The Sporting Class: The Trade That Kept Inside the NBA Alive

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Affected legal term is credit à trois.

It can be a deux or a quatre.

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David has brought his, I think,

most David Sampson jacket to date.

I was told, I believe, that the jackets are in a closet, and basically the order is not determined by him as to, yeah, this is my Tuesday jacket.

It is the next jacket.

It is.

Take the next jacket.

And what's interesting is I wore this for nothing personal today, the day we are taping.

Usually I change clothes because this will be released on a different day, like in 24 hours.

But I was assured by Coca, our esteemed producer, that people are totally fine with wearing the same clothes two days in a row because you're really wearing it one day in a row, but it's as though you're wearing it two days in a row.

So this is me trying to change.

Wow.

You're trying to change by literally not changing.

That's exactly right.

And so I'm a little uncomfortable, a little schwitzy, anxious because people will have seen this today

in real time.

What pattern would you say that jacket is?

If you were to describe it for the just audio audience, it is a

material that has some sort of dark and light shapes that are all purple and black.

And it is a beautiful jacket that you can get on sale if you do it right.

If you have the Lord Robe I do,

there are stores that do sales at certain parts of the year.

You just have to pay attention.

And then, do you know that you can contact the store to get the maximum amount of sale?

If there's a sale during the year, like 60% off, and you miss it, you can get it back.

Wow.

I did not know that.

And

it shockingly enough is not where I'm putting my energies, priorities, and time is figuring

out how to get to the.

I would describe that, Jackie,

the audio audience as looking like an MC Escher print

that a seven-year-old took a purple crayon to.

Yeah,

I would describe it as

maybe Tony Soprano upholstered a Jaguar.

Not many people in the audience will understand the reference he just made, but it's an art reference, which is perfect for the way you describe the show.

But what I love is that, are you the type who assumes that your child could have been Jackson Pollock?

Like, are you the type of child?

I do not.

No, no, I do not.

Okay, good.

I actually

stand in art museums and listen to everybody say, well, my kid could have done that.

And I'm like, well, if they can, they should.

But they cannot.

There was a $6 million banana that got eaten.

David's a big, John, you know this.

I know this.

I don't know if the audience knows this.

David is an enormous art guy.

Yes.

Which the jacket may be complete proof or repudiation of, depending on your taste, but you're a big art guy.

Yeah, I must say

there's no such thing as a $6 million banana.

There was a $6 million art concept, which involved a banana and some duct tape, and which somebody who, as Robin Williams once said, that cocaine was God's way of telling you you make too much money.

A $6 million banana is another way of telling you you make too much money.

And why am I not surprised that the

knucklehead who bought a banana with duct tape for $6 million is a crypto bro.

Why am I not surprised?

We have no proof, but it's possible that the person who bought it is also the person who bought Haktua's NFTs.

We don't know.

This is pure conjecture.

That's the whole thing.

But we think that it could be.

Well, in the absence of proof to the contrary, I suppose it could be.

I do like how the open of today's show now officially resembles.

an MC Escher painting, though.

We are a staircase that is just running around in circles somehow.

Did you have to Google that?

I knew it.

I knew it.

Did you Google the confirmation?

I did.

Thank you.

Because I am a journalist.

Oh, that's why.

Now, people of a certain age will know MC Escher because

I don't know this from personal experience, but I'm told that if you smoke a lot of marijuana as an undergraduate, an MC Escher book of prints is an outstanding thing to look at because he sources close to the situation.

He made architectural drawings which cannot exist in reality, but which look like they're real.

And

they,

you know, it's staircases that go up and down at the same time.

It is what they were trying to do at Hudson Yards with The Vessel, I think by Norman Foster, but I could be wrong.

The vessel.

It's not M.C.

Escher.

Thomas Heatherwick.

Thomas Heatherwick.

All right.

Also English.

I am, though, left staring into David's jacket.

Like, if I was on mushrooms, what an incredible jacket to encounter is how I would describe the visuals of this.

I had an amazing Obama couch in Amsterdam.

What does that mean?

It means it's a couch that had these weird patterns with Obama's face

and physical dimensions.

That's a very problematic reference that you had invented.

Oh, no, it's a true thing.

So if you happen to do mushrooms in Amsterdam and look at a jacket like this,

it actually can change your life,

which it did mine as I took notes during my entire experience.

Did it surprise you, John, to know that David's approach to a psychedelic adventure is to take out a notebook and to categorize things.

Every six minutes, I wrote down what I was thinking and feeling and all the ideas that I had.

I have somehow the feeling that you figured out how to get the mushrooms for a less expensive price.

No, I went to a legitimate store.

It's totally legal.

You know, if you call them and they give discounts at any point during the season.

You're making fun of me.

You you should be able to get that discount.

The threadbare nature of my cardigan does remind me of the threadbear conversation that we have had about this lawsuit.

