Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
52 published records
01 / belief
“We don't need to go into a bunch of the specifics, but I think like from the acquired standpoint and the NFL audience standpoint, this was a major, major trust-breaking moment.”
02 / belief
“You can't trust those valuations. I think any actual trade would have to be higher than that.”
03 / belief
“Are we some kind of entertainment franchise that has lost its way? I think that's the interesting dichotomy between owners these days.”
04 / belief
“Yep, but we're a short number of years away from, I think, seeing a giant breakout star who started in flag football because it was a part of their school or YMCA program from another country.”
05 / belief
“Yep, speaking of hard to control the narrative, let's talk about blackballing Colin Kaepernick. I think an interesting place to start is the job of the commissioner.”
06 / uncertainty
“Acquired as part of the gloss and sheen. If you had told us that three years ago, I don't know what we would have said.”
07 / belief
“The press had been looking for something to call it. And Lamar Hunt, I think, had been the one who observed his kid playing with a WAMO Super Bowl.”
08 / belief
“For a long time, this ownership structure and ownership code was actually, I think, a key part to the NFL strategy working.”
09 / belief
“Indeed, baseball had a lot to lose. And to be fair to all of them, in the early days, and I think for a long time, local market home television airing of home games absolutely depressed in-person attendance.”
10 / belief
“The Supreme Court decision came down, I believe made it a state's rights issue of what type of gambling, sports gambling to allow.”
11 / belief
“I think that revenue stream was almost as large as the advertising revenue stream.”
12 / commitment
“Go tell that high school recruit that if that recruit plays for you, then we will do a private side deal with them to pay them money while they come and play for your team.”
13 / uncertainty
“One other point that I did miss while we're in TV broadcast land on the episode. David, I don't know if you knew this.”
14 / belief
“I think the biggest players getting paid in the NCAA right now with the sort of weird way that the booster stuff works is like $2 million.”
15 / uncertainty
“I don't know mechanically and legally how this actually works, but in practice, this is exactly what it is.”
16 / belief
“I think when we recorded, there was just games in London and Germany, or maybe we were one year off from that, but there are now seven international games across five countries.”
17 / belief
“I think Lamar was like, "Oh, it's just kind of a funny placeholder name." But then it just stuck.”
18 / belief
“I think that's probably right. For those networks, for the last decade, run the counterfactual of the networks no longer had football.”
19 / belief
“A thing in playbook here that I think is interesting to talk about is the relationship that the NFL has with its players as a supplier and with the networks as a customer.”
20 / belief
“Now listeners, just like our NBA episode a couple of years ago, this is an episode on the business of football. It's not specifically about things I learned reviewing game film or the merits of the eye formation.”
21 / belief
“I think generalizing from that, I agree with even more that this for the greater good mindset was easier to do when everyone's individual franchise was smaller.”
22 / belief
“I believe Travis Kelsey is the active NFL player for now with the highest number of Instagram followers these days.”
23 / uncertainty
“Yeah, and I don't know if this is directly related, but I think so much of the '70s and the '80s and the '90s were also about just like the continued growth trajectory of the incredible marriage of the NFL and television.”
24 / belief
“One, NFL teams are now just always reliably profitable businesses. That's not true in most sports and it wasn't true in the NFL's history, but if you own an NFL team, you are going to get, I believe get a dividend check every year since they're cash generative.”
25 / belief
“I think if I remember it, the core thesis of our NBA episode is what they got so right through the social media era was give the players the voice, give the players the platform.”
26 / belief
“Rozelle will remain the commissioner and Al Davis is going to go back to running the Raiders, which Davis is fine with, that's all he really wanted anyway. Not announced, but included, this I believe only came out much, much later.”
27 / observation
“The only way anybody's going to write about us and give us space on the sports page is if we make their job easy and put the stats right in their hands every day.”
