The CUSP Show

Live from SuperBowl Radio Row, on National Girls & Women in Sports Day, Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Dystany Spurlock to the show. Spurlock shares her unconventional path to stock car racing, starting on motorcycles as a kid, setting a record on a BMW S1000RR, and grinding for years while working as a tractor-trailer driver and sending sponsorship emails between loads. Now backed by Foxxt...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Daniel Shi and Shivaas Gulati, co-founders of Arkero AI, for a conversation on how artificial intelligence is beginning to transform the business side of sports. Fresh off a $6.2M seed raise backed by investors including Alexis Ohanian and Roger Ehrenberg, the founders explain why sports remains one of the most under-software-ed...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Olympic Gold Medalist and two-division UFC Champion Henry “Triple C” Cejudo for a powerful conversation on resilience, reinvention, and what it truly means to compete at the highest level. Cejudo reflects on his journey from growing up in poverty as the son of undocumented immigrant parents to becoming the youngest American Olym...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner sit down with Chris Stone, whose career spans across sports media at Sports Illustrated and the LA Times and Co-Founder of emerging platform, Off Ball, to unpack how sports storytelling is changing in real time. Stone explains Off Ball’s founding premise: making it easier to sort the “chaos” of the internet and surface the most interest...

Recorded at the 2025 Columbia Sports Management Conference in October, Kati Fernandez (Chief Content Officer at Together) welcomes: Emilie Arel (President, Mitchell & Ness), April Guidone (COO, SMAC Entertainment), and Natalie White (Founder & CEO, Moolah Kicks) to talk how brands, leagues, athletes, and entrepreneurs are shaping modern fan identity through product, partnerships, and culture. Arel...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Marcus Kuhn, NFL alum (Giants and Patriots) and Columbia Sports Management program alum, for a conversation on the rapid international expansion of American football. Kuhn, who was the first German-born player to ever score a touchdown in the NFL, reflects on the evolution of the NFL in Germany, from early grassroots efforts to...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Joe Favorito welcomes Xander Zayas, the newly crowned unified world champion in the light middleweight division, for a conversation on championship mindset, the business of boxing, and representing Puerto Rico on a global stage. Zayas reflects on visualizing success long before stepping into the ring, detailing the discipline, sacrifice, and preparation that led him...

Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Jesse Linder, Vice President of Community Relations for the New York Jets, and Callie Brownson, Senior Director of High Performance and National Teams at USA Football, live from Super Bowl Media Row, for a focused conversation on the rapid growth of girls and women’s flag football. Linder shares how the Jets helped launch girls flag football in New York City i...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Joe Favorito welcomes Lawrence Hamm Jr., Vice President of Events DC, for a conversation on how cities compete to host the biggest events in sports. Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Hamm discusses how Washington, D.C. landed the NFL Draft, why the timing aligns with the return of football to the District, and how the National Mall will serve as an iconic backdrop for...

Live from Super Bowl Media Row, Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Tara Sullivan, Sports Columnist for The Boston Globe, for a conversation on the business of sports journalism and what it takes to cover an NFL franchise. Sullivan walks through her career path from the Bergen Record to the Boston Globe, explaining the shift from traditional beat reporting to column writing and how the Globe’s d...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Scott Rosner welcomes Ken Shropshire, longtime sports law professor and leading voice on race, leadership, and governance in sports, for a wide-ranging conversation on the NFL’s hiring landscape and the broader business of the league. Shropshire reflects on the origins of the Rooney Rule, the research that helped shape it, and why recent coaching cycles, marked by m...

Live from Super Bowl Radio Row, Scott Rosner and LJ Homegrown welcome Greg Cosell, NFL Films analyst and longtime football educator, for a wide-ranging conversation on how the game is truly evaluated through film. Cosell walks through his weekly in-season routine, explaining why tape study, not stats or television coverage, drives his analysis, and how defensive trends like two-high safety structu...

Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Brian Billick, Former Super Bowl Winning NFL Head Coach and Entrepreneur at XTECH Protective Equipment, for a behind-the-scenes look at football innovation and athlete safety. Billick shares how his career evolved after coaching into the technology side of the sport and why he became involved in developing equipment focused on keeping players healthy. The conv...

