Fox contract creates pay-per-view games
The news was expected months ago and the news was announced weeks ago, but as kickoff nears for the historic OU-Army game Saturday on Owen Field, reality starts settling in on Sooner fans. This game is pay-perview. And they don’t like it. They don’t like it one bit.
“Every season Oklahoma fans get ripped off having to pay an exorbitant fee to watch a home football game,” wrote one fan. “Why??? It’s such a farce! I’d like to know who receives this windfall of money. Is it OU, Sooners Sports Properties, Fox Sports, Cox Cable...???”
Good questions. And the answers are easily known.
The money is reaped primarily by Fox Sports, in conjunction with cable providers. That’s because of OU’s contract with Fox. Pay-perview, which is a foreign concept in most 21stcentury television proceedings, exists almost exclusively within Big 12 football, because of conference television contracts.
The SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 have television contracts that grant all their games to their media partners. But the Big 12’s contracts with ESPN and Fox keep back one game per school to present however it wants.
Texas, for example, has one game a year that goes to the Longhorn Network (although ESPN often moves a second game to Bevo TV). Kansas State and Iowa State, for example, each take their game for digital distribution. OU, OSU, Baylor, TCU and Texas Tech have individual contracts that give Fox Sports that extra game.
But whereas Fox generally takes that OSU game (South Alabama this year) or Baylor game or TCU game and puts it on one of its subsidiary Fox channels (Fox Sports Oklahoma, Fox Sports Southwest, Fox Sports Plus, for example), Fox takes the OU game and puts it on pay-per-view for one simple reason. OU fans will buy it. The cost for the OUArmy game varies per provider (Cox charges $34.99), and Sooner fans by the thousands purchase the game. You can do the math. That’s why Fox makes the game payper-view.
Iowa State’s game Sept. 1 against South Dakota State was available on digital streaming for a price of $6.95. Big difference.
Most years, the payper-view is a pain to OU fans but doesn’t really deny Sooner diehards from a memorable game. You want to see OUTulane, OU-Akron and OU-Louisiana Tech, but it’s really not a big deal if you have to listen on the radio.
But Army is different. The Cadets on Owen Field is a once-in-alifetime event for most OU fans. That’s something to see.
The real question is how much OU reaps from that Fox contract. The Sooners get $7 million a year from Fox, in addition to the $36.5 million distributed by the Big 12 last season. That’s $43.5 million for OU athletics, which puts the Sooners well ahead of all but the SEC and Big Ten schools — and well ahead of all Big 12 schools, other than Texas.
That’s the kind of money required to compete at the level OU chooses to compete. That Fox contract helps the Sooners get to where they want to be.
But it comes at a cost. The primary cost is a pay-per-view game.