Clay talks to Fox Sports' Michael Mulvihill

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis, play talks
with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in Wins and Lost his
podcast where we talk about hopefully really entertaining things in

(00:24):
the world of sports, media, politics, business, you name it,
with hopefully entertaining people. And I think you're really gonna
enjoy this guy. Mike mulve Hill. Uh, he is, I
believe at Michael Mulvehill on Twitter or at mulbi Hill.
We'll figure it out here in a sec. But anyway,
I'll be tweeting out his Twitter handle. I would encourage
you to follow him because I actually first started noticing
Mike on Twitter years and years ago as he was

(00:46):
publishing some of the data that he was seeing in
the world of sports. And if you are interested in
the business of sports or media, you're gonna absolutely love
everything about this conversation. So I want to go ahead
and welcome in Mike Mulvihill. Mike, what is your official
title at this point in time? I am the head
of Strategy and Analytics for Fox Sports. So that is

(01:08):
an really interesting and awesome job title and as we
unpack exactly what you do, I think people are going
to see why that is. Uh, But I don't know.
It occurred to me. I mean, I've known you for
years now, but it occurred to me that I don't
really know that much about how you ended up getting
the job that you got. So I believe I'm correct
that you grew up in the Pittsburgh area. And at

(01:29):
what point did you recognize where did you go to
school and kind of what was the first job that
kind of got your foot in the door in the
sports industry. That's a great question, And first of all,
thanks for inviting me to be on the podcast. Really
excited to get into a little bit of my background
and the things that we talked about every day, uh
here at this job. UM. In my case, you know,

(01:50):
I started working in non commercial radio when I was fifteen.
I did grow up in Pittsburgh, as you mentioned, uh,
and I started working at the University of Pittsburgh's student
radio station, UM prior to my junior year in high school.
It was a situation where a lot of those kids
went home for the summer. They had a hard time
keeping the station on the air, and so they needed
younger kids who would volunteer UM to just become DJs

(02:10):
and read the news and read sports clips and do
whatever they needed UM to keep the station going twenty
four hours. And so I got into this environment where
I was working in radio every day, and I really
got hooked UM immediately. It was just one of those
things where sometimes as a young person, you walk into
a professional setting and you just know instantaneously that it's
where you want to be for a long time. And

(02:31):
that was the way I felt, And so at a
really young age, I felt like I wanted to work
in broadcasting and media in some capacity. Went to the
University of Missouri, where they traditionally have great media programs.
I worked at the college radio station there. I ran
the college radio station for a time. UM. I actually
got very lucky. While I was at MISSOO, I put
together a concert that was a reunion UM of a

(02:53):
nineteen seventies band called Big Star with Alex Chilton, who
sang the Letter and was in the Box Stops in
the sixties. Relatively obscure band, but a band that had
a lot of influence, and that reunion show generated a
fair amount of attention. UM just a really lucky thing,
right place, right time, and coming out of that show,
I was able to get an internship with Fox in

(03:14):
Los Angeles. So prior to my last year at Miszoo,
UM I came out here and I interned in what's
called a current programming department, thinking that what I wanted
to do was work on episodic TV and work on
sitcoms and dramas and you know, have the kind of
job where you're involved in the creative process and developing

(03:34):
series television, and that's what I really firmly believed I
wanted to do. UM went back to Miszoo for my
last year, graduated, came to New York, graduated into kind
of a tough job market UM, and was only able
to get a job in New York working in media
research and market research, which is dealing with the ratings
and audience measurement and trying to understand, um, what people

(03:55):
are watching and why. Really not a creative job at all,
And to complete surprise, UM, I kind of got hooked
on that too. I mean, I found that I really
enjoyed working with the data. I enjoyed identifying situations where
the perception of the business was at odds with the
reality of the data and trying to figure out what
drove that gap in perception and what the truth really was. Uh.

(04:20):
And I also found that I wanted to get out
of entertainment and get into sports. You know, this was
at a time where Fox had just completed its first
season of the NFL, we had just acquired the rights
to Major League Baseball. UM, and it was pretty clear
to me that the people, at least in this company
who were working in sports were having a lot more
fun than the people who were working in entertainment. And

(04:41):
you know, this is the mid nineties. At that time,
there were no sports marketing degree programs. You know, people
who were working in sports were generally coming from communications
or journalism majors. And if you just had a passion
for sports and you could write a little bit, and
you were willing to just grind for a long time,
there's a certain process of natural selection in this business

(05:02):
where it doesn't really matter where you went to school
or what your last name is. You know, if you
get your foot in the door and you're just willing
to keep grinding and keep working. UM, the people who
wanted the most, I think, tend to find a way forward,
and that's what happened to me. It's really so much
interesting stuff in there. And so I want to go
back to you going in at fifteen years old and

(05:23):
working at a college radio station. Were you a big
radio guy, like listening to sports on radio? Did that
partly drive you? Was it music that you were listening
to on the radio? What was it that initially took
you two I think you said the University of Pittsburgh
to be able to work there during that summer? What
was the impetus? Uh, It was a lot of what
you just mentioned. It was also that I didn't want

(05:44):
to have a regular job, you know, one of these
things where you're a teenager and your dad or my
dad was pressuring me to go, you know, work at
a fast food restaurant or work at a Baston Robbins
and and actually make a little bring a little bit
of money into the house. Um, and that didn't seem
that interesting to me. And so this opportunity you came
up to work on a volunteer basis in radio, I
thought it sounded a lot more interesting, a lot more fun.

(06:06):
I was able to sell my family on the idea
that it might lead to something bigger and better, which
it did. Uh. And I did I love the music. Um,
I love that the station had a daily news and
sports show that I could be a part of. You know,
Pittsburgh obviously has a really strong sports culture and a
strong sports media culture. So I grew up kind of

(06:26):
wanting to be part of that in some way and
not really understanding how I ever could be. Uh. And
as soon as I walked into that station, I think
it a white bulb went off and I felt like
there actually was a path for me to do this
or do something like it for a living. I think
for a lot of us who work in media, there's
a moment where you sort of realized that people actually
get paid to do this, and it's a little bit overwhelming,

(06:49):
Like you can't believe that this is actually a career option,
And as soon as you understand it, you don't want
to do anything else. It is really fascinating. So, and
did you grow up a fan of the Pirates, of
the Penguins, of the st Laers, all those teams evenly,
or how would you say you assess your sports fandom
as a kid. I grew up as a fan of
the Pirates and Steelers, and of the University of Pittsburgh

(07:10):
football and basketball. I mean I grew up at a
time where the Pirates had some of the most charismatic
teams of our lifetime. Is that we are family Pirates
team that won the World Series in nineteen seventy nine.
I grew up around the Steel Curtain Steelers and the
pitt Panthers teams that had Dan Marino. UM So that
was a really vibrant sports culture at that time. UM
it is a pretty favorable place to grow up where

(07:33):
your your teams are having a lot of success and
it encourages you to sort of stay with your sports fandom.
But Pittsburgh in the seventies, it's a great sports town
town now, but at that time, it was this coming
together of really successful teams, really compelling charismatic athletes, a
local economy that at that time was really thriving. I mean,

(07:54):
Pittsburgh was one of the great working class in middle
class cities in the country, which I think Foster is. UM,
a great sports culture, and all of those things came
together to make me a fan for life. Let me uh,
let me go to when you go to Missouri, were
you did you have that like a cultural shock at
all going from Pittsburgh to Columbia, Missouri. Or did you

(08:15):
immediately fit in when you went away to college. Uh? No,
I had a cultural shock, and I wanted to have
a cultural shock. You know, when I grew up in Pittsburgh,
I grew up very much in the center city. You know,
it was an urban environment, um, which I appreciated a lot.
I loved having a city childhood. But when it came
time to go to school, UM, I felt like it
was my one opportunity to have a really different experience

(08:37):
and live in a small town, live in the Midwest.
You know, Missoo is one of those kind of classically
all American big school experiences. Uh. And it was really
really appealing to me. So it was a culture shock,
but it was a culture shock that I sought out.
I wanted it. Be sure to catch live editions about
kicked the coverage with Clay Travis week days at six
am Eastern, three am Pacific. We're talking to Michael mul Hill.

