Dan Kaplan| Front Office Sports

When the whole family comes together to watch the game, nobody wants to miss a second of the action to run to the grocery store. With Instacart, you can get all your weekly groceries in as fast as an hour. Less time shopping means more... game time. Let's go. Visit Instacart.com to get free delivery on your first three orders.

Offer valid for a limited time, $10 minimum per order. Additional terms apply. It's a place where friendships are forged, football is revered, and food is enjoyed. Solo Stove, the perfect flame for the big game. I actually found our next guest on social media because I'm such a nerd and I'm really interested in the business side of sports, but also because there have been some major developments when it comes to how we consume our sports and how the NFL and other leagues move forward. So we sat down with Daniel Kaplan, who's a business reporter on Radio Row for Front Office Sports, and I asked him, just to clarify, is it about the business and the football intersecting?

Is that where you come in? I meet at the intersection of sports and business, yes. The business of sports has just grown exponentially in the last two decades, and you look around here, I mean you've got podcasters, you have influencers, you have simulcasts.

Pat McAfee's around the corner from here. Radio Row started in 1993 with five or ten radio desks in a little room above a conference hall at the Stadler Hilton in Pasadena. I know this because I did a story on this this week, and I talked to Jim Stieg, the former head of events of the NFL, and a little story. The year before, Chris Russo and Mike Francesca, they wanted to go to the lobby of the League headquarters hotel and do their show. That hotel, I think it was a Hyatt, wanted to charge them $40,000. That's about $90,000 in today's dollars, and so they went across the street to the Holiday Inn apparently, but that got Jim Stieg to thinking, we need a space for the radio stations at the Super Bowl, and that's how Radio Row was born, and now you look around here, I know you radio listeners can't see.

Oh no, we've shared photos and videos so they can see it. I mean, it's crazy. You get FanDuel and DraftKings. I mean, this being Vegas, you walk in here, you see three slot machines. It's crazy.

It is. Even since I started attending, which was San Francisco for Super Bowl 50, it's grown exponentially. As someone who covers the business of sports, why does the NFL have such power?

As in the Midas touch, everything turns to gold. Well, you'd like to say there's a lot of brain power over there, and there is. I mean, they do a good job, but the NFL, I mean, it's the made-for-TV sport, and it's also the fact that unlike other leagues, they have a limited number of games, and every game means so much, and fans look forward to it all offseason, all week, and it's a made-for-TV sport.

There isn't much inventory, and it's supply and demand. It always blows me away that we in the United States can agree on very little, and yet on Super Bowl Sunday, a third of our nation is tuned in to one broadcast, right? One game. Nothing unites us like football. It's an incredible phenomenon.

It is really an incredible phenomenon. Too bad that can't be the way the rest of the year. Right. So, when you think about the business part of sports, though, do you have to cover the NFL and then everything else? Because there really isn't anything like the NFL. Well, I mean, people cover the NFL over the top because that's what draws the readers in. Personally, one of my favorite sports is tennis, and I love covering tennis, but it never gets the readers. I think it's a fascinating sport, but anything you cover in the NFL, it gets the readers in. It certainly does. It's a vicious cycle.

I mean, again, looking around here, people want to hear about it. We call it the best reality show on TV. Yes. So, we're in Vegas where they're partnering the gambling and the football, right? How much do you think that the betting aspect and the way that betting is growing has to do with the continued growth of the NFL? I think it has a lot to do with it because it's not just the bets on who will win or lose. It's micro bets. It's prop bets.

How much will someone rush for? How many touchdowns will someone... And so, that's why you hear a grown or a hooray go up when somebody, you know, gets a five-yard gain late in the game of a blowout, and that's what people are watching. I mean, there's the Taylor Swift effect, of course, with the Kansas City Chiefs, and don't discount it. Her fans are tuning in, but the ratings have been going up for several years. The exception was 2020, the pandemic year, and people didn't seem to like watching games with no fans in the stands. Other than that blip, the ratings have just been on a skyrocket ride.

