Georgetown sports business professor Marty Conway joins Nestor to talk Orioles marketing and Ravens branding in a big Baltimore sports season for growth.
Nestor Aparicio and Marty Conway discuss the Orioles’ disappointing start to the season, with expectations outpacing performance. Conway highlights the importance of managing expectations and the need for strategic changes, particularly in pitching. They also touch on the Orioles’ new ownership group, led by Peter Angelos’ successor, and the lack of communication and strategic direction from the team. On the Ravens side, they address the ongoing Justin Tucker scandal and the NFL’s resilience despite scandals, attributing it to a strong media landscape and strategic media deals.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Orioles marketing, Ravens branding, Baltimore sports, Marty Conway, Georgetown University, sports business, baseball expectations, Camden Yards, non-baseball revenue, Justin Tucker scandal, NFL media strategy, sports ownership, fan engagement, sports business strategy.
SPEAKERS
8
Marty Conway, Nestor Aparicio
Nestor Aparicio 00:02
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T, am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore. Positive. This is a big, big week around here. Is Preakness week in Baltimore. The Orioles returning home. They’ll play the locals from down the road. And I spent a little time down the road in Raoul. John this week. CNN is young and Brian Johnson rock my world with AC DC. This guy always rocks my world. We we’ve attended a few Bruce Springsteen concerts together and domes and otherwise, uh, he is our defending champion of all things sports business, as well as the branding of sports. He is a long time insider in the sports business space and now a professor at Georgetown University. Amongst other many, many skills, we welcome Marty Conway back onto the program. First time in season. Might be the first time this calendar year, Marty Conway and I’ve gotten together. How are you? What’s going on? How’s life out there? Lacrosse guy like you and all that going on. And a baseball guy, baseball was supposed to be funnier, Marty. And then suddenly it hasn’t been up.
Marty Conway 01:02
Yeah, expectations, anytime you anytime you allow expectations to be set as high as they were, you know, you’re quite likely. Baseball is a humbling sport, let’s be honest, right? It’s the nature of it. How many times you play, you know, all the different elements right now, with professional baseball, it’s a humble it’s meant to humble you. Fans don’t understand that a lot so, but again, I just think expectations got out ahead. And there’s a professional, it’s a professional way that you can, you can set expectations and then step over that bar, exceed it. But you know, it’s a I think it’s bound to happen. The question is, what do you do about it? Right? It’s not so much what happens. It’s what do you do about it? So we’ll see what they do about it. Earl Weaver used to say, I look over my shoulder twice, that’s Memorial Day, and 100 games, he said. And at that point, that’s when I’m checking, that’s when I’m really checking what I have. So Memorial Day is coming. 100 games is down the road, and we’ll see what they do. There’s opportunities to add to release players to do different things. We’ll see what they do. Marty, you’ve been at this a long
Nestor Aparicio 02:13
time. I mean, I’ll give everybody your background. You know, you ran the Orioles in the late 80s, early 90s, all part of Larry Latinos group, and moving into Camden Yards and all that happened during that, the why not period and the miracle 88 you were there for all the awfulness of all that I don’t with this particular era of Orio baseball, because I’m 56 now, and I’ve seen the errors of EBW, one of your eras, and the angelos, you Know, as you said, the used to call it unorthodox, very kind of you back in the day, but I don’t know what this is. I have written my letter to Katie Griggs. They have refused to shake my hand, meet me, talk to me, be professional in any way. They won’t even zoom. They wouldn’t look at me. So I’ve gotten my cues from where they are, but the cues I’m getting are this 74 year old billionaire owner who wants to be famous, likes to likes himself, likes to be a spokesperson, likes to Magna Carta, likes to buy, likes to put himself in front of the Kennedy Center, like all of that, and now he’s bought a baseball team for fun. Obviously, it’s for fun. He’s already made a bobblehead of himself when the team was under 500 his first act as the owner was to make a bobblehead of himself like you knew Eb, W, I knew Peter Angelus. Peter loved Peter, but I don’t think Peter was ever gonna make a bobble head of