With innovations in sports television underscoring the emphasis on direct-to-consumer technology, NBC Sports is set to air the first-ever exclusive live-streamed National Football League playoff game on Peacock. The matchup between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs takes place on Saturday, Jan. 13 at 8 p.m. EST/5 p.m. PST and will feature a commentary team of play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico, analyst Jason Garrett and sideline reporter Kaylee Hartung. This game is one of three Wild Card round playoff matchups that NBC Sports will be airing this weekend, something that was not originally in its 11-year agreement with the NFL.
Although the contest will be available on broadcast television in the Miami and Kansas City marketplaces, there is national appeal to football, especially a consequential playoff game. The NBCUniversal subsidiary reportedly paid the league $110 million in order to present the matchup after the company learned it was available to be sold to a streaming platform. The league has been expanding in the space over the last several years through ventures including Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video and NFL Sunday Ticket with Alphabet subsidiary YouTube/YouTube TV.
For new NBC Sports president Rick Cordella, it is a chance to expand the company’s longstanding relationship with the league. At the same time, it provides Comcast a chance to drive subscriptions, ingratiate Peacock to prospective consumers and reduce overall churn. Data from Nielsen Media Research reveals that Peacock accounted for 1.3% of all total-day viewing among persons 2+ in November 2023. As a whole, streaming constituted 36.1% of all viewing in this category, the largest share among means of television dissemination. Continuing to expand the reach and relevance from the streaming service is part of the company’s business strategy as it executes ongoing endeavors and deliberates potential future opportunities.
“It’s part of everything we do,” Cordella said. “Every rights deal we look at – we look at it through a broadcast, cable and Peacock lens – and we try to determine where the content is best put forth across those varying NBCU platforms.”
Cordella was part of the team that helped launch Peacock after serving as executive vice president and general manager of digital media for NBC Sports Group. Under his previous role, he was responsible for overseeing various aspects of the business and was integral in pioneering and executing seminal projects. Some of these included live-streaming the Super Bowl and Olympics for the first time, along with hosting and publishing many on-demand clips.
“Obviously I was at Peacock for almost four years, so I know everyone over there and have great relationships and we work really well together,” Cordella said. “When an opportunity to invest in sports comes up, we sit down and we do our models and our analysis, and that includes the Peacock team.”
Part of the proposition that would ensure effectiveness with this expenditure pertained to the Peacock exclusive regular-season game the platform aired on Dec. 23 as part of a holiday exclusive doubleheader. Featuring a commercial-free fourth quarter and a reduced advertising load of more than 40%, the game averaged 7.3 million viewers and accounted for the largest prime-time audience on the night.
While the exclusive game was part of the deal with the NFL, placing it in prime time was not and was done to resemble the forthcoming Wild Card doubleheader. Saturday’s matchup will be preceded by the Cleveland Browns against the Houston Texans at 4:30 p.m. EST/1:30 p.m. PST, which will also be available to simulcast on Peacock and watch on Telemundo.
“A big audience coming in to watch an NBC Wild Card game, and us being able to promote to that audience saying, ‘Coming up next,’ that immediate adjacency to a Peacock exclusive playoff game I think made a lot of sense on many different levels,” Cordella said. “The NFL actually were the ones who came up with that idea, so I give them a lot of credit for that, but it’s a good opportunity for us. It’s a good opportunity with a top show to have it exclusively on Peacock, and we’ll see what it does for our business.”
Outside of the holiday exclusive contest, NBC Sports Digital amassed an average minute audience (AMA) of 1.56 million viewers for Sunday Night Football broadcasts during the 2023 season, and three matchups drew more than 2 million consumers. Kansas City was the second highest-rated metered market for the property, generating a 20.2 household rating and 45.0 share. For the year, Sunday Night Football averaged a total audience delivery (TAD) of 21.4 million viewers, its best finish since 2015, and was up 8% on the year. The prime-time property is on pace to be the No. 1 ranked show in prime time television for a 13th consecutive year.
“We were happy with the schedule; we’re happy with how things turned out,” Cordella said. “I think also a little bit of this is the writers’ strike was going on too, so there’s probably less content available elsewhere which helped, I think, overall sports content this fall. But we were happy with the numbers overall and it seems sports TV ratings are defying a little bit of the overall TV gravity.”
Digital platforms in television provide users with a variety of options to watch and engage with both linear and nonlinear material, concurrently putting in to play a shift in the business model of various legacy networks. Peacock eclipsed 30 million subscribers last year with overall losses peaking at $2.8 billion, an improvement on the company’s initial projection of a $3 billion loss in January 2023.