(09:00):
This is the Wins and Losses podcast on Clay Travis. Okay,
so you get that first job and you start to realize,
you know what, I kind of like diving into these
numbers and sometimes finding counterintuitive lessons from the data that
might not necessarily be common sense, might not certainly be
conventional wisdom. Do you remember the first time you discovered

(09:22):
something that surprised you and that other people were impressed
you knew in that job. Yeah, and I don't think
it was anything earth shattering or I don't know if
it's a story that would really make a great impression
on people. But there were a couple of instances early
on UM where the data was telling me something other
than what the perception of the industry was. You know.
One of the perceptions at that time was that John Madden,

(09:45):
who was the most prominent NFL broadcaster, probably the greatest
to ever do it. I think a lot of people
would agree, And there was this perception that part of
the value of having John Madden as you're on air
talent was that he could keep viewers tuned into a
blowout game because they would continue to watch just because
John was so entertaining, and he was that entertaining. The

(10:06):
data didn't back it up. Uh, And it was interesting
to me that very senior executives, people who had infinitely
more experience, and we're making a lot more money, UM
and having a lot more success had a perception that
was not in any way backed up by the numbers.
I don't there wasn't really anything for me to do
with that data, but it was interesting just to recognize

(10:28):
that there was a disconnect there. Um. It was interesting
to notice that as the Bates Baseball rights holder, we
would sometimes get excited about a pitching matchup that we had,
and what you would come to find was that the
ratings didn't pop based on a great pitching matchup any
more than they would for kind of a generic pitching matchup.
I came to learn years later that um Bill James

(10:50):
had actually done a very similar analysis that was based
on attendance rather than TV ratings, and came to the
same conclusion. The pitching matchup didn't drive attendance at all. Again,
just another case where you feel like, Gee, the whole
business believes one thing, and I'm looking at numbers that
tell me something else. So who's wrong here? And I
think when you start to identify, um those kinds of circumstances,

(11:11):
you can get hooked on it, and it can be
a little bit exciting to feel like I've got a
data set here that's telling me something that maybe a
lot of other people haven't figured out yet. And I
still kind of get a charge out of coming up
with some kind of insight or or nugget of information
that gives me a window of understanding that maybe some
other people haven't figured out yet. How do you find
that people respond when their conventional wisdom is challenged, Because

(11:34):
sometimes when you've got the data to back you up,
people can feel like you're attacking them. When you're saying, Hey,
you know that thing that you believe, which is the
pitching matchups, drive ratings, or John Madden is so good
at his job that people could keep listening to him,
it doesn't actually stand up when the data is actually analyzed.
How have you found people responding to things like that? Yeah,
I think one of the most fortunate things that has

(11:57):
happened to me in my career, and certainly that happened
to me at a young age, was that I got
to work at Fox Sports at a time when it
was run by a guy named David Hill, who was
the founding president of Fox Sports and had previously been
an executive in the UK and Australia. And David is
one of the most creative people to ever work in
this business. He certainly has one of the most active

(12:18):
and most restless minds and imaginations that I've ever been around.
Uh And at that time, where David was at the
top of this business and the top of this company,
and I was nobody, as a twenty four year old
research anils, she couldn't possibly matter less. Um he was
willing to hear those things out, and he was really
encouraging of the hearing data and facts and ratings information

(12:40):
that maybe ran counter to what he already thought. And
I think if I had had a different boss at
that time, I might not have been longed for this business.
But David was really encouraging and Clay, as you know
from you know, all the work that you've done with
us at Fox, this building is littered with people who
had experiences like that with David Hill, people who you know,
probably would not be in this business today had they

(13:01):
not gotten the encouragement that they got from David at
a young age. So that was really pivotal to me.
And it really shows like what a difference um the
right boss and an open minded boss at a young
age can can make, and also what culture is at
a job right where you can be at twenty four
year old and if you've got information that you think
is helpful, people in positions of power will listen to it.

(13:21):
And I think that's a kind of the story of
Fox in general. There are a lot of people like
you who came in as twenty two year olds or
even younger and started working there. I mean, you look
at Brad Zager, you can look at Eric Shanks. I
mean guys who just got into business at an insanely
early age and just grind it at some of the
lowest jobs imaginable until they rose up like you did.
And like those guys have two pretty high positions at

(13:43):
the company. I mean, I think it's Eric Shanks used
to do who is now runs Fox Sports. Used to
be like the p A, the production assistant who would
pick up Terry Bradshaw and some of the young guys
at the very earliest days of of Fox Sports and
drive them around. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. And
when I talk about this business have a certain survival
of the fittest element, that's really what I mean. You

(14:03):
know that there were guys like Shanks and Zeger, Jacob Allman,
hopefully me um who started at a really junior level,
and we're able to just keep grinding and make it
to the jobs that we have today, partly on desire
and determination, but also because we were part of a
culture that UH encourage young people with that attitude to thrive.

(14:24):
And I think if there's anything that defines the culture
of this company now, it's that those people you just
mentioned who have risen to pretty senior positions want to
keep that dynamic in place. You know, we want this
to be a place where a young person at twenty
three or twenty four can walk into the office of
somebody who's a president or an e v P and
have an idea or a way of thinking that's different, uh,

(14:45):
and really be heard and make an impact. That's the
way it should work. First time I saw your name
and started to pay attention to your work was you
wrote what I would say is a counter into intuitive narrative,
diving into the numbers behind Major League Baseball and explod
meaning why the baseball business was more sound than a
lot of people thought. And let me just kind of
for a background for people out there in general. And

(15:07):
I'm curious if you're gonna buy into this hypothesis I'm
gonna lay out and then I'll let you kind of
dive into it. In general, I think that the data
you presented shows that Major League Baseball is incredibly popular
on a local level. In fact, if you compare Major
League Baseball teams, for instance, to NBA franchises in the
same market, the Major League Baseball team is buying large,

(15:28):
wildly popular. Where baseball struggles on a national level is
pretty much every NFL team. If you're a sports fan,
you know a couple of guys that play on that
team and maybe a couple of their stories. Certainly in
the NBA there are six or seven or eight names
that are so big they kind of dominate. On the
national level. Baseball is regionally stronger than almost any sport,

(15:48):
but nationally does not dominate in the same way, and
so we don't talk about it as much as we
probably should. Is that roughly accurate as the data, like
kind of spoke to you, and would you say about baseball?
Maybe that would be counterintuitive to people out there listening
right now. So that's a lot to respond to. I mean,
I think that the way that we tend to evaluate

(16:09):
television programming and media content is things that are strong
nationally and that air once a week, UM tend to
be viewed a little bit more favorably because that's the
model of television programming that we all grew up with.
You know, we all grew up with a hit television
show being something that aired once a week in prime time,

(16:32):
whether that was a sitcom or a drama or Monday
night football. And so it's a way of thinking about
content that everybody is really comfortable with. And that way
of thinking about content very much favors the NFL model
and somewhat less so favors the college football model and
the NBA model, which, as you say, even though they
play eighty two games a year, that is very very

(16:54):
much a leak that's driven by five to ten superstar
personalities that can drive at national aiding baseball because it
is so UM, It's popularity is so locally driven, and
it's it's so market to market doesn't really UM is
not really advantaged by a way of thinking about content

(17:14):
that's all about national and weekly programming. So you have
to adjust your thinking a little bit and evaluate baseball
in terms of the local viewership that it generates a
hundred and sixty two times a year, and when you
convert those local ratings into minutes of consumption in a
market like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, wherever, what you

(17:35):
come to realize is that people in those cities spend
more of their time watching Major League Baseball than they
spend watching literally anything else. Um. And if you can
get people to kind of reframe their thinking so that
you're thinking more locally and more five or six days
a week, which in television terms would be more like
a syndication model, rather than thinking in terms of national

(17:56):
and once a week, I think it does make sense
to pe and we have been able to persuade a
lot of people who covered this business for a living,
who by advertising, who invest in content, um, that there's
a much greater value to the baseball business than maybe
was previously understood. I actually think that, And it's not
just me making that argument. I mean it's being made
by people at the Commissioner's office every day, people who

(18:19):
work for the regional sports networks. But I think we've
had a lot of success in helping people reframe their
thinking around baseball and why it's a lot more successful
as a television property than maybe was understood as recently
as five years ago. Fox Sports Radio has the best
sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our
shows at Fox sports Radio dot com and within the

