Apologies for getting this issue out a day late. Issue 6 Opening Take Last week Stan Kroenke agreed to buy the Los Angeles Angels for $4 billion. This is more than another sports team sale story. Kroenke doesn't buy sports teams. He builds ecosystems - and the franchise is almost always the least interesting part of the deal. As of early 2026, he owns approximately 2.7 million acres of land across the United States - more than any other private individual in the country. More land than...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Issue 5 Opening Take This week officially kicks off the 2026 college football season. When Penn State takes the field in their season opener against Marshall, the game will be the first big event for Penn State Rewards. As I mentioned last issue, Penn State Rewards is a loyalty program where fans earn points for attending games, spending at partner locations like Dunkin' and Jersey Mike's, or at Penn State athletic facilities. The technology is powered by Uptop - a card linked rewards...
19 days ago • 2 min read
Issue 4 Opening Take The 34-Year Advantage No One Is Taking About Over the next three weeks, everyone will cover what IBM built for the 2026 US Open. The AI-powered Server Quality metric tracking 21 data points across a player's body 50 times per second. The personalized Live Updates feed. The watsonx-powered Match Chat letting fans interact with the tournament in real time. What most coverage won't touch is the more interesting number: 34 That's how many years IBM and the USTA have been...
26 days ago • 4 min read
Issue 3 Opening Take The Los Angeles Lakers are changing hands for $12.5 billion, and most of the coverage the past week has been about Mark Walter - why he's selling, what he knows, what does the timing tell you. Those are the wrong questions if you're trying to understand what just happened to sports business. The right question is: why would Josh Kushner, a venture capitalist whose entire career is built on backing AI companies, pay 22.7x revenue for a basketball team?Kushner isn't new to...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Issue 2 Opening Take Walk most college campuses and you'll find two worlds that barely speak to each other: the athletic department chasing wins and revenue, and the academic side chasing research and rankings, often with a wall of politics and budget lines between them. UT San Antonio just did something quietly unusual - pairing its College of AI, Cyber and Computing directly with UTSA Athletics, and the trade looks genuinely like a win on both sides.Athletics gets real insight into fan...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Issue 1 Opening Take While most of the industry is racing to bolt AI onto every fan touchpoint, TKO's Mark Shapiro just made the opposite bet. On this week's earnings call, he framed the company's life event holdings - WWE's SummerSlam among them - as a hedge against AI, not a use case for it.I don't think that's a rejection of AI infrastructure. I think it's a bet on scarcity. If AI makes synthetic and on-demand content infinitely available, the thing it can't replicate is being in the...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
A while back, I mentioned I was working on something new. It took longer than expected, but it's finally ready to share. Here's where it landed. Beyond the Whistle is now a podcast and newsletter covering the intersection of sports business, technology, and analytics — and how they're shaping the future of sports. This is for the people making those decisions, not just watching from the sidelines. Starting next week, you'll get a short email every Tuesday morning: one sharp take on something...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read