That's a good point. Daniel Kaplan is a writer and insider working with front office sports here on Radio Row. It's after hours on CBS Sports Radio. I'm glad that you mentioned Taylor Swift because as much as some of my audience is fatigued with the whole storyline, we know that it continues to get the clicks and continues to get the attention, but what's bigger? Is it Taylor Swift? Is it the NFL? I was at a panel discussion a few hours ago on AI and data, and at the end of it, Steve Bornstein, they were asking what he was thinking about with the Super Bowl. Steve Bornstein used to run NFL Network and ESPN, and he said his was the over-under on the number of times CBS shows Taylor Swift, and the consensus was the over-under is 10.

What do you think? Over-under? I think under.

I do too because I don't know there'll be nearly as many touchdowns as many points for Travis Kelce, and so maybe we won't see her as much. Yeah, CBS, they've heard the criticisms of your listeners. Really? The people, they know it's over the top when every other play they're going to Taylor Swift in the suite, so I take the under.

Okay, but you didn't really answer my question. What's bigger, Tay or the NFL? Well, in my household, it's the NFL.

My daughter's in college. She's not a Taylor Swift fan. Gotcha. Okay, but I like Taylor Swift, but I gotta say the NFL is, it's here to stay. They are both gigantic entities, that's for sure. The big announcement earlier this week, a lot of my listeners really engaged and wondering how it will impact them. This new streaming platform that will be the joint venture of ESPN and Fox and Warner Brothers, right?

That's right. And we're talking about folding in 15 different networks, the four major professional team sports, golf, tennis, NASCAR, pretty much every sport, March Madness. How is this going to work? Well, it's TBD. The details are not out there. What it's going to cost, you know? Will other outlets like Peacock or Paramount Plus, will they become part of it? Oh gosh. Right, and Peacock, it's Comcast, NBC, they have the Olympics.

How would that fit into it? And do you really want, you still, it has a lot of sports, this trio of streaming networks, but it doesn't have all of them. Paramount Plus has a lot of soccer, it has a lot of college football, so does Peacock. You get into a situation where you gotta buy that, you still gotta buy this, you still gotta buy that, and at a certain point, something like YouTube TV sounds a lot better.

I'm glad you said that because I was talking about it earlier in the week. If you want to watch everything, you're talking about an Apple that now has baseball and other products. Paramount Plus, as you point out, partners not just with the soccer but the NFL.

Peacock had games this year. How about Amazon Prime? Exclusively Thursday night football, then potentially this app that's the merger. When you encounter, whether it's sports fans or the business side of things, is there fatigue yet there?

It's not, it's not fatigue, it's frustration. People are angry that they can't get their sports in one place or all the time. I remember in New York during the, when Aaron Judge was going for the home run record, one of the games was on Apple, Apple Plus, and people were furious because if he broke the Roger Maris record on Apple Plus, who would have seen it?

He didn't, but that's just one example of many I'm sure you listeners could point to. And now Disney and Fox and Warner Brothers would say, well this is what we're trying to avoid by putting it all in one place, but the problem is there's so many other outlets that it's just putting the thumb in the dike there. And you can only afford so much, right? The average American household doesn't have all the discretionary income in the world to be able to shell it out for the apps. And you know the sports leagues, which apparently were taken by surprise by this announcement, that's what the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. My discussions over the last day with some people here, they're not thrilled with it. First they're worried that it actually reduces competition because these are three entities that would be bidding on properties against each other. Do they now collectively bid? So when college football playoffs or NBA, which is up for renewal, goes for these are now no longer three competitors, they're together. So that's something the sports leagues are not thrilled with. And you know, what does it mean for ESPN's direct-to-consumer? They've been talking about for years bringing ESPN as its own streaming unit, called direct-to-consumer.

And they said they're going to do that in 2025, so now you're going to have this ESPN wrapped into this bundle, and then you're going to have ESPN on its own. It gets really confusing. It does. That's a good point. People ask me all the time, where can I find this game?

Where do I find this property? Because it's a lot to keep track of if you're not familiar with it, and it just keeps getting bigger. So my question then, Daniel, how can leagues turn down the money, though?

