Sports TV Business

Probably the last word on Roethlisberger-gate, as in, I’m chiming in so late I doubt anyone else will chime in after me. Or even listen.

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If ESPN wanted to cover up the Roethlisberger scandal, their initial decision not to report on it may have inadvertently helped that goal more than they intended, by moving the focus of the story off the suit itself and onto ESPN… (I swear I won’t spend every one of my posts talking about stories everyone has already left behind!)

Ultimately, the outrage directed at ESPN seems to have two sources. First, ESPN wouldn’t report on it, at all, not even on its web site, when other organizations – including the same company in the ABC News division – did. In his interview with ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer, Vince Loria declares that “[i]t was never our intent to be out front on this story.” Newsflash, Vince: ESPN is expected to be out front on every story. At the very least, ESPN is expected to acknowledge the existence of every story, since so many people turn to it for their sports news. As more people turn to the Internet for their sports news, that may start to change, but ESPN is still the definer of the news cycle, and for the moment the Internet only increases ESPN’s responsibilities, by not restricting it to filling only an hour and thus not giving it any excuse for ignoring a story. (Ohlmeyer seemingly acknowledges as much towards the end, though he also seems to recommend that ESPN itself should make the story about its refusal to report, and no one goes to ESPN for that sort of meta-discussion… this was an issue with Ohlmeyer’s predecessors as well…)

Second is the question of whether ESPN’s decision was fair, balanced, or consistent, given the fact that ESPN has not shied away from reporting on unconfirmed civil suits in the past… then other times it has. ESPN’s inconsistent stance on this issue has seemed wildly inconsistent and left people in the dark as to what criteria ESPN is using to determine whether to report and when. (And how; some have accused ESPN of slanting the story when they did report it.) With people left to come to their own conclusions, some have determined it has less to do with ESPN’s claimed criteria and more with irrelevant aspects of the athletes themselves, such as popularity, race, and relationship to the network. Ohlmeyer arguably did a disservice by asking Loria only about Marvin Harrison. ESPN has a lot more than that to answer for. Ohlmeyer also did a disservice by asking only about ESPN’s perceived protection of the NFL, and not Roethlisberger or the Steelers (especially given some writers’ dredging up ESPN’s Spygate coverage for evidence that the Patriots are/were not one of ESPN’s “protected” teams and the Steelers are).

(In fact, Doria himself notes that “prior history” goes into coverage decisions – a commendable position on its face, but Mike Tyson getting in trouble with the ladies is kind of old news, and a pillar of the community doing so is big news.)

I think most of us would prefer that the media not get so wrapped up in accusations against athletes that damage reputations and then not restore those reputations if the accusations turned out to be false – a natural result of the fact that once the case is settled, there’s no reason to report on it anymore, so the “no accusation” doesn’t get as much coverage as the “accusation”. But that’s not the way the media (or this country) works, and ESPN shouldn’t pretend it is.

On another note, I’m debating whether to include Ohlmeyer’s line – “I think the Internet is the most transformative technological advancement since the printing press” – in my book on the impact of the Internet… then again, Ohlmeyer’s hardly the first to say it.

Sports journalism in an age of transition for all journalism

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This is my first blog post to be republished on Bleacher Report. Hi! I’m going to bring some quirks to my writing, which I hope to (re-)introduce you to over the next few days and weeks. I just relaunched my Web site, MorganWick.com, where I talk about a wide variety of topics, including some you might never have heard about, and even the topics that are familiar I often talk about from a unique perspective, because I’m constantly thinking about them. On my site, the motto is “Ideas every day”, and to celebrate the launch of the new site, this is Ideas Every Day week month at MorganWick.com. Because I got the idea for Ideas Every Day week over a month ago, I’m going to start it with some ideas for posts that are not as topical now as they were then.

We are in a period of painful transition in journalism. We are in a period where the Internet is big enough to take a bite out of newspapers but too small to effectively replace them and too young to know what, exactly, will replace them, or how it’ll be paid for. It’s outside the realm of a single blog post for me to proclaim to have all the answers for how to save newspapers or maintain the standards they set in the Internet Age. It covers too much ground, touches on too many aspects of our everyday life. One day I hope to write a book on all the changes the Internet is bringing to society, and maybe I’ll try to find the answers there. Nonetheless this post is on just one symptom, one aspect, of this larger problem, and it unavoidably means talking about the larger problem and thinking about how to fix it.

The second sentence of the preceding paragraph is an important way to describe and look at the situation. For all the trouble that newspapers are in, they still reach many more people than most websites and even most TV news shows. The slow disappearance of newspapers isn’t just about the in-depth journalism that will be lost, which itself is less about the disappearance of newspapers and more about our increasing demands for immediacy. There are still a lot of people, people without any access to the Internet, that are reliant on newspapers (and, admittedly, TV) to know what’s going on in the world. At least in the short term, losing access to newspapers could mean complete disconnection.

The flip side of that is the reality that whatever it is that replaces newspapers, it will exist in a greater number, diversity, and precision than what exists now. The diversity of voices on the Internet has a lot of advantages. But it also has a number of problems.

For many, including me, it’s easy to assume that the future of the Internet and journalism in general will follow the mold set by television, a future largely supported by ads. There are a few problems with this supposition, but one of them is that very, very, very few web sites will have the mass penetration of a leading daily newspaper or TV station. The value of advertising lies primarily in the number of eyeballs you can have seeing your ad; the fewer eyeballs, the less value. While it’s theoretically possible for people to follow more websites than they subscribe to newspapers or watch TV shows, the fact is that there are going to be more voices fighting for a piece of the pie, and there’s a limit as to how big the pie can grow, especially when a lot of the eyeballs are going to be the same people over and over again.