(18:40):
I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live.
I want to go into the decision that you made
and uh and and certainly that Fox has made to
build a college football pregame show that airs on Fox,
and to follow it up with what you guys are
calling Big Noon Saturday, a big game called by Joel klatt,
Us Johnson, Jenny Taft. How do you look at the

(19:03):
data and decide we're gonna go after noon in college football?
And then what goes into that? How do you have
the hypothesis, what data do you like, what pricks that
interest initially? And then how does something like that end
up happening. Sure, so let's start by just kind of
laying out the landscape of college football. I mean that's
a sport where the Disney Networks, ABC, ESPN and ESPN

(19:26):
two UM really have a dominant position and have for
many many years. You know, they're involved in all five
of the power conferences. UM they've had a powerful presence
in primetime now for probably ten years or more UM,
and so we're coming into the collegiate space, or we
came into the collegiate space, I guess it was six
seasons ago, UM facing a really powerful competitor. And then

(19:49):
in addition to those Disney networks, CBS obviously has their
relationship with the SEC, which is really powerful and generally
is in that late afternoon window. And NBC has six
or seven or Dame games a year. So it's a
marketplace that's very crowded, and your competitors are extremely well established.
And so even though our conference relationships are excellent, the

(20:10):
portfolio of content that we have is terrific. UM, it's
hard to break through. And I think what we were
finding was that when we would put our best games
on in prime time, UM, we were just walking into
a very crowded, competitive marketplace. And you would hear from fans,
you would hear on social media, I would hear it
from you personally that the most frustrating thing as a

(20:33):
college football fan would be to show up at three
thirty on a Saturday afternoon and there were five good
games on five different networks, whereas just a few hours
earlier there was nothing to watch. UM. That's that seems
like a market inefficiency, right, That seems like something that
we can exploit. Simultaneous to that, our Big Ten contract
UM prohibits us from playing from playing as many games

(20:57):
in prime time as we might otherwise late in the season,
you know, the weather gets cold, the calendar turns to November.
Some of those Big ten campuses, they don't want to
host games under the lights, and so we're required to
play big games, including Ohio State Michigan early in the day.
And what we found was that we were having a
lot of success with those games that we were required
to play earlier in the day. UM. Sometimes what you

(21:19):
are required to do turns out to have been a
pretty good idea all along. And so I felt and
we felt as a company that we were seeing enough
success with the games that we were required to play
outside of prime time that it probably made sense to
go even further with that strategy and see if we
could just orient our collegiate brand around the early part

(21:40):
of the day, which meant going out and upgrading our
studio show, creating the pregame show that's now called Big
Noon Kickoff UM, and having that lead into our best
game of the day, which typically this season, The New
and Eastern game is our best game of the day.
You know, I had felt for some time that every
other network and Alton College football had an identity. You know,

(22:02):
cbs is identity is the best game from the best conference.
You know, we can debate whether the SEC is still
the best conference. I know you believe that it is,
but that's a very clear identity to put forward to people.
NBC's identity is all the iconography and history that comes
with Notre Dame football. That's a very clear identity. And
the Disney identity is just volume. I mean, they're almost
like a public utility of college athletics. You can just

(22:24):
turn them on any time and know that you're going
to get something relevant and something watchable. Well, what was
our identity? You know, we didn't really know what it was.
And now I think we've been able to establish this
narrative that our identity is that the first place you
should go when you get up on a college football
Saturday is Fox. We want to be the first must
see game of the day. Uh. And I think it's working,

(22:44):
you know, to kind of get into the ratings a
little bit. We're five weeks into the season. Um Our
college football in general is up thirty. Our college football
games at noon Eastern are up se and this is
at a point in the season where the board generally
across every network is flat with where it was a
year ago. So the sport in general is kind of

(23:06):
going sideways. And we've been able to take a big
step forward just because we've rethought the way that we
used those assets and we saw an opportunity to take
advantage of the early part of the day, and I
think it's working out really well. How do you pick games?
That's a question I think that people ask all the time, Uh,
the scheduling of you. You mentioned that Fox has got
the Big twelve, the Pac twelve, the Big ten. Uh.

(23:28):
Certainly ESPN has got a lot, NBC Notre Dame, and
SEC is on CBS. How do you uh, in a
given week? How does the draft process work when you're
not when it's easy if you have every game right
like so, uh, if you're like that, For instance, the ESPN,
I believe, has virtually every A C C game, So

(23:49):
they know that they've got every A C C game,
they can schedule and work about where those games are
gonna air. But when you're dealing with multiple schools in
situations like that, how do you how do you make decisions?
And how far out are you picking games? Like? How
does that work? So it's a multi step process, and
the first step happens in the spring where we and

(24:09):
Disney we'll sit down and have a draft in which
we um pick windows. Were not actually picking games, but
we're picking what the selection order will be in each
week of the season as the year goes on. So
to kind of put that in more relatable terms, when
we do our Big Ten draft, we have the first
pick in the Big Ten, and we don't say we're

(24:32):
taking Ohio State Michigan, but we say we'll take the
number one selection on November and that the massive likelihood
is that you will later take Ohio State Michigan. But
what you're actually selecting is the right to select that
match up later in the year. So we have the
number one pick, We'll take November thirty, they'll come back

(24:52):
and take October. Then we come back and take November,
and you go through this process of just divid hiding
up the dates so by the time you get through
that draft, you know who has picks one through seven
on every week of the season. Then as you get
closer to the season, you actually fill out those boxes

(25:14):
with the matchups themselves. And what that allows you to
do is it gives you the flexibility to react to
events on the field, UM as they happen. You know,
certain teams overperform expectations, other teams obviously underperform expectations, And
instead of being locked into a game that you fought
was going to be strong in March or April, you

(25:35):
can react to that as it happens. And that process
is managed by a guy on our team named Derek
Crocker UH and a small team that he has that
focuses exclusively on collegiate sports, and they spend all their
time just gaining out these draft scenarios and what will
happen if we take this game number one, and then
ESPN takes this one number two, what's left for us

(25:55):
after that. It's a really fascinating process. If you're a
passionate fan of college football, um, it's one of the
most fun jobs you could possibly have. I always say
that the college football draft process is, um the world's
greatest fantasy football It should be, right, well, it's the
it's a great fantasy football draft. It just happens to
cost five million dollars to play instead of fifty bucks.

(26:19):
But then as we go through the year, you know,
we'll get into situations where I think November sixteenth of
this season is a great example. Michigan State Michigan is there, Wisconsin,
Nebraska is there. If you had been asked in April,
you would have said Michigan State Michigan is probably the
number one game on that day. Because Wisconsin just blew

(26:40):
Michigan out, that might change your thinking. Wisconsin might still
be alive for a spot in the playoff by the
time we get to November six and so, because we're
not locked into a matchup, but we've selected the right
to make a certain selection on that date, you know
we can adjust and adapt as we see results come
in throughout the year. Is the selection process us occurring

(27:00):
via phone, like everybody's sitting around the table with a
speaker phone or are they in the same room? Um?
One year we did it in the same room, and
we found that it was actually more efficient to just
do it on the phone because it can be a
slow process. That's the reason it wouldn't make for good
television is that there can be long periods where you're

(27:21):
just thinking about what your next move is and where
you want to go next in the schedule. In our case,
we're drafting our three conferences simultaneously, So you might make
UM a couple of Big twelve selections and then a
couple of Pack twelve selections, and then four Big Ten selections,
and they're they're all intertwined, you know, each conference affects
the others UH, and so that can be a really slow, UM,

(27:44):
deliberate uh process to go through, and it just doesn't
make that much sense for us to all be in
the same room, like we've found that it's just easier
to do it via teleconference. But we do have a
lot of fun with it. It's an opportunity for us
to sit with our talent and get their opinions. UM.
They all seem find the process really interesting. You know.
This is obviously our first season working with urban Meyer,

(28:05):
and he provided a lot of insight for us into
each of the Big ten schools. And it was really
a conversation that we had with urban Um that led
us to select the Army Michigan game on September seventh
over the Cincinnati, Ohio State game. You know, all things
being equal, Ohio State is probably a little bit better
ratings draw than Michigan is nationally. I mean, they're both

(28:27):
elite brands, but Ohio State is probably a little stronger.
But in that case, because of the conversation we had
had with Urban in which he really stressed the difficulty
of preparing for that triple option offense, we went ahead
and took the Army Michigan game. And you know what
happened next. I think Ohio State beat Cincinnati by forty
and the Army Michigan game went to overtime. Turned out
to be one of the most interesting games of the

(28:48):
season so far. So you know, that's the case where
you really benefit from getting your talent involved in the process.
How do you much do you see brands? You were
talking about some of the counterintuitive wisdom that you might
have picked up early on with John Madden and UH
and with baseball pitching. How much do brands themselves matter?
So you you mentioned like Ohio State in Michigan, the
audience is primarily coming to watch Ohio State playing a

(29:11):
game against Cincinnati. The audience is primarily coming UH to
watch Michigan playing a game against army. What are the
best brands in college football just in terms of delivering
audience and also in the NFL, like just teams the
irrespective of who they're playing. How much do teams move
the needle? Um brands matter enormously. I think you almost

(29:32):
cannot overstate the importance of brands because not everybody is
following the league or following the college game as closely
as you or I or people who would be listening
to this podcast. You know, the majority of the audience
are people who are following it in a very casual way, uh,
and they're not clued into teams that are overperforming expectations.

