Even in a fast-growing market for streaming, NBC’s forthcoming rights deal with Major League Baseball is a further testament by both parties to the enduring power of broadcast television.

Both MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and NBC Sports president Rick Cordella, in separate interviews Tuesday at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit in New York, championed the linear broadcast reach that is core to the pending deal that will include a Sunday night showcase in the regular season and early-round postseason rights.

“Being in business with baseball is fantastic,” Cordella said. “How do you elevate any one baseball game to be more meaningful than the rest? One way to do that is with storytelling and production, and we plan to do that with baseball.”

Manfred added that the NBC deal is part of a broader strategy to expand the league’s national reach where possible.

“We feel that Sunday Night Baseball on broadcast television is important,” Manfred said. 

The NBC-MLB deal, expected to be announced later this season, is part of a set of “agreements in principle,” Manfred said, that will also include a substantially reworked pact with ESPN and a new deal with Netflix for the Home Run Derby. Those agreements are all part of a reallocation of rights previously held and then abandoned by ESPN, and are a precursor to a fundamental reconstruction of MLB’s media profile planned for 2028.

A significant presence on the Peacock streaming service is also a core part of the NBC-MLB pact for the 2026–2028 seasons. Both executives, however, touted the ability to place baseball along with the NFL and NBA to create a dominant year-round presence of live sports on primetime Sunday night television. That broad notion to expand the established viewership power of Sunday Night Football, the top primetime show in U.S. television for 14 years running, has been actively considered for months.

“Fifty weeks of the year is what we’ll have between the NFL, Major League Baseball, and the NBA. That’s something that I don’t think has ever happened in broadcast TV history,” Cordella said. “So we’re pretty excited about that. … Sunday night is going to be hopefully easy in the consumer’s mind, knowing that NBC has high-level games across the three major sports in America.”

The Jordan Rules

When NBC announced in May the involvement of NBA legend Michael Jordan in the network’s coverage of the league as a “special contributor,” there was an audible gasp at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but there have been few details disclosed on the nature of his involvement in the broadcasts.

Cordella sought to keep the suspense high around His Airness.

“You can expect to see him on opening night [on Oct. 21], for sure,” Cordella said. “Where it goes from there, you’ll have to tune in to see.”

Georgia’s 44–41 overtime victory over Tennessee was the most-watched Week 3 college football game and ABC’s largest audience of the season, drawing 12.6 million viewers Saturday.

It’s the second-most-watched game of the season so far, behind only the 16.62 million people who watched Ohio State’s 14–7 victory over Texas on Fox in Week 1. The contest also marked ABC’s highest college football TV rating in the 3:30 p.m. ET broadcast window since 2006, showcasing the value of the complete SEC package that Disney took over from CBS last year. 

ABC is off to its best three-week start on record, with CFB games on the network averaging 7.8 million viewers, up 41% from the same period last season. 

Georgia-Tennessee was the fourth game on ABC to draw more than 10 million viewers, following a trio of Week 1 matchups each topping eight figures. ABC had four games with an audience of 10 million or more for the entire 2024 regular season.

Watch Party

LSU’s 20–10 win over Florida was the second-most-watched game of Week 3, drawing 7.6 million viewers in primetime on ABC. Third was Texas A&M’s 41–40 victory at Notre Dame, which drew 6.2 million viewers on NBC, also on Saturday night.

Miami’s 49–12 blowout win over South Florida (which suffered a 102-minute weather delay) did not deliver a record rating for The CW, as some expected it could, with the Hurricanes entering the game ranked No. 5 and the Bulls No. 18. The network drew 720,000 viewers, which marks its fifth-largest CFB audience since entering the sport in 2023. The CW’s most-watched game on record remains a Florida State–North Alabama matchup that drew 1.33 million viewers in November 2023.

College football ratings across all networks were up 21% through two weeks; final figures for the entire Week 3 slate are not yet available. 

NBA commissioner Adam Silver faced scrutiny last week after referring to basketball as a “highlights-based” sport. At the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit on Tuesday, he clarified his statement, saying it was “misconstrued.”

Silver insisted that his comments were meant to label highlights as “additive” to the game. He added that the league office constantly talks about how to ensure that fans who watch highlights can be converted into fans who watch the live games.

“I accept that what I said was misconstrued. I certainly did not intend it that way. I think it’s a positive thing that there’s so many highlights in every game. But, to completely clarify, those are highlights that ideally we’d like people to consume live, not after the fact,” Silver said.

Silver’s original comments were made on Sept. 10 following the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting.

“For the league, there’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. This is very much a highlights-based sport. Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you name it … there’s an enormous amount of content out there,” Silver said last week.

He pointed out Tuesday that his answer was in response to a question about the impact of social media on the viewership behavior of younger fans, particularly given the NBA’s new media deal.  

The question, which came from the New York Times reporter Tania Ganguli, was, in part: “I know that there are other points of entry for fans to interact with the NBA. There’s social media, and [for] a lot of younger fans, that is how they’re experiencing the sport. I wonder how much you think about that and how that will shape the next generation of fans.”

The NBA’s 11-year, $77 billion deal with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon adds national games, but also additional broadcasters and streaming services that could make it more difficult—and expensive—for fans to watch all the live games.

The first returns of the 2025 WNBA playoffs viewership showcase both sides of the Caitlin Clark effect.

The WNBA’s four-game slate on ESPN networks was down 16% compared to last year, according to Nielsen data. However, the decline was driven solely by the 3 p.m. ET game between the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream, which drew 951,000 viewers on ABC, 47% less than the 1.8 million the Fever at Sun game drew last year.

Clark, who has been ruled out for the rest of the season, missed Sunday’s game for Indiana. She was available for the Fever last postseason, the first WNBA playoff appearance of her career.

However, the rest of the Game 1s, all of which aired on ESPN, averaged 545,000 viewers, up 28% compared to the other three opening games last year. It’s important to note that Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel data, implemented last month, is expected to boost viewership numbers across the board.

Here are the results of all four Game 1s and comparisons to the same timeslot in 2024 (all times ET):

• 1 p.m. Golden State Valkyries at Minnesota Lynx (ESPN): 680,000 (+66%)
• 3 p.m. Indiana Fever at Atlanta Dream (ABC): 951,000 (-47%)
• 5 p.m. New York Liberty at Phoenix Mercury (ESPN): 481,000 (+19%)
• 7 p.m. Seattle Storm at Las Vegas Aces (ESPN): 476,000 (+3%)

The games also aired against Week 2 of the NFL season, including the 4:25 p.m. ET Super Bowl LIX rematch between the Chiefs and Eagles that delivered historic viewership.

Last year, WNBA viewership numbers were higher for Game 2, as matchups on Tuesday and Wednesday drew more viewers than the Sunday Game 1s. All four of those games aired on ESPN, as is the case this year.

There were no Game 3s last year, as all four best-of-three first-round series ended in sweeps. This year, under the new 1-1-1 playoff format, at least two series will have a Game 3 following Tuesday’s results. All Game 3s are scheduled to air on ESPN2, with ESPN set to air college football.