Not all journalistic functions that are going to be changed, and possibly not for the better, by the Internet are time consuming. Some are just expensive, underwritten by less expensive sections of the paper. Something that requires a lot of traveling may attract a significant number of readers and eyeballs, but it’s still going to be harder to pay the bills that go along with it – which in turn, means fewer people are going to be willing to take the plunge. It’s doubly hard when we’re talking about something that requires a lot of traveling yet is still local.

Which brings me to July’s series in the Sports Business Journal on the declining sizes and budgets of newspaper sports sections. Sports sections have reduced staff and page counts, cut travel expenses on beats (especially by not sending writers on the road), and even when they haven’t reduced beat coverage, cut coverage of big events as well.

A one-two punch of the Web and ESPN has put a crimp on local sports sections, and given its frivolity compared to the rest of the paper, I wonder if sports sections will be first to be cut entirely. Hardcore sports fans who once were reliant on the local sports section, or the sports minute on the local newscast, for sports news from anywhere in the country have found ESPN a godsend. A self-reinforcing pattern of people flocking to ESPN for sports coverage in the wake of shrinking coverage in the local paper has started to emerge. There’s now a significant group of people like me who consider themselves general sports fans, rather than necessarily fans of any particular team. The team I have the closest attachment to is the Mariners, and that’s because I’ve been going to a couple of games every year since I was a little kid and feel a sentimental attachment to keep going. I probably couldn’t tell you half the names on the team.

ESPN will tell you when Brett Favre is coming back – they’ll cover the big stars and the big-name teams. That’s why its detractors like to call it the “Eastern Seaboard Programming Network”, despite its willingness to cover LA teams even before opening a studio there. They’ll cover leagues at the macro level, at least to an extent, but as Don Ohlmeyer noted in his first ombudsman column for the boys in Bristol, “programming and commentating for a national audience made up mostly of local interests is a treacherous balancing act.” ESPN itself has suffered from becoming “America’s sports section” in a nation more patriotic about local teams than any other. To get the same level of coverage of individual teams requires a local-level operation whose patrons only expect them to cover two or three teams. There’s less money in those local level operations, so travel expenses have been cut and coverage has suffered.

For teams that aren’t already being doted on by ESPN, that means they’re threatened with a slip to irrelevance. When ESPN puts and keeps an event in the news, people pay attention. If the amount of coverage a team gets in a local paper is a short wire story on the game on page 36 and the amount of coverage on the local news is less than ten seconds, meaning they’re probably getting more coverage from ESPN than the local media (assuming it’s a Big Three team), the team effectively gets shut out. Unless a blogger can become really popular, they’re not going to be much of an improvement, because they either watch the team on TV, cover only the home games live (just like the beat writers who see travel expenses cut), or fork over a considerable amount of money for travel expenses.

That’s why I think it’s smarter for papers to skimp on coverage of big events. Unless their team is in it, people already get more coverage of the Super Bowl or World Series from ESPN alone than they’d ever need, and there are, by my count, nine national sports websites before you go into single-sport websites like the sports’ official sites, fan-powered websites like Bleacher Report, and blogs like Deadspin – ESPN, CBS, Fox, Yahoo, SI, NBC, USA Today, Sporting News, and depending on whether or not you consider it a blog, Fanhouse. What people want, and need, is maintained coverage of the local teams. And if their team is in the championship, no coverage the major sports organizations can provide can match the coverage provided by someone who has grown intimately familiar with the team over the course of the season. But not all papers have realized this, and for papers with large, somewhat national readerships, like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, it poses some tough questions as to which audience to appeal to.

At least in the short term, most of the easy answers are unsavory, involving the dicey concept of teams subsidizing their own coverage, which always raises the specter of conflict of interest. The LA Kings, who saw the Times‘ beat writer stop travelling with them on the road, hired their own freelance writers to write coverage for their own web site.

Now that he’s seen what they can do with editorial content, [Vice President of Broadcasting and Communications Mike] Altieri said he is warming to the idea of hiring a newspaper pro to cover the team both at home and on the road.

They looked into doing it three years ago, but decided against it, mostly because of the expense. The salary of a seasoned professional likely would approach $100,000 in Los Angeles, a difficult expense when he can’t demonstrate that it will lead to more revenue, particularly at a time when the team’s on-ice performance has been shoddy.

If traditional coverage continues to wane and the team improves, it may be worth the money, Altieri said. The debate then will be whether the front office is prepared to occasionally find criticism on its own site. Without it, fans probably won’t view it as credible, and they won’t come back.

The Kings wouldn’t be first: the Dallas Mavericks hired the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s NBA writer as that paper left Mavs coverage to the Dallas Morning News (merging of beats between competing papers has also become common practice where once that level of collusion would have been unthinkable), and at least six NFL teams have done similarly, led by the Bengals’ Geoff Hobson, who has written for the team site for a decade. In Major League Baseball, where the Advanced Media division runs MLB.com and all 30 club Web sites, 12 online writers have Baseball Hall of Fame votes. The Chicago Bulls, concerned about the loss of legendary Chicago Tribune NBA writer Sam Smith weakening the NBA’s profile in a football- and baseball-crazed market, hired him to continue his work for their site. In their case, they saw the departure (without their intervention) of one writer having a severe impact on their profile. The resulting uptick in traffic suggests other teams may follow the Bulls’ lead in that sense, ignoring the concerns about editorial control and conflict of interest given the larger issues at stake. Major League Baseball seems to have leapt into the future head-on: with no editorial interference from MLB or the clubs, the Advanced Media-run sites are fairly impartial.

Still, given the issues involved, I would suggest a better, less nauseating option, especially in markets without competing papers to share resources, would be to help pay for some of (in the Kings’ case) the Times‘ beat writer’s travel and other expenses – maybe, depending on the comfort level of all parties involved and necessary logistics, even letting him ride on the team plane. That would not only be cheaper than subsidizing all a reporter’s expenses, it would not only lessen (though not eliminate) the appearance of a conflict of interest, it would also restore that broad exposure of coverage. The only people who will find coverage of the Kings on the team’s own site are people who are looking for Kings coverage in the first place – not casual fans, unless they read aggregators, but content providers are very protective of content these days and some of them want to kill aggregators for “stealing” content.

