The NFL once again took the competition straight to the NBA on Christmas Day. And David Samson had a word for Charles Barkley’s challenge to Roger Goodell in calling the NFL “greedy” for doing so – tread lightly.
Inside the NBA was back to work on ESPN with a Christmas Day quintuple-header. And as the day’s action got underway, Barkley bemoaned the fact that the NBA used to have the day to themselves before Goodell and the NFL decided to take the territory for their own. It was a rare instance of somebody with a major national platform being willing to take on the NFL.
On his Nothing Personal podcast, Samson had praise to share for Charles Barkley by being willing to give a message straight to Roger Goodell that he and the NFL were being “pigs” for stepping onto the NBA’s turf. But then he said that America’s addiction is so strong for football that nothing else that happens – either inside or outside of football – would stop people from actually watching.
“As you head into 2026, please try to remember the one sentence that all of us in sports need to say over and over like it’s our mantra,” Samson said. “The NFL is king and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. It doesn’t matter if players lose limbs on the field, it doesn’t matter if they lose their life on the field, or almost. It doesn’t matter if they’re concussed or they die young and they can’t count to 10 in their 40s or 50s. It doesn’t matter if there are more carts on the field than players carting people off each play. The NFL, Roger Goodell, they don’t care, because we don’t care. and neither do we. We keep watching no matter what we see. We watch our gladiators because that’s what the human race does. We don’t care when gladiators get killed or bull fighters get gored, we actually root for it.”
David Samson then put his business hat on by saying that Charles Barkley was playing a dangerous game in being willing to call out Roger Goodell so directly on national television. And ultimately, he thinks it may earn a talking to from his bosses at Warner Bros. Discovery and the Inside the NBA syndication partners at ESPN and Disney.
“So Charles Barkley did something that I like to call ‘pissing against the wind.’ There’s a very good lesson that little boys learn. You don’t do that,” Samson added.
“You know how that’s going to end, by the way? Charles Barkley gets a talking to by Warner Bros. Discovery even though Charles Barkley is above that. He gets a talking to by Disney, because you just don’t want to make enemies with Roger Goodell, especially when Roger Goodell’s about to opt out of every media rights deal and Roger Goodell has about 20 different choices and platforms to put his games on. ESPN needs the NFL more than we need oxygen.”
It may sound silly to think that a comment from Charles Barkley could impact a multi-billion dollar rights deal, but he should know that it can better than anybody. The NBA on TNT franchise started to crumble when WBD CEO David Zaslav said that his network didn’t need the NBA and it was something that Adam Silver definitely kept in mind during negotiations.
However, ESPN has something going for it that Zaslav and WBD did not – an equity deal that will give the NFL a 10% ownership stake in the network. That should pretty much give ESPN a long-term guarantee that they will always have NFL games on their platforms. It remains to be seen if Roger Goodell will be called out on ESPN airwaves again if and when that deal goes through.