second payment is called a “carriage fee,” and it amounts to around $10 per subscriber per month — an enormous coup responsible for much of ESPN’s profitability over the last three decades.

Carriage fees are operated on a contractual basis, and need to be renegotiated every few years, which is what led to the current stalemate between YouTube and ESPN. According to YouTube TV, ESPN is asking for too much from its next set of carriage fees, while according to ESPN, YouTube TV wants a better rate than any of its cable TV counterparts.

As with most corporate disputes, the truth lies somewhere between, and is overshadowed by a much larger reality: The cable TV model is collapsing. Today, cord-cutting has made the cable business resemble the newspaper business of 30 years ago: Still profitable, but steadily losing ground. The latest estimates place standard pay-TV bundles in 65 million homes, down from more than 105 million in 2010.

For ESPN, the downside of that shift is potentially cataclysmic. The network has been backed into a corner: Either raise the cost of carriage fees consistent with the decline in cable customers, or find a way to recoup that money directly from consumers.

That rock-and-hard-place leads us into today’s rock-and-hard-place: Where ESPN has launched its own direct-to-consumer app allowing sports fans to pay $30 per month for an all-access pass to the network, and where a feud with YouTube TV over increased carriage fees has spilled out into the open.

If you find yourself thinking, doesn’t this feud help ESPN launch its new product, speeding the eventuality of cable TV’s demise? Well, you’d be correct. Except for one key point: ESPN doesn’t want its customers fleeing cable TV for a $30/month app. In an interview on Peter Kafka’s brilliant Channels podcast last month, ESPN CEO Jimmy Pitaro laid out the issue plainly.

“If you access us directly, the biggest problem we are going to have is churn,” Pitaro said. “If you go back to the [cable] ecosystem, you don’t have much of a churn problem. It’s really easy for me to turn a streaming service on or off. I do it all the time. It’s much harder for me to do it on cable.”

Pitaro’s point? Every cable subscriber lost for the ESPN DTC app represents a high-risk departure. The goal is to slowly build the DTC audience, eventually creating an ESPN app that provides value to customers for 12 months out of the year, discouraging people from holding their subscriptions only during, say, football season.

In Pitaro’s view, the goal of the new app is to pull from the 60 million people who have left cable in the last two decades, not the 65 million who remain, because the 65 million who remain present a low-risk path to billions in revenue in the short term.

“We’ve wanted to protect [traditional cable],” Pitaro said. “By the way, we still believe there’s a ton of value in the traditional ecosystem.”

The subtext of this point is hard to ignore. For the time being at least, ESPN needs cable providers at least as much as cable providers need the network. In the current fight for the latest batch of carriage fees, that sense of leverage might provide YouTube TV with an upper-hand.

Of course, that upper-hand might manifest in several weeks without ESPN on YouTube TV — an ugly outcome that would harm both sides of the carriage fight. But with nearly eight weeks until the next stretch of golf programming on the network — the launch of TGL season two on Dec. 28 — golf fans have plenty of time.

Rest assured, an agreement will be reached, and lots of money will be made. That’s the way the cable business has always worked for ESPN. But those times are changing … and in the long term, that might not be a bad thing for the people paying.

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