Flamboyant Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has in fact taken this idea one better: he’s proposed that the major sports leagues form a “beat writer’s cooperative,” “hiring reporters who would provide daily content to local newspapers in exchange for guaranteed space in the print edition.” He’s gone on record stating he doesn’t believe a team Web site is the place for objective, unbiased opinions and reporting, but for selling the team. (He does think it’s the place to break news despite the risk that runs of antagonizing papers the team needs more than ever.)

If local teams are concerned about the loss of local beat writers, at least those writers spend half their time at home, and the emphasis on their presence adds up to less concern for the leagues. Take all the pressure faced by each of 30 teams, ratchet it up considerably, and concentrate it in one place and you have the problems facing individual sports – NASCAR and golf most prominently – that are all travel no matter where in the country you are.

It’s easy to separate the national and local levels in team sports – ESPN and the national outfits cover the biggest games like the playoffs, local outfits focus on the local teams. But that dynamic goes completely out of whack in the NASCAR and PGA tours, where for years local beat writers often spent all their time on the road. Considering the additional expense that entails, it’s no surprise those beats have often been axed entirely. Even national chains (who could conceivably get by with one beat between them) and content-sharing local papers have severely cut back coverage as writers have left for the Web. But that just puts more pressure on the national outfits to put as much resources into covering every event on the tour as local outfits do into covering every game for their local teams. It’s easy to cover the big races like the Daytona 500 and the majors – but the Local Dodge Dealers 400 and the side tournament Tiger’s skipping on some random golf course in Texas somewhere? Other than golf-specific magazines, only the AP, New York Times, and three of the aforementioned sports sites (ESPN, CBS, and USA Today, the latter more as a paper than a Web site) have a regular presence on the PGA tour.

PGA Tour Executive Vice President of Communications and International Affairs Ty Votaw insists that, mostly because of ESPN’s and CBS’s online presences, there’s still more being written about golf than ever… but here we run into that little “transition” problem, and a potential harbinger of problems to come. As with local teams, newspaper beat writers are a more visible place for coverage than a team web site, and unless they take the form of a blog, national sports sites aren’t really much better than the latter. Although Web sites have more space than newspapers, the amount the average fan will see is less. General sports fans can easily look through every page of the sports section, but they can only look at the front page of the Web site before anything they aren’t already interested in falls off the radar in favor of what they already came to look at. (The value of RSS for improving this situation is… iffy.) The result is a far more Darwinian competition for space than that which ever existed in the sports section.

For NASCAR, it seems like the universe has it in for them. NASCAR devoted so many resources to encouraging newspapers to covering their circuit in the late 90s as they made a push to be accepted as one of the modern four major sports… only to see their efforts wasted in the face of the juggernaut destroying the business they courted, and in a position to be first to go. Many papers haven’t ended NASCAR coverage entirely but switched to running abridged AP copy. NASCAR has attempted to adjust by removing the travel from its coverage – running weekly streaming press conferences with e-mailed questions from around the country – and, like local teams, has begun credentialing bloggers and other Web-based operations.

There is a silver lining in this for teams and leagues: as newspapers die, sports coverage may slither to the Web easier than you may think. Smith’s example suggests that sportswriters with large – even if strictly local – followings may be in the best shape of anyone threatened by the decline of newspapers; they have a ready-made audience to follow them to the Web in the form of a blog or just a series of columns for another web site. Unlike most journalism, sportswriting lends itself well to a conversion to blog format. Several sportswriters – especially those let go by ailing newspapers – have found new homes at a league or team web site, one of the national sports sites (ESPN seems especially popular), or even starting their own blog or web site.

Which approach is best for the sport or team varies. The best approach to reach a general audience is probably the national sports sites for the sports in general, especially the big individual ones. For local teams, the future for reaching a general audience may be dicier, at least until more local Web-based sites spring up and become popular. For their part, ESPN is trying to broaden and focus their mandate; earlier this year they launched ESPNChicago.com, a site dedicated to coverage of Chicago-area teams. The site quickly attracted more eyeballs than the Chicago Tribune‘s online sports section, and ESPN will soon launch similar sites for New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. All four cities are places where ESPN owns a radio station (Pittsburgh being the only other), but few doubt that they’ll eventually expand beyond that zone into markets like Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington DC.

If what’s wanted is coverage, regardless of whether that coverage only reaches the people that are looking for it, a blog may be the best approach to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, at least for the writer looking for creative freedom, and for the sport or team that’s looking for a diversity of voices. But that sends the writer plunging headlong into the issue plaguing so much else of the Internet: the question of money. (SBJ’s profile of Racin’ Today, started by four laid-off motorsports writers, encapsulates many of the issues involved.)

Over the seven or so years that it’s run, ESPN’s Around the Horn has almost been emblematic of the changes coming over journalism. It started as a show for banter between four newspaper sportswriters. From west to east, the current lineup of writers includes: Bill Plaschke (Los Angeles Times); J.A. Adande (formerly L.A. Times, now ESPN.com); Woody Paige (Denver Post, excepting about a year working double duty as co-host of Cold Pizza-turned-First Take‘s 1st and 10 segment); Tim Cowlishaw (Dallas Morning News); Jay Mariotti (formerly Chicago Sun-Times, now Fanhouse, though probably moving to the Chicago Tribune); Kevin Blackistone (formerly Dallas Morning News, now Fanhouse after a lengthy unemployment); Bob Ryan; and Jackie MacMullan (both Boston Globe). Only five out of eight regular panelists still work for newspapers, and because Mariotti shows up almost every day, it’s a rare sight to see nothing but newspaper writers on one show. Occasional panelist Gene Wojcehowski moved from the Sun-Times to ESPN.com; Michael Smith became an occasional panelist (after being a regular for a while) after moving from the Globe to ESPN.com. On ATH‘s “big brother” show, Pardon the Interruption, Tony Kornheiser no longer works for the Washington Post.

