I’m a weirdo among American sports fans. Sure, I love football, but I prefer the college variety to the NFL and when it comes to pro sports, I will pick the NBA over the NFL ten times out of ten.
But I am not so devoted to either that I am blind to the power of the NFL. It’s a unique animal that can change and define viewing patterns for sports fans. There is a reason that the NFL has never struggled to raise the floor in its rights negotiations. Its power in the American television marketplace is unmatched – not just by sports, but by anything.
The NFL offered a unique value to Amazon. Even though there was no precedent for the sport having a streaming-exclusive game every week, taking on Thursday Night Football was not a gamble.
Amazon wants to grow its portfolio of the four major pro leagues in the United States and is reportedly pursuing a weekly package of games with the NBA in order to make that happen. I am not sure it is a smart investment though. Amazon and the NBA cannot offer each other the same value proposition.
Not only is the NFL a television superpower, but Amazon had a unique approach for standing out. Tony Gonzalez, who just a few years earlier was the “young guy” on the NFL Today set would be the senior-most analyst on the streaming giant’s pregame show. He was surrounded by recently retired stars Ryan Fitzpatrick, Richard Sherman, and Andrew Whitworth.
The Thursday Night Football pregame show looks different. It immediately stood out in a landscape where the other networks offered shows that were either bad, boring, or populated exclusively by men old enough to have strong opinions on Kiss’s first public appearance without makeup.
Amazon does not have that familiar point of entry for NBA coverage. TNT’s Inside the NBA is the pregame gold standard – not just for basketball, but for all of sports. The show is built on genuinely entertaining personalities with authentic chemistry. There is no talent or combination of talents that Amazon could hire to unseat Ernie, Chuck, Kenny and Shaq.
When it acquired NFL rights, Amazon was able to make a splash in the broadcast booth too. The company paired a legend with a star. Al Michaels had been cast off by NBC and Kirk Herbstreit’s fame had come from his work in the college game, but the combination was one that created intrigue. Although they have received some uneven reviews in their two years together, Amazon seems satisfied that it has the right team in place for Thursday Night Football.
Can the company re-create that in basketball? Who is the legendary play-by-play man looking for a home? Surely, no one is thinking about trying to lure Marv Albert or Bob Costas out of retirement. And even if Amazon got its legend, who is the analyst hire that could make America say “Oh, that is interesting”?
All college sports are a niche. The pro version of every sport will outrage and outdraw its college counterpart. College football has the advantage of being football though. The ceiling on Kirk Herbstreit’s celebrity is much higher than say Jay Bilas’s or Dick Vitale’s.
Would Amazon consider following the Tony Romo or Jason Whitten model and pulling someone right off the floor and throwing them into the company’s top NBA booth? If so, who is that? Short of LeBron James or Steph Curry retiring at season’s end, who can you point to in the NBA and say that not only do they have the personality to make it work, but they are a name big enough to make fans say “okay, I need to see this at least once”?
Romo and Whitten were not those kinds of stars, but again, the bar for the NFL is very different from any other sport. All you need is Jerry Jones’s star of approval and you do bring a certain level of celebrity to the minds of football fans.
Reuniting Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson is out of the question. Van Gundy is now in the Celtics’ front office and Jackson…look, I like the guy as an analyst and hope he gets another chance somewhere, but if you’re a big tech company, with allegedly unlimited coffers, and you trot out a retread as your lead analyst next to a retread as your play-by-play man, I am going to wonder if it is because you’re apathetic, uncreative, or maybe you aren’t as rich as you claim to be.
Finally, and this is the biggest sticking point in my opinion, why would I go out of my way to watch the NBA on Amazon? Thursday Night Football is the only option for NFL fans that night. For people who can be entertained by either college or pro football, the Amazon game is usually competing with something that only the most diehard college football fans would want to watch. The path to success is virtually unobstructed.
The NBA is never going to take a night of the week and give its fans only a single game to watch. The NFL has a short season. Games are played on specific days of the week and the calendar is structured around TV. The NBA wants product on every night. It is the only way to get 1230 games in before the postseason starts.
Streaming entertainment is a hassle. It may be second nature to us since the onset of the pandemic turned streaming entertainment into something so common across most US households, but take time to think about it. You aren’t even looking in a single ecosystem. You have to choose a service, find what it is you want to see, wait for it to load, and if no one else in your home is using wifi, you can watch it without stops or lags.
When you only have one option to watch or bet on, you’ll overlook all of that without so much as a second thought. When you have other choices on regional and maybe even national television, it is pretty easy to convince yourself that unless your favorite team or player is on Amazon that night, the Hornets and Wizards on NBA TV will be just as entertaining.
Maybe this is part of a grander plan. It would have to be, right? It doesn’t make sense for Amazon to get in bed with the NBA just to have the games. The company has said that doing a deal with the league would make Prime Video a Thursday night sports destination year-round and that is true, I guess, but I would have trouble keeping a straight face if that is all an Amazon exec had to sell me.
The only motivation that makes sense to me is ESPN. Either Amazon is trying to make a strategic partnership with Disney a no-brainer by sharing as many major properties with ESPN as possible or it sees inspiration. ESPN has partnerships with all four major pro leagues, the WNBA, and two major college conferences. If Prime Video is going to stay in the sports business, it makes sense for Amazon to chase the same status. I’ve been told the company has the money to make the goal an easy one to accomplish.
Demetri Ravanos is a former columnist and editor for Barrett Media. He is the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host of the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