himself. The whole thing’s disconcerting in the amount of money they spent in the off season on old pitchers that haven’t worked out, the fact that they didn’t extend any of these young guys, and maybe not a bad idea in the case of Adley rutschman right now. But this is, this is its own case study, not only for Mr. Rubenstein, who’s a billionaire who’s trying to figure out and clearly does not know a lot about baseball, but for even the smart baseball people like Elias and my Dell to think you mentioned it being humbling. It’s been humbling for Adley rutschman. It’s been humbling. It was humbling for Jackson holiday. It’s humbling for Kobe Mayo right now. It’s probably humbling for gunner Henderson so far. We’ll see, but it’s kind of this was supposed to be the glory era, and getting the stadium done, and Angelos is dead, we have a new owner, and instead, as I speak to you preak this week, this is really messy right now. Yeah,
8Marty Conway 04:22
no, like I said, when I you know at the jump, which is expectations, but look to all the all those different things that you, that you talked about, one of the things that if you look at what, when, first of all, baseball has the best track record, or one of the best track records of any sport that there is, which is who can win. So we all hear the headlines. And again, this is, you know, part of managing in the off season, which is, you’re never, you’re never even going to compete, frankly, in Baltimore, I don’t think in the in the free agent spending race. And so to allow the narrative. Uh, look, on the one hand, do you want to say that you got close to Corbin burns and you want to let people you know off the record know that? Sure, but you know, Ricky Bobby would say first, you know, second place is first loser. So I just think that if you set a different set, a different messaging plan. And the second thing is, in order to win consistently or have any good season, you go back and look, you need to have about at least six of your lineup players have their almost career year in any one particular year together. If you go back and look at all you know, the 83 Orioles and all the different things. Look at the guys who had peak career years and then almost never reached that peak again. So yes, is it about the rutschmans or the or the gunner Hendersons, or people that are your stars or perceived your stars? But at the end of the day, you need a lot of guys who have the best year of their careers, and a lot of times, then go on someplace else, because you can’t resign them. That’s usually a formula for a successful season, because you can’t have a lineup with Stanton and judge and all these other guys. You just can’t afford to do that. So where it’s really let them down was their pitching strategy from an on the field perspective, and that is a lot you mentioned Elias and my Dell, their approach on drafting and Scouting is primarily around field players. It’s not so much about drafting and developing pitchers. You know, Rodriguez is a, you know, is a Dan Duquette holdover, you know. So Grayson Rodriguez is a Dan Duquette holdover. So, you know, that’s also an issue on the field that they’ll have to look at and determine, hey, is our approach really sound here with not getting enough young pitchers into the system, you know, off the field,
Nestor Aparicio 07:01
well, you can’t adjust that in the middle, though, once you’re in the middle of the fly, it’s, oh, maybe we didn’t have enough pitching. Yeah, maybe you didn’t. And maybe money bags is going to have to buy it. And then when you go to buy it, you get Japanese 35 year old pitchers. You get 41 year old Charlie Morton. Or you can go two, 50 million deep into Corbin burns or into Garret crochet. Or give away Jackson holiday to get a picture. But like this is problematic, and I think it’s something that the fan base didn’t consider people like me to consider myself an expert, because I’ve watched all these years. I didn’t think all their arms were going to fall off right? Like blaming Elias on this when bradishes arm means suave, just down the line all of these guys, I don’t know that any of the even Batista, if you go back two years like I don’t know that that could have been prepared for. But I do know that guys like you that don’t wear the uniform, that wear the suits in the front office, you have to sell it whether they win or lose, right bobblehead nights coming down the line either way. And that’s the concern I have, is, what can they control? What? What can leadership control at this point, and firing baseball people who he didn’t hire has to be in play, whether it’s Brandon Hyde last week, Mike Elias next week, the players themselves, but the front office itself and trying to figure out television, massing, streaming, money, state money, the stadium, the area. I mean, all those things we talk about, all of that was predicated on, hey, the team’s going to be pretty good. Like we didn’t even talk about whether the team was going to be good or not, because we just thought it was. This now becomes way more problematic because the team’s not good. And Marty we consider all day, I don’t think it’s going to get fixed this year. I don’t think they can be really good this year the way we we thought they were going to be. Well,
