The Josh Innes Show - Is ESPN/NFL Deal A Conflict Of Interest?

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

The ESPN/NFL Deal is clearly a conflict of interest. But, here's the thing....no one cares. Let's dive in to what people expect from sports leagues and networks in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right. Well, let's get right back into this, then, talking about why it matters. Thank you, Chat, GPT, the co-host of the All-Up Innis podcast. So why this matters, all right? That's the why this relationship between a sports league and a network matters. This marks the first time the NFL holds ownership in a major sports network like ESPN. ESPN will integrate NFL's media assets, including NFL network, red zone distribution, and fantasy football, into its lineup and into its upcoming direct-to-consumer streaming service launching in 2025. The deal still requires regulatory and NFL ownership approval, likely taking up to a year before

finalization and full execution, potentially not in effect until the 2026 season. So then let me ask then one more question about this, and then we can kind of dive more into this. Actually, let me play a couple commercials here, and I'm going to look into this, and then And we will continue. All right. So the most important question that people have is how this will impact the coverage of the NFL. Are people skeptical of how ESPN will cover the NFL now that the league is part owner? And this is one of the things I've been seeing people talk a lot about is, oh, my God, what are we going to do?

All right, here's why people are worried. Conflict of interest concerns. Critics argue that because ESPN now financially benefits from the league's success, it may soften critical coverage or downplay controversies. This echoes past criticisms like ESPN canceling its drama series playmakers after reported pressure from the NFL. Well, there's number one. So here's the thing. There's been a lot of people. And this kind of goes back the last couple of weeks with Mike Floreo and all these people going in on the NFL Players Association and how they've mistreated the players in terms of colluding to pay players less or whatever the hell it was.

And the guy got whacked and all that. Here's the thing, man. This is 2025 and this is the NFL. This is not politics. This is not government. This is not White House shit. This is what has often been referred to as the sandbox. Not even the sandbox.

I take that back. The toy box, the toy department. I used to talk with Barry Warner all the time, and Barry would say, savant, we are in the toy chest. We are in the toy department. Sports is the toy department. And I forgot who originated that comment. It could have been like a Howard CoSell thing or something. But it was, this is the toy department. We are in the toy department. People who are consuming the NFL, real talk, They don't want people who are trying to destroy the NFL. People love to talk shit on the Internet, and people love to get dramatic on the Internet and act like they want to know the truth and they want all the details on what guy's hitting, what chick, what guy's cheating on what woman, who's doing all of this horrible shit, DUIs. Here's the reality. We are a nation that is addicted to the NFL. We are addicted to football, but particularly we are addicted to the NFL. We don't give a shit about what's happening behind the scenes as long as on Thursday, Sunday, Monday, depending on the holiday, a Saturday or a Friday. At some point, I think there will be NFL games on like five or six days of the week this season.

As long as we can build our fantasy teams, as long as we can bet on the teams that we love, as long as we can sit down on our asses, order wings, drink beer and watch football for all day Sunday, watch Monday, night football. As long as we can do that, we don't care. The people who care about these conflicts of interest are, look, and I get their point to a degree. I get why you want to be Mr. investigative journalist. And if you want to be investigative journalist as it relates to Trump or the politics or Biden or whatever, that is valid, that is warranted, that is real. Congrats Woodward and Bernstein. That's real life. Football is not real life. People just want watch football, enjoy themselves, get drunk, have a good time. So like media people and media critics and the most hardened steadfast sports media people may hate the idea that the NFL

owns 10% of ESPN. Because by the way, there is no doubt that there will be a conflict of interest. The conflict of interest isn't up for debate. That is a conflict of interest. A league that you cover owns 10% of your network. Of course there's going to be behind the the scenes bullshit. Of course there's going to be drama. And of course that's going to be a conflict of interest that you have to deal with. But the only way that matters is if your consumer views you as non-credible and doesn't watch your products because of that. And the NFL fans do not care. The NFL is a juggernaut. The league is a juggernaut. It is unstoppable. Now, if you start screwing with the programming they like and mess it up, then you'll start

having to deal with people. If Stephen A. Smith is hosting Red Zone, then you're going to deal with people and you're going to incur their wrath and they're going to be super pissed off. That's real. But as long as you keep giving the people what they want and they've become accustomed to and they can enjoy watching their teams play, they don't care. The only people who are worried about a conflict of interest are media people who are looking to create some sort of drama or talk about it. And by the way, and I know I just said this, but those people, aren't wrong. It is a conflict of interest, and 10 years ago, I may have viewed it different. Like, remember, I've worked for multiple radio stations that have been the flagship station

for teams. And in every one of those instances, I believe, pretty close, there have been radio hosts who are employed by teams that are on the station. You know, Mark Vandemere was an employee of the Houston Texans. So when he was on the radio, He was an employee, well, okay, let me take that back. He was not an employee of the team at the time, but he was the voice of the team. He might as well have been an employee. He was paid by CBS, but he was the voice of the Texans. So you knew that you were not going to get a guy on the radio that was going to shit on them.

You knew that and you kind of accepted it. And that kind of hurt his credibility in terms of offering opinions. Now, if the Texans were 13 and 3 every year, nobody would have given a shit that Mark blew them. But they were 6 and 10 and losing games in tremendous fashion, and then people shit on them for that, right? Like, that's when people, like, basically it's what the masses think. If you echo the voice of the masses, it really doesn't matter. If you're Mark Vandemere and the team's 13 and 3 and everybody loves them, they don't give a shit that you're Mr. Ra Ra Homer guy that works for the team.