The NBA and its suitors.

It is a saga that now has clarity.

We can now pull apart all of the little strings and figure out, okay, they got this and they got that.

What did we learn?

We have led the world in analyzing this for months now, and now it's done.

And inside the NBA has headed to ESPN, which I want to talk about.

But big picture, David, let's start with you.

What should people take away that maybe is not the most obvious thing about this?

Well, the number one takeaway is that here on the sporting class, we had it right, which is that Turner was not going to get a fourth package, which John perfectly articulated and came true.

That David Zasloff had indicated to Adam Silver that he could live without the NBA, and this was years ago.

And it turns out that was the introduction of the end of TNT and the NBA.

That ended up being true.

The fact that the board recognized that Warner Brothers Discovery had not been performing and that the NBA was a huge expense.

They mucked it up from a PR standpoint and the settlement helped solve that in a very interesting way.

But what we learned is that while sports rights are growing and the NBA cashed in, it is more valuable to the new partner than it was to the old partner retaining the rights.

And the lawsuit that Warner Brothers filed was not meant to actually ever be won.

It was meant to be settled as had been discussed here.

And in fact, Warner Brothers managed to get some value from it.

They got highlights throughout 11 years for House of Highlights and Bleacher Report.

They got ultimately ended up trading

inside the NBA to ESPN for basketball and college football games from the Big 12.

Yep.

And some, I'm told, Latin American rights to games and Polish rights.

We polished that up.

That was part of it.

We did.

We polished that.

That was part from NBA.

So it was like a three-way trade.

Yeah, the college settlement was three-way.

It was Turner with ESPN and Turner with the NBA.

The only group that didn't do any trades, actually, was NBA and ESPN.

So Turner was the centerpiece of two trades separately.

So I want to, I want to, sorry, John, go ahead.

No, no, I was just going to suggest that three different parties solved some problem they had by looking at the assets that each held and making an exchange.

And they were able to wrap it up and move on because at this point it was nothing but a distraction.

Costly one.

So Barkley inside the NBA, the crown jewel of sports studio shows.

They're going to be on ESPN and ABC around high-profile live events is what it's called, which is to say not all of the time as you might have hoped if you like that show.

They'll be doing pre-game, halftime, post-game stuff on the finals, conference finals, playoffs, the big ABC games and the new year, Christmas Day, opening week, that kind of stuff, marquee events.

So this is a limited sort of residency, as it were.

But I want to get to this idea of the big news being a trade, because this is amusing to me.

Because I was trying to say, look at this trade that happened.

I want to talk about trades off the field that CEOs, presidents of companies like yourselves have been execute, because this is sports and business in actually a very literal mechanical sense.

It's funny because people think that a deal is only for cash, where you're selling something, or in the case of Turner, they're licensing inside the NBA to ESPN.

And so you view the only consideration as cash.

But in the real world of business, that's not always how it goes.

You can actually swap assets where you look at what you own, you look at what someone else owns.

And it's a little bit like Monopoly, where you trade for properties because you want to continue and build houses on Connecticut Avenue and you're willing to give give up Park Place, but you need something extra to balance it out.

You feel like a guy with a defined Monopoly strategy.

I happen to love playing Monopoly and I have

shocked.

We are shocked.

No, wait, are you talking about the board game or board game?

Or capitalism.

No, well, it actually helped inform a lot of how I negotiated.

This is all making so much sense.

So I played Monopoly as a child and I played Monopoly with my children.

What was your piece?

What did you use on the boardplay?

So the way to bankrupt people is to get boardwalk in Park Place.

No, no, I meant what was your

top hat.

I was always the top hat.

Of course you were.

I wish I could have just declared that you were the top hat.

I was the top hat.

Not a boot guy, clearly.

No, definitely not the boot guy.

I would have the kids be the boot guy and there's the car because they would love to play with the car, which is obviously a waste of time during a board game.

They would move the car like that.

Do you feel like this?

Wait, a waste of time during a board game.

Which implies that the whole exercise is not a waste of time other than the the fellowship with your children.

There's tremendous, I disagree, actually, there's tremendous business lessons I learned to play Monopoly.

I always thought that the only way to play was just to buy whatever you landed on and hope that you accumulated something.

Because my goal was to- Welcome to Metal.

My goal was to quit playing as soon as possible.

I wanted to get bankrupt.

So every time I land, I was like, can I pay more for Marvin Gardens?

David is still collecting rent on Monopoly games that are still ongoing for decades.

He is a landlord, actually.

He's charging these increased rates.

So the answer is you can trade for different things.

And so what Warner Brothers said is, all right, we're going to settle this suit because they didn't want to win it.

And it was getting to the point where they were going to start depositions.

They were going to start actually having public things out there, which they didn't want public, the NBA or Warner Brothers, frankly.

So the NBA said, listen, we're trying to keep everything quiet.

