January 9, 2024

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It’s the end of an era. Michigan’s national title win last night closed out the four-team College Football Playoff era with the 12-team format set to debut next season. … Playoff chases helped mark the end of the NFL’s regular season, but so did players publicly celebrating contract bonuses and incentives. … The Dodgers are continuing to spend on player talent for the 2024 season. … And the parent company of sports talk radio giant WFAN is bankrupt.

— Eric Fisher [[link removed]]

Michigan’s Championship Caps Four-Team College Football Playoff Era [[link removed]]

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

On Monday night in Houston, Michigan’s 34-13 triumph over Washington brought the four-team College Football Playoff era to a close.

When the four-team structure began, the CFP didn’t have a staff or an office, let alone a selection committee, according to executive director Bill Hancock, who has presided over the Playoff since its inception in 2014. “We didn’t own a copy machine,” he tells Front Office Sports with a laugh.

The four-team model was an expansion of the postseason that gave classic bowl games new meaning. Hancock knew it would be successful—but perhaps not this successful. “It’s been everything we hoped it would be,” he says.

The CFP’s media contract with ESPN rakes in between $400 million and $500 million per year. As a result, schools receive a total of up to $500 million a year. The games draw monstrous ratings—even last year’s blowout Georgia win ranked as the 78th most-watched program [[link removed]] in all of television.

The four-team system wasn’t without controversy. In many instances, fans decried the lack of parity in allowing just four programs out of more than 100 into any postseason that mattered. That criticism reached a crescendo this year when the CFP’s Selection Committee, made up of independent members, chose to give Alabama the fourth slot instead of undefeated ACC champions Florida State.

The backlash was swift and harsh. Fans sent profanity-laced, threatening emails to committee members, Hancock told reporters on Monday. Both local and national Florida lawmakers attacked the result. FSU, for its part, mentioned the decision as a key reason the school intended to sue to get out of the ACC.

It’s unclear whether a 12-team model will fix the controversy over who’s in and who’s out. It will surely allow for more parity, provide campuses with the opportunity to host games for the first time, and perhaps even give multiple networks a chance to broadcast college football’s crown jewel.

Just one year away, the CFP still has several major details [[link removed]] to iron out, but Hancock isn’t concerned. The advent of the BCS championship and the creation of the four-team playoff were “bigger steps,” he says. “Getting people to come together that hadn’t come together before … that was the biggest leap of all.”

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🎙️ They Said What?

“The Panthers could have the hardest job to fill after Dave Tepper fired another coach midseason, and then his water-bottle incident. … When you have the Chargers with all their talent and the Commanders with new ownership, [Carolina] is No. 3 right now.”

—Senior reporter A.J. Perez on the Carolina Panthers having the least attractive job to fill after a slew of coaches and general managers were fired yesterday. To hear more about the aftermath of Black Monday, check out the latest episode of FOS Today.

🎧 Listen and subscribe on Apple [[link removed]], Google [[link removed]], and Spotify [[link removed]].

NFL Player Incentives Spice Up Final Regular-Season Weekend [[link removed]]

Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports

The Baltimore Ravens finished the regular season last weekend with essentially nothing to play for, having already locked up the top seed in the AFC playoffs. But that final game against Pittsburgh was still huge for Ravens linebacker Jadeveon Clowney.

Clowney recorded a sack against the Steelers, giving him 9.5 for the season and winning him a $750,000 bonus. The 10th-year pro, who has earned [[link removed]] more than $83 million in his career, celebrated with an elaborate on-field dance. [[link removed]]

“I didn’t know I had a sack, and then they told me,” Clowney said. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah,’ and you just start turning it up right now. I had a good time on that.”

In an NFL weekend otherwise dominated by playoff races, the chase [[link removed]] for a whole slew of statistic- and appearance-based player bonuses and incentives frequently crept into game broadcasts and postgame comments. Among those achieved:

Kansas City Chiefs DE Chris Jones: $1.25 million for racking up 10 sacks. Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB Baker Mayfield: $1 million for reaching the playoffs. Tennessee Titans receiver DeAndre Hopkins: $500,000 for hitting various statistical milestones. New York Giants WR Darius Slayton: $200,000 for a pair of statistical milestones in the team’s final game, also increasing his 2024 roster bonus by the same amount. Slayton’s roster bonus for next season is now $2.6 million.

Dozens of other players earned smaller bonuses on the regular season’s final weekend. Transcending mere contractual language, those bonus achievements quickly became active fodder for both live game broadcasts and on social media [[link removed]] as players exuberantly celebrated their forthcoming money. Such feats also were the subject of player prop bets on multiple sportsbooks.

Jones said [[link removed]] he now plans to buy his defensive line teammates and coaches Rolex watches.

“He wanted to get that done,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said of Jones’s pursuit of the bonus money. “[The $1.25 million], that’s a couple cheeseburgers right there he made.”