(29:53):
What they know is that when they think of the
Big Ten, they think of Ohio State and Michigan first.
When they think of the SEC, they think about Bama first,
and maybe Georgia and l s U after that, or
in other years it's been Florida. Um Brands are incredibly important,
and I think we have a constant debate about the
value of excuse me, powerful brands who are maybe underperforming

(30:16):
on the field versus less powerful brands that are actually
winning games. Excuse me, there are winning games and delivering
on the field real life example that we just faced
in the PAC twelve. Um, we had USC and Washington
and on the same day we had Washington State and Utah. Now,
in terms of performance on the field, the better football

(30:39):
game was likely to be Washington State and Utah. The
better brands inarguably our USC and Washington. And we had
a lot of back and forth about that, and ultimately
we decided to go ahead and put the USC Washington
game on the broadcast network and put the Washington State
Utah game on FS one, thinking that particular or case

(31:00):
that was the right decision. Um. But it's a constant
debate because there are cases where the weaker brand is
so much stronger on the field, um, that it does
carry more weight than potentially a stronger brand. You Know,
in the NFL, I don't think it would be any surprise, um,
that the Cowboys are the most powerful brand nationally. And
then there's a second tier that I think concludes the Packers,

(31:24):
the Bears, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and by now you'd have
to say the Patriots. I mean, there was a time,
you know, in our life as fans, where in the
Patriots were actually one of the weakest brands in the league.
But they've now been so good for so long. Um.
But I think you'd have to consider them as being
solidly on that second tier of NFL brands, at least
for as long as Brady and Belichick are are with

(31:46):
the organization. In an errow, when there is almost an
infinite number of entertainment options, are brands becoming more valuable
because they cut through the noise? Probably yes, Um, I
think that's probably fair. And look, a brand can be
a school, um, A brand can be a team, and

(32:07):
a brand can be an individual like in the case
of the n b A, I think they are driven
more by individual stars than college football or NFL football.
But those individual stars are brands, just the same as
the star on the side of the Dallas Cowboys helmet
is a brand. UM. I do think that, as you say,

(32:27):
we're in a world of virtually infinite choice, virtually infinite
flexibility in terms of how, when, and where you can
consume your media content. I think you hear anecdotally all
the time that people feel almost overwhelmed by the degree
of choice that's out there, and so it's useful to
be able to simplify that process for people. And I

(32:50):
think what's really simple is Packers Cowboys at on a
Sunday afternoon. You know you don't have to be paying
that close of attention to understand that that's kind of
a cool watchable matchup. So I tend to agree with
the premise. I think brand has become more important all
the time. Be sure to catch live editions about Kick
the Coverage with Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern,

(33:11):
three am Pacific. We're talking to Michael mulvihill. I'm Clay Travis.
This is the Wins and Losses podcast. In that world
of infinite options, Read Hastings recently said that he thinks
live television is basically going to become news and sports.
Do you think that thesis is correct? I mean, I
think it becomes more correct every year. And that's a

(33:33):
way of thinking that we um talk about within Fox
Sports a lot. That the world of video content is
separating into live and on demand, and the on demand
marketplace is increasingly controlled by companies like Reads and companies
that allow consumers to choose the content that they want,

(33:55):
any time that they wanted. I mean, that's an environment
that's all about um consumer and hourman and flexibility and
then on our side, we're part of a marketplace of
content that demands to be viewed in real time, and
I think that is primarily or almost entirely UM premium
sports and twenty four hour news. So I tend to

(34:16):
agree with that. I think it becomes more challenging all
the time, UM to do entertainment content in an environment
that is not on demand. There's still a business there.
You know, there are still tens of millions of people
UM watching entertainment programming on traditional television every night, so
it hasn't disappeared, and I don't think it's going to

(34:37):
truly disappear anytime soon. But I think it's a reality
that the business bifurkates more into that on demand world
and the live world UM literally every quarter, and it's
to the benefit of companies like Netflix, and it's to
the benefit of brands like Fox Sports, ESPN, Fox News, CNN,
brands that are all about content that you have to

(34:58):
see as it happens, which, by away, if you're watching
the content as it happens, that means you're not avoiding
the advertising. And from strictly a business point of view, UM,
I think that's one of the most compelling arguments that
we have for the future of our content. How much
do you see people making decisions between news and sports?
In other words, you talked about like a casual fan

(35:19):
out there might not know what's going on in particular
with Ohio State or Michigan or the Dallas Cowboys in
a given year, but they know those brands and they're
more likely to watch those brands because of, you know,
associational relationships. I guess that would be in their head
that I know this is a big game because it
involves so and so or at least it's something that
they feel familiar with, which makes them want to watch

(35:40):
when there are big news events. Are there very many
people who sit down in front of their television and decide, Hey,
instead of watching an NFL game today, I'm gonna go
flip over to MSNBC or CNN or Fox News and
watch the latest news of the day. Do you see
a lot of those people existing? Yes? I think that
absolutely happens every day. Um, you know, you'll remember that

(36:01):
in NFL viewership was actually down by pretty noticeable percentages,
by high single digit percentages, still the most powerful content
in TV, but the league was on kind of a
declining trend in those seasons, and I think the number
one reason why was because the election of sucked up
so much oxygen and took up so much public interest

(36:23):
that it affected everything else in the television environment. And
then obviously the result of the election was so surprising,
and the first year of the Trump presidency um was
so eventful. I think news interest at that time was,
you know, probably the highest that it's ever been in peacetime, right, Like,
that's kind of an interesting hypothesis. I guess that for

(36:45):
news interest to be any higher than it was from
the election up through the say, eighteen months that followed,
I don't know that you can have a faster um
news cycle and still be in a peacetime scenario. So
I think that definitely impact to sports viewing during those
two seasons. More recently, you know, we just had our
first Thursday night football game of the season last week,

(37:08):
UM Eagles went to Green Bay. Games turned out to
be terrific. We were up over the previous year. The
reason we were up wasn't only because the game was
a quality game between pretty compelling brands. It was also
because last year's Thursday night football game on the same
week was the day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, um

(37:30):
which went on for hours and obviously galvanized the attention
of the country and resulted in millions more people watching
cable news instead of watching our Thursday night football game.
You take that big news story out of the mix,
those people migrate back to football all of a sudden,
we're up. So I think the two are are absolutely correlated,

(37:51):
um every week. So you get nervous about that thinking
about Obviously you have a big investment in sports programming
and you can't control what happens. But it seems like,
as we're talking now, a little over a year out,
that would probably challenge potentially for the craziness, the zany
nous of it, and that might pull eyeballs away from

(38:13):
whatever big sporting events are going on. Yeah, and look,
I don't want to pretend to be a political prognosticator,
but the news cycle is moving so fast right now
that it's it's hard to speculate with any confidence on
what the the campaign might look like a year from now.
I mean, we could be looking at um unexpected candidates,
unexpected nominees, you know, who knows where we could be.