Because there's billions of dollars. For instance, Amazon Prime and Thursday Night Football, there's billions of dollars there. If you're the NFL, it's sort of, this is the problem.

They create different categories of games. Thursday Night Football games, Sunday Night, Monday Night, they slice and dice it. Now, Roger Goodell at his press conference said 90% of our games are on network television, so hopefully it stays in that percent range. But you've got something like MLS, they're completely on Apple Plus.

And Major League Baseball, they've been putting their games on Apple Plus and others. So I'd like to offer some soothing words to the listeners, but I don't think there are any. Wow. It's going to continue to change.

Daniel Kaplan from Front Office Sports with us here on Radio Row. You mentioned AI. That's such a buzz term right now. Whether it's technology or sports, what does the NFL have to do with AI? Well, I'll give you one little example.

And I'm going back to that panel discussion that I was at. Executive from the NFL, Hans Schroeder, said they're going to begin using AI and creating the schedule. Now, I talked to him after the panel, and he said they sort of use it already.

And it depends on, it's a semantics thing. What is AI? Amazon Web Services they use right now, AWS. And that's really like high-speed computing. It's massive data processing.

And it turns out millions of schedules for them right now that they call. But he says the problem with that is that it all relies on human input. If a human inputs something wrong, the computer just goes on that. So what they're looking at is adaptive AI, AI that learns. This is the scariest, the science fiction stuff. And so it would be basically leaving it to the computer without human input to create the schedule.

That's incredible. Now, I don't know how far off that is. Probably not next year, but that's where the future is. But you can imagine if the NFL goes that direction, other leagues will as well because the NFL, as we talked about, tends to make money pretty much everywhere it goes. And so the other leagues will start to copy. In fact, leagues like the NBA probably will move it first. The NBA has been way out front on a lot of these issues. It was 2013 that Adam Silver wrote his op-ed in the New York Times that sports gambling should be legal. It was five years after that that the Supreme Court lifted the ban. So I wouldn't be surprised.

I haven't talked to the NBA that they're already well ahead of the pace of the NFL. I know it's a lot to cover, a lot to keep track of, but it's so great to be able to connect with you. Something fun though. Who's your favorite tennis player? My favorite tennis player? All-time or currently? Currently. Let me think.

Did I catch you off guard? You could go all-time. I like Ben Shelton. Okay, what about all-time?

Justine Anna. She had the greatest one-handed backhand I ever saw. Well, I was a huge Steffie Groff fan when I was growing up, so she was my favorite. And also John McEnroe because of the personality, of course. John McEnroe was great.

He was. Well, it's great to meet you. Remind us Twitter so we can find you on Twitter. Kaplan's sports biz.

And here this week on Radio Row covering the NFL for front office sports. That's right. Thanks so much for a couple of minutes. It was great to talk to you.

It was great to talk to you. Daniel Kaplan says here that Graybar is a distributor. Yeah, we support electrical and datacom projects all over the country. So you can get me the products I need.

Where and when I need them. Yeah, thanks to our national logistics network. Any industry? Yeah.

Construction, industrial plants, schools, hospitals. So you could say Graybar is much more than a distributor. Yeah, you could say that. When you need a hand powering, connecting, or maintaining your operations, join the thousands of professionals who rely on Graybar to help keep them up and running.

Yeah, Graybar does that. Okay, picture this. It's Friday afternoon when a thought hits you. I can spend another weekend doing the same old whatever, or I can hop into my all new Hyundai Santa Fe and hit the road. With available H-track all wheel drive and three row seating, my whole family can head deep into the wild. Conquer the weekend in the all new Hyundai Santa Fe. Visit HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603 for more details. Hyundai, there's joy in every journey. 2024 Santa Fe available early 2024.

A peanut butter M&M's production. In a world where Super Bowl winners get the world's admiration and a fancy ring, but the runners up get nothing. One retired cop returns. That's one retired quarterback. Read the script.

Oh, sorry. One retired quarterback returns to claim what's his. Um, that's claim a ring with diamonds made from M&M's peanut butter, but you're on a roll. The Ring of Comfort coming soon to a Super Bowl new you.