As its growth continues, the company has negotiated deals and incorporated Peacock therein. For example, the recent seven-year deal with the Big Ten Conference includes an exclusive streaming package that includes men’s and women’s basketball games, along with early round games in both tournaments. The network recently concluded its first season of B1G Saturday Night for football in the conference featuring play-by-play announcer Noah Eagle, color commentator Todd Blackledge and sideline reporter Kathryn Tappen. This broadcast team will be on the call for the Browns-Texans game on NBC before the Peacock exclusive playoff game that night with Tirico, Garrett and Hartung.
“We have a great NFL booth right now with Mike and Cris, and we hope that lasts forever, so I wouldn’t say that Todd and Noah are the next SNF folks; that’s not in our calculus whatsoever,” Cordella said. “We have them on Saturday nights, we have the Big Ten deal for another six years and we hope that those two are the voice of Saturday night football on broadcast TV for the duration of that contract and beyond.”
The Sunday Night Football team called the exclusive Peacock game during the regular season and will be on the linear television game on Sunday night when the Los Angeles Rams face the Detroit Lions. NBC Sports elected to have Tirico on the call for both matchups because of his experience and work with the company, including as its primary host for Olympics coverage.
Tirico assumed play-by-play duties on Sunday Night Football when Al Michaels left the property to sign a deal with Amazon Prime Video to work on its Thursday night schedule of games. Michaels was given an emeritus title by NBC Sports, which included contributing to NBC’s broadcast of the NFL playoffs and the Olympics. The network’s decision to exclude him from the commentary assignment in a year where it is televising three games elicited both surprise and confusion from fans and industry professionals.
“We love Al – Al’s the best play-by-play guy in history and continues to do incredibly solid work on Thursday Night Football,” Cordella said. “It really had nothing to do with Al; it had more to do [with the fact that] we have an incredible Big Ten team. This is the first year we had the Big Ten team, so we have a full unit that goes with the biggest games on Saturday night prime time, and to reward that team; to use that team in a bigger spot here seems to make a lot of sense for us.”
Whether Michaels appears on NBC in future seasons remains to be seen, although Cordella did note that they hope to use him down the road. The nature of the company’s contract with the NFL calls for certain years with one Wild Card game and others with two. It will also air Super Bowl LX from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. on Feb. 8, 2026, marking the first time it will broadcast the game since the Los Angeles Rams championship to conclude the 2021 season.
“There’s no sort of riff,” Cordella said regarding the accord between NBC and Michaels. “I saw some of the headlines and I kind of blanched at them. They weren’t really all that accurate. We have a great relationship with Al.”
Starting at Rotoworld in 2003 while he was in graduate school at Boston College, Cordella wrote for free on the website to gain repetitions in the field. When NBC acquired Rotoworld in 2006, Cordella came to the company in the acquisition and ultimately ended up overseeing the portfolio of fantasy sports content.
There is a growing number of sports fans choosing to wager in varying capacities following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to declare the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) unconstitutional wherefore states have reserved power over its legality. Various broadcast networks have experimented with how they can leverage this interest and implement it within the broadcasts, ideating and conducting trials aspiring for auspicious results.
“Overall my thoughts are that you don’t necessarily need a separate gambling theme,” Cordella explained. “We’ve experimented that in a few different areas and have pulled back because I think it’s just a matter of acknowledging why people are watching the game and some of the interesting odds that may be taking place, but you don’t have to be a dedicated feed for it or you don’t need to hit the viewer over the head with constant gambling sort of updates. We’ve had varying degrees of integration.”
When Cordella began working at NBC Sports in 2006, the company was being led by chairman Dick Ebersol, a venerated luminary who received the NFL’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award for his contributions. He was fortunate to be in the same division and is cognizant of the division’s longevity and accomplishments. In making decisions, he seeks to utilize the expertise of the team around him and values his colleagues.
“I know I’m not the smartest guy in the room, and I have a lot of smart folks that work at NBC Sports that you can lean on to get the right answers to the right problems,” Cordella said, “so it’s more of a collaborative sort of environment I hope.”
Cordella was named president of the division shortly after the departure of chairman Pete Bevacqua, who joined the University of Notre Dame to serve as its athletic director. Bevacqua has been shadowing current athletic director John Swarbrick in the role and will assume full responsibilities during the first quarter of this year.
Before the conclusion of last year though, NBC and Notre Dame came to an agreement on a new media rights agreement, retaining Fighting Irish football home games on the network. Financial details of the contract were not disclosed, but it is believed to help ensure the school remains independent of a conference. Notre Dame had the 10th-highest average number of viewers during the college football regular season, according to a report from the Action Network.