(38:37):
But I think the premise that you're coming from is
the correct one that we should expect um the election
cycle to have an impact on all other content, including
but not limited to sports. Now, the better news for
us is that a at this company, we're also partnered
with the leading brand in twenty four hour news, and

(38:59):
so even if there's a certain risk factor there for sports,
there's also a tremendous upside for our news business. And
I think even if there's a potential impact to viewership,
the amount of money that we expect to see spend
UH in political advertising next year is so significant that

(39:20):
we may be headed for a situation is isn't just Fox,
I mean, this is everybody who's associated with premium sports.
We might be headed for an election cycle that is
not necessarily good for viewership but good for revenue. Like
it wouldn't surprise me if that's the way it played out,
do you think at all? I mean, I'm kind of
fascinated by this, just I think when everything is so politicized,

(39:41):
I haven't made paid a lot of attention, but I'll say,
for example, in the mid terms last year, I noticed
on the SEC network that a ton of the Senate
candidates were buying games? You know, so, in other words,
yet a competitive senate race in Missouri. Uh, the Senate
candidates in Missouri, we're buying ads during those games. Uh?
Is that a big I don't even know. I can't

(40:03):
think necessarily. Is it typical that candidates spend a lot
of money on ads during NFL and college football games?
Or is that a sign of just there being so
much money that it's kind of something that they buy
on top of everything else. Do you do you know
what I'm asking, like, does it index highly for sports
to get bought for by political candidates, um on the

(40:24):
national level? Not necessarily, Like, there wouldn't be that much
opportunity for a candidate in a mid term and a
congressional race to buy the NFL or buy college football nationally.
There's just no need for them to reach a national audience.
What does exist is a great opportunity to reach people
via sports on your regional sports networks, where you're buying

(40:45):
Major League Baseball, the NBA or the NHL. I think
that is actually an underutilized asset. And I think I
can now say that with a little bit of objectivity
because Fox no longer owns those r s n S,
so I hope I'm not being just a homer. I
think there's some objectivity in saying that the audiences that
are delivered by pro sports on m r s ns

(41:09):
all over the country, those audiences correlate really strongly with
likely voters. Right like, those sports audiences skew a little
bit older, they tend to be a little bit more affluent,
better educated. UM. In general, those sports audiences are about
two thirds male, one third female, which might correlate slightly
better with UM likely voters, But I don't know that

(41:31):
that makes a huge impact. But you know, if you're
thinking in terms of your likeliest voters being people who
are a little older, a little more affluent, and a
little better educated, and I think that's a pretty well
documented fact, there's no better place to be than in
the local MLB team or the local NBA team, And
I think some of the smarter campaigns have figured that out, UM,

(41:54):
But I feel like there's still a lot of runway
there that the campaigns could take much better advantage of
the rs n S. One of the questions that gets
asked all the time is who has the best fans
in America? What cities care about sports. The most you
look into the data, and the data kind of tells
you some interesting stories. Right. For instance, I am very
confident in saying, based on the data that I've seen,

(42:16):
no city in America loves college football more than Birmingham, Alabama.
Right Like Birmingham over index is off the charts for
virtually every college football game in America. I think from
your data, the NFL is more popular. I believe it's
true in New Orleans than any city in America. What
am I correct in those two in your mind? And

(42:36):
what other city data have you looked at and just
found to be fascinating? Um? I would agree with you
that Birmingham is probably your strongest college football market. And yeah,
I believe New Orleans is the strongest NFL market and
the strongest overall football market. Where if you're looking at
the viewing that's being done on both Saturdays and Sundays,

(42:57):
I don't think there's a market that shows up for
both the college game and the pro game pro game
UM to the extent that New Orleans does, I mean
they'll do close to a fifty rating. And what that
means is that close to of all the homes in
a market are tuned into the game, they'll do close
to a fifty rating for the Saints, and then they'll
go out and do a twenty or twenty five for

(43:18):
non Saints games, and they'll also do for an LSU
game or an Alabama game on Saturday. I don't think
there's another city in the country, UM that has that
kind of all weekend consumption of football. And look, there
are a lot of cities in this country that are
passionate about their NFL team or passionate about their local university.

(43:38):
But I really do believe that in the post Katrina world,
the relationship between the Saints and the city of New
Orleans UM is unique and it has helped to drive
UM football interest and Saints interest to a level that
no other city can match. I just think that what
that team meant to the city after Katrina, and what

(44:00):
it meant to them in their Super Bowl season a
couple of years later, has really carried through and created
a unique circumstance. What does the Super Bowl data tell you?
Fox has got the Super Bowl this year, it's in Miami.
I'm fascinated by what you can learn from the data
for the Super Bowl, for instance, I'll start with this question.
How representative of the American audience in general is the

(44:22):
Super Bowl audience? In other words, does it pretty much
perfectly mirror America in general, or what audience is skew
more popular with the Super Bowl than maybe a represented
in the country. Yeah, that's a really great question. I mean,
television consumption is always going to skew older than the
general population. So there's a limit to how much a
television audience can truly reflect the American population. It's always

(44:46):
going to be a little bit older. But if you
accept that premise, the super Bowl probably comes closest or
comes closer to to reflecting the cross section of the
American population than anything else it's out there. Um, the
audience is more female than it is for a regular
season game. It's significantly more younger than it is for

(45:08):
a regular season game. Um, the halftime entertainment tends to
bring in audiences and demographics that are not weekend, week
out football viewers. That helps it make that helps to
make the Super Bowl a little bit more representative of
the entire country. I mean, I really think that, And
and maybe I'm being a little bit lofty about it
because I've been close to it for a long time,

(45:29):
and it's an event that means a lot to me.
But I think the Super Bowl is more reflective of
the character and the fabric of this country than any
other day. Forget about any other television event. Super Bowl
Sunday reflects where we are as a country more accurately
than the Fourth of July, more accurately than Thanksgiving, more

(45:51):
accurately than any holiday that you want to name. It's
the truest representation of who we are. And that's why
it's so exciting for us to be able to be
the people that get to get to present it once
every couple of years. So when the Super Bowl airs,
how much do the teams matter that are playing? And
I'm not telling you to be a fan of the teams,
But if I told you right now Fox's Super Bowl

(46:14):
is going to have the Cowboys and the Patriots. Is
that the best possible draw from a purely team perspective.
And how much the teams matter in terms of audience,
They matter a little. They don't matter as much as
they matter in the World Series or as much as
they matter in the NBA Finals, where I think you
can have a huge degree of variability between one matchup

(46:36):
and another um, but I wouldn't say that they don't
matter at all. No matter who gets to the Super Bowl,
it's going to be, by an enormous margin, the most
watched television program of the year. I mean, by fifty
million people, it'll be the most watched television program of
the year. And that's true even if the matchup is
Jaguars and Panthers, right, But there is some variability where

(47:00):
you know, having the Cowboys in the game might get
you an extra five Having the Cowboys against the Steelers,
or you know, another prominent a f C brand might
get you a couple of extra percent on top of that.
So I do think there are matchups that are better
than others, but there really is no matchup that would

(47:21):
scare you or make you think that the bottom is
going to fall out of the Super Bowl. I think
this year there's an interesting debate to be had, and
I'm not sure that I have a conclusive opinion on it. Um.
The Patriots are probably the strongest brand on the a
f C side, but because they've become so familiar on
Super Bowl Sunday, Uh, it's possible that having Pat Mahomes

(47:45):
and the Chiefs in the game might be better for
viewership than having another year of Brady and Belichick. Again,
I think it's debatable. You really could argue it from
either side, UM, but I would say any combination of Cowboys, Packers,
Bears on the NFC side, Patriots or Chiefs on the
a f C side UM would get you really into

(48:06):
a stratosphere and get you into place where you could
threaten viewership records. I think this will surprise people. You
mentioned the halftime show. Sometimes the halftime show is the
highest rated part of the Super Bowl, and I think
that data reflects that that sometimes is the case that
stuns me or stunned me when I saw it as
a sports fan. Did that surprise you when you saw it? Yeah,

(48:29):
And that's a relatively recent thing. I mean, I think
it's only in the last five to ten years that
the halftime acts um have been booked with an eye toward,
you know, an audience that maybe isn't watching the NFL
every week. You know, we went through a period where
the halftime acts were pretty straightforward guitar guitar rock act,
starting with the YouTube show in New Orleans and now

