When it comes to football, it’s all about the Benjamins, no matter what
Despite soccer’s gains, Americanstyle football remains, by far, our dominant sport, and a new season kicks off this weekend. For the TV business, which in July saw streaming services’ viewership surpass cable’s for the first time, live events are especially valuable because viewers are less prone to skip the ads.
Football’s unique value was evident last week when the Big Ten Conference and three TV networks — Fox, CBS and NBC — announced a seven-year deal valued at $7 billion for the rights to televise football, basketball and other sports.
The deal starts in 2023. By the time it takes full effect during the 2024 football season, the Big Ten will stretch from coast to coast, having expanded to 16 teams by luring
UCLA and Southern California away from the Pac 12 Conference.
Notably missing from the Big Ten’s deal is ESPN, which is closely allied with the Southeastern Conference. The SEC is also expanding, having recently persuaded Texas and Oklahoma to defect from the Big 12 Conference.
Signed last year, ESPN’s deal with the SEC covers 10 years at roughly $300 million a year for rights previously held by CBS, and it’ll add to the TV revenue that SEC schools already receive.
ESPN also owns the rights for the college football playoffs, plus 41 bowl games. Many of these made-for-TV bowls are so meaningless that some players refuse to participate, lest an injury ruin their pro prospects.
Bottom line: It’s all about the Benjamins. Examples abound:
Amateurism is a relic of the quaint past in college sports. Players may now sell the rights to the use of their name, image and likeness. Some prized recruits trigger bidding wars, and wealthy boosters are busy devising ways to pay them.
Granted, in an era when some college coaches are paid millions of dollars — and when other college students are free to earn as they learn — athletes ought to be compensated.
However, as the Miami Dolphins’ suspended owner Stephen Ross discovered, even the NFL has rules in an effort to preserve a semblance of competitive balance. In the absence of such rules, money and chaos will
Areign in college football.
Sports betting is expanding, with big games attracting bets on everything from the coin toss to penalty yardage. Already there have been scandals in which gamblers influenced the outcome.
Thus far, the gamblingrelated corruption has been mainly in men’s basketball, where the college game is but a brief stopover for the numerous one-and-done recruits who are in college primarily to showcase their skills for the pros.
However, given the rapid nationwide expansion of online sports betting, it would not be a shock to see more scandals, with some of them again involving game officials as well as players and coaches.
The organization that once regulated college sports — the National Collegiate Athletic Association — has been rendered
AAessentially powerless, in part because of court rulings and follow-up legislation; in part because of its own ineptitude. The
NCAA needs to be resuscitated as the problems proliferate.
For many years the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics sounded alarms about those problems and the overall direction of college sports, but urgent concerns such as the longterm impact on players who suffer repeated concussions are still being largely swept aside in the dash for cash.
Too often ignored by campus administrators is the bending of rules to maintain players’ eligibility, despite atrocious behavior off the field and poor performance in the classroom.
Indeed, in TV interviews, some of the “scholar athletes” are so inarticulate that they make Georgia’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker seem eloquent by comparison.
Worse, nobody nowadays seems to be asking why so many of America’s
Alargest institutions of higher learning are still spending huge sums of money operating semi-pro sports teams as a sort of farm system for the NFL and the NBA.
Then again, these new TV deals have given the lucky schools in the two emerging “super conferences,” the Big Ten and the SEC, the hope that they’ll soon be on the receiving end of larger amounts of money to offset the large amounts they spend.
Meanwhile, the other conferences’ member schools, including the University of Miami in the Atlantic Coast Conference, may soon find that they’ve been treated like Europe’s underachieving soccer teams: “relegated” to a lesser league.
Robert F. Sanchez, of Tallahassee, is a former member of the Miami Herald Editorial Board. He writes for the Herald’s conservative opinion newsletter, Right to the Point. It’s weekly, and it’s free. To subscribe, go to miamiherald.com/right tothepoint.