On Monday, NFL insider Peter Schrager announced that he was leaving NFL Network for ESPN.
On Tuesday — Yep, April Fool’s Day — boxing insider Mike Coppinger announced he was leaving ESPN to work for Ring Magazine. That is, though, no joke.
They’re two seemingly unrelated announcements, just reporters updating fans on their newest jobs.
It’s likely going to turn out, though, that those announcements weren’t so unrelated.
It’s hardly been a secret in media circles that ESPN and the NFL have been doing the dance, with ESPN looking to take over the NFL’s media assets and the NFL potentially getting an equity stake in ESPN.
So far in 2025, ESPN told Top Rank, and Formula One it was not going to renew their deals after they ended this year. It also opted out of its deal with Major League Baseball, which won’t appear on ESPN in 2026.
The UFC’s deal with ESPN ends this year, as well. And UFC owner TKO Group is looking for a broadcast home for its yet-to-be-named boxing league that will start in earnest in 2026.
If ESPN is preparing to walk away from UFC and wave goodbye to boxing entirely, it signals something deeper: The network no longer sees combat sports as essential to its long-term strategy. That’s a massive shift from where things stood five years ago.
As the pieces move on the board, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that ESPN is laser-focused on saving as much money as it can to put it toward a deal with the NFL.
If you’re ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro, looking to right a struggling ship in turbulent times for broadcasters, more NFL content is never an issue.
If that means not bringing back Major League Baseball in 2026 for the first time since April 9, 1990, dumping F1 and not bidding on UFC and boxing, so be it.
In the U.S., NFL is king, and it’s not really close.
ESPN has also made a major commitment to the NBA. If focusing on the NBA and the NFL comes at the expense of baseball, car racing and combat, it’s clearly a trade-off that Pitaro and his team see as worthwhile.
In 2024, ESPN renewed its broadcast rights deal with the NBA for 11 years at a cool $2.6 billion a year. Reports have ESPN willing to spend $2 billion for the NFL Network and related properties. ESPN also made a deal with TNT Sports last year to broadcast Inside the NBA.
In addition, the network agreed to a five-year, $100 million extension with "First Take" host Stephen A. Smith.
That’s a lot of coin, and the ESPN brass obviously determined having Smith commenting on NFL and NBA issues was more valuable to it than airing baseball games, fights and car races.
The UFC is going to come out of this all but unscathed. It will be no shock if when its broadcast deals are announced, it rakes in a billion a year in rights fees.
It would have been unthinkable even in 2019 when the current ESPN-UFC deal kicked off for the UFC to consider abandoning the network. Just having its news on the ESPN crawl was a massive deal for the UFC.
The UFC is now a fully mature property and ESPN’s not the behemoth it was just six years ago.
In June, Sports Business Journal reported that ESPN is in just under 68 million American homes. That’s down from over 100 million 10 years ago.
Viewing habits have changed, technology has improved and internet speeds have increased. Streaming is easier now than ever, and only going to become more ubiquitous as fiber replaces cable and/or cellular internet and provides greater and more consistent speeds.
Kirby Lee/Imagn Images
ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro is eyeing a potential $2 billion deal with the NFL.
UFC CEO Dana White has long spoken of a deal when there was one or two networks that were available worldwide where all of his content could appear.
It seems like Netflix is in the driver’s seat. TKO has done a deal with Netflix to put WWE’s Monday Night Raw on the service, and it is believed to be a huge focus for TKO in UFC talks.
Even if UFC lands on Netflix, it could still do streaming deals with Apple, YouTube and Amazon Prime.
Apple made a massive bid for the rights to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket last year that ultimately went to YouTube. Apple has the rights to MLS and shows a Friday night Major League Baseball game on its Apple TV+ service.
Adding UFC content — which brings a highly coveted young male demographic — would fit Apple’s existing strategy.
The platform is no longer the primary focus. It’s who is willing to pay and how they’ll elevate the content.
The UFC tightly controls its content now. Imagine if it ends up on one of those four major streaming services what it would be able to do.
On Tuesday, the UFC social media account posted on X that White was planning to make a live announcement on Instagram. White is on the board of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp.
But if TKO does a deal with, say, Apple, White can also simulcast his news on a show on Apple TV+, from a studio with pre- and post-announcement analysis. It can be done in an instant to a worldwide audience that meets the desired demographic.
At that point, from TKO’s point of view, who needs ESPN?
The downside from fans will be having to reach into their pocket to pay for the content. Now, the UFC does 14 pay-per-view shows a year, and if it finds a streaming partner like Apple, which is valued at more than $3 trillion, it could easily buy out the PPVs.
But UFC fans in the U.S. already had to pay for ESPN+ just for the ability to buy the PPVs, so it wouldn’t be new territory.
Another risk for fight fans is being ignored entirely. When ESPN doesn’t own the rights, it often acts like the sport doesn’t exist. It was hard to get NHL scores on SportsCenter for a long time, though that changed when it did a deal with the NHL.
But if boxing and UFC are no longer on ESPN, the coverage on the ESPN family of networks and sites will dramatically decrease.
That said, it’s no given that ESPN won’t bid on either UFC or boxing, though it seems unlikely.
At the start of 2015, boxing was on HBO and Showtime. PBC debuted in March of that year and soon that reach expanded to all four major broadcast networks, and ESPN.
At the same time, UFC was in the middle of a deal with Fox and its various cable channels.
Now, neither HBO nor Showtime are involved in combat sports at all.
Boxing is now available streaming on DAZN, but could be departing ESPN. UFC is about to cut a bold new future that may leave it off one of the major broadcast entities entirely.
Technology and money (mostly money) are dictating this. It’s great for the UFC to have White and/or his fighters on ESPN’s shows, led by Smith’s highly rated “First Take.”
For as influential as Smith may be, though, his ranting and raving on ESPN about, say, a Jon Jones versus Tom Aspinall fight, can’t come to the global impact that UFC could get by partnering with Netflix, YouTube, Apple or Amazon.
Pitaro and ESPN are going to commit to a pair of proven commodities for U.S. sports fans — NFL and NBA — in an effort to repair and rebuild their business.
Ari Emanuel, White and Co. are going to do what best helps position the UFC.
The strange thing is, it could turn out to be right for both sides.