“The motivation is it’s a good financial deal for NBCU first and foremost,” Cordella said. “On top of that, it’s a 31-year partnership that we’ve had with that school and the special relationship that we have with Notre Dame, and we want to continue it. This sort of fits hand in glove with our Big Ten deal as well where you look across 15 nights of prime time. We’ll have a few that are Notre Dame and the rest being Big Ten.”
NBC lost the broadcast rights to the National Hockey League following the 202-21 season, ending a 16-year stint with a closing video narrated by Mike “Doc” Emrick. The network could opt to bring another professional sports league on its air in the next few years though with the expiration of media rights for the National Basketball Association.
The Walt Disney Company (ESPN/ABC/ESPN+) and Warner Bros. Discovery (TNT/TBS/Max) are within the penultimate year of their deals with the league worth a reported average total of $2.67 billion. Collectively, the 30 franchises surrounding the National Basketball Association garnered $10.58 billion in revenue last season, up $500 million from the previous season.
“I think with any big property we run analysis on it,” Cordella said. “The NBA is no different than any other property that would come to market. [It] is certainly a bigger property that comes to the market very rarely.”
An exclusive 45-day negotiating period with existing rightsholders commences on March 9, during which renewals and/or new deals can be formally discussed. If the rights then hit the open market, NBC Sports will consider numerous factors and render a determination. Numerous reports have suggested that the league is looking to broaden the scope of dissemination in its next deal by utilizing linear and digital platforms.
While the inaugural NBA In-Season Tournament was televised by Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery networks this year, it remains unknown if the league will look to bundle those games separately. There are also questions surrounding the viability of regional sports networks surrounding the ongoing Ch. 11 bankruptcy of Diamond Sports Group, making a prediction of a new deal’s structure somewhat enigmatic.
“We’ll certainly take a look at the NBA,” Cordella said, “but it has to make sense, and we’ll be disciplined when we approach it.”
NBC Sports previously carried the NBA Finals from 1991 until 2002, but the marquee championship round matchup has since been affiliated with Disney on ABC. Last season’s NBA Finals between the Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat averaged 11.64 million viewers on ABC, and the NBA playoffs in totality were the most-watched in five years. Bringing the games back to NBC is a potential outcome that remains ambiguous, although there is ostensible interest.
“It’s like asking if we want the Super Bowl,” Cordella said. “The NBA Finals is a fantastic property – the NBA’s a fantastic property. When the time comes when they’re out of their exclusive negotiating period, we’ll certainly hope we sit down with them and see what is available to look at. Until then, it’s hard to speculate.”
NBCUniversal continued its efforts to add sports programming on Peacock with the two-year deal it inked with Major League Baseball to air an exclusive Sunday morning regular-season game. At the moment, it has not yet been determined if MLB Sunday Leadoff will return for the 2024 season or if the company is interested in expanding its package of MLB rights.
“We like being in business with baseball,” Cordella said. “We’re working on what we can do in the future together and we’ll see. We’d love to make it work and be in business with baseball.”
Cordella will oversee the company’s production of the Olympic Games this summer, which are slated to take place from Paris, France. On top of that, NBC Sports will continue its partnerships with the PGA Tour, Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Premier Leagues, properties that tend to elicit interest and viewers. The key, however, will be ensuring the business is strong and making prudent decisions based on both qualitative and quantitative metrics.
“Certainly we have one of the best sports portfolios of any media company out there,” Cordella said. “How do we sort of justify to continue the investment that we have in it?”
Through long-term deals with sports entities, internal and external factors are at risk of changing and altering the scope of the contract. The Peacock exclusive NFL Wild Card Game was derived out of the league’s penchant for exploring capabilities in the streaming space, and NBC determined it was a chance it wanted to take. Cordella never could have imagined helping to lead the company into the future, but he feels prepared for the challenge. With the strength of its existing rights and forthcoming aspirations, NBC Sports will aim to capitalize on the dynamism imbued in the marketplace and serve as a premium content provider in the space.
“You’re a steward of the NBC Sports brand,” Cordella said of his role. “I grew up on NBC Sports, and it’s sort of again [a] pinch-me kind of moment that I’m now leading it. How do you make sure NBC Sports matters like it did when I was growing up? Other people look at the Olympics and all that stuff. It’s really all those things combined into one, and we’re navigating each and every day and pushing the ball forward.”
Derek Futterman is an associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, email Derek@BarrettMedia.com or find him on X @derekfutterman.