Let's figure out a settlement.

They knew the settlement had to include inside the NBA living because the fans had spoken.

They needed it to live.

Wait, what?

You're suggesting that part of the calculation was the fans, we need to solve this for the fans?

I'm saying that there was a realistic calculation by Adam Silver that saving, he said it, this is coming from his mouth, that inside the NBA is a property is something that we want to continue.

And so him fomenting a license agreement matters.

Yeah, I have no doubt that he means that when he says says it, but that's a press release.

If there had been no lawsuit filed, you think that

there would have been a negotiation that the inside the NBA needs to live on.

You and I have always agreed that the fans, what the fans care about coming into consideration is a rare moment in most

financial transactions.

Yeah, they get the boot, as it were.

But however, you know very well that TNT, Warner Brothers Discovery, wanted to lay off some of the expense of those characters, characters, Barkley, Smith, Shaq.

They get to, and they needed product because they needed to try to save their worth, their cable worth.

So they wanted programming.

So they went to ESPN.

Remember what their trade was?

They traded inside the NBA.

They licensed it to ESPN.

And what they got from ESPN was game rights.

13 Big 12 college football games, 15 men's basketball games.

Why would they do that?

Because they need average.

They have a playoff games as well.

Yeah.

That was my view.

That at least was my take on why that trade was made.

It was.

I don't, look,

each of the parties had a problem they needed to solve.

The NBA's essential problem is not only distraction, but is we really don't want to be deposed and have to reveal the particulars of the deals we made with Amazon, ESPN, and NBC.

That was their biggest problem, not losing inside the NBA.

Warnerbrook's problem is they got to figure out a way to save face with fans and investors.

So they manage not to take away the precious inside the NBA.

They manage to get some game rights, which will have value for them.

And they managed to mostly, mostly manage to save face.

ESPN solved the problem of we've never been able to compete with inside the NBA.

It is a better studio show than we've ever been able to construct.

I put myself in that

failure.

And so they solved that by, well,

gee, we won't compete with it.

They will have to compete.

So still have to do another show.

So those were their essential problems.

I don't regard had any of those problems not existed, I believe we would have seen the end of Inside the NBA.

How much of this, David, you indicated that this was a bit of a long-range play for David Saslov.

Do you believe that this outcome is what he had anticipated?

You never get exactly what you planned for.

But a trade

was in the offering, you think, for him from the start.

Not from two years ago when he made the declaration that he doesn't need.

I think that this came into play once he saw how it had unfolded.

You go into something as a president of a company, you have your vision of where you want everything to end.

But in the real world, it doesn't always work that way.

How much saber-rattling was this story that we've covered for months?

And how much of it was actual unfolding of new developments?

I think that I will give not just us credit, but the media in general.

And while I do agree, the media does not necessarily dictate policy in all instances.

There are instances where there is public pressure brought to bear that comes from shareholders.

And by the way, there's a lawsuit going on right now against Warner Brothers over something different.

But

I'm fascinated by the role of media and social media in corporate planning because it never used to exist.

And

I don't believe I can say that anymore.

No disagreement.

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I want to get get back to trades, though, because you guys have both executed these sorts of swaps, non-cash transactions, as it were.

John, you are the, I don't know, were you the architect?

You were the executor.

Were you the architect of, I think, the most notable recent

off-field broadcasting trade?

I would not suggest that I was the visionary of such a exchange,

but

when I got

the responsibility for Monday night football, I inherited the booth of

Al Michaels and Joe Theisman.

And if you know even the public personas of those two individuals, you will understand it is not a match made to work.

Not significant chemistry between the two of those different styles, different things.

So I knew that was a problem.

So once again, like the NBA, Warner Brothers, and ESPN, I had a problem, which is I had a pretty unworkable booth.

Sometimes things get solved in a way in which you never imagine they will, which is Al Michael's agent called me and said, gee, NBC has called saying they would like to speak to us.

He's under contract to you.

Is there any

way in which we can persuade you to

facilitate, let us do that?

So clearly I had a problem.

So I was happy to do that.

I had to seek permission to think about that because

Bob Iger

was friends with Al Michaels.

Al Michaels is a very accomplished play-by-play broadcaster.

So it would seem on the face of it something you wouldn't want to do.

Yeah, how do you get value back for Al Michaels in a trade context?

So

I went and asked Bob, gee, if we were to agree to that, can you think of anything we would like to get from NBC?

This is one of those things where you kind of walk into something you didn't know existed.

He said, well, as a matter of fact, NBC, and I think I have this right, bought the Hanna-Barbera

Intellectual Property Library.

Cartoon.

Cartoon, Tom and Jerry, among other things.

Clintstones.

And he said, within that is something they might not even know they got, which is Oswald the Rabbit.

And I said, well, what is Oswald the Rabbit?

