Skydance Sorting Out Sports Rights For New Company

Skydance is preparing to cut jobs and shed sports rights at the newly combined CBS Sports and TNT Sports, as an $80 billion debt load turns “synergies” on a portfolio that was barely discussed during the Warner Bros. Discovery takeover.

John Ourand of Puck reports that executives already expect the integration to be a bloodbath. CBS Sports president David Berson will run the combined sports group; TNT Sports chairman and CEO Luis Silberwasser is leaving. The company, renamed Skydance after Paramount closed the deal this week, has told investors it is targeting more than $6 billion in run-rate savings within three years and wants net leverage down to 3 times by the end of 2029. Sports, long treated as a side issue in a fight over studios, streaming, and CNN, is now part of that math.

The rights most exposed are the ones TNT bought after it lost the NBA. Those include a College Football Playoff sublicense with ESPN that runs through 2028, a Big 12 football and basketball sublicense through 2031, and a French Open deal that lasts through 2034. Major League Baseball and NHL packages, together costing more than $700 million a year, expire in 2028 and are also under review. “The reality is that Skydance probably has more sports rights than it needs,” LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield told Ourand. “All of the things that TNT Sports was doing to scramble to fill the hole that the NBA left—Skydance doesn’t need those rights anymore.”

What the company is likely to keep is the core that justified the deal: the NFL on CBS, March Madness (now under one roof after years of being shared), the Masters, NASCAR, and the UFC package Paramount signed this year. Carriage agreements still require some games to stay on TNT and TBS, so an immediate shift of inventory onto CBS is unlikely. Ourand reported that Skydance and the leagues are already reading those contracts to see what can move later, with the Stanley Cup Final among the properties under discussion.

CBS Sports stayed out of the spotlight while Paramount chased WBD. With the merger closed and the debt in place, the sports division is no longer on the sideline.