A wise man once said, “Real Gs move in silence like lasagna.” It appears the NFL and ESPN are Real Gs.

Late Saturday night, news broke that the transaction between ESPN and the NFL, originally announced last August, which will see ESPN gain control of key NFL Media assets, including NFL Network and linear distribution rights to NFL RedZone, has been approved by federal regulators.

The timing of the news was surprising. Outside a lone report suggesting ESPN and the NFL had pie-in-the-sky hopes that a deal could be waved through in time for the league to consider the new arrangements while scheduling the 2026-27 season, no one would’ve believed this first-of-its-kind deal would gain approval so quickly. Immediately after the deal was announced, reports indicated that it’d take at least one year, possibly two, to finalize.

Given the media landscape at the time, that timeline made sense. The Trump administration was in the midst of shaking down then-Paramount owner Shari Redstone before approving a sale to David Ellison and Skydance. That same administration had brought frivolous lawsuits against Paramount and Disney over coverage they deemed unflattering. The FCC has readily injected itself into matters ranging from small-time carriage disputes with regional sports networks because of the owners’ close ties to Trump to pressuring Disney into temporarily taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air because of a Charlie Kirk joke.

It seemed there was no point of leverage — however inconsequential — that the Trump administration was unwilling to exercise to reshape the media in its own image. The idea that the sitting president wouldn’t want to get involved in the ESPN-NFL transaction, where he could exert influence over a crown jewel of Disney’s portfolio in ESPN, and also the NFL, which is the most important programming left on television, would seem unlikely.

In the nearly six months since the deal was announced, there hasn’t been a peep from any federal agency about reviewing the transaction. Not the FTC, which is required to sign off on any transaction this large. Not the DOJ, which apparently reviewed the deal for antitrust concerns, according to a wire report on Saturday night, but never publicly announced it would investigate the transaction. Not the FCC, whose jurisdiction over this deal would’ve been largely extraneous, though that hasn’t stopped the agency from meddling in any number of media microdramas recently.

We didn’t hear anything about the ongoing regulatory process until it was over. Why is that? It’s not as if this were an open-and-shut transaction. Far from it. At no other time in history has a major professional sports league, one that is granted a federal antitrust exemption to sell its media rights as a collective, purchased a stake in one of the media outlets competing for those rights. Even if the league has said otherwise, there’s clear concern that ESPN could receive preferential treatment over other bidders when the NFL’s media rights return to the market. It’s exactly the type of arrangement the DOJ would normally take a long, hard look at. Even Disney said that closing the deal in late 2026 “is our best case“ when discussing the federal approval timeline.

And Disney wasn’t the only party concerned about approval. The uncertainty stretched to NFL owners as well. On Friday, one day before the transaction was approved, ESPN published a story that included a detail about an NFL owner who was concerned the deal would be held up because the NFL had chosen Bad Bunny to perform at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. “I told Roger [Goodell] he should’ve thought through that better,” the owner reportedly said, referencing Trump’s public criticism of Bad Bunny’s selection and the president’s history of retribution over culture war matters.

But the NFL is a Real G. Maybe we don’t often think about the influence a professional sports league can have in Washington, D.C. Maybe it’s not relevant to any league aside from the NFL, the lone modicum of monoculture left in our ever-fragmented society. But the league has an army of lobbyists stationed permanently in our nation’s capital for a reason. And they had been building professional relationships with regulators well before this deal was announced.

This transaction has been in the making for many years. In other words, the NFL and ESPN have had time to nurture the relationships necessary to get a deal of this magnitude through with little spectacle. In the days immediately following the deal’s announcement, the league had already reached out to the offices of approximately 30 members of Congress to advance the transaction. While those are not the same people responsible for rubber-stamping a deal, it’s a testament to the NFL’s operational competence in its lobbying efforts.

The truest sign of that competency, however, might be keeping a lid on whatever regulatory procedure actually went down over the last six months. Somehow, there were no leaks. No public comments from anyone in the administration. And, seemingly, no hiccups in attaining approval.

It’s borderline mind-boggling. Trump is a creature of the media and hasn’t missed a single opportunity to put his thumb on the scale wherever he can. Even now, he’s actively involved in Paramount and Netflix’s fight to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, to the point that both companies are publicly arguing over which side has the better odds of receiving regulatory approval.

There’s been no such public courting by ESPN or the NFL. Real Gs.

ESPN declined to elaborate about the regulatory process beyond the joint statement the network issued with the NFL on Saturday. The NFL did not respond to the inquiry beyond the joint statement.

In the absence of any transparency about the approval process, what’s clear is that, however it happened, it was abnormal by the standards of the Trump administration. No transaction involving a major media company has involved less public scrutiny than this.

The question becomes, why? Perhaps the answer will become apparent over time. The most transactional president in history would typically be licking his chops to extract some concession in return for greenlighting this deal. Maybe he did that here. Maybe he didn’t.

Whatever the case, the timing of this raises an eyebrow, especially without any formal statements from the federal government.