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Afternoon Edition

November 6, 2025

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The demise of Penn Entertainment’s sports betting deal with ESPN will save the sports book hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and stock warrants to ESPN. Its early termination acknowledges the reality that the tie-up would never make a dent in the FanDuel-DraftKings duopoly.

— Eric Fisher [[link removed]] and David Rumsey [[link removed]]

Wall Street Sends Mixed Signals on ESPN-Penn Breakup [[link removed]]

Florida Times-Union

Wall Street doesn’t know yet what to make of Penn Entertainment’s accelerated divorce from ESPN.

The initial hours following the early Thursday announcement from the two companies to shutter the ESPN Bet sportsbook [[link removed]] brought a whirlwind of activity, but also left plenty of questions.

Initially, investors cheered the deal, with Penn Entertainment stock shooting up about 10% in premarket trading, and then by about 5% at the opening bell. Those gains, however, were quickly erased, as by mid-morning shares were in negative territory. Penn Entertainment stock ended the day down more than 10% to $14.65 per share. ESPN parent company Disney saw its shares fall by less than 1% while stock in DraftKings, reunited with ESPN in a multiyear deal based around content and marketing, rose marginally.

The demise of ESPN Bet is an acknowledgment of the clear and, for the two companies, painful reality: ESPN Bet was stuck at a low, single-digit percentage of market share in most key states with legal sports betting, and was never going to get anywhere near the intended 20% position by 2027 [[link removed]] as the sports duopoly of FanDuel and DraftKings remains largely intact.

Cutting ties now allows Penn Entertainment to save hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and stock warrants to ESPN, as well as in marketing costs. The 10-year, $2 billion deal, reached in August 2023 [[link removed]], had called for $150 million in annual cash payments from Penn Entertainment to ESPN, as well as about $500 million in warrants.

Penn Entertainment will now rebrand its U.S. sportsbook to theScore, a brand it already works with in Ontario.

“We view the ESPN Bet termination as a significant positive for Penn,” JPMorgan analysts wrote Thursday in a research note. “ESPN Bet/Penn’s expensive [online sports betting] has been a distraction for investors and management for several years (going back to Barstool) and overshadowed a fairly solid land-based business that offered an attractive pipeline of growth projects.”

Company Path

Penn Entertainment said its brick-and-mortar casinos and racetracks will indeed be a key focus going forward. Third-quarter earnings, also released Thursday, however, revealed a net loss that soared from a prior $37.5 million to $865.1 million. Revenue grew 5% to $1.7 billion, but company executives said a heightened focus on profitability will be paramount in a post-ESPN era.

“We made these digital investments to make money, to deliver a return for our shareholders. We have not done that yet,” Penn Entertainment CEO and president Jay Snowden said Thursday in an earnings call. “That’s the focus in 2026, and moving forward, to deliver profitability for our shareholders, which will only grow over time.”

In the final termination agreement, ESPN will retain vested warrants to purchase 7.96 million shares of Penn Entertainment with a weighted strike price of $28.95, a figure much closer to the company’s stock value when the deal was originally made more than two years ago. Since then, Penn Entertainment shares have fallen by more than a third.

All other unvested and performance-based warrants, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, have been forfeited by ESPN.

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Zaslav Downplays Live Sports As WBD Reports Weak Results [[link removed]]

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Warner Bros. Discovery, already in the midst of corporate upheaval, continues to develop a new streaming home for TNT Sports. For WBD CEO David Zaslav, that shift probably can’t happen soon enough.

As WBD reported third-quarter earnings Thursday, the company reiterated its previously announced effort to develop a new streaming service [[link removed]] for TNT Sports and its retooled portfolio of programming. That new platform is expected sometime next year, roughly coinciding with a planned split of the company [[link removed]].

“The [development] team is making great progress, and that will put us in a position to have a compelling standalone offering, but also something that will allow us to partner and bundle with our own products and others in the market,” said WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, who will also lead the planned Discovery Global that will house most of the TNT Sports assets.

Thus far, TNT Sports content has been streamed on HBO Max [[link removed]], and previously, that was a major corporate priority for WBD. That positioning is not unlike how NBCUniversal has made live sports a focal point on Peacock, a key competitor in the general entertainment streaming space.

Zaslav, however, said Thursday that sports on HBO Max has not made a significant impact on the service.

“Here in the U.S. … we were so robust in our storytelling that we did not find that these sports were providing enough value for us in terms of incremental subs. We did not get that many,” Zaslav said. “HBO Max is much stronger as being a motion picture and storytelling product, not dependent on rental sports.”

The executive has had a history of being somewhat dismissive toward sports [[link removed]]. Most notably, he said in 2022 that WBD “didn’t have to have” a new deal with the NBA, and ultimately, the company lost its live rights to that league.

Future Pathways

WBD, meanwhile, did not have much of a substantive update on its ongoing process to potentially sell itself [[link removed]]. Since that was formalized last month, there have reportedly been multiple offers from CBS Sports parent company Paramount that have been rebuffed, while Netflix [[link removed]] and NBC Sports parent company Comcast [[link removed]] have taken more cautious stances toward potential WBD deals.

“The team is hard at work, both on a separation transaction and following the board’s direction to evaluate strategic alternatives,” Zaslav said. “You’ve all seen media reports as to potential interested parties, and I won’t comment on anything specific. It is fair to say we have an active process underway.”

The WBD quarterly report also included a generally downbeat set of financial results, as revenue fell 6% to $9.05 billion, below Wall Street projections, and net income swung from a prior $135 million gain to a $148 million loss. Declines were felt in multiple areas, including advertising and linear TV subscribers.