There’s one other noteworthy thing about ATH: almost always, the youngest person on the show is host Tony Reali. Perhaps more disturbing, the youngest of the panelists still at a newspaper is Cowlishaw, who seems to be in his 40s if not 50s, and the only regular panelist I’d even suspect not to be in his 40s or above is Adande. It takes a long time for a sportswriter to build a reputation and following, but there haven’t been a lot of writers to get their start this decade. Newspaper sports sections are being further crunched by the fact most people who once might have been aspiring sportswriters are getting a head start on the future and starting out on the web and firing up their own blogs, free of editorial control and deadlines. Bill Simmons once aspired to be the next Ryan, but instead found enough of a following with his “Boston Sports Guy” web site he was picked up by ESPN.com and is now one of the site’s major attractions. Until recently he even had a regular column in ESPN the Magazine – akin to being a regular writer for Sports Illustrated.

Ultimately, the content of sports journalism will come out intact and possibly even expanded. It’s just an open question how much it’ll change in the process.

Idle musings on America’s most watched shows.

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Okay, let’s see if I have this right.

Ignore for a second that the Sports Business Daily has made an article available free if only briefly. This (courtesy Fang’s Bites) is a list of the highest-rated programs so far this year. The only programs to get more than 24.8 million viewers are the Oscars and episodes of American Idol.

(Does anyone know of any other programs to get into that range that come later in the year that aren’t sports?)

So, let’s take the Super Bowl’s rating of 42.0, divide it by its number of viewers (98,732,000), then multiply by the lowest number of viewers on the list to establish the cutoff, and we get a rating of 10.5.

Wait… the lowest-rated sports event on the list is the Ravens-Titans playoff game. Which got a 15.4 rating. Ravens-Dolphins should have also gotten on the list at 15.0, as should have Cardinals-Panthers, Falcons-Cardinals, the Rose Bowl, the college basketball championship game, and depending on relative positioning, the Super Bowl Pregame Show.

Okay, let’s try the conference championship games. Try the AFC Title Game. That last place episode of Idol should have gotten a 13.4. That still doesn’t account for the three NFL Playoff games I mentioned. The NFC title game? By those standards, the lowest rating should be 14.1. Still doesn’t account for Ravens-Dolphins.

Okay, let’s zip down to Ravens-Titans. Well, this makes more sense: a 15 even, evidently with more viewers than Ravens-Dolphins. Still, evidently rating/viewers is not a constant and there’s a bit more that goes into the formulae… which could be a problem if I want to work with that sort of thing.

(Although at the very bottom it says the ratings are Live + Same Day. Are those not the same numbers as the final ratings? How useful is that?)

Let’s look at the big picture.

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First, in order to keep Extra Innings the cable companies swung a deal that gave MLB Network wide distribution, not just on the Sports Entertainment Pack.

Then, Comcast and the NFL spontaneously settled their differences out of the blue, and Comcast agreed to give the NFL Network wide distribution as well. At the same time, Comcast also finally reached an agreement with ESPNU, and that’ll involve wide distribution as well.

Now, in the past week, Comcast has engaged in similar distribution-broadening with the NHL Network, and now NBATV. (Although the NBATV deal was reported on as early as March.)

That doesn’t even mention the end of the impasse between Comcast and Big Ten Network last year; outside the Big Ten footprint it was placed on the Sports Entertainment Pack.

So I have to ask: Is Comcast giving up on its Sports Entertainment Pack?

What’s next? Will CBS College Sports or the FCS networks get bumped up? What about the Tennis Channel? Will new channels like GOL TV get added to make up for the losses? Is ESPN Classic getting bumped down, as was rumored? Could I even have the opportunity to get the mtn. outside that conference’s footprint?
(I’m certainly not complaining about the sudden jolt in options, and the ability to watch all the cool new stuff, especially on NFLN and ESPNU.)

NBA Playoffs First Round Ratings

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Source: Sports Media Watch. This is an experiment. Asterisks indicate rating not reported by SMW; if there is an asterisk and no network, I couldn’t determine whether it was on ESPN or NBATV. I can forgive the lack of NBATV ratings and even the one missing ESPN2 rating. But asterisked ESPN games could get over 2.0 and appear on my year-end roundup! (CLE @ DET Game 3 is most likely to do so and all the others are rather unlikely, and it might not be SMW’s fault, but still.)
EASTERN CONFERENCE FIRST ROUND
DET @ CLE Game 1, ABC, 2.2
DET @ CLE Game 2, TNT, 2.4
CLE @ DET Game 3, ESPN, *
CLE @ DET Game 4, ABC, 3.5

CHI @ BOS Game 1, ESPN, 2.0
CHI @ BOS Game 2, TNT, 2.5
BOS @ CHI Game 3, TNT, 2.2
BOS @ CHI Game 4, ABC, 3.3
CHI @ BOS Game 5, TNT, 2.5
BOS @ CHI Game 6, TNT, 3.5
CHI @ BOS Game 7, TNT, 4.4

PHI @ ORL Game 1, TNT, <2.0
PHI @ ORL Game 2, NBATV, *
ORL @ PHI Game 3, ESPN2, *
ORL @ PHI Game 4, TNT, <2.0
PHI @ ORL Game 5, *
ORL @ PHI Game 6, *

MIA @ ATL Game 1, TNT, 2.2
MIA @ ATL Game 2, TNT, <2.0
ATL @ MIA Game 3, TNT, <2.0
ATL @ MIA Game 4, TNT, 1.8
MIA @ ATL Game 5, TNT, <2.0
ATL @ MIA Game 6, *
MIA @ ATL Game 7, ABC, 2.6