And they said, oddly enough, Oswald the Rabbit was the first character drawn and used by Walt Disney prior to Mickey Mouse.

So now you're talking about sometime in the 20s.

He is a bad, he looks like Bugs Bunny who's been on a bender.

Yeah, what if Bugs Bunny loved MC Escher paintings?

Is how I would describe it?

Amsterdam.

Yeah, the forerunner of Mickey Mouse.

This is in that, in that vein.

So it was not much more complicated than they agreed to turn over the copyright of Oswald the Rabbit in exchange for being able to negotiate with Al Michaels for appearing on Sunday Night Football.

Was it dependent on a successful negotiation or

did you get the rabbit just for allowing the conversation to take place?

And I'm asking this for a particular reason.

No, there needed to be a successful conversation.

So it's interesting.

That's a little point that people are going to gloss over.

When you give permission to somebody to talk to another entity, you do it through their agent or through themselves, you actually don't get the benefit of any bargain until there's a done deal on the other side.

And so it's in the best interests of Al Michaels representative to know that not only was ESPN interested in him doing a deal with NBC, that they were encouraging him to do a deal with NBC.

And I don't know if you were that forward, but I would imagine there are ways, maybe not through you, if you don't want to be caught in that uncompromising position.

But I've done that before, where you give an indication.

You've traded a cartoon character.

No, I'm talking about.

You're letting a player know or a person or an employee know, hey, listen, you're being asked to join this company.

I strongly suggest that you engage in a negotiation, which is my way of saying with HR permission, we're not renewing you or we're not giving you the money that you think you want.

It's not going to work out with us here.

And so I don't know whether you did that with Al, but I do know that you needed that deal to happen.

We did.

I, of course, thought there was a overwhelming likelihood it would happen, right?

Al didn't want to be in the booth, I don't believe, Monday Night Football.

NBC had a better schedule.

And he was not, as I say, sympatico with Mr.

Seisman's approach.

But he could have asked you to get rid of Joe.

I mean, Al had enough power at that time, even maybe even today, but that's a conversation they could have had right with Bob, which could have put you in a compromising position.

Could have.

We felt we had a pretty good alternative, too, right?

We ended up putting Mike Tarico in the booth.

He's had a fine career, so it turned out to be a fine decision.

Yep.

It also is the instance in which I put Tony Kornheiser in the booth, which did not work out as well.

Not because of Tony.

Love, of course,

my bias for Grandpa Tony is known and documented.

I just love that the domino effect of

Oswald the Rabbit gets us to all of these.

I mean, by the way, the full trade, this was 2006, just for the accounting of this.

ESPN also got the rights to Ryder Cup matches.

I had to pay a rights fee for that.

John, I hope this is jogging some amount of memory.

Olympic highlights, expanded highlights from Notre Dame football, the Derby, Kentucky Derby, the Preakness through 2011.

And of course, Oswald the Rabbit.

You know, there are numbers associated with all that.

So I'm not going to speak for Bob Iger because I'm going to let you, if you will.

The Oswald the Rabbit was the sort of trailer of that trade in terms of value.

It may have had a personal value to him, his children, his wife, his family, his first cousin.

Who knows?

But when you value the assets in that trade, you can assign a value to almost everything you got other than the rabbit.

Yeah, the rabbit is, of course.

The thing we pulled out of the hat.

And

the, no, look, Oswald the Rabbit is sort of more fun to tell the story of.

Those other things had real value and were things we wanted.

So there was a little more deliberate process than I remembered, frankly, that, oh, let's see what would make sense to get.

And that's what happened.

Oswald, I think, was Bob, I think, considers himself the

successor to Walt Disney and the keeper of the flame.

And I think it mattered to him.

I think it mattered to the Disney family that the first thing Walt Disney had, first character he created, came back to

the battlefield.

I was going to say, I'm waiting for like the Oswald the Rabbit cinematic universe.

As far as I know, I've never saw any byproduct of that or product of that, but we did.

I had forgotten about the preakness and the highlights.

Olympic highlights matter.

As you know, when you own the rights to something, you can actually monetize giving people highlights because the other networks have to follow a very strict rule of the number of seconds they can show of a game.

This is a real thing between networks.

And you were back in an era where people were very protective

of their highlight rights.

Seems almost quaint now.

Right.

But this, so by the way, just how did Al Michaels feel about this, you might ask?

The quote from him, this is a reference to the fact that famously,

around the same time, the Kansas City Chiefs and the New York Jets executed a strange trade of their own.

The Chiefs gave the Jets a draft pick as compensation for releasing Herm Edwards from his contract, and they, of course, acquired him on the other side of that.

And Al Michael said, quote, Oswald is definitely worth more than a fourth-round draft choice.

Which brings me to David.

What kind of weird trades did you cook up in this way?

We were

one day our owner walked in and said, hey, we have to hire this guy named Jim Benedict.