Marty Conway 08:48
yeah, when you’re nine or 10 games under 500 if you look at it over the next you know, even if it’s 100 plus games, what do you have, you know, what kind of record do you have to have in order to even get to 500 right? If you just do the math, what’s it going to take for you got to play 20 games over 500 or so. You got to be able to roll together, 6789, game winning streaks, you know, a couple times in order to eat into that. But as I said, Look off the field. The future is, is mixed use development in and around Camden Yards, right? If you look at what’s happening on the football side, that’s what’s really happening down there. Now you’re seeing a transformation of the footprint from what the state approved 35 almost 40 years ago. Now, about two stadiums, four sports, one for football, one for baseball. They didn’t think or say anything about anything else. You know, nothing about non football, non game day, you know, events, everything else. But it’s all transforming in that space into with the state money, the $1.2 billion that has been allocated the Orioles. I mean, the ravens are two thirds of their way through that. The Orioles are just. Getting warmed up. That’s really where you’re going to have to put your emphasis, because, you know, win 100 games, win 80 games, whatever the number is, you still got to draw people down there based on the experience that they have. And today, it has to be more than a baseball game if you just look the other day, one of the ways that you can assess how sports is doing is there’s a couple of teams that are public right. The Atlanta Braves are publicly traded. The Green Bay Packers, although they’re not publicly traded, they’re publicly held, community held, and they release their financials every year, usually around the end of May. And you can look at that you can assess how teams are doing. The most recent piece that I saw from the Atlanta Braves said that their non baseball revenue, okay, keep that in mind, non baseball revenue was up 30% right? First of all, who has non baseball revenue? Not everybody, but the Braves do, and it was up 30% so all those space, all those buildings around the ballpark are now more and more occupied. They’re getting regional headquarters in Atlanta for a lot of companies like that, Comcast and others. And that’s what allows you to fuel your payroll, fuel all the different things you want to do to make you competitive. I think it it smooths out some of the swings. Could you go get a player at that point if you had 30% increase in non baseball revenue, of course. So that’s what you need to find. And I think in order today to be competitive, is you need to have your ballpark just be the center of attention. As I’ve said before, it’s the ride in, you know, in the amusement park, but it’s all the way in the back. You’ve got to walk past every other ride, every other place you spend money, to get to the baseball park. And that’s the analogy I use there. It has to happen sooner than later. And the second thing is, they have to get into the direct consumer business much, much faster. You can’t just say, I don’t think that now your games can be seen on mass and without a cable subscription for, you know, $29 a month, whatever it is, what’s the marketing of that you’re going to give people free for 30 days in order to test it, you got to get larger reach. So those are the kind, I think, the kind of things that, from the franchise standpoint, why somebody would buy the team a couple of years ago. Yes, you want to be a competitive sports owner, but the investment has to return. Those are the kind of things you need to do. Marty
Nestor Aparicio 12:27