WESTERN CONFERENCE FIRST ROUND
UT @ LAL Game 1, ABC, 3.2
UT @ LAL Game 2, TNT, 2.3
LAL @ UT Game 3, TNT, 2.6
LAL @ UT Game 4, ESPN, 2.2
UT @ LAL Game 5, TNT, 2.4 (SMW has this game listed as Game 4)

NO @ DEN Game 1, TNT, 2.0
NO @ DEN Game 2, TNT, 2.0
DEN @ NO Game 3, ESPN, *
DEN @ NO Game 4, *
NO @ DEN Game 5, TNT, 1.9

DAL @ SA Game 1, ESPN, 1.7
DAL @ SA Game 2, TNT, 2.0
SA @ DAL Game 3, NBATV, *
SA @ DAL Game 4, TNT, <2.0
DAL @ SA Game 5, TNT, 2.2

HOU @ POR Game 1, ESPN, 2.1
HOU @ POR Game 2, NBATV, *
POR @ HOU Game 3, ESPN, *
POR @ HOU Game 4, TNT, 2.1
HOU @ POR Game 5, *
POR @ HOU Game 6, TNT, 2.5

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… another retype. I thought I made myself immune to this bullshit.

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If the Super Bowl were covered the same way the NFL Draft is:

  • It would last two days.
  • It would be covered by TWO networks.
  • It would be preceded by a five-hour pregame show. Same (or less) than now, right? Well, there would be pregame shows on both networks.
  • One of the two networks would have analysis throughout the entire game on a sister channel.
  • There would be cameras inside each team’s locker room which each broadcast could switch to whenever they needed to, AND cameras inside the houses of players who could be called in at any moment to fly to the game and pitch in for either team.
  • There would be in-game interviews with coaches and team executives, and an interview with one player after every play either early or late in the game.
  • Each network’s broadcast team would include an expert who has analyzed every single play each team could possibly use during the game and has drawn up a “mock game” scripting every move of the entire game (or at least the first quarter).

On another note, Al Davis is now officially certifiably insane.

Something I’ve been meaning to say since the news broke.

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There’s been a lot that’s been said about John Madden’s retirement, and I could repeat everything that’s been said about how beloved he was (not so much in my household, but that may be because he made all the obvious things he said obvious) or his alleged man-crush on Brett Favre or his impact on football and the broadcasting profession or his retirement’s impact on NBC, the NFL and its network, and the careers of Cris Collinsworth, Al Michaels, and Frank Caliendo.

But let me just say this about replacement Collinsworth.

NBC was caught off guard by Madden’s retirement, but they were not caught unprepared.

That said, I have to agree with what Curt Smith had to say about Harry Kalas: “[Collinsworth] will succeed [Madden]. None will replace him.”

The post we don’t want ESPN to read

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Two weeks ago I did a post on the biggest sports TV ratings of 2008, which went beyond its Sports Media Watch inspiration to cover every sports rating I could find over 2.5 (well, 3.0 anyway), and a few over 2.0. I mentioned that I had found the original post to be one of the most useful references I had in the new year. How useful could such a post be? What can we learn from that post?

 

We can learn just how devastating the BCS’ move to ESPN really is.

 

It should hardly be surprising to most people who are paying attention that the BCS Title Game is the biggest event on the sporting calendar outside the NFL or Olympics. It’s got a full two-point margin over its biggest competition, college basketball’s National Championship – but that could easily change with the distribution penalty the Title Game will take from being on cable, especially if the economy drives people to ditch cable or satellite and just go with their antennas. If the depression stretches into 2011, I have a feeling, or at least hope, that ESPN will move at least the Title Game to ABC (and keep the Rose Bowl there).

 

But if what happened to the BCS Title Game is the wave of the future – big sporting events moving to cable en masse – it becomes imperative that we find real competition to ESPN. ESPN will now not only have the biggest sports property on cable, but the top two in the BCS and Monday Night Football. You have to scroll down to 7.9 to find a cable sports rating held by anyone other than ESPN, and 5.4 to find a second (still behind an unusually strong Home Run Derby). Throw out the Red Sox-Rays series, as you undoubtedly will have to do with TBS picking up the weaker NLCS this year, and you have to go down to 4.8.

 

The future could be one where ESPN bullies its way to capturing virtually every sport imaginable, marginalizing all but the biggest to smaller channels like ESPN2, and dominating what gets said in the sports conversation. The allegations that it’s guilty of an East Coast/LA bias show that a monopoly is not really something we can trust ESPN with. But no one’s even daring to challenge ESPN’s dominance. Versus was thought to be trying its hand at it… but last week, its president Jamie Davis, interviewed by the Washington Times, denied that ESPN was “what we want to become” and that “we are trying to serve a fan base that we believe has been underserved in the past”. I’m hopeful that Versus’ prior attempts to take baseball or the NFL reflect that there’s more to this than meets the eye, but I’m not optimistic. Other than ESPN and sport-specific networks, the only other cable networks to even appear on this list are TBS and TNT. We’re in trouble if the closest thing we have to competition for ESPN doesn’t even see itself as a sports network, and the biggest non-ESPN sports network doesn’t see itself as competing with ESPN.

 

Unfortunately, there are pretty slim pickings for a network looking to establish itself as a competitor to ESPN. Aside from the BCS and MNF (and ESPN won’t let go of the latter without a fight with all the NFL programming it has), there’s not much in the way of big events for a cable network to pick out, and before the BCS deal it may have seemed that whatever network controlled the NFL cable contract controlled the world of sports. The NCAA and the major sports are under pressure from Congress to keep their big events on broadcast; the only reason the BCS could shore up with ESPN was because it’s not under the banner of the NCAA, and the non-BCS conferences have been talking about pressing antitrust charges against it anyway.