He was a coach for the, I want to say, Pittsburgh Pirates.

And

we really did not want to hire him.

We didn't view him as an asset, but he somehow had convinced the owner that he was going to change the fortunes of our team on and off the field.

And the Pirates, yep.

And he was under contract.

And so we had to call the Pirates, and I had to call the president of the Pirates.

And I said, listen, I got a small problem.

My owner is going to tamper with your employee.

We are going to have a deal done that is going to overpay him so badly.

He was the special assistant at the time in Pittsburgh, which is, again, just a great title in general.

Because what does that even mean?

Meaningless.

I loved my special assistants.

But in any case, I basically, have you ever done this negotiation where you just

get naked?

Where you not literally, although, listen, you just say that's a different kind of negotiation.

I have no

legal terms a trois.

It can be a deux or a quatre.

I see.

Or just what's what's solo in French?

Oh, yeah.

Stop it.

You say to someone in negotiation, I have no basis to win anything that you could say.

I have no counterpoint.

I have no basis to win this, but I'm just telling you that I need this and there's nothing I can do.

And we are going to overpay and we're going to overpay in a way that is going to be idiotic and you're going to look like a genius.

So when you say naked, you mean here are the cards, here is the table, please examine all of them.

It's not please examine.

I'm going to introduce you to the cards on the table so you know that I am not fooling around.

Pun continued.

And so we ended up having to trade an actual pitcher who ended up being a bona fide major leaguer.

The pirates took him from us.

And we got this coach who ended up, you know, being terrible.

But the point is that you can do trades that are not common.

Am I Googling wrong?

No, Trevor Williams.

Trevor Williams.

Your right-hander, one of your top pitching prospects.

This was

the Lee Coca.

We're looking at it.

Oh, my God.

We are

idiots.

I'm sorry, Miami.

I really am sorry.

That's funny.

That's terrible.

We had to trade a player to get to the Nationals.

2024, AD.

That's a real career, he's had.

Wow.

That's a real big league.

Nine years.

Nine years all in so far.

I'm very sorry.

We traded a player to try to get Azzigi.

And the point is, you can come up with creative solutions to get what you want when you want it.

And it's not just sports, it's business, it's life.

And you have to look when you're doing a negotiation, you have to look at what the other side has in their entire quiver.

You have to look at everything, every asset they have, because you don't know if you value something differently than they do.

And that's where true value can be extracted on both sides.

So, my question for this framework of a deal, for these deals, is

is this easier or harder, given that now you're trying to compare apples to oranges, special assistance to actual major league arms.

Like, how hard is it to come to an agreement, even given that there are mutual needs that are nakedly being expressed?

John, I find it easier because when you're trading for a stock price, you know, a stock price has a market, you know what the price is.

And if someone's either going to offer you more per share than that stock price or less, but when it's something that you can't put a value on necessarily,

and if we get back to what just happened with Warner Brothers, ESPN, and NBA,

they They probably were not going to solve that with money because

Warner Brothers had to get something that allowed them to feel good, to present a good face to

their customers, and more importantly, their stock shareholders.

And NBA had to get out of this sort of disruptive discussion and didn't want those other contractual details revealed.

And ESPN was a bit of a, could have been a bystander, but at some point they clearly got brought in.

They solved each other's problems without trading money, without exchanging money.

That's a positive deal.

Yeah, your company was brilliant because they wanted, they've got one small issue with inside the NBA because what you read is such a critical part, which is it's not going to be Shaq and Barkley and Kenny Smith for every one of ESPN's games.

And so they're going to need what will end up being a B-league, a

B-level team studio show to do pre- and post-game.

They certainly will not want to call it that.

And they probably have to account for my friend Stephen A.

Smith, who really cares about the NBA

and is not going to want to just be in the shadow of these other guys.

I think you'll see him on the inside of the NBA at some point.

Renegotiating his deal as we speak, reportedly.

Yes.

And the only way to pay for the number for Stephen A.

Smith is you have to have it spread across different cost centers within a company like Disney, which is why you're reading there could be some Disney when you read that he's going to do stuff for Disney or stuff on politics, sports, really what you're saying is that people get together at Disney under Bob and say, all right, we got to get to this number.

I'm not taking all that from my budget.

That's ridiculous.

And so you trade within a company.

I don't, you had this certainly at ESPN.

There are trades that happen within budgetary silos of who's going to get which allocation for someone.

It's true, of course.

And ordinarily, they feel like they're ridiculous because there's no way anybody could do all that.

With Stephen A.

He is maybe the hardest working owner talent, among the hardest working owner talents I ever saw.

He would do a radio show in the morning, a talk show in the afternoon, a three, you know.

He will be.

Stephen works.

Works, works, and works.

He will be playing, I believe, a Hawkeye in the next Avengers sequel sequel at this rate.

Well, Jeremy Renner is better.

