If you want long-term relationship advice, I offer this: Find someone who loves you as much as the news media loves year-end content.
The New Yorker wrote a piece 11 years ago about why our brains like lists, and it holds up today. Among other things: it organizes information spatially and promises a story that is finite.
The NFL story will obviously continue into 2025 and beyond, but below we offer eight NFL media stories that piqued our interest in 2024.
1. Tom Brady begins his NFL broadcasting journey
Fox has the broadcast rights to this year’s Super Bowl, meaning Brady will call the league’s biggest game in his rookie season as a TV analyst. He is 15 games into a 10-year, $375 million deal with Fox, a journey that has generated plenty of commentary on his performance, including several pieces from this author.
Brady’s broadcast work has improved over the season – not so much that he has become an elite TV analyst, but the progress is noticeable. Still, the long-term prediction here is that Brady’s juggling role as Las Vegas Raiders owner and TV analyst, and the restrictions that come with it, feel untenable for Fox and Brady.
Tom Brady has improved as a game broadcaster, but February’s Super Bowl threatens to be the ultimate test of his progress. (Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
2. Netflix releases an NFL gaming package
Netflix and the NFL announced in May a three-season deal for Christmas Day games through 2026. That deal is getting even bigger now that Netflix has secured exclusive broadcast rights in the United States for the 2027 and 2027 editions of the Women’s World Cup. 2031. These are major signals to the market (along with the WWE rights deal, given its live element) that Netflix has shifted from an interest in sports-adjacent properties to a legitimate sports rights holder.
The streaming giant aired the Kansas City Chiefs-Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens-Houston Texans games on Christmas Day and largely managed to avoid an error-filled repeat of the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight event.
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‘Look What Netflix Does’: Unpacking the NFL’s Christmas Day Experiment
3. Peacock broadcasts a regular season game from São Paulo
The September 6 Philadelphia Eagles-Green Bay Packers game was the first-ever NFL regular season game in South America and was broadcast exclusively on Peacock, the streaming network’s third exclusive NFL game after the Buffalo Bills-Los Angeles Chargers regular season game in December 2023 and the Miami Dolphins-Chiefs AFC wild-card playoff game this past January.
The result was a significant viewership gain for the league and the streamer. Peacock delivered 14.2 million viewers for Eagles-Packers, well above the 7.3 million for Bills-Chargers and Peacock’s second-best NFL streaming audience ever, trailing only the Chiefs-Dolphins game (23 million viewers). The figures include figures from the over-the-air markets where the games took place.
The NFL will play eight international games in 2025, including in Madrid, as Spain will become the sixth country to host a regular NFL game. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt have spoken openly about it play 16 matches abroad every year in the near term, according to this report from SBJ’s Ben Fischer. It’s clear we’ll soon see a Sunday morning window with a new international media rights package.
4. Super Bowl LVIII sets TV ratings record
We live in an apples-to-pomegranates world when it comes to comparing today’s sports viewership to that of the past, due to factors like new out-of-home ratings and cord cutters and cords. Using current metrics, via Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, the Chiefs’ 25-22 win over the San Francisco 49ers in February’s Super Bowl averaged 123.7 million viewers across television and streaming platforms. That makes it the most-watched program in history, breaking the previous mark of 115.1 million for Kansas City’s last-minute win over Philadelphia in the previous Super Bowl.
Fans watch Super Bowl LVIII outside Chase Center in San Francisco. The game was the highest-rated program in television history. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)
5. The rise of alt broadcasting
Alternative broadcasts of NFL games entered a new stratosphere in 2024 featuring a “Simpsons” animated alt-cast from “Monday Night Football” airs on ESPN+ and Disney+, and NBC Sports makes its alternate NFL broadcast debut on Peacock with last week’s Texans-Chiefs game. It follows alt broadcasts on Nickelodeon and ESPN’s now long-standing Manning Brothers broadcasts and one using “Toy Story”.
6. The “New Heights” podcast is blowing up
The popular podcast — hosted by brothers Jason Kelce, the Eagles center from 2011-2023, and Travis Kelce, the current Chiefs tight end — struck a deal with Amazon’s podcast network Wondery in 2024 to become the program’s new home.
The show ranks among the top podcasts in the United States and has nearly 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube. One of the interesting notes in the deal is Wondery’s plans to translate the podcast into several languages to expand its global audience, including in NFL-strong markets like the United Kingdom and Mexico. That’s a blank space for NFL fans.
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The Kelce brothers and the ‘heights’ of podcast popularity
7. New broadcasting rules for better access
It was no coincidence that you saw more in-game interviews during NFL games this season. Last May, the NFL Broadcasting Department outlined access changes for the NFL’s television partners following a review between the league and its media rights holders. The shared goal? To improve the game content that we as NFL viewers see. The new rules include in-game coach interviews for all games, pregame player interviews for all games, network pregame locker room coverage, preseason player interviews and network cameras in coaches’ booths. See if it goes through.
8. The NFL Must Pay $4.7 Billion in ‘Sunday Ticket’ Antitrust Lawsuit, But It’s Overturned
In August, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles overturned a $4.7 billion judgment against the NFL for conspiring to raise prices for its “NFL Sunday Ticket” television package. The judge disqualified expert testimony used by the jury to determine damages. (The jury’s verdict had threatened to undermine the league’s strategy of selling exclusive television packages to broadcasters.) Next: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Per Sportico’s legal writer and sports law professor, Michael McManna decision is likely to take many months, if not longer.
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Imagine NFL on TV in the year 2030: Tom Brady out, Travis Kelce in?
(Top photo of a Netflix “Christmas Gameday” banner during Wednesday’s Chiefs-Steelers game: Mark Alberti / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)