 

The only options may be those opened up by the BCS deal, namely the Masters, the Triple Crown races, some high-profile college football games like BCS conference championships and the Capitol One Bowl, and the Final Four and earlier rounds of the NCAA Tournament. I don’t know what their relative commitment to broadcast is; the Masters will probably stay on broadcast for a while, and the Cap One could bolt to ESPN at any moment. But ESPN’s second highest rated MNF game got an 8.7, and the above list consists of the only events I could think of that would top even the fourth highest rated game (7.9). The highest rated of the bunch is an SEC Championship at 9.3 that was an effective BCS semifinal, which you can’t count on; is the Cap One Bowl at 9.1. Even 80% of the 14.4 the BCS Title Game received would be an 11.5, two full ratings points ahead (almost 2.5 over the Cap One). (You might be able to throw the Daytona 500 into the mix as well, but THIS year, it fell below 10.0 if my memory serves me correctly…

 

(There’s the Olympics, but the Olympics are still legitimately valuable for the broadcast networks.)

 

The prospects are even bleaker for long-term competition. ESPN has two networks, a connection with a broadcast network, the top sports news web site, a nightly sports highlight show, an international arm, a web-streaming site, a mobile deal and mobile-TV channel, a radio network, a sports news network, a classic sports network that serves as an overflow channel, a college sports network, and a Spanish-language network. To create a compelling bid for just about any sports entity and to truly be seen as an equal with ESPN, you need to be able to compete with almost all those revenue streams.

 

Fox may be the best positioned with Final Score, News Corporation’s international presence, Fox Sports Radio, Fox Soccer Channel, Fox College Sports, and Fox Sports en Espanol. Indeed Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of most of the regional sports networks was made with creating competition for ESPN in mind, and its failure may have scared off Versus, but what was supposed to be Fox Sports Net’s strength – local programming – turned into its weakness, as many regions pre-empted national programming. The Big 12 and Pac-10 tried to abandon ESPN for a time and put their top cable football games on FSN and TBS, but it only led to people making fun of them for being on FSN. Now FSN has been selling networks like there’s no tomorrow – Chicago, the Bay Area, and New England have all gone from FSN markets to Comcast SportsNet markets, and that’s not counting the ones sold to third parties like FSN New York (now MSG+) or the ones sold to Liberty Media in the DirecTV deal.

 

Ideally, competition for ESPN would reduce the need and demand for ESPN2, by moving some events that would be on ESPN2 to ESPN. The four major networks all have some online presence, though their streaming capacity varies, as does CNN and Time Warner with SI, USA Today, Sporting News, Yahoo Sports, and AOL Sports/Fanhouse. Yahoo in particular may already have the most popular non-ESPN sports site, so if for some unfathomable reason you don’t already have such a presence, shacking up with Yahoo might be a good approach. (NBC is learning of the perils of launching your own site at too late a date.) Alternately, embracing blogs can help with marketing your brand. An international presence is one of the biggest obstacles unless you’re Fox. For radio, Fox Sports Radio and Sporting News Radio are out there, and Westwood One may be an actual competitor for sports rights (which helps CBS, which owns it). CBS has a top-quality college sports network as well, while NBC would be best positioned other than Fox to launch a Spanish-language sports network alongside Telemundo. (There’s a part of me that wonders if the acquisition of what’s now Universal Sports was made with an eye to becoming a competitor to ESPN.)

 

Of the above, I think the most important aspect may be the sports highlight show. It may not get a lot of eyeballs, especially in the age of the Internet, but it helps further that notion that you’re a major player. Even if you get the same number of eyeballs as ESPN for big events, people might not associate you with being a leader in sports. Besides, it’s with time on SportsCenter that ESPN blackmails lesser leagues into joining them, or at least that’s the perception. But you need something to promote. You need a reason for sports fans to come back to your network again and again.

 

Ignoring the NFL, and assuming the BCS moves back to ABC and other big events stay on broadcast, a good way to establish your presence is to have at least an even split of MLB, the NBA, and NASCAR with ESPN. All three are held by ESPN, but all three also have alternate contracts with TBS or TNT, alternate contracts that make them at least equals to ESPN in at least one respect (one LCS, one Conference Finals, and most of the biggest cable races not held at the Brickyard, like the second Daytona race). But even if the Turner networks were to start a sports highlight show and turn one of its networks into a sports hub, they wouldn’t be convincing people to keep coming back again and again nearly as often as ESPN. It’s college sports and other relatively lesser sports that are ESPN’s real hook (not to mention shows like ATH and PTI).

 

For a network to hold up in comparison to ESPN, at least in my view, it needs to at least tie ESPN by comparison. For all practical purposes, it needs to come close to tying ESPN in the ratings. Outside of the NFL, the largest cable sports ratings in 2008 were:

  • 7.9: ALCS Game 7 (TBS)
  • 5.5: Home Run Derby (ESPN)
  • 5.4: ALCS Game 6 (TBS)
  • 4.8: Western Conference Finals Game 4 (TNT)
  • 4.7: ALCS Game 5 (TBS)
  • 4.6: Western Conference Finals Game 5 (TNT)
  • 4.5: Champs Sports Bowl (ESPN)

There’s a pretty small list of events with ratings 4.5 and above. I didn’t like the move of one LCS to cable, partly because only one LCS was moving there. I might have been okay with both LCSes moving to cable, but Fox needs some sort of presence in the playoffs like ABC does, and you see above that the LCSes can be a more significant property than the NBA’s conference finals. Before the BCS deal, a cable sports rating higher than 5.5 or so may have been sacrilege.

 

You also see it driven home that not only is Turner the closest thing to competition to ESPN in terms of events, the three networks combine for every cable sports rating over 3.4 in 2008. (Their high ranking may be because the closest thing they have to a connection to a broadcast network is the CW.) FSN and Versus do not even register on the chart at all, failing to break 2.0 nationally even once – but the list does provide a possible template for which sports to go after. First, they need to keep up with ESPN in the acquisition of big events that are currently on broadcast – the ones like the Masters and (what I think is likeliest) the Triple Crown races. In addition to those and the ones listed alongside them above, the US Open in golf, baseball’s All-Star Game, the World Cup, and the Pro Bowl (which will be on ESPN in 2010) should all be targets.