8Conway is here. He’s the good professor of all things sports business. We love having him on and, you know, I’ll just throw this to I mean, I’ve written about this, and I talk about it all thing every day. What? What do you like about what the Rubenstein group has done? What? What? What in regard to this? Has there been any change that you’ve seen that’s appreciable? I have not. I have tried to just meet them and talk to them and figure out what their intentions are. I haven’t figured much of this out, other than it looks like a Johnny Bravo, sort of made for reality TV, throwing the hats and the bobblehead I had a former colleague of yours, a person that you know well, text me from afar on that Saturday morning and saw the bobble heads showing up on his timeline and said, this seems clownish, like, what are they doing? This is two weeks into the season. We didn’t know the team was bad then or the team was going to be bad then. I just, I don’t understand this, and I’m never going to own a team. You’ve been involved with this. It was years ago, but the modern notion that someone’s going to come in and plop down $2 billion and bring in partners, and it’s going to be a syndicated people that’s going to own it. I expected more stuff. I don’t even know what that is. I expected more tinkering. I expected more hands in the pudding. Other than here’s a bobble head, it makes me feel good about myself. Put me on TV. I want to take selfies. Like, I’m blown away by it. I really am. Like, I just thought these were going to be really serious people that would come in and have serious, strategic things. And it doesn’t. It hasn’t felt that way to me. It’s felt like they want to take pictures with Cal Ripken, and they just thought the team, they would roll it out, and the team would be good, and that would heal everything now that the team’s not good. And you know this more than anyone, everybody has to do different kind of work when the team’s not good, it’s a different sell than we’re winning the World Series this year. And you thought they had that, I thought they had that. Now they have a different thing. And I’m wondering how they’re what, what are they doing? That’s the thing. I just don’t get a lot of communication. It doesn’t feel like anything’s much different than it was with the Angeles group. Yeah,
Marty Conway 14:38
no, I can see how you could feel that way. Look, I think there were some questionable, you know, when I said unorthodox in the last administration, let’s call it questionable this time, at this point. Yeah, I look, I think anytime you put your anytime you put somebody out front who can’t impact the results on the field, it’s probably. Probably a mistake, right? So bobbleheads are meant for players. They’re not meant for anybody else, because they’re collected items and all those different things I might have said, you might want to rethink that before you commit to it. Look, I think the process here in the ownership group is now, and I’m seeing the changes happen in management, people are stepping down, stepping aside, moving on, and other people are coming in. And so I think from a management standpoint, a year from now, you’ll see some different things approach. Having said that, as I said, from an ownership standpoint, the advice is to talk about winning all the time, every time. That’s what fans want to hear. Even when you’re not winning or you are winning, they want to talk about, they want to hear you talk about sustained not just not just being competitive, not just being, you know, wanting a salary cap or another to they want to talk about winning all the time, every time. There’s nothing wrong with with talking about that, about excellence on the field. Does that put pressure on Sure, but you know what? These guys know that these guys that are in the clubhouse, they know they know how much what the expectations are. So I think, from a messaging standpoint, less talking about who the owner is, and more talking about what the owner does is probably a better prescription for them, and have that seep through the rest of the organization, so that everybody, everyone understands that everything that you do on a daily basis somehow can and should translate into performance on the field in order to make us competitive. Every dollar that we make, every dollar that we save, all these different things that we do in the community. So still pretty early. But I would, like I said, I would advise, I think a lot of people that were in my time with the team probably would have advised against that. You know, Edward Bennett Williams, or Larry Latino or others were never going to put themselves out there like that, but, you know, it’s, it’s a different world. And maybe they thought there was some cute rationale for that, but if they did, they probably misread the fan base, misread the news, and could not have, could not have gotten off, frankly, to a worse start. I know it’s just nine or 10 games under 500 but back to what I said about the expectations. You know, I lived through a zero and 21 beginning of the season, so I know about expectations that don’t reach. Like I said earlier. Question is, what do you do about it? And there’s still time. It’s mid May. We haven’t run the Preakness yet, so what are you going to do about it? There’s still plenty of