He recovered from the snowplow thing.

Oh.

I think he got run off.

I thought you were suggesting he'd be better than Stephen A.

Smith.

He's going to play that rolling.

You're saying he's well.

He's well.

It's funny when companies fight internally.

I always use

this as the president of a company because I'm interested.

Bob Igera, it's hilarious.

He's looking at his empire, and he's got different fiefdoms within the empire.

And often they're competing to take his place or they're competing to shine.

And when you have to split up a budgetary item under an umbrella of a company, you know, it doesn't actually impact.

If the cost for Stephen A is 20 million a year, and it doesn't matter if different entities are paying $5 million or $8 million, it's costing the organization $20 million.

But people run their own P ⁇ L within the bigger company.

Right.

I will actually hazard a guess that all of the salary is being paid by ESPN and that Stephen A.

has the ambitions to be doing other things he wants to do and that they are reaching out to the other parts of the company to say, gee, could you take a meeting with Stephen A.

He's interested in producing a scripted film?

So my guess would be that they're not, I don't ever remember being involved in many instances where we were going looking for money from other divisions.

You think it's eyewash, the whole Disney, you think it's just football?

Because I know he wants to be in football.

So that, that to me is all under ESPN.

I was under the impression that he was interested in politics and interested in other things that Disney is doing on other channels.

Stephen A certainly has ambitions to do other things.

But again, my guess is they're not.

ESPN is going to pay for this salary would be my guess.

And then what they're doing is trying to.

convince him that staying with ESPN gives him access to the rest of the Walt Disney company for some of the other things he would like to work on.

It does lead me to a loaded loaded and related curiosity I have, which is that did you guys enjoy negotiating with talent with players?

Because we've talked about now, of course, the transactionality of all of these assets, but this very specific dance, did you guys like that?

Was this something of interest to you, John and David?

I can't say it was the most delightful activity I ever engaged in.

First of all, you're not negotiating with the talent.

So it's annoying anyway

because you're negotiating with an agent.

And really the

most important, and tell me if you disagree, David, you probably understand this better than I do.

The most important reason to have an agent is so they can be aggressive,

say things that you might

not feel comfortable saying.

And also,

the benefit you do get as good person on the other side of the table is you don't ruin your relationship.

Right.

Right?

You don't want to be with somebody and tell them, no, we're not going to let you do that.

No, that's ridiculous.

You say that to the agent.

So the agent is a go-between to carry messages back and forth.

And to,

since

his or her sole purpose is to get a deal done, they know what not.

You know, it's like my being in between you two and going, you say, oh, well, I want to do this.

And I go, well, he says he wants to do this, but it's okay.

We'll take care of that somehow, some other way.

I mean, they serve a very important purpose, which is to protect the relationships, get the best deal for their client, and

by the way,

serve the person they're doing the deal with as well.

So where agents are even more important than that, which I agree with you for the most part, but where you need an agent is when you're negotiating termination for cause provisions.

You're negotiating the legal part that's with all the contracts with talent.

That talent wouldn't have the understanding.

It's not their background.

They're not lawyers.

And the company will take advantage.

So we used to be fine with players who would not have agents, except the union would always look at the contracts.

So you couldn't really pull one over on some of the termination languages.

But for talent, if you have a talent who doesn't have an agent, it's fantastic because you have them sign a one-way contract where all of the benefits.

I mean, you need a net Pablo.

If I were you, I'd get an agent.

Keep going.

I know John doesn't like them.

Take them, take, take notes.

I'm going to set David up to tell me I'm lying once again.

Oh, I love it.

I love it.

I never had glee that somebody didn't have an agent because, oh, I can take advantage of them.

They pretty much.

It's because you had people who did.

It's just your perch allows you to be this sort of lovely character that you were.

You know, I did, I did.

This benevolent dictator that you were.

It's so funny to me.

I did not get born on the perch.

I got born

below.

So I know kind of what goes on there.

It's not that I don't understand it.

It's not how we did business.

It's so good that not another show went by when John does not remind everyone that he's a man of the people.

That's right.

Born in rural Carolina, where I went to a public school with a bunch of pumpkins.

You've never heard me utter the phrase, I'm a man of the people.

Because you are.

What did Ozzy Guillain tell you when you informed him that you were trading him for some stuff?

He said, Poppy, you don't give me four years.

Don't give me four years.

He actually told me, can you imagine?

And we gave him four years because he had already agreed to it with our owner.

No, I had the conversation with Jerry Reinsdorf and with Bud Selig about Ozzie Guillain.

And they said, you really want Ozzie Guillain?

They were saying that's not a trade you should make.

And our owner had a deal done with him and wanted Ozzie Guillain to be our manager.

And Ozzie Guhan, the first time I ever spent time with him, he was our third base coach when we won the World Series in 03.

So I knew him for years.

But when we hired him nine years later, he said, David, like, what are you doing giving me four years?