28 / evaluation
“The interesting thing too is that the leagues aren't respecting each other's drafts. It doesn't matter if you draft someone in your league, I'm signing him to a contract in mind and that contract is valid in the United States.”
29 / uncertainty
“"Walking up the stairs of the rotunda when the vote looked like a sure thing, Rozelle was ever his usual humble self. Congressman Boggs, I don't know how I can ever thank you enough for this.”
30 / belief
“Pretty immediately the courts strike down this deal and there's about, I think a one to two month period where it's all in limbo.”
31 / belief
“Three years ago, in January of 2023, we released an episode on the National Football League, which David, I think, is absolutely an essential part of Acquired canon.”
32 / belief
“I think there's definitely scale economies here in the sports entertainment aspect of the product.”
33 / belief
“There's now, I think when we did the episode, we said something about $18 billion a year, the league now does over $23 billion per year] across all teams that's on track to surpass $25 billion.”
34 / belief
“I think related to that is one, basketball definitely won the social media era in a way, not as to as big a degree as the NFL won the TV era, but basketball's on the rise.”
35 / commitment
“Now it doesn't actually come down to a vote, but just by virtue of having that leverage in 2023, Snyder finally steps down, stops fighting and says, okay, I will bow to the pressure and initiate a sale process here.”
36 / belief
“I think the NFL wields a lot of influence and saying, oh, you may not be a part of the networks that get our broadcast in the next generation.”
37 / belief
“I think if you look at the $18 billion a year of revenue the NFL, if you include the players, captures as much value as it possibly can.”
38 / belief
“Paul Brown was the first modern, not just football coach, but I think sports coach period in America.”
39 / belief
“The distance between Jim Thorpe as an athlete and any other athlete in the world at that point in time was greater than I think that distance has ever been since.”
40 / belief
“I think so, that's my best guess. It's super different city to city. This is probably the most variable, 10% comes from sponsorship and advertising.”
41 / evaluation
“NFL players wear helmets, basketball players don't wear helmet. That's little stuff, but it doesn't matter as a business, NFL's fine.”
42 / uncertainty
“Let's assume it's 10%. I don't know if that's conservative or not, but it's less than 20%.”
43 / prediction
“I think the takeaway is the league is extremely good at predicting what this revenue is going to look like. And because of the structure that we've talked about all episode with the way that the salary cap and the TV deals and her play and the length of the TV deals, it's just extremely knowable what the future of the league looks like.”
44 / recommendation
“We think you should just compete against each other until your margins are zero, and we're going to accrue all the profit pool now, because there's basically nothing else that you'll put on that people want to watch.”
45 / evaluation
“Then Amazon is having to do make goods with the advertisers because Amazon wasn't able to get enough people to watch the streams because frankly, I think a lot of people want to watch the NFL on TV.”
46 / evaluation
“Players are effectively a partner in the league because the league's success ends up being their success, not necessarily evenly distributed among all players by any means, in fact, quite the opposite.”
47 / evaluation
“I think the Giants actually got more because Joe Namath was the other one in their city.”
48 / evaluation
“I think actually, I don't know if we said this upfront, I'm pretty sure the NFL is the largest single media business in the world.”
49 / prediction
“The right thing was as soon as possible, the NFL to get as much distribution as possible because the TV rights would become the most important revenue line, but also the thing that most fueled the flywheel.”
50 / evaluation
“NFL is a league, great, they're fine. But the players, I think other league players and especially the NBA have been able to build wealth and businesses and revenue streams much better than NFL players because they're the platform and the audience value accrues to them so much more.”
51 / prediction
“LeBron, I think is already a billionaire. And especially once his playing days are over, he will be a multi billionaire because of the influence that he has.”
52 / evaluation
“On any given Sunday, any team in the league should be able to beat any other team. And he pushes this through with the owners and gets them all to agree to this, like, hey, the only way we're going to survive and prosper is if we agree that none of our teams can get so dominant that we end up with a Cleveland Browns situation.”