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Dodgers Continue Offseason Spending Spree, But At What Cost? [[link removed]]

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Dodgers made another free-agent signing, this time bringing in Seattle Mariners outfielder Teoscar Hernández on a one-year, $23.5 million deal. On the surface, it’s a fairly low-stakes transaction, even if Hernández is a former all-star.

The agreement, however, pushes the team’s offseason spending commitments to more than $1.2 billion when including free-agent deals for two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani [[link removed]], pitchers Yoshinobu Yamamoto [[link removed]] and Joe Kelly, a five-year contract extension for pitcher Tyler Glasnow, and several other smaller deals. And that’s not including the nearly $51 million posting fee also being paid to Yamamoto’s former Japanese team. The Dodgers’ offseason spending roughly equals [[link removed]] that of the other 29 MLB teams combined.

The deal has helped reignite [[link removed]] commentary among fans and some team executives surrounding an MLB salary cap. It’s a long-discussed concept that has been resisted by the MLB Players Association just as long.

“Even MLB: The Show won’t allow you to construct this roster,” said [[link removed]] The Athletic’s Jake Ciely on X, referring to the baseball video game.

The Dodgers, however, remain fully compliant with the collective bargaining agreement, both with the current expenditures and the $680 million in salary deferrals in Ohtani’s $700 million contract. The team’s current projected 2024 payroll [[link removed]] of about $300 million is slated to bring the Dodgers into the fourth tier of MLB’s luxury tax, colloquially known as the “Cohen tier,” in reference to high-spending New York Mets owner Steve Cohen.

Because the Dodgers are a repeat luxury tax payer [[link removed]], they are slated [[link removed]] to incur a 110% tax on any payroll above $297 million, in addition to lower tax rates on payroll spending below that figure but above the luxury tax threshold. Overall, the Dodgers are in line to pay more than $40 million in luxury taxes for 2024.

WFAN Helped Start—and Today Dominates—Sports Talk Radio. Its Parent Company Is Bankrupt [[link removed]]

Seth Harrison/The Journal News / USA TODAY NETWORK

Even the perennial appeal of sports talk radio, a major presence in the country’s largest media markets, and strong ratings weren’t enough for radio and podcast company Audacy to avoid bankruptcy, yet another sign of the ongoing challenges for the media advertising market.

The Philadelphia-based Audacy has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and reached an agreement with most of its debt holders to turn about $1.6 billion of its $1.9 billion debt load into equity in the reorganized company. The moves marked a rapid fall for Audacy, which has roots going back to the 1960s as the former Entercom and which owns more than 200 radio stations—including WFAN-AM, the New York sports talk radio giant that essentially invented the genre in the 1980s with its 24-hour format and continues to dominate [[link removed]] local ratings.

“The perfect storm of sustained macroeconomic challenges over the past four years facing the traditional advertising market has led to sharp reduction of several billion dollars in cumulative radio ad spending,” said David Field, Audacy’s chairman, president, and CEO. “These market factors have severely impacted our financial condition.”

In addition to the extensive radio station presence, Audacy owns the Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Media podcasting studios and distributes shows by the likes of Stephen A. Smith and Jim Rome. The bankruptcy filing also arrives about six months after Audacy paid more than $3 million in executive retention bonuses, including $1 million to Field alone.

No immediate operational impact to Audacy stations and podcasts is expected. The company’s issues, however, follow similar ones for top rival iHeartRadio Inc., which filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2018, and reemerged about a year later.

Conversation Starters Michigan has one of the most unique apparel deals in all of sports. See how [[link removed]] the Wolverines’ $174 million deal with Jordan Brand breaks down. With Warner Bros. Discovery in reported talks [[link removed]] for a merger with Paramount, TNT could make a return to NFL TV. Kalen DeBoer played football in his home state at South Dakota’s University of Sioux Falls, and he and three of his staff members got their first coaching jobs there. On Monday night, the school hosted a National Championship watch party [[link removed]] in DeBoer’s honor. Editor’s Picks What’s the Value of a Viral Touchdown Dance? Its Creator Is Trying to Figure That Out [[link removed]]by Joseph Bien-Kahn [[link removed]]The Squabble was born in 2011. Should its creator get a cut? Tuned In: ESPN Acknowledges Rodgers’s ‘Dumb’ Joke—But Feud ‘Will Go As Far As Kimmel Wants To Take It’ [[link removed]]by Michael McCarthy [[link removed]]The battle continues between two of Disney and ESPN’s highest-paid talents. Mississippi Attorney General Yanks Lawyers in Brett Favre Defamation Case [[link removed]]by A.J. Perez [[link removed]]An upcoming book written by the state auditor questions the integrity of the AG. Advertise [[link removed]] Awards [[link removed]] Learning [[link removed]] Video [[link removed]] Podcast [[link removed]] Sports Careers [[link removed]] Written by Amanda Christovich [[link removed]], Eric Fisher [[link removed]] Edited by Matthew Tabeek [[link removed]], Brian Krikorian [[link removed]]

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