The NFL first publicly broached the idea of renegotiating its media rights deals with current broadcast partners last September, an effort to improve contracts that quickly became outdated and undervalued after the NBA signed its landmark 11-year, $76 billion deals in 2024.
When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell first acknowledged the possibility, most observers saw revised deals as inevitable. Networks, it was understood, would be compelled to pay more (perhaps significantly more) for NFL rights and, in return, guarantee themselves a partnership with the most important television property in America through the 2033-34 season. It would be a tough pill to swallow as legacy networks struggle to stymie the declines associated with the pay-TV bundle, but it’d be necessary. Without the NFL, the networks’ retransmission fees and advertising businesses would crater, and there wouldn’t be any network left to save.
But then came some roadblocks. The NFL’s efforts were met with pushback from Washington, where lawmakers and administration officials began to take a keen interest in protecting broadcast networks, threatening the NFL’s vital antitrust exemption should the league take games off public airwaves and put them onto streaming services. That effort, a Wall Street Journal report indicated, was spearheaded by one of the NFL’s broadcast partners, Fox, and its nonagenarian chairman emeritus, Rupert Murdoch.
By this time, reports indicated the NFL had already engaged one of its active partners, CBS and its parent company Paramount. The reasoning behind starting these talks first was simple. In the summer of 2025, Paramount was purchased by Skydance. The transaction triggered a change-of-control provision in the NFL’s broadcast deal with CBS that allows the league to shop those rights on the open market if it chose to do so. Negotiating with CBS first means that if talks go south, the NFL can credibly threaten to walk away with those rights; a level of leverage the league does not have when renegotiating deals with its other broadcast partners.
The plan for the NFL, as reported earlier this year, was to get a deal done with CBS, move on to Fox next, and then knock out deals with the remaining partners one by one throughout the offseason. That clearly has not been the case. The preseason begins this week, no deal has been agreed to with CBS, and formal negotiations with other networks have not yet begun.
One reason for the delay, a recent report by Sportico’s Anthony Crupi reveals, is the ongoing merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which has now been stalled on account of an antitrust lawsuit filed by 12 state attorneys general. The lawsuit “would appear to have put any near-term talks between the NFL and CBS on hold,” Crupi writes.
The Sportico report continues: “There is little doubt CBS will be the first to strike a renewal. Just don’t expect anything to be finalized before NBC stages its near-instant replay of Super Bowl LX at Lumen Field” next month.
Despite the merger-induced holdup, Crupi does write that a deal between CBS and the NFL remains likely, just on a delayed timeline. “CBS and the NFL are eager to get their contractually mandated confabs back underway as soon as circumstances allow,” he writes, adding, “The CBS-NFL mutual admiration society is as collegial as it’s ever been.”
The delay has a knock-on effect for other broadcasters, who can now seemingly rest easy until next offseason without sweating over renegotiating their NFL deals. “Historically, the NFL has preferred to hash out its most important business arrangements outside the penumbra of the season proper, and once the annual Kickoff Game gets underway, that tends to signal that the heavy-duty arrangements have been put on ice until after Roger Goodell presents the Lombardi Trophy to the champs,” Crupi continues.
As Awful Announcing wrote when it became apparent around the NFL’s schedule release in May that the league seemed to be punting its revised deals to next offseason, even delaying the new deals by one season may have saved networks billions of dollars in the aggregate. And at a time when cord-cutting continues to eat away at the television business at an alarming rate, saving those billions is nothing to scoff at.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.