And he was right.

We fired him after one and had to pay him for four.

Idiots.

That's obviously what you were doing.

A better monopoly player than I would have imagined.

That's why you have to screw some other people who don't have agents.

That's right.

It's so true.

We had to find money from a different silo to make up for all the money we were paying him.

I can't decide if doing these shows with you, with both of you, makes me feel better or worse about my future.

It's really hard sometimes.

Mission accomplished.

Way to go, John.

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The college football playoff, speaking of John's past and sports

apostrophe, sports is future.

It's here, John.

The 12-team playoff is here.

The cabal that David accuses you of being still a part of somehow

has made its penultimate ruling.

And as a broadcast concern, as a sports business concern,

what has occurred to you as we're now on the precipice of this

that maybe

is news we could use here?

Is a development in how we understand what we're actually getting as a product?

Well, the only revelation I've had this week, I was in studio with Dan and his crew Monday and Tuesday.

And you not only have the experience of watching them do the show, televisions are up with all the other shows that are on, right?

GetUp is on and McAfee comes on.

And I realize that the college football playoff is doing exactly what it was intended to do because that is all anybody was talking about that day was who is going to get in.

This is going to be a smash.

That's all they talked about last year, too.

What?

Let's be better than that, honestly.

That's all they talked about last year.

They always talk about the selection.

When FSU gets left out, that's all anybody's talking about.

They're looking for content this time of year.

I want you to come out and tell the truth.

I want you to tell us that the broadcasters are involved in the rankings.

I want you to tell us that it is more important to have Alabama on TV than Miami.

So let's set up this story.

Because I'm livid listening to him say that.

Well, but this is, in Don's defense, this is also a bit of a rerun of an argument, which is the SEC and ESPN.

are part of the cabal and there's an incentive here to prioritize Alabama as the team that edges edges out Miami out of the ACC because Alabama, of course, is a bigger brand.

And of course, there's strength of schedule stuff, which is real about

the SEC versus the ACC.

But yeah.

So, John, how do you respond to

your interlocutor, to your inquisitor here?

Look, we won when they decided to do a national championship.

Four teams wasn't the right thing to start with.

The 12-team is not the right thing.

They're 75% of the way there.

When I look at that crazy bracket, which is eight and nine will play and they'll play one, it's like play 16 teams.

There's eight games.

One plays 16, two plays 15.

It's easy.

And there are the more people that are in, the better it is for the broadcaster.

You get more games.

These games will do big numbers.

I don't know how to calculate because I think some of them will fall in NFL windows and that will have an effect.

But

this is a big deal.

These are going to get big ratings.

Everybody's talking about it.

And I would say, David, I bet you if you went back and looked at the minutes on 10, the most, 10 most important podcasts that were devoted to the college football playoff, I would bet you they are double this year, what they were last year.

I'll take the under.

Last year was Florida State.

That was a big deal.

This,

you've got 15 conversations.

The electoral map has been activated.

Just tell me that you would not rather have Alabama versus Miami.

I really want to hear you say that.

I would never deny that that if you started out, I would start out and say, I want Notre Dame.

I want Southern Cal.

I want Texas.

I want Michigan, Ohio State, I want Georgia, I want Alabama.

And yeah,

you want those teams, but

there was no attempt at this point in the year to go and try to convince the committee that we figure out a way to put Alabama in instead of Miami.

They rely upon this sort of pretense that all of this is mathematical.

Strength of schedule, we've looked at this, we've looked at that.

At the end of the day, there's a group of people who are sort of deciding, and there's some hard calls to make, and they'll make them.

But I can guarantee you that they're not calling up

ESPN and going, you know, it's really close.

You want Miami or you want Alberta?

Well, they don't have to, is my point.

So

David's frustration is.

They know it, and so they give it to you, but I don't think they do.

Well,

I want to.

So, David, whenever I notice David being so exercised about this, what I detect is that he knows how he would do it if, in fact,

it was done to me.

That's how I know it.

Because I was part of a team that was not interested.

ESPN had no interest in having us on Sunday night baseball, or there was no interest in any national broadcast.

And you can deny that ESPN was involved in the schedule, but you're lying to everyone.

No, no, no, no.

That's the quickest.

But you are.

No, no.

Suggesting.

that on Sunday night I want the Yankees and the Red Sox is very different than suggesting that in a postseason

playoff that we are going to dictate or that they know who we want.

They'll consequently put them in.

That's not true.

We didn't want the Florida Marlins on Sunday night is accurate, though I did do the contract with baseball in which we agreed and we proposed it to put every team on at least once.

Remember that?

That was, you're saying that was your idea.

Hold on, John, John the Socialist Autocrat is back.

I want to know about this.

Wait a minute.

Everybody, orange slices.

There was a mutiny inside the ownership room because it was all Yankees Red Sox.