They care when you're 6 and 10 and you're interviewing the head coach after a game and you're pussy footing around and people are like, why don't you represent me? That's when the people care about that type of shit. You know, when I worked at 610, 790, WIP, these stations all have. had rights, the rights to certain teams. And I used to get pissed because it was expected of me by those teams to kind of pussyfoot around and kind of do that. But I didn't work for them, right? I worked for the radio station and my job was to give my honest opinion of shit. That was 10 years ago, 12 years ago, 13 years ago. My mindset was different. I like to be honest about teams.

I like to give you my opinion. But at the end of the day, the people tuning into the radio station are people tuning in because they like the teams and they want the teams to win and like me fighting this fight to like give my legit opinions it almost seems fucking stupid as to where we're sitting now in 2025 with the NFL owning 10% of ESPN you know or back in the day the cardinals used to be on camoX radio in st louis and at one point the cardinals like bought stake in a radio station called kTRS in st louis and for a handful of years the cardinals were on that station and they were part owners of that. Of course, there's a conflict in that, but people don't really give a shit. It's the toy department. People don't sit around with the NFL or sports and

give a shit about that. As long as they're hearing shit about their team and they like what they hear, they're not going to bitch. When I see people that are skeptical of this, it's people that are like, well, they're going to have to paint the league in a positive way. People watching don't want you to paint it in a negative way. They don't want the league hurt. They don't want to go away. Complicit too. The audience is complicit. We are all in on this because we love football and we don't want it to go away and we don't want dickhead reporters trying to tear it down. Is that the right thing? That's debatable. But it's what people want. And if it were something involving, you know, Biden and a Hunter Biden's laptop, we want the truth. In sports, we don't really want the truth. We don't care about the truth. That's not something that impacts us on a day-in, day-out basis. wrestling, which is now on this ESPN app, right? ESP, like the people watching wrestling, some of them love to run to the internet and tell you how appalled they are that Brock Lesnar is back in wrestling.

You know what, 95, 97, 98% of the people who watch wrestling are doing now? They're celebrating that Brock Lesnar's back and they don't care that he might have done something fucking totally heinous involving this Janelle, whatever her name is. Like, they don't give a shit. That's not what people think about. Like, I was listening to a radio show in Detroit. and this guy has great ratings and he's not a bad radio host

I don't think he sucks or anything he's spent 20 years here and it's got big numbers and he's kind of like the one guy that's got the hard opinions and I'm listening to him and at least once a week he's doing some show about asking the listeners if they even really want him to give honest opinions or if they just want him to drink up

the bath water of the teams and it's lazy and it's call baiting and it's boring and I turn it off when he does it but I think he even gets the the point that like people it's sports it's not life and death it's not war people are just listening because they like teams they want them to win they want to hear good shit about their teams is it something i want to do that's kind of why i hate sports radio now it's very cultish and people

and their little cliques and if you're not part of this group of people that like will always defend your own team no matter what then you're an asshole and i don't really want to be part of that world that world doesn't interest me and that's why i'm glad i'm doing what i'm doing but I don't know they I just don't think people care I don't think people look at it as a situation where they want people to bring down the NFL they don't they don't want people to bring down their baseball team they don't want people to bring down their favorite college program it's like saying don't you want the truth like back in the day when cheating was a thing in college football where there was no NIL like and people were just paying dudes under the table like nobody liked the dude in the town or in the state that was out there digging deep and to try to unearth the cheating. Like, sure, is it a sexy story, yes, and is it legit and viable, yes. But at the end of the day, it's the toy department and nobody who enjoys their team. Like when Dale Brown was the coach at LSU and you had media people that were out there trying

to tear down Dale Brown because he was paying for players to go to funerals and shit. The fans don't want that. So what does that matter? It matters because the only reason credibility matters, right? And that's one of the big things is people are skeptical of what this means for the credibility of ESPN. The only people who care about the credibility of ESPN are media people who are involved in it and they still wrap their brains around this idea that the audience cares about your credibility. The audience really doesn't.

The audience just wants football. The audience just wants this product and they don't want you tearing it down. Go back 10 years ago to the concussion stuff. You know why most people didn't give a shit about concussions? Because they viewed that as something that could help tear down the NFL and they love the NFL. Maybe you're right in the person, the other guys that were breaking this were right in what they were doing. But people didn't want it. And why didn't they want it?

They didn't want it because they didn't want to see their league destroyed. They don't want to see their product that they enjoy destroyed. So again, if the argument, according to Chat GPT when I searched it, chat GPT tells you that people are skeptical because of the idea that this will be a, that you will have to deal with conflict of interest. The average person who drives a truck for a living, works at a bank for a living, works a nine-to-fiver, has an ugly wife, has annoying kids. When he gets off of work, then has to take his kids to ball practice, doesn't have time to scratch his own balls or drink a beer. That person does not give a fuck if the NFL owns 10% of ESPN. They don't give a shit. So I don't think this is going to hurt ESPN at all because this is 2025 and I don't believe credibility matters.

I don't believe being impartial matters. And part of that is a world that Trump created with, you know, the fake news and all this shit. I think people just don't give a shit. They're going to take and believe what they want to believe and they're not looking for honesty. You can say that's bad. You could say we're in a weird kind of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome type of thing. This is 1984, maybe. But it's the truth.

In the same way that when I was fighting these good fights on like 790 or 610, 610 was different because people were truly going against the Texans and what I was doing kind of echoed most fans. But like on 790, people who love the Rockets, they don't want to do shitting on James Hard. I still did it. That's what I believed. But if I just would have got on there like an Adam Clanton and said what they wanted to hear, I'd probably still be there. This is 2025. The media is what it is.

And the people are what the people are. The people are not addicted to getting the truth. the people are addicted to getting their form of the truth or their version of the truth. And as long as you give them that, they're fine. And in the case of the NFL and a conflict of interest, the people just want their team to win football games and they just want the NFL to be fine because they're addicted to it. So anyway, more to come.