 

On a larger scale, though, the above list of events that are already on cable provides a basic framework to go after. Simply put: NFL, MLB, NBA. More specifically, the cable NFL package (which I explicitly excluded from this list), Home Run Derby, and the baseball and NBA playoffs. Choose at least one to start building your empire. The easiest picking would probably be baseball, as ESPN is identified too much with its NFL coverage and TNT is identified too much with its NBA coverage. Pick out at least one of the ESPN weekly packages for baseball, plus the Home Run Derby, plus at least a piece of TBS’ playoff coverage. TBS’ Sunday afternoon games are almost a complete flop.

 

There isn’t much need to go after much else, because taking something away from Turner creates a nice balance between ESPN, Turner, and what I’ll call EK, for ESPN Killer. As long as you seize the Home Run Derby and, if necessary, at least one LCS, you can throw ESPN whatever’s left of the bone you want. And it’s very much within the grasp of Versus to follow through on this in my opinion.

 

Let’s continue down the list below 4.5:

  • 4.3: Spurs/Hornets Game 7 (TNT)
  • 4.3: Eastern Conference Finals Game 5 (ESPN)
  • 4.3: Allstate 400 at the Brickyard (ESPN)
  • 4.3: Miami (FL) @ Florida (ESPN)
  • 4.2: Eastern Conference Finals Game 6 (ESPN)
  • 4.2: USC @ Oregon State (ESPN)
  • 4.1: Western Conference Finals Game 1 (TNT)
  • 4.1: Tennessee @ UCLA, Labor Day (ESPN)
  • 4.1: ALCS Game 1 (TBS)
  • 4.0: Eastern Conference Finals Game 4 (ESPN)
  • 4.0: Emerald Bowl (ESPN)
  • 3.9: Pocono 500 (TNT)
  • 3.9: Alabama @ Georgia (ESPN)
  • 3.9: Angels/Red Sox Game 3 (TBS)
  • 3.9: Meineke Car Care Bowl (ESPN)
  • 3.9: Alamo Bowl (ESPN)
  • 3.9: Holiday Bowl (ESPN)
  • 3.8: NBA All-Star Game (TNT)
  • 3.8: Coke Zero 400 (TNT)
  • 3.8: Pennsylvania 500 (ESPN)
  • 3.8: ALCS Game 2 (TBS)
  • 3.8: ALCS Game 4 (TBS)

Highlights of this relatively small section include the second NBA contract – the one with ESPN’s half of the conference finals – plus both NASCAR contracts, the NBA All-Star Game, and both regular season and postseason college football games. Only one NASCAR contract and the NBA All-Star Game are on Turner. The rest are on cable.

 

I’ll get to college football in a second. It goes without saying you want a piece of that action, preferably the top cable contract (not second fiddle like FSN and Versus get with the Big 12 and Pac-10). Throw out the regular season college football, and you want to limit ESPN to half of the second NBA contract, both NASCAR contracts, and bowl games. The bowl games can be thrown out as well, but if both LCSes move to cable, the contract that includes the second LCS comes into play here.

 

Basically, claim one, and make sure you have no less than one less of what ESPN has. As Turner’s only presence is one of the NASCAR contracts, you probably have to take on ESPN directly here.

 

I’m going to start my discussion of college with the regular-season conferences, which take care of your needs in football and basketball, so the consideration of balance needs to be made with regards to both. In football, the two “weakling” conferences are the ACC and Big East. In basketball, the two “weaklings” are the Big 12 and Pac-10. Claiming one of each leads to the obvious conclusion that you need to claim one of the remaining two conferences, the SEC or Big 10.

 

It’s been suggested that recent megacontracts signed with the latter two conferences will give them an edge over the field, especially in college football, so signing a deal with both the Big 12 and Pac-10 and thinking that counts just as well towards your three will lead to a perception you’re signing with two runts, or positioning yourself as a “West Coast network”, especially in conjunction with the Mountain West. I’m looking at you, Versus. But there are major problems going on here. ESPN doesn’t want to give up the Big East because they’re in Bristol near UConn, they don’t want to give up the ACC because they don’t want to lose Duke-UNC, they don’t want to give up the Big Ten and lose Ohio State-Michigan (even though that technically airs on ABC), and you just missed the boat on a hefty 15-year deal with the SEC. Sports on TV as we know it could be dying by the time that deal ends.

 

The Big 12 and Pac-10 already play a basketball series against one another, so why not split the difference on the other two series, ACC/Big 10 and SEC/Big East? That means the other two conferences are either the SEC and ACC, or the Big 10 and Big East. Whatever you go with, you need to have the first pick of cable networks for at least one conference, and the more bones you throw ESPN the more you need to build your empire even further to compensate.

 

(The Mountain West could become a BCS conference soon, but the reasons they moved to Versus and the mind-boggling lack of flex scheduling suggest they don’t want Versus to develop the regimentation of time slots in football ESPN has, which is probably required by having so many conferences. That could cut it out of the discussion, and the Mountain West is generally in the lower portion of the BCS conferences anyway.)

 

Non-BCS conferences are also an important part of the picture, but I’ll get to that later.

 

What about bowls? FSN’s not going after any, that’s for sure, because of local hockey and NBA coverage. Versus doesn’t want bowls because they want “total immersion” or some such malarkey, but it seems to me that the Las Vegas Bowl – top-line Mountain West against a team from another Versus conference, the Pac-10 – would be perfect for them, serving as a continuation of the “immersion” Versus already provides for those two conferences. Turner has zero presence at the bowls, meaning ESPN dominates the bowl landscape. 23 of 35 bowls, nearly two-thirds, are on ESPN (two more on ABC, the BCS Title Game to air there next year, and three more to move to ESPN in the form of the BCS, bringing the total to over 80%); ESPN is the chief beneficiary of the proliferation of bowls. Not all bowls are equal, but sadly, ESPN tends to lump in even its top bowls with bowls like the Independence Bowl or New Orleans Bowl in its “Bowl Week” promotion.