(48:52):
almost twenty years ago. And then there was this run
of YouTube, Springsteen, Tom Petty, the who I mean, I'm
I'm painting with a very broadbrush here, but those are
acts that are probably resonant to an audience that tends
to watch the NFL every week. And then we've moved
since then into this period where the acts have become Beyonce,

(49:14):
Katie Perry, Bruno Mars, and we find that there is
an audience that will show up at halftime, watch the
halftime show, and then hopefully stick around for the second half,
and it can create a dynamic where the highest rated
part of the game, uh is the halftime show. So yeah,
that's that's a pretty recent change. And in theory for
Fox's Super Bowl this year with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, like,

(49:37):
I don't think and I could be wrong, I don't
think that your average hardcore Jennifer Lopez fan also sits
and watches eight hours of NFL every day. So in theory,
that kind of selection also brings in the potential for
a larger audience that might not otherwise be consuming the
Super Bowl. That's a that's a decent thesis I would imagine, right, Yeah,
I think that's exactly right. I think that's what we
hope happens. Okay, So leaving behind mind the super Bowl

(50:01):
for a second, Uh, there are a lot of things
going on in the world of entertainment, sports, media, business,
everything else. Gambling is starting to grow. You've got all
of this different proliferation, as we've mentioned before, of different
channels of different different aspects of entertainment options that are
out there. If you had a billion dollars, Let's say

(50:21):
you had a billion dollars right now and you had
to invest, you had to invest it in an aspect
of sports. And I always like to act like think
about questions like these, because, for instance, if we've been
having this conversation fifty years ago and we've been talking
about the three most popular sports in the world right
then would have been baseball, horse racing, and boxing, right
And you could have been like, I'm gonna I know

(50:41):
you still love uh, I know you still love horse
racing and everything else. But if you had a billion dollars,
pretend we're having this conversation fifty years from now, what
would you have wanted to put that billion into that
you think would be much more popular fifty years from now,
or at least as popular or grow at a great rate.
Where are we head it? If you had to project,

(51:02):
I'm going to give you a really boring answer, which
is that I would put that money into an NFL team,
recognizing that the irony in that answer is that you
can't even buy an NFL team for a billion dollars,
So you'd probably be looking at buying bullish though on
the NFL, because some people would say, oh, I'm not
bullish on the NFL. You would put a billion into
the NFL right now, I would put a billion into owning,

(51:24):
you know, a third to half of an NFL franchise.
I think that if you had that kind of money
to invest, UM, the part of the business where that
you would want to be on is team ownership. You know,
there's obviously a lot of volatility and uncertainty in the
media side of the business. UM. I like where we are,
given that our brand is built on premium live content.

(51:45):
I think it leaves us, It leaves Fox really well
positioned for the next say ten years. But I think
the safest bet is to be on the team ownership
side and be providing the content to that changing and
uncertain media environment. And in the case of the NFL.
I think that, Look, this is a very well established

(52:07):
trend that every year, the viewership and therefore the value
of the NFL separates itself further and further from everything
else that's out there on TV. So it's not necessarily
a very creative answer. It would probably be more interesting
to say that you would invest in a gambling company,
or in E sports, or in some of the things

(52:28):
that are um more rapidly emerging and maybe are a
little sexier to people. But I think the correct answer
is an NFL team. Fox Sports Radio has the best
sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our
shows at Fox Sports Radio dot com and within the
I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live.

(52:50):
We're talking to Mike Mulvihill. I'm Clay Travis. Wins and Loss.
Is your first reaction when they when you heard that
Fox might be interested in the w W E was what? Oh?
I love it. I think it's incredibly exciting. Um. I
love that we are getting into a sports entertainment business. UM.
I think it's great for us in prime time on

(53:10):
the broadcast network. Uh. And I think we're getting into
business with an executive in Vince McMahon and an organization
that understands showmanship and understands television as well or better
than any other organization in sports or entertainment. So I
think it's really exciting and I can't wait to go

(53:32):
to Staples tomorrow and see our first show. I mean,
it's gonna be pretty cool. That whole Cogan the Rock
are there, right, Yeah, it's gonna be amazing. I mean,
I think it's gonna be for a casual observer of
w w E, it's going to be practically everybody that
you've ever been familiar with since songs like going to
the Academy Awards of Wrestling. Uh okay, let's go to
you mentioned brands and how valuable they are in terms

(53:53):
of producing audiences in the world of sports. How much
are individual opinion maker brands valuable? In other words, Colin
Cowherd is now at Fox. You've got Skip Bailiss at Fox.
Both of those guys came over from ESPN and have
brought pretty substantial audiences for themselves that are quite a
bit more than we're watching other programming on At the

(54:15):
same time, is the value of those brands in the
opinion business going up? In your mind relative to again,
with the same issue of noise that's out there, it's
hard to cut through. Do you think that is also
true in the opinion space, And by the way, it
could probably be true in the opinion space of sports,
and also certainly would be true in the opinion space
of news, where it's hard to cut through and create

(54:38):
kind of an audience. And once you have, is their
value there over and above maybe than what you would
have anticipated. Sure, I don't think we would be investing
in the talent that you just mentioned if we didn't
believe that UM opinion driven programming was valuable and likely
to increase in value. I mean, this is a business

(54:58):
that is all is going to be driven first and
last by the events, right, and we can never lose
sight of that. Like, what really drives this business is
having the rights to the games UM, and when we
have an exclusive right to a game, it's the only
thing we can deliver to an audience that nobody else
can deliver, and so we always have to have that
as our our top priority. But having said that, you know,

(55:21):
it's a reality that on Fox Sports one, on ESPN,
on ESPN two, we've got eight thousand seven hundred sixty
hours of programming to fill every year. And that's airtime
that our distributors are paying for, us for the consumers
are paying for through their monthly cable or satellite bill. UM.
And it's got to be filled with something compelling. And

(55:42):
so when you have um what we sometimes call an
opinionist who can fill a high volume of hours with
something that is entertaining and watchable, I mean, I think
there's incredible value there. I mean, I know, you're doing
a radio show every day, you're doing Lock It In
with Us on FS one, You're doing this podcast, you're writing.

(56:04):
You know, you you kind of position yourself as an
individual who is also a content factory. And I think
once we get away from the live games, a lot
of the other programming becomes a volume play. You know,
you really are looking for people who can be a
content factory, who have the ability to sit in a
studio and provide watchable content for three or four hours

(56:27):
a day, which will get you to maybe fift dred
or two thousand hours a year of that time that
you need to account for. I think those people have
unbelievable value and it is a really rare and special
skill set. I know that. You know, it's easy to
be cynical about some of that programming. It's easy to
be sarcastic about it, um, but it is a unique

(56:47):
ability to be able to sit in a studio and
talk about sports competently and entertainingly for three hours every day.
Not a lot of people can do it, and they
have great value. Yeah, it is interesting when you mentioned
because it's it's almost like a picture who's going to
give you a huge number of innings? Right, Like this
guy is gonna give me two hundred innings because what
did you say? Eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours

(57:10):
of programming. I mean when you think about a guy
like Cowherd, who is doing three hours of live radio,
I'm doing three hours of radio two. But three hours
of radio on television that's compelling in rates? Well, I
mean that's an awful lot of just minute audience hours, right, Yeah,
it absolutely is. I mean that's also the reason why
I believe The Today Show and Good Morning America are

(57:30):
the highest revenue generating shows on television. They may not
be as highly rated on an average minute basis as
something in prime time or as an NFL game, but
they're on the fifteen hours a week, twenty hours a
week every week, and they're just churning out an enormous
volume of sellable content. And just the same way that

(57:53):
it's rare to be able to do that on the
sports side for three hours a day, it's rare to
be able to fill those three hours on a network
morning show every day. And that's that's why those people
are worth. With their worth, the data that you look
at has probably never been more available in terms of
your ability to actually get it. But sometimes it's got
to feel like you're trying to drink from a fire

(58:14):
hose in terms of all of that data that's coming
at you. How do you distinguish between the signal and
a noise, like something that is just creating a lot
of noise versus something that actually matters. Yeah, that's that's
a great question. And I think that you're right. I mean,
we are overwhelmed by data. Um, I think sometimes there's
a a perception. It's not just a perception, it's a