And they could no longer get support for agreeing to a TV deal because there were eight of us, low-revenue teams that you ignored

that got together.

You name the eight.

Royals, Guardians, Brewers, Marlins, Sharays.

You have no interest in the world.

I am Spartacus.

It's not incredible.

No, no, it's not incredible.

I'm John Skipper.

I'm going to show every team.

Stop.

Stop.

Come on.

Stop.

We made you.

No, you did not make me, but you are probably right about one thing.

I went to Tim Brosnan and said, well, how much money am I going to have to pay?

And what matters to you?

You're right.

And he said, we got to put all the teams on.

So then it wasn't your idea.

What he said to you was, look, this guy in this weird Jaguar print coat won't stop bothering you.

Please give him a

right.

I ask what you'll need.

And then we agree.

And then when I went back to, so you're right.

So when I went back to propose the deal, it included that.

Okay.

But it was, but by the way, that's very different.

Why would I not, in the course of doing a deal, say, yes, and I want to get more Yankees-Red Sox games?

Why would you not do that?

But do you think that ESPN would go and say, I need you to make sure the Florida Marlins don't make the World Series?

It's understood.

You just treated a picture of the special specialist.

What you're suggesting is understood that we don't want the Marlins in the World Series, so baseball does something to prevent that.

I'll tell you, it's understood that the ESPN wants Alabama instead of Miami.

It's just understood.

You're right.

There may not be a smoking gun of a phone call that came from Ward Manual to ESPN.

Michigan, who's running the committee,

to Jimmy and saying, hey,

we're tight here.

Allie, Ala, or do you want Miami?

Come on.

I believe that the members of the committee would pass lie detector tests if they said, is ESPN putting pressure on you to put in teams from the SEC?

This has a metaphor for politics in a way that is sort of undeniable, right?

Here you have a body that is

on a factual basis insulated.

from the pressure that David is indicating.

Their job is to be insulated, but the entire premise of them being elected, nominated to that position, might suggest suggest that they were chosen for, again, this larger puppeteering interest, which David and many,

it's really not a conspiracy.

It's good business.

They give billions of dollars to get the CFP.

They don't want Franklin and Marshall v.

Lehi.

Though if I don't know why I just thought of this school,

if I actually had that kind of influence, I would have said there are no non-power for economists.

That's what I would have said and did say over and over and over to the people running it.

Please don't do this thing where if somebody in conference number eight is undefeated, they have to come in.

So that was a place where directly they knew I didn't want that.

I wanted only teams from the SEC, the Big 12, the Pac-12, the Big Ten,

and the ACC.

That's all I wanted.

Probably in that order.

And by the way, in not in that order.

And by the way, I wanted them to play.

I wanted them to play.

I remember with the SEC and we were paying a bunch of money.

I said, you guys have got to quit playing these.

Alabama's got to quit playing Troller and you got to quit playing.

You know, North Carolina's got to quit playing North Carolina Central.

But they wouldn't do it.

So

the money we were paying did not make us all-powerful and allow us to dictate.

I mean, you could.

You could push things.

We did.

We pushed the ACC to play 20 conference games.

There are still coaches, I'm sure, who

MF me for, why am I playing 20 conference games?

Because what they care about is getting a contract next year.

And that means they have more losses.

But, I mean, if they want to get more money,

you'd go and you'd say, don't play any cupcakes.

And you'd say, by the way, if you wanted to make the most money in the college football playoff, USC would be in.

And so would Michigan.

Right?

Yeah.

I wouldn't be looking at SMU and Boise State and those schools getting in.

But there wouldn't be a deal without that.

Well, this is the Super League.

Right.

This is a future topic on this program.

And around the margins here,

they are involved in what I think is kind of a silly charade, but they believe it, which is, oh, we're using math, we're using analytics, and we're making the tough decisions about who deserves to get in.

It becomes all about, and all the, and I witnessed it in the studio Monday, what's fair?

Are they doing what's right?

There's no fair or right.

It's a damn,

it's an entertainment on television designed to attract a large audience.

You can collect distribution fees

or advertising

dollars.

That's what it's about.

So forget fairness.

I mean, it's not about fairness.

Forget fairness, David.

It's just business.

But it's not just business.

It is business at its core and it is maybe business first, but it's not just business.

If it's just business, SMU would not be in, and Southern Cal would be in.

Yeah,

right.

I mean, you don't disagree with that.

Well, look, the Southern,

the SMU game, by the way, another litmus test for how much we actually do want Alabama in this playoff this weekend.

John, thank you for going from trading cartoon characters to now at this company actually hiring some.

So,

good show.

Thank you, Pablo.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metal Arc Media production, and we are produced by Walter Averoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Rachel Miller-Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren.

Our studio engineering by RG Systems, our sound design by NGW Post, our theme song, as always, by John Bravo.

And we will talk to you next time.