news-engine

NFL Media’s search for content to fill its platforms now extends to an outlet that already covers the league better than almost everyone else. The Athletic and NFL Media have discussed the New York Times-owned outlet supplying content to the league’s digital properties, according to Front Office Sports. The Athletic and the NFL reached an agreement last September giving the outlet rights to use official game footage across its articles, social feeds, and video shows, following similar arrangements the outlet had already reached with the NBA and WNBA. The Athletic’s leadership told Awful Announcing at the time that the deal was meant to package game footage with expertise from its journalists to synthesize the stories of each week’s NFL games for its growing subscriber base in something closer to a modern SportsCenter segment. “There’s something about it that feels very intuitive and table-stakes while at the same time, we see an opportunity to do things that are different and can help elevate the product,” The Athletic’s Chief Commercial Development Officer Sebastian Tomich told AA’s Brendon Kleen. That was 11 months ago, but examples from the earlier deal with the NBA and WNBA feature The Athletic reporters narrating clips of key plays in big games, such as in one article that answers the question, “Just how clutch is Tyrese Haliburton?” Another uses footage of Caitlin Clark within a video analyzing her economic value to the WNBA. More recently, the NFL deal enabled The Athletic to embed video footage of key plays from the Buffalo Bills’ miraculous comeback in Week 1 on Sunday Night Football, in a story highlighting quarterback Josh Allen’s poise. Tyrese Haliburton coming up clutch, by the numbers 📊 pic.twitter.com/OoYAgnhyd0 — The Athletic (@TheAthletic) June 6, 2025 The Athletic has already done a version of this with the NBA, as FOS notes. A licensing arrangement already sends select Athletic stories over to NBA.com, and one of them went up just days ago: a piece covering LeBron James’s new golf-focused YouTube channel, whose debut video ran 96 minutes and featured a Scotland trip with several of his 2016 championship-winning Cavaliers teammates. Putting something similar on NFL.com would be a bigger commitment, since so much of The Athletic’s revenue still depends on people paying to get past its paywall rather than reading for free somewhere else. Whatever comes of these talks would be joining a rebuild that’s already well underway on NFL Media’s side. The league sold NFL Network to Disney earlier this year in exchange for a 10% stake in ESPN, giving up its linear cable channel while retaining NFL.com, the NFL+ app, its YouTube presence, and the NFL Channel, a FAST service available on Roku, Prime Video, Peacock, and several other platforms. Filling those properties with original programming has already brought back NFL Network veterans Andrew Siciliano and Colleen Wolfe, along with Michael Yam, while adding newcomers Trevor Sikkema and Brett Kollmann. Siciliano and Yam are set to co-host The NFL Report, Wolfe is taking over Power Rankings, and Kollmann and Sikkema will pair up twice a week for a show built around Xs-and-Os and Next Gen Stats. They’ll join holdovers like Gregg Rosenthal and Bucky Brooks, giving NFL Media a freshly rebuilt on-camera group. Nothing here is confirmed, and talks like this can fall apart before they produce anything. But it’s the second connection between the two in less than a year, on top of the footage-rights deal from last September, and it’s arriving as NFL Media actively decides what its post-Network identity looks like.