USA TODAY International Edition
Rose more like Supreme Court Bowl
Georgia, Oklahoma teamed up in TV case
Chuck Neinas has a nickname for Monday’s Rose Bowl semifinal between Georgia and Oklahoma.
“The Supreme Court Bowl,” said Neinas, the longtime college football power broker.
It’s all because of precedent. The last time these two storied programs shared such a big national stage, they shook the foundation of the sport for decades to come.
But it didn’t happen on the field. Monday’s matchup will be the first time the two have faced each other in more than 1,200 games apiece since the 1890s.
Both instead joined forces against the NCAA in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984. They won a 7-2 decision, allowing schools and conferences to make their own deals for television coverage instead of having a heavyhanded NCAA control it as a monopoly.
The ruling eventually led the sport to where it is now: Dozens of games are on television every Saturday in the fall instead of only a few. Other fallout from the case includes wildly lucrative television contracts, the debut of conference TV networks and more schools switching conferences in pursuit of more TV money.
“I think it’s been the biggest event to help college football in the last 50 years,” said Neinas, former boss of the College Football Association and former commissioner of the Big Eight and Big 12 Conferences. “It brought exposure to the game and created more interest in the game and obviously opened up the game to many people.”
The legacy of this case is still debatable. The rise of cable TV and the Internet might have forced college football to move in a similar direction anyway. And not everybody agrees that a deregulated money grab for TV revenue was good for all.
Yet here they are: Georgia and Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl — a College Football Playoff game owned by another powerful entity that controls certain postseason TV rights and revenue for all major-college conferences. Only this time the Sooners and Bulldogs aren’t complaining.
The world before
There were only a few television networks back then, primarily ABC, NBC and CBS. The Internet as we know it didn’t exist, and ESPN was just getting started. So the only way to see your favorite team play was to attend the game in person or hope that it had earned a rare appearance on television.
Since 1951, these appearances had been controlled by the governing body of college sports for two primary reasons:
To avoid having TV compete with paid attendance at games.
To preserve “competitive balance” and spread television exposure to as many NCAA members as possible, not just the most popular teams.
To meet these objectives, the NCAA limited a school to no more than six TV appearances over two years. It also effectively restricted competition without regard to viewer preference.
Consider the case of two games on Sept. 26, 1981. Oklahoma played Southern California in a top-5 matchup televised on over 200 stations. Across the country, a game between two lesserknown programs was televised on four ABC affiliates: Appalachian State vs. The Citadel.
“Yet, incredibly, all four of these teams received exactly the same amount of money for the right to televise their games,” Judge Juan Guerrero Burciaga wrote in a lower-court ruling for the case in 1982. “There is no dispute as to the fact that, but for the NCAA contract, no broadcaster would be willing to pay the same amount for the CitadelAppalachian State game as they would pay for the USC-Oklahoma matchup.”
An act of rebellion
Bigger schools sought more exposure and money for football in the regular season, hoping for a free market more like regular-season basketball, which wasn’t restricted by such rules. They banded together through the College Football Association (CFA) to get a better deal and eventually reached one with NBC in an act of rebellion against NCAA power.
In retaliation, the NCAA threatened to punish these mutinous members.
“The NCAA indicated if the members signed on to do that, they would be placed on probation and would be ineligible for postseason competition, both men’s and women’s sports,” said Neinas, the CFA’s former executive director.
The CFA wanted to fight this in court. But to do so, Neinas said, it needed some schools to put their names on an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA — as NCAA members that would be harmed by the threatened penalties.
Neinas said Georgia and Oklahoma stepped forward as plaintiffs in large part because both schools already were tightly connected with the CFA cause. University of Georgia President Fred Davison served as the first CFA chairman.
Davison’s football coach and athletics director, Vince Dooley, also wanted more TV exposure for his program but questioned whether it would come at a cost.
“The NCAA’s idea was that if this (case) opened it up like that, it would dilute the attendance,” Dooley told USA TODAY. “And there were athletic directors — and I was, too — concerned that this might happen.”
