4 People Moves
Shane O’Mara: Proof that DraftKings is taking the prediction market threat seriously. This hire, combined with DK’s October acquisition of Railbird, signals quite a bit about what’s coming down the pike.
Miranda Bose: The wearable wars continue apace. We’ll look back at these years as the infancy of where this technology is headed. It’s on, and it’s global. Data is the new oil…
Chris Stango: WWE → Barstool → PrizePicks → C-Suite at Lucra. Backed by Wayne Kimmel’s SeventySix Capital, the company already counts Dave & Buster’s and Puttshack as customers. Keep an eye on this one…
Karan Jain: After a decade at Apple, Karan joined Oura to revolutionize wearable technology and “make health a daily practice”. It takes serious conviction to leave the world’s greatest hardware company to bet on one that’s 360 times smaller.
People moves data via Workforce.ai by Live Data Technologies
3 Announcements
TKO And Polymarket Announce First-Of-Its-Kind Sports Partnership | UFC News
This move captures the shift from passive viewership to active participation. For Gen Z audiences, simply watching isn’t enough — engagement has to feel real-time and responsive. UFC’s partnership with Polymarket turns fan sentiment into on-screen sport, merging attention, data, and narrative into a single layer of entertainment. Dana White and Ari Emanuel are making sure UFC doesn’t just broadcast fights, it streams the crowd’s collective mind.
Sixth Street’s sports fund gets $775M from California pension fund | SBJ
CalPERS just dropped $775 million into Sixth Street’s sports fund. Sixth Street has stated that it will focus (focus?) on “college sports, stadium debt or similar financings, real estate, strategic arrangements, entertainment, media, licensing, data, merchandising, ticketing, sports agencies, talent agencies, sponsorship and other related or adjacent rights and assets.”
Brace yourselves.
Goldman Sachs Buys Talent Agency of Tiger Woods, Caitlin Clark | Sportico
Goldman knows the demand for sports and starpower isn’t cyclical, it’s compounding. They just put $1 billion behind that belief to bring a major part of the Sports Economy in-house.
2 Things I Liked
WATCH: Saving College Sports, NIL, & A $7B Opportunity - Cody Campbell - #398 | Powers Podcast
17 years ago, four years removed from his playing days as an offensive lineman at Texas Tech, Cody Campbell Co-Founded Double Eagle Energy. Today, the 44-year-old billionaire is one of the biggest fundraisers and personal check writers in college sports.
The student section at Cody Campbell Field is all for it:
READ: Fort Worth Proposes $82M Youth Sports Infrastructure Investment to Address Field Shortages | Youth Sports Business Report
It’s in the proposal stage, but Fort Worth’s plan reflects a national need: investing in youth sports as both community service and economic engine. These projects thrive when cities combine public funding with private‑sector creativity to accelerate timelines and keep facilities active year‑round.
1 Stat That Matters
>$30 million – the amount of money that Disney lost per week during the YouTube TV / ESPN standoff. (Newsweek)
At a time when the perception of ESPN is already at an all-time low, losing millions of viewers (myself included) for MNF didn’t help the brand. The (finally) agreed upon new deal integrates the full features of ESPN Unlimited into YouTube TV—another step towards making it the nation’s top distributor (FOS).
Pull of the Week
Patrick Willis demonstrates the power of leverage:
Let me know what you think about this format! The plan is to release Field Notes every other Wednesday.
No essay next week, we’ll be back December 3rd 🦃🫡
–Brent