Mark Cuban still gets a lot of guff for predicting that the NFL would gorge itself to death if it continued to overdo it at the barnyard trough, and while nearly every metric would seem to indicate that the Shield is now stronger than it’s ever been, a recent spasm in the marketing ranks suggests that the Shark Tank guy may have been on to something.
Speaking to reporters ahead of a Dallas Mavericks home game against the Brooklyn Nets in March 2014, Cuban famously reached for the captive bolt stunner as he assessed the NFL’s seemingly boundless avarice. “Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered,” Cuban said. “I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion.”
The oinks you hear around Roger Goodell’s farm are still mighty joyful, as the NFL raked in a little over $23 billion in its most recent fiscal year. (Of that haul, each team earned $416 million from the NFL’s national media, sponsorship and licensing pool, which marked a 9% increase compared to the previous year.) As it happens, the league just wrapped its most-watched season in 36 years, averaging 18.7 million viewers per game, with each of the five key rights holders enjoying significant lifts in their deliveries.
In Cuban’s retelling of Charlotte’s Web, the spider is the final boss of Cluster B personality disorders, spinning messages that read, “Bacon: Yum!” and “Wilbur, the Other White Meat” while the farmer sharpens his axe. If that version of the fable hasn’t aged terribly well, an item in The Wall Street Journal this week elicited a few nervous squeals from some the NFL’s TV partners.
Per the WSJ report, Verizon is said to have considered backing out of its $10 billion sponsorship deal with the NFL—a claim the company has refuted. Under new CEO Dan Schulman, the telco is looking to slash costs across the board, or as the exec told analysts during Verizon’s October earnings call: “We will be a simpler, leaner and scrappier business. This work is overdue and will be multiyear and an ongoing way of life for us.”
Schulman regularly recycles the “way of life” trope as a means to contextualize Verizon’s determination to cuts costs as it tries to reclaim its place at the head of the wireless pack, and backing out of pricey sponsorships is arguably an express lane to freeing up a whole lot of capital. (Unfortunately, another foolproof way to save money is to lay off more than 13,000 employees, a mass culling that Verizon began implementing in November.)
While Verizon is but one of the 54 official NFL sponsors that threw their support behind the 2025-26 season, the company is also one of the league’s leading in-game advertisers. Per iSpot estimates, Verizon spent $108.4 million on commercial time during live NFL games, making it the No. 3 advertiser behind Geico ($164.4 million) and Progressive ($158.8 million).
Such is the insurance category’s stranglehold on the NFL’s ad breaks that Verizon was the sole interloper among the top five spenders; per iSpot, Allstate came in at No. 4 with $86.5 million, while State Farm was hot on its heels at $84.1 million. All told, insurance spend reached $634 million over the course of the regular season; other top categories were telco, automotive, quick-service restaurants and beer/hard seltzer.
Insurance brands alone account for as much as 15% of all in-game NFL spend, and while it’s always a bit of a risk to stuff so many of one’s eggs in a single basket, the marketplace dynamics have been working in the networks’ favor for the last quarter-century. As long as insurance companies (and telcos and fast-food joints and automakers) continue to rely on traditional marketing tactics to retain existing customers and maintain brand awareness, the NFL’s network partners are going to make a bundle on in-game unit sales.
In 2024, the average upfront price of a 30-second spot in NBC’s Sunday Night Football jumped 14% to just over $1 million a pop, and the rates for each of the league’s premium windows have never been higher.
For all that, Verizon’s mandate to curtail spending could signal a coming change in the weather. As the NFL’s distributors seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that they’ll have to pay a premium to re-up with the league—the accelerated renewal talks could begin as soon as late summer—the additional burden of retaining ties with the last great American reach vehicle will all but certainly be shared by everyone from advertisers to the fans.
As framed by a report from Guggenheim Securities, the NFL’s “partners will likely pursue aggressive monetization through affiliate rate increases, station revenue and advertising pricing, with the majority of these costs passed through to consumers.” As the analyst report notes, the NFL’s top-banana status—the league accounted for 83 of the 100 most-watched telecasts of 2025—will allow it to command “significant cost increases” when it revisits its current $110 billion-plus rights juggernaut. (While the NFL’s contractual opt-out clause isn’t set to kick in until 2029, Goodell has made it clear that he’d like to begin the process before the end of this year.)
The actual rate hikes are TBD, but Guggenheim’s math suggests that the NFL’s legacy partners are in for a whopper of an increase. In a flourish that almost seems as if it were designed to grab league owners by their starched collars, Guggenheim noted that the NBA’s massive $76 billion media package fixes the cost-per-viewer-hour at $3.55—or nearly treble the NFL’s $1.27.
And while it’s worth noting that the viewer-hour comp is “not definitive in the context of increased value potential for NFL rights” (to Guggenheim’s way of thinking, either the NBA’s partners paid too much for their pro hoops impressions or the NFL isn’t getting paid nearly enough), the inevitability of a big jolt has clouded the near-term outlook.
Speaking to investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference earlier this week, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch seemed to revise his earlier statements about the looming rights haggle. “[NFL] prices were renegotiated only three years ago and they went up, I think, over 100%,” Murdoch said. “So we think our current pricing is at market … but to the extent that there was any incremental cost for that programming, the key thing for people to realize is that incremental cost would flow through to local affiliates, to our distributors and, ultimately, to consumers and the fans.”
That assessment was a bit of a departure from what Murdoch said a month ago, when he told analysts that Fox would consider “rebalancing our portfolio” if the cost of sticking with the NFL demanded such an accommodation.
On Thursday, Paramount boss David Ellison did a victory lap on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, during which he was asked about CBS’ determination to remain in the NFL business. Ellison said the network plans “for them to stay one of our most important partners,” although he did not comment on projected price increases. When pressed on the possibility of a 50% hike, one that would drive CBS’ annual rate from $2.1 billion to $3.2 billion, the mogul begged off with a few variations of “no comment.”
One area that’s already been much diminished as broadcasters look to save up for a monsoon-y day is entertainment programming. Of the 14 new series that debuted on the Big Four networks during the NFL season, only six were scripted shows. With the exception of CBS, which remains bullish on developing scripted fare for its linear-TV platform, broadcasters are increasingly pushing their original comedies and dramas to streaming as advertising dollars can no longer pay the freight for the primetime schedule. (Little wonder; per Nielsen, the average entertainment series on ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox is now averaging just 398,950 adults 18-49 per episode, with viewers in the target demo accounting for a mere 12% of the overall primetime audience.)
While the Guggenheim report concluded that “the NFL is not looking to kill television,” there’s only so much its legacy partners can afford to spend on the effort to hang on to what amounts to an existential necessity. The greater the increase in the price of staying in the game, the more disruptive the downstream impacts are likely to be for the companies who do business with the league and its network partners—and it doesn’t require an MBA from Stanford to deduce that fans will left holding the bag if there’s a significant shakeup in how the NFL’s games are distributed.
In the meantime, Verizon hasn’t backed out of its pricey sponsorship deal, and the dynamics that inform the telco space suggest that in-game NFL spots are one area in which it and its competitors can’t afford to cut corners. So there’s that.
But when a company with a $4 billion annual advertising budget intimates that the price of doing business with the NFL may be too rich for its blood, perhaps it’s time for a re-think. Maybe Mark Cuban wasn’t entirely off the mark when he let fly with his little diatribe about pork futures.