(58:37):
reality that television is at a data disadvantage compared to
a tech company like Google or Amazon. And yet even
if we are at a data disadvantage, We're still getting
far more data every single day than we could ever
really process and make use of. And so what you
really need are people who can separate the signal from

(59:00):
the noise and take all that data and sort of
massage it into a narrative that makes sense to content partners,
to advertisers, to press to all the constituencies that we
deal with. I mean, I work in an analytics department,
and I think there's an assumption that the people who
work for me should be uh, mathematic geniuses, and it's

(59:22):
actually not necessary. It's helpful to have an aptitude for
the numbers, obviously, but what you really need our storytellers,
you know, what you really need are people who can
sip through all that data and come up with a
handful of data points that you can string together into
a narrative about a sport, or about our company, or

(59:42):
about where this business is going, that resonates and makes
intuitive sense to people. UM. And I think that's surprising
when I say that, you know pretty frequently, and I
think it's sometimes surprising to people UM to hear me
say that I don't necessarily need numbers people. I need
people who can put data points together into a story

(01:00:02):
that that adds up to something meaningful as part of
all that noise. And I'm fascinated by that too, because
you have to. It's almost like you have to test hypotheses, right,
I mean, how often do you look at something say hey,
I wonder if this might be what's going on, and
kind of test it for a couple of weeks, right
or longer to try to figure out whether the data
is just noisy and it's not necessarily reflecting, or causation

(01:00:24):
is an issue and everything else. Because stories are constantly evolving,
your story to explain the data has to evolve in
some ways to right. Yeah, And we do experiment sometimes,
whether that's experimentation with where a show airs or um,
you know, in the case of the NFL, where we
regionalize games and we're assigning a game to two hundred

(01:00:45):
different markets all over the country, we might say, well,
let's just see what happens if we put this team
into this market up against this competition. Let's see what
we find out. And I've been working for Fox Now
for over twenty years, as you know, hard to believe,
as that is, uh, And I feel like I'm constantly
learning new ways of thinking about programming, and the only
way to learn those things is to try things on

(01:01:07):
the air that you haven't tried before. When you look
at all the noise of social media beneficial or negative
overall to the business of what you do, because you
may have a hypothesis and the narrative can be accurate,
it can be inaccurate. You can see, uh, you know,
if it can lead to the spread of accurate, inaccurate information.

(01:01:29):
Do you pay attention at all to social media in
terms of looking at the data or do you have
so much data that you don't need more opinion? UM?
I don't pay much attention to social media in terms
of audience feedback. I mean, I feel like the most
useful insights that I can glean I'm typically getting from
the Nielsen data set. UM. I do scroll through Twitter obsessively.

(01:01:53):
I'm on it way too much, so I can't claim
to not pay attention to it. UM. But I tend
to value the insights the Nielsen ratings over the insights
that you're getting anecdotally. UM from Twitter. Now, there's another
way of talking about social media, which is, rather than
using it as a gauge of public opinion. You know,
I feel like I've been able to use it um

(01:02:16):
as a way to get the data out there into
this never ending conversation that's happening on Twitter, specifically about
our business and about sports. I mean, I think Twitter
has become absolutely fascinating as an endless incubator of ideas
and a place to just pressure test ideas that you

(01:02:37):
have about where our business is going, what's working, what's
not working. It's interesting sometimes to float a data point
out via Twitter and just see what sticks, what do
people respond to, or what do people push back on
and reject um. I think it's become a really fascinating
laboratory for ideas that then can harden into can mentional wisdom,

(01:03:00):
and that's a really new dynamic. I think that you know,
you're even more active on Twitter than I am. I'm
sure you've observed that um, probably more frequently than I do.
But it's fascinating to see how an idea can be
debated and pressure tested on social media and then make
its way into more traditional media, and then once it
does make its way into more traditional media, it becomes

(01:03:22):
conventional wisdom. I'm fascinated by it, and I don't ever
know how representative any kind of story is for instance,
in my audience, we know that, at least according to data,
like Twitter is gonna skew young, It's gonna skew Liberal,
It's gonna skew you know, probably costal more than it's
middle part of the country. But what I love is
just using it as a resource, even with those flaws.

(01:03:44):
When I'm up in the morning doing my radio show
and we come up with an interesting poll question, I
love just to see the results, right, Like if people
are going to vote on something, I just genuinely love
seeing what they're going to say. And also love thinking
when in I'm gonna expecting to get an answer one
way and it goes the other way, right, like whether
my needle is accurate in terms of what my anticipation is. Now,

(01:04:08):
I'm curious here. I've only got a couple more questions
for you, because I know how busy you are. Fox
Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation.
Catch all of our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot
com and within the I Heart Radio app search f
s R to listen live. We're talking to Mike Multihill.
I'm Clay Travis. This is Wins and Losses podcast. I

(01:04:28):
have a theory, thesis, hypothesis, whatever you want to call it,
that we're in the middle of a major paradigm shift
in the world of sports media in particular, and I
think we've had several of these over I would say
the last forty years. The first was cable. I think
cable changed everything in terms of the way that you
consume sports. I think a secondary major impact was fantasy football,

(01:04:49):
which I think drove football in general two different heights
of popularity than it had ever seen before. I think
the third major paradigm shift that we're going to see
is gambling. Would you buy into those being the three
kind of seminal events of the last thirty five to
forty years of the sports industry? Would you add any others?
And do you think that gambling is going to be

(01:05:11):
as transformative as I believe it will in terms of
the way sports are covered. Let's go through those three again.
One was cable TV right now, the last one was gambling,
and then what was the one in between? I think
fantasy football, but fantasy sports in general really change. I
think I think, in my opinion, this is my thesis.
You may have data that says I'm an idiot for this.
I think that the reason why the NFL suddenly skyrocketed,

(01:05:35):
and I believe the data reflects this in the mid
to late nineties and continued on its upward trajectory. So
rapidly was fantasy football became so popular that people liked
the NFL already, but suddenly you had a reason to
watch every game with a steak in that game, right,
I'm playing against somebody. I want to see how this
running back does I need a touchdown to win my week.

(01:05:56):
I'm in a high stakes fantasy football league that I'm
embarrassed how much we're all putting into this thing. And
I was like hitting refresh maniacally during Monday Night Football
to see whether or not I was going to beat
the guy that I was playing against. Right, And by
the way, Ferman and Sal from our show lock it
in or in that same league, and we spend a
decent amount of time talking about how that league is going,
because there's a lot of money at stake, right, And

(01:06:17):
I I already am watching NFL games obsessively, but it
makes me care more. And it made me care more
back in nine and ninety six when suddenly I could
start to play it on the internet with my buddies,
and I think that's a big driver for NFL. And
I think gambling is gonna be similar because it gives
you a steak, and anytime you can create a interest
or a incentive or a connection with a viewer, I

(01:06:41):
think it drives up interest, whether it's fifty bucks, twenty bucks,
or the potential to win a hundred thousand dollars in
a twenty five team parlay. I think that all matters
in a big way, very beneficial for sports. So I
would agree with each of the three that you mentioned,
And then if we were going to talk about potentially
a fourth, I think you would have to look at
the evolution of facility construction and how much more advanced

(01:07:06):
fee the venues and the buildings that we go to
to watch sports are today compared to where they were
thirty or forty years ago. I just got done reading
an awesome book called Ballpark Um by a guy who's
a Poetzer prize winning architecture critic, and so he's talking
about ballpark construction through the lens of um architecture and

(01:07:27):
architecture criticism and really thinking about it in a in
a thoughtful way, And there was this great anecdote in
that book where UM George will was putting forward the
idea that the three most significant things that have happened
to baseball in the post war decades are integration, free agency,
and the construction of Camden Yards. Like that's a really

(01:07:48):
interesting idea, and it speaks to three things that are
so fundamental to the business of baseball. It's all about
who's allowed to play, who are you allowed to play for?
And where are we going to play the games? Right?
And I think that the building of Camden Yards and
the generation of ballparks that it lead to UM has
fundamentally changed the way that we experience baseball. It's made

(01:08:12):
the experience of going to a game UM I think
more palatable for somebody who wants to bring their family,
or wants to bring their kids, or maybe go on
a date to a game. UM. The experience is just
so much more comfortable and entertainment driven. With that obviously
comes a higher price point, and maybe some of those
people who were passionate fans and regular attendees UM at

