Cris Collinsworth retains PFF media arm in $100M+ Teamworks acquisition

The Teamworks acquisition of Pro Football Focus is now official, per Sports Business Journal, and the deal structure offers some clarity on what it means for Cris Collinsworth’s role at the company he has owned since 2014.

When Wide Left’s Arif Hasan first reported the deal in February, one of the biggest open questions was what would happen to PFF’s public-facing content arm. Teamworks does virtually nothing on the content side with any of its acquired properties, and those working on PFF’s consumer and fantasy verticals reportedly weren’t even informed of the deal when it was announced internally.

Per Hasan, that picture is now clearer, as the business-to-business data side is what Teamworks is acquiring and will operate under its own name and brand, while the consumer-facing side is being spun off into a separate company. It is Awful Announcing’s understanding that the public-facing media side of the business will stay under Collinsworth’s control.

Collinsworth joins Teamworks in an advisory role as part of the deal, which Hasan confirmed is north of $100 million. Teamworks also plans to integrate its vision-tracking technology into the PFF workflow, aiming to create a unified product that combines the two data sets.

The split structure also clarifies one of the more pressing questions about what this deal means for Sunday Night Football. PFF grades have been a fixture of NBC’s broadcast for years, appearing on screen next to player names throughout the game, and the assumption when the sale first emerged was that NBC would have less incentive to feature them once Collinsworth no longer owned the underlying company. With the public-facing side staying under his control, that relationship appears to remain intact for now.

The grades themselves have never been without controversy, as we saw CBS NFL analyst J.J. Watt go on The Pat McAfee Show last season and claim the methodology is fundamentally broken, arguing that you cannot produce a definitive grade for a player without knowing his exact assignment on a given play, and Watt is hardly alone in that view.

Whether the separation of the data business from the consumer side changes any of that debate remains to be seen, but at a minimum, Collinsworth retaining control of the public-facing product means the Sunday Night Football connection is not going away anytime soon.