Chiefs, Cowboys Dominate Most-Watched NFL Games Halfway Through Season [[link removed]]

Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

The battle for the moniker of America’s Team is heating up—at least on TV.

Halfway through the NFL’s regular season, the Chiefs are responsible for the two most-watched games, but the Cowboys occupy a league-high five spots in the ten most-watched games through Week 9.

Here are the ten highest game audiences as the NFL enters Week 10, and crosses this season’s halfway point:

Eagles-Chiefs (Week 2): 33.8 million on Fox Chiefs-Bills (Week 9): 30.9 million on CBS Cowboys-Eagles (Week 1): 28.3 million on NBC Lions-Chiefs (Week 6): 27.4 million on NBC 49ers-Buccaneers (Week 6): 26.9 million on CBS Packers-Cowboys (Week 4): 26.9 million on NBC Commanders-Cowboys (Week 7): 25.63 million on Fox Packers-Steelers (Week 8): 25.5 million on NBC Cowboys-Bears (Week 3): 25.47 million on Fox Cowboys-Broncos (Week 8): 25.33 million on CBS

Kansas City has played in three of the ten most-watched games this season (all inside the top 4), and its Week 3 Sunday Night Football matchup against the Giants narrowly missed the top-10 list, drawing 25.3 million viewers on NBC. That game came after an 0–2 start [[link removed]] for the defending AFC champions.

While Dallas is struggling on the field with a 3-5-1 record, NFL fans have still tuned in for many of the team’s most visible games in prime time and late Sunday afternoon windows.

The Chiefs and Cowboys are set to play each other on Thanksgiving Day, in what should likely be the most-watched game of the season [[link removed]], and even break records for NFL telecasts on the holiday.

Also of note on the top-10 list, the Eagles are the only other team to appear twice, perhaps not coincidentally, in games against the Chiefs and Cowboys.

Overall, NFL game broadcasts are averaging 17.8 million viewers across all networks through the first nine weeks of the season, up 7% from the same period in 2024, and the league’s highest mark since the 2015 season. The TV ratings boost coincides with the implementation of Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel methodology [[link removed]] being used to determine audience figures.

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FRONT OFFICE SPORTS TODAY Why ESPN Bet Failed

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ESPN is folding ESPN Bet and “winding down” its partnership with Penn Entertainment after failing to pace their lofty market-share goals. FOS media and entertainment reporter Ryan Glasspiegel has the latest on this failed experiment and what it means for the sports betting industry.

Plus, women’s sports reporter Annie Costabile talks through former WNBA MVP and current union president Nneka Ogwumike signing with the Project B women’s basketball league, and what this says about the W’s ongoing labor discussions.

Also, Stephen A. Smith gets ripped for his sketchy solitaire partnership, Rico Dowdle starts a hilarious GoFundMe campaign, and a college basketball team loses by 90 points to avoid a big fine.

Watch the full episode here [[link removed]].

STATUS REPORT Four Up

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Broncos ⬆ The NFL team is seeing a 22% spike in retail revenue halfway through the season, compared to the same period in 2024, according to data provided to Front Office Sports. Jersey sales on game day have risen 40% from last year, as Denver leads the AFC West and is tied for the best record in the league at 7–2.

NFL team owners ⬆ Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the late Bud Adams, who founded the Houston Oilers, were among nine contributors advancing to a semifinal stage [[link removed]] for the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s class of 2026. A committee will meet next week to select a single finalist for final voting. Sports television pioneer Roone Arledge is also part of this contributor group under consideration.

PWHL expansion ⬆ The women’s pro hockey league said previously disclosed teams in Vancouver and Seattle [[link removed]] will be known as the Goldeneyes and Torrent, respectively.

Professional Bull Riders ⬆ The series has a new five-year deal with Paramount+, which will have streaming coverage of PBR’s premier tour, Unleash The Beast. Paramount subsidiary CBS Sports has had PBR rights since 2013, and it will continue to broadcast live coverage, too. The deal deepens the relationship between Paramount and TKO Group Holdings entities following prior deals for rights to UFC [[link removed]] and Zuffa Boxing [[link removed]].

Conversation Starters Northwestern’s $862 million future football stadium is progressing to its opening before the 2026 season. It will be the first stadium built for a Power 4 football team since Baylor and Houston opened new stadiums in 2014. Check it out [[link removed]]. Fox NFL analyst Greg Olsen was reunited with Bryson, who was in the hospital alongside Olsen’s son eight years ago when they both awaited heart transplants. Now 14 and healthy, Bryson surprised the former Panthers tight end in Green Bay [[link removed]]. Following his surprising trade from the Jets to the Colts this week, cornerback Sauce Gardner tried to make it up to two very unhappy young Jets fans by sending them Colts jerseys. See what happened [[link removed]]. Editors’ Picks LSU Names New President, but Athletic Leadership Still in Question [[link removed]]by Amanda Christovich [[link removed]]The new university president has already contradicted himself. ESPN Shutters Betting App and Pivots to DraftKings Deal [[link removed]]by Eric Fisher [[link removed]] and Ryan Glasspiegel [[link removed]]ESPN Bet is ceasing to exist roughly two years after its high-profile debut. [[link removed]] Solitaire App Pushed by ESPN Stars Faces Suit Over Bots, ‘Rigged’ Games [[link removed]]by Ben Horney [[link removed]] and Colin Salao [[link removed]]Papaya Gaming was promoted by Stephen A. Smith and others. DAILY TRIVIA Factle Sports

Can you rank the top 5 largest sports stadiums in the world?

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