Nestor Aparicio 17:36
time. Marty Conway is here. We’re talking about the business, sports and the Orioles and the relative disappointment of all of that. But then there’s the football side of things. And talk so much about branding. And you know, when I wrote to Katie Griggs, it was about like, Hey, if you don’t want me at the ballpark, who else Don’t you want at the ballpark? Because the ballpark’s empty and you need people there, the football team. However, just printing money. I mean, the league’s printing money. It’s larger than it’s ever been. It’s jumped the shark to the point where, like, the draft thing has become like a WWE comedy thing for three days. Um, the shadoor Sanders thing was sticky and ugly and like all of that. But here, specifically, since the last time you and I got together, I don’t think we’ve said Justin and Tucker together. I think it’s been three, four months since you’ve been on the show, the Justin Tucker thing and the scandal and the fallout and the Ravens running away from it and issuing this press release on the day after har ball speaks so they can run for 23 days. We’re now in day nine of them running. Two weeks from now, they’re going to have to come out and answer to this. The league hasn’t shared anything about its investigation. The only investigation was the banner talking to 16 women who offered stories. And Justin Tucker offered that the media are scumbags. That was his ret was the media are the bad guys. The team, meanwhile, has done the no speaky on the back end of Ray Rice, which, I mean, if there was a textbook on how to f up a domestic violence situation, how to lie, how to get caught lying, how to make the player lie, how to have his wife lie, they did all of that 10 years ago. In disgrace. They burned the jerseys. They did all that. Now, Ray Rice is back being honored. He’s coaching over at Milford the whole deal, and we’re in the middle of this Justin Tucker thing, and how they’ve handled it, soup the nuts here in the off season to get rid of him, to say, football decision, football. I mean, it’s very, very obvious. There’s a lot of legal flying around here in regard to Tucker and and a lot of people are hiding. And I think Justin Tucker is going to kick in the league again. I have no doubt about that. I don’t know what this investigation is going to find. But the Ravens didn’t even wait for it, even though they knew this is just the rate. This is the Ravens running away from the pilot do do and wanting to never hear from it again. They’re kind of in it, though, and I think it’s going to be harder for them to run from this doesn’t cost them ticket sales. Doesn’t cost them branding. Which is really the strange part, because no matter what they do, they really are Teflon, the NFL and the Ravens. Well, just keep
Marty Conway 20:07
in mind, we might have talked about this before, but you you mentioned that the NFL, as big as it is and they are, they’re a cultural phenomenon. Is what they’ve grown into. They play the fewest games of all the big major sports, hockey, basketball, baseball, by far the fewest games, and they have the longest off season of any of the sports that we play. And so that allows you to, to some extent, you know, bury storylines and different things, because it’s such a long time between the competitive game in January and the next competitive game, frankly, in September, that allows you to do that. Look couple things, clearly, Justin Tucker was advised by his lawyers, maybe I presume this, and that is to take the Lance Armstrong approach, which is to attack the media, attack your to some extent, attack your accusers, at least, deny, deny, deny, but we’ll see. I mean, people are being very careful and tiptoeing around it for very good reason, which is, if you do say something or take actions which later prove to be untrue, you’re opening yourselves up to libel, you’re opening yourself up to a lawsuit. Of you know, you’re given the inference, for example, that he’s guilty when there may never be a finding of certainly criminal guilt or maybe even a civil settlement. And so you see that very, very clearly in the language that is used in press conferences or in releases, and that is, we’re going to steer far away from that, because you can see that the risk that they had now, you know, I think it was clear to everybody, even people who barely follow football, that if you draft a kicker in Round six, which, by the way, round six is The first round for kickers. If you’re ever going to draft a kicker, it’s as early as the sixth round. It was very clear that the writing was on the wall and that a like you said referred to quotes investigation. Look, I think the NFL will