Tom Richardson welcomes Kiswe co-founder Wim Sweldens, a longtime digital video and streaming pioneer, for a look at how live sports and entertainment are being rebuilt for a direct-to-consumer future. Sweldens shares Kiswe’s origin story, and how he went from Nokia, to Columbia University, to launching the company in 2013. Sweldens explains the philosophy behind “democratizing access” to live exp...

Joe Favorito and Scott Rosner welcome Sports Business Journal NFL reporter and Staff Writer, Ben Fischer, for a live conversation from Media Row at Super Bowl week in San Francisco. Fischer, widely regarded as a leading journalist covering the business of the NFL, shares how the Super Bowl has grown into a self-sustaining global business ecosystem, and why it’s now impossible for leagues, sponsors...

Tom Richardson welcomes Steve Kuhn, former hedge fund executive (Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Pine River Capital), founder of Major League Pickleball, and the co-founder of SportsPredict.com , for a look into the fast-moving world of prediction markets and prediction-based gaming in early 2026. The conversation breaks down why prediction markets surged in late 2025, what it meant when the NHL announced...

Recorded at the 2025 Columbia Sports Management Conference in October, Tom Richardson welcomes Jay Marine, Head of Global Sports and Advertising for Prime Video in the U.S., for a conversation on how Amazon is reshaping the sports media landscape amid the industry’s shift from fragmentation into package rebundling. Marine explains how Prime Video has evolved into a platform for discovery, allowing...

Joe Favorito and Tom Richardson welcome Columbia Sports Management student Austin Emile, a FIFA-licensed soccer agent, for a behind-the-scenes look at the business of player representation and how transfers really get done. Emile shares his path from growing up in a Tottenham Spurs household to playing Division III soccer at Haverford, then breaking into the industry through internships with MLS c...

Joe Favorito and Tom Richardson welcome Columbia Sports Management alum Jeff Aubry, Executive Director of the Next Gen Players Union, for an inside look at labor, leadership, and player advocacy in the NBA G League. Aubry traces his journey from Cornell basketball to a professional playing career overseas and in the early days of the NBA Development League, before transitioning into sports busines...

Joe Favorito kicks off the first episode of 2026 by welcoming longtime coach, administrator, and now college basketball analyst, John Giannini, for a wide-ranging look at where college athletics, and especially men’s basketball, stands in the NIL and transfer-portal era. Giannini traces his journey from a Division III national championship at Rowan to Division I success at the University of Maine...

Joe Favorito and Tom Richardson mark a milestone, 10 years of The CUSP Show, by welcoming Aggregate Sports CEO Chris Pearlman for a conversation on career-building, Olympic marketing, and the realities of the global soccer business. Pearlman retraces his path from early internships and sales roles at ESPN and ABC to working at Van Wagner, and a pivotal leap overseas as the Chief Operating Officer...

Joe Favorito and Tom Richardson welcome Columbia Sports Management student and Lebanese taekwondo standout, Ward Selman, for a powerful conversation about resilience, identity, and building a career in sports beyond the mat. Selman, who began taekwondo at age four and joined Lebanon’s national team at twelve, discusses her TEDx talk on “Resilient Dreamers,” shares what it meant to pursue a “non-tr...

Joe Favorito welcomes ViewLift President & Co-Founder Manik Bambha for a behind-the-scenes look at the streaming infrastructure powering modern sports consumption. Bambha traces his path from an early role at MySpace to building one of the first OTT movie platforms and launching some of the earliest apps on iPad, Roku, and connected TVs, before turning that technology into ViewLift’s white-label s...

Joe Favorito and Tom Richardson welcome Pro Sports Assembly CEO & co-founder, Laura Dixon, for a deep dive into why the sports industry went so long without its own professional trade association, and how she’s fixing that. Dixon, the former head of External Relations for the San Antonio Spurs, explains what “external affairs” really means inside a team front office, why informed and inclusive lea...

Joe Favorito sits down with Mark Neifeld, the Founder, and current Commissioner & CEO of the Sport Fishing Championship (SFC), for a conversation about how an emerging league can scale into a global sports property. Neifeld explains how he went from working in the NHL, NFL, MLB, and collegiate athletics to identifying a massive opportunity hiding in plain sight: more Americans fish than play golf...