 

I averaged the 2005-6 through 2007-8 ratings of all the bowls and came up with these average ratings for the non-BCS bowls (courtesy here):

  1. Capitol One (6.7)
  2. Chick-fil-A (5.0)
  3. Alamo (4.7)
  4. Holiday (4.5)
  5. Cotton (3.63)
  6. Liberty (3.56)
  7. Gator (3.47)
  8. Emerald (3.41)
  9. Outback (3.37)
  10. Meineke Car Care (3.04)
  11. Champs Sports (2.96)
  12. Music City (2.8)
  13. Independence (2.6)
  14. Sun (2.4)
  15. Motor City (2.32)
  16. Las Vegas (2.28)
  17. Armed Forces (2.10)
  18. Hawaii (2.07)
  19. Papajohns.com (1.97)
  20. New Mexico (1.89)
  21. Humanitarian (1.58)
  22. GMAC (1.56)
  23. Insight/New Orleans (tie) (1.55)
  24. International (1.45)
  25. Poinsettia (1.447)
  26. Texas (1.3)

Some notes: The EagleBank and St. Petersburg bowls only started this year and aren’t counted. Ratings for the Texas and Insight bowls are depressed by being on NFL Network. Ratings for the Outback Bowl are depressed by airing at 11 AM ET (8 AM PT) against many other bowls, and it deserves better ratings given its conference tie-ins and payout money. Fixing its gametime problem, either by moving to a saner hour or earlier in the week, should be a top priority for the Outback the next time its contract comes up for renewal.

 

And a shocking number of the highest-rated bowls are on cable.

 

The broadcast non-BCS bowls are the Cap One on ABC, the Gator and Sun on CBS, and the Cotton on Fox. The Chick-fil-A, Alamo, and Holiday bowls all beat all the broadcast bowls except the Cap One, and the Liberty Bowl beats both CBS bowls. The position of the Sun on broadcast despite iffy ratings is probably because of the potential of Notre Dame going there, which also explains why the Gator and Sun are on broadcast instead of better conference tie-ins. (Both bowls have their potential Big 12 tie-ins ranking behind the Holiday, and ditto for the Sun’s Pac-10 . When the Sun picks a Big 12 team it picks behind the Alamo, and the Gator’s ACC pick is behind the Chick-fil-A… which itself picks its SEC pick after the Outback.)

 

Based on these ratings, the bowl payouts, and more than anything else the quality of the conference tie-ins, I came up with a ranking of the non-BCS bowls:

  1. Capitol One
  2. Cotton
  3. Outback
  4. Chick-fil-A
  5. Holiday
  6. Gator
  7. Alamo
  8. Champs Sports
  9. Sun
  10. Liberty
  11. Music City
  12. Emerald
  13. Meineke Car Care
  14. Insight
  15. Independence
  16. Las Vegas
  17. Motor City
  18. GMAC
  19. Humanitarian
  20. Hawaii
  21. Poinsettia
  22. Armed Forces
  23. Papajohns.com
  24. International
  25. New Mexico
  26. New Orleans
  27. St. Petersburg
  28. EagleBank
  29. Texas

I identified several subdivisions where the comparison was closer than others. If you’re running EK, you’re paying attention to this list of conference tie-ins, but you’re ALSO paying attention to the above list of TV ratings. The latter is what you really want, but you can turn the former into the latter if you try. Assuming the broadcast/cable status quo holds, that means, from a TV rating perspective, an emphasis on the Alamo, Chick-fil-A, and Holiday. Throw the Outback on there, since its conference tie-ins warrant it, and the Champs Sports after its gerbonkers ratings this year. I’m tempted to add the Liberty as well for its ratings and position on the tie-in list, but that’s opening up a can of worms. Of the first five, claim two – and make sure at least one more is taken from ESPN if one of the bowls you claim is the Champs Sports. (Replace the Champs Sports with the Liberty if you want.)

 

So we consider the Liberty (or Champs Sports), we throw in the Emerald and the Music City to fill the gap, and throw in the Meineke Car Care bowl as well. Split them half and half? Maybe. Consider, too, though, that the Insight would probably get better ratings if it were off NFL Network. Fairness dictates you also consider the Independence and Las Vegas bowls, and may-y-ybe the Motor City Bowl. Everything else is comparatively minor and not worth worrying about, but it might still be worth going after anyway.

 

(Note that most people don’t see it this way. A matchup between two BCS conferences is all they see that’s valuable. The Las Vegas Bowl is valued much lower than this by most people. The Pac-10 is considered to deserve better for its fourth or fifth line. The Mountain West actually does deserve better for its first – though it would suddenly make some sense on the off chance the MWC joins the BCS. Why the Liberty Bowl ranks so highly is beyond me, but tradition probably has a lot to do with it.)

 

Look at the ratings chart. By seizing only the bowls that matter, you’ve pretty much guaranteed yourself that your bowl coverage will almost exclusively (maybe one exception, two if you’re unlucky) get ratings large enough to make my end-of-year chart. Some bowls are better for this than others; I recommend getting bowls that align with your own conference tie-ins. If you’re going the SEC/ACC route, pick up the Chick-fil-A bowl and either the Holiday, Outback, Champs Sports, or Liberty Bowl (or a combination of two of those, preferably not Champs Sports AND Liberty). The Alamo might be an option as well if you have a tie-in with the Big 12. For the second tier, pick up the Music City Bowl and one other; if you pick up the Pac-10, that one other should probably be the Emerald. If you pick up the Big 12 instead