(01:08:35):
facilities thirty or forty years ago now can't afford to
go to a game. That changes the nature of the event.
But I think it's not just baseball clearly. You know,
you go to NFL stadiums and it's mind boggering to
me the amenities that we have UM in the more
recent construction. The same is true with NBA arenas, and
so I think facility construction would also have to be
part of that conversation about things that have been transformational

(01:08:58):
in sports. But that's kind of a tangent to get
back to your point about gambling. I mean, I couldn't
agree more. Um, having the job that I have, I
felt for years that the two most impactful things that
could happen to sports television would be for out of
home television viewing to be included in the ratings. Well,

(01:09:18):
that's now going to happen, you know, and your people
out there who like that's when you go to a
bar or you're you know, like out in a public venue, right, correct,
So all the viewing of sports that you do in
a bar, in a hotel room, maybe there's a TV
set in your place of business, or you're in an airport,
all of that viewing will now be able to be
captured by Nielsen and counted in the viewership metrics that

(01:09:41):
we sell to our advertisers, So that's a seismic change.
So that's one of what I felt like could be
the two biggest changes to our business. And the other, obviously,
is the legalization of gambling, and I think we're just
at the beginning of that transformation. There are so many
more states still to um figure out what they're a
way forward is going to be in terms of legalization.

(01:10:03):
But we've developed our participation in the gaming space in
the expectation that five to ten years from now you
might have thirty ish states representing roughly two thirds of
the country that will have some form of legal sports wagering.
And when that comes, it's going to make the television
product so much more engaging and so much more compelling

(01:10:25):
to somebody who has a small wager on the game.
And we're not talking about people who are going to
quit their jobs and become professional sports gamblers, but we're
talking about people who are passionate Philadelphia Eagles fans, and
they may find that their enjoyment of the game is
amplified just a little bit by having ten or twenty
dollars on the outcome of this Sunday's Eagles game, and

(01:10:46):
I think that's the kind of audience where the opportunity
really lies. How important is it for your job for
you to be intellectually curious about things other than sports.
I would like to think that it is important, you know.
I'd like to think that you're able to glean insights
from other interests that might be relevant to, uh, the

(01:11:08):
job that we do here every day. Um. I just
got done reading a really interesting book, um called How
Music Works by David Byrne, who fronted Talking Heads for
a lot of years, and so much of what he
had to say about the nature of performance and the
nature of a mass audience coming together to have a
shared experience in a club or in a concert hall

(01:11:31):
was so interesting and so applicable to the nature of
live sports and the nature of the events that we televise,
you know, every day. So you want to believe that
if you have some curiosity about things outside of the
world of sports, that curiosity will lead you to places
that you can then bring back to this job. Um.
That that's the way I try to approach it anyway. Yeah,

(01:11:51):
I always tell people that the best way to I
think have creative ideas is to experience a variety of
creative disciplines. So it doesn't mean that you have to
be an expert in something else, but you have to
be intellectually curious enough to think outside of whatever realm
you're involved in. To me, to allow you to make
connections that are bigger than whatever you're involved in. Does

(01:12:12):
that make sense? Like there is? In my opinion. I
tell people all the time, if there's a high school
kid listening right now to our conversation and he wants
one day to have the job that you have or
the job that I have, I say, you gotta read
as much as you can. And it doesn't necessarily need
to be everything about the world of sports, because I
think everybody has been out to a dinner party or

(01:12:32):
you've got a friend and a lot of times he's
a guy who all he can talk about is sports,
and I'll just see, like my wives like eyes roll,
you know, because you're out a dinner and it's like
it's a really nitty gritty sports conversation that you're in
the middle of, you know, like you're analyzing four star
linebackers from uh, the state of Georgia compared to the
state of Alabama, and there's a small subset of people

(01:12:53):
that care about that, but it's probably not everybody who's
sitting around a dinner table, right, And so there's a
there's an ability, I think, if you're a generalist in
some sense of the word, to be able to be
interested in a lot of different things, to recognize maybe
connections in the world of sports and beyond that others
wouldn't see if they're obsessed with one particular thing. Hey,
that's a great point. I think it's really relevant to

(01:13:13):
my job and to the people that I work with
because we are a data analytics department, and it's very
easily it's very easy to fall into a trap of
making it all about the data. You know, you have
to remember that the data is only relevant in that
it's a language that we can use to talk about
things that are really difficult to quantify. You know. The

(01:13:33):
things that really make this business work are the feeling
that you get when you have a shared experience at
a game with somebody that matters to you, or the
feeling that you get when your favorite team wins a championship.
You can't put a number to that, um but the
ratings and the attendance metrics and the revenue metrics allow
us to sort of approximate what those things mean to people.

(01:13:55):
If you ever become so narrow minded and shortsighted as
to make it all about the numbers and you lose
sight of the emotions and the experiences that those numbers represent,
you're done, You're lost. You You always have to remember
that it's about the experiences. It's about the feelings that
sports generate, and the ratings are just a shorthand for

(01:14:16):
us to talk about it. We watched the Alabama Clemson
game together. Speaking of the environment of stadiums, you were
talking about reading about the geography of stadiums in a
suite that allowed you to get your d n A
tested now San Francisco, remember that, like how we do
that was now wasn't open while we were there. But
I was like, I can't even believe that something like
this exists. And I know you do it and I

(01:14:38):
do it too, and I think it's instructive and helpful
for a lot of people out there. Every now and
then it's important to just pinch yourself and make yourself
realize that this is what you do for a living,
because I don't I don't think it matters what your
job is. At some point in time, you can get
so immersed in that job that you forget how excited
you would have been to have that job. If you've
been talking to yourself twenty years ago, or fifteen years

(01:15:01):
ago or thirty years ago, how important is that to you? Uh,
to be able to almost uh what I like to
say is uh the illusion of the first time right
actors and actresses, It's all about being able to come
out on the stage even if they've done the same
play a hundred times, and sell you on the idea
that they're doing it for the first time, to present
something fresh. Do you think about things like that in

(01:15:22):
in in your endeavor? Yeah, I think about it constantly
and really literally, just before we take this podcast, I
was walking back from a session that we did here
on the Fox lot where our president Eric Shanks was
interviewing Vince McMahon in advance of our w w E
premiere tomorrow night, and I was walking back over here
with Charlie Dixon got who you know, well, he's responsible

(01:15:43):
for all our studio programming on this one, and we
were having exactly this conversation that it's amazing that Vince
is able to retain his sense of showmanship and his
sense of what will please an audience. And it got
us talking about what excites us as people who have
been this business for a number of years now, and
how excited we still get when we launch a new

(01:16:04):
property or a new show, or we get to go
to a Super Bowl. And you never lose that astonishment
that somebody actually pays you to do this. I mean,
it's just incredible. And I said to him just on
the way over here. If you ever lose that sense
that you get up on Super Bowl Sunday and you
can't believe that you actually get to do this for
a living, you have to quit. You have to move

(01:16:26):
on and just go do something else, because you've lost it.
When you become one of those people who for whom
it is only about this game did an eight rating
this year and a nine rating last year, and you've
lost your connection to the event itself and the sense
of wonder and excitement and happiness that it brings to
the tens of millions of people who care about this stuff,

(01:16:48):
then you're of no use to this company. You have
to maintain your connection to that outstanding stuff. How can
people find you on social media and see what you're
the information that you're putting out there on a regular basis.
I'm on Twitter. I'm on at eighteen hours a day.
My handle is at Mulvihill seventy nine. The seventy nine
is a reference to the seventy nine Pittsburgh Pirates team

(01:17:09):
that won the World Series. And UH, I love having
new followers. I love interacting people with people who have
any curiosity about this business. So come check us out,
uh and UM and I appreciate that at Mulvihill seventy nine.
Go make sure you check them out because you're gonna
get a lot of great information there. I know you're busy, guy.
I appreciate the time today and look forward to two

(01:17:29):
people being able to experience and see what you do
for a living. Thanks, man, really enjoyed it. It's Michael Mulvihill.
I'm Clay Travis. You've been listening to the Winds and
Losses podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, there's a lot
more real enjoy as well. Go listen and subscribe. Appreciate
you all. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk
lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at
Fox Sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart

(01:17:51):
Radio app search f s R to listen live.

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