continue with whatever they were doing. They will put that folder in their desk, and if a team says, Hey, we’re interested in adding Justin Tucker to our roster, the league will reveal the contents of the investigation to them, and they’ll have to make a decision. A, is it still something we want to do? And B, what’s the penalty, if any, going to be is it going to be required to sit out certain amount of games because of that conduct. And again, it’s going to come down to the commissioners conduct policy to do. But yeah, that’s, that’s what it is today, which is, like you said, there’s 20 plus days between when you have to put the coach out front anymore because of many camps and different things, and you leverage every day of that, does it? Does it look right? Does it smell right? Questionable. But there’s such a long time between appearances and a long time between competitive games that people, people move on. There’s so many other things that you know they want to talk about,
8Nestor Aparicio 23:15
or they’ve even got new royal farms ads already, like, alright, it’s over with for him, right? So,
Marty Conway 23:20
yeah, you know? I mean, if you’re in that, if I’m in that situation, the day that you hear that, you’re halting all production, and essentially, you’re putting everything on ice, knowing that there is after things like this. There really is no upside to being connected to somebody like that. It’s not to say there’s anything right or wrong about what’s happened in this experience. And by the way, fantastic journalism by the Baltimore banner. I’m sure they took significant risks in order to get that story that’s probably an award winning story, but that’s the nature of what we have. So even though, even though media has changed dramatically, there’s still, there’s still a place for investigative journalism and stories like
Nestor Aparicio 23:58
that, I asked the question, what made Justin Tucker such a hero here, your marketing guy, your sports marketing guy, like, Yeah, what about him? His youngness, whiteness, flowers, romance, God, Christianity, singing, kicking, chicken, coffee, wearing the chicken suit. Like making big kicks. Making big kicks is probably the beginning of all of it, because without that, none of it exists. That, none
Marty Conway 24:23
8of it exists. Yep, no, for sure, number one, the performance on the field and and if you’re asking, you know what I referred to him one time, is almost like Steph Curry is what? What does that mean? If you walk down the street and you saw Steph Curry, you feel like, Oh, he’s, he’s kind of like us. That’s why he’s very popular outside the US, in places like Asia and others, just his frame, his size, six, one, whatever. Six two, whatever is he doesn’t seem like it the same thing for Tucker, which was felt like I knew somebody that could be like him and go out and do what he does. I didn’t see him as six and a half feet tall and 200 50 pounds, whatever it is. So there’s a place sometimes for the every man frame in sports. And I think in addition to his overall performance, kicking in key moments and then being like you said, because look, there were very few players on the team who were able to get the sort of commercial opportunities that he did, and there has to be a reason for it, not just what you do on the field, but how people perceive you. There’s what’s called the The Q Score. Men and women had a favorable opinion. He’s
Nestor Aparicio 25:30
also well well, cultivated by him. He Johnny Bravo himself, even setting up his cell phone in Patterson Park to show himself kicking. He was the sort of the original Tiktok social media. You know, he was on the front end of that being a late 30 something right now, to be in the 15 years of Twitter came along, right along the time he was kicking to Texas, and he embraced it and made money off of it and maximized it. You would say, you know, big winner in the business of sports, ain’t nobody made more money on or off the field around here than him.
Marty Conway 26:04
Yeah. And then add in the fact that, how many times does the kicker get a second, third, fourth contract, whatever it is, right? I mean, how many
Nestor Aparicio 26:11
times does the kicker go out and get 2550 grand on a Friday or Saturday to sign autographs and show up at a supermarket like that? Doesn’t happen anywhere.
8Marty Conway 26:18
Nope. That’s right, so, but that era is gone, and there’ll have to be a new era of somebody, somebody will have to step into that position. But there’ll be a lot of a lot of pressure, because I think what has there been three kickers in the history of the team since they came to Baltimore, something like that? So that’s a long time just to have a few players at one position.