After years of NCAA appeals, the Supreme Court finally ended the fight in June 1984.
Justice John Paul Stevens delivered the opinion, holding that the NCAA had violated the Sherman Act with its stranglehold on televised college football.
“The NCAA has restricted rather than enhanced the place of intercollegiate athletics in the Nation’s life,” Stevens wrote.
What if the NCAA had won?
It took a few years, but market forces eventually burst the dam for big money. And fans still packed stadiums. Among the highlights: Notre Dame broke from the CFA and made its own $38 million national TV deal with NBC starting in 1991. In 1994, the Southeastern Conference announced a five-year deal with CBS, starting in 1996 and worth about $90 million.
Now there’s so much television money flooding the system from various networks that 39 schools are paying their coaches $3 million this season, up from nine in 2011.
If the NCAA had won the case instead, its membership eventually would have realized it could make more money by offering more games to more buyers “the way the NFL does today,” former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson told USA TODAY. It just might have come along slower.
“It would have taken another 10 years probably,” Pilson said. “Ultimately you would have found a lot of more games on television, all of it channeled through the NCAA. But still there would be widespread distribution, not as wide as you have now, where it’s open season and anybody can buy a football game. But it would have grown much larger, just from technology development.”
Slower growth on television still could have held back the game’s popularity at a critical time.
“You’ve got to remember you’d be lucky if you got more than one game a week (as a viewer),” Neinas said of the early 1980s. “Well now what happens is basically you can see your favorite team play most any time, and what happened is the exposure has definitely helped popularize college football nationally.”
That exposure helped create vast riches for the Power 5 conferences. And that was a concern for the NCAA back in the early ’80s.
The NCAA’s control of college football television was designed in part to get exposure for smaller schools, too, giving them attention and revenue they otherwise wouldn’t get in a free market dominated by the likes of Oklahoma and Georgia.
“One benefit of NCAA control was a bit more equality between large schools and smaller schools, which needed the NCAA revenue to maintain football programs,” said James Ponsoldt, a Georgia law professor who served as counsel in the case against the NCAA. “Now, of course, the major conferences have grown exponentially in terms of budget so that they are essentially professional.”
Supreme Court Justice Byron White seemed to see this future when considering the case in ’84.
Back to Appalachian State
White, a former star player at Colorado, saw value in the NCAA controlling TV for its larger membership and educational mission.
“Most fundamentally, the (NCAA) plan fosters the goal of amateurism by spreading revenues among various schools and reducing the financial incentives toward professionalism,” White wrote.
But he lost the argument. And now here come the Sooners and Bulldogs again, playing for the first time ever, in a postseason semifinal whose television rights and revenue are controlled by a different centralized entity: the College Football Playoff Administration LLC.
It’s much different than the old NCAA plan for the regular season but still spreads the wealth while increasing revenue and exposure. The Playoff is affiliated only with six major bowl games and receives $470 million annually from ESPN after starting in 2014. It is owned by Notre Dame and the 10 major college conferences, including less prominent leagues such as Conference USA and the Sun Belt.
That means even Appalachian State gets a cut from the Playoff despite not playing in it. It just doesn’t get the same cut as Oklahoma, as it did for that game against The Citadel in 1981.
Appalachian State is a member of the Sun Belt, which received $17 million in revenue sharing from last season’s Playoff.
By contrast, Oklahoma’s Big 12 Conference got $61 million from the Playoff last season, according to NCAA records.
The idea was to “do what’s best for college football,” Playoff executive director Bill Hancock told USA TODAY.
There was plenty to go around, mostly because major-college football is so popular. And that can be traced to the television exposure and the free market Georgia and Oklahoma helped open up in 1984.
“When they joined together they had a hell of an impact, didn’t they?” Neinas said of Monday’s Rose Bowl teams. “We think it should be called the Supreme Court Bowl, and we think Supreme Court Justice Stevens should be the (Rose) Parade marshal.”