Nestor Aparicio 26:39
We’ve tried to forget Billy Cundiff, but we haven’t. Marty Conway is here. He’s the good professor of all things business from a brand standpoint. This is my TEF. Let’s go back to the beginning, which is Justin Tucker could have done worse things to 16 women. It wouldn’t nobody’s cashing in their tickets over this. Nobody’s not watching the game. Nobody’s not gambling on the game. That is really the rub with you get mad at an actor. You might not go to the movies. You have one bad french fry at a fast food place. You never go back to Wendy’s again, like there’s, it’s crazy. But with the NFL, the Justin Tucker thing, no matter how bad it was, or would be, even Ray Rice, Ray Lewis, we go through all of the transgressions that it doesn’t, it doesn’t hurt their ticket sales or their interest in the same way that bad baseball hurts the baseball team as an example. Well,
Marty Conway 27:32
like I said, back to what I said about fewer games longer off season. There’s it’s hard to sometimes think about those things, but at the end of the day, that’s what the NFL has done, they came through COVID. They came through, you know, the first Trump administration, and the kneeling and and all the different things. So they’re sort of impervious. They just keep marching ahead. And a lot of that has to do with the commercial media deals that they have and the exposure that they get. Look, we’re sitting here talking now. We’re about to hear not who the teams are playing, because we already know that, right? We already know at the end of the season they release who you’re playing next year. All we’re learning over the next 48 hours is when and where those teams are playing, and there is outside commercial and media interest in that. Nobody does it better than orchestrating on the Today Show, on Fox and Friends and everything else, when and where teams are going to play and on what network they’re going to play. And that’s just unprecedented in sports business today. I don’t think anybody will ever, ever reach the pinnacle that the NFL has in their media strategy, and as long as they have player peace, labor peace. And I think the ride continues. I
Nestor Aparicio 28:48
8think along with the violence and the game and the gamble ability, and you and I can argue about this in football season, I do think thanksgiving to the root of all of this for football, the fact that they played on Thanksgiving 50 years ago and made it a family thing, and now they’re playing on Christmas three games on Christmas Day, which I’d say, ill advised not. I don’t know people are going to watch it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s on Apple, it doesn’t matter if it’s on Amazon Prime. It’s, I don’t know how big the goose can get, but you spent your life educated in this and teaching that. What is Mark Cuban saying, Hogs get slaughtered. Pigs get fat, or whatever it is, right, slaughtered. I don’t know where the bubble could be on this, but it’s, it’s, it’s been an amazing bubble to watch in my lifetime. So
Marty Conway 29:34
if you look at sports, I was just looking at some international soccer just the other day, and some research, you your your brand, your sport, can get as big as your domestic media landscape. The reason why other countries, French soccer, for example, others English soccer, in some cases, when they struggle, it’s because the size and scope of their domestic media landscape is either the same. Name, or it’s shrinking, and ours is growing, peacock, Netflix, Amazon, prime, you name it. We have this unique set here in this country of a very flourishing even though, in transition media, global media empire, and they’re centered here in this country. And so they need programming like the NFL. That’s what drives it. So when you look around, if you look at where so as I say, bubble in the US for the NFL, not a chance until those media companies start to really suffer financially, as they did at one point in the 90s, and like the RSNs in baseball, exactly right, right? And there was a time when NBC didn’t want sports, CBS didn’t want sports, and they learned when they were outside looking in that they made a mistake. And so as long as you have 789, media companies willing to move around to the musical chairs, knowing that five or six of them are going to land the NFL package, it’s going to continue to grow. Because I think upcoming they have an opt out. They did a long term deal, but they have an opt out in the next three years. They’re going to exercise that opt out, and they’re going to even increase because that what they’re going to do Nestor, is they’re going to eventually sell games on a game by game basis. They’ve started to do that. You want the game in Spain, here’s how much it costs. You want the game in in Ireland or Brazil, here’s how much it costs. I could see them going to a situation where you want to buy 16 games, you can buy an a la carte package of 16 games from the NFL. Tell us when you want to broadcast them, and we’ll figure out how to make it work
Nestor Aparicio 31:32
on our next program. Marty Conway and I already get get together about Copa moon, dialec. We are 365, days away from the World Cup coming here, right down the road, all that, you know, all the things that are happening around here. Marty Conway is the good professor of all things sports business at Georgetown University. Amongst other sports business pursuits, it’s always good to catch up with you, man. We gotta get down on me. She’s get some food one day or something like that. See a show. But just a lot going on. It’s been a couple of months since we got together, and just a changing landscape, I think, for Baltimore sports as well as sports in America. So we’ll get together and we’ll chat again soon. Hope all is well. Hope the lacrosse season is treating you well as well, and hope the Orioles get back in here make this fun for us.
Marty Conway 32:10
No, I hope so. I mean, it makes it more interesting, but makes for a better summer. Let’s put it that way.
8Nestor Aparicio 32:15
Yeah, last year was more fun than this year. I am Nestor. We are W, N, S T. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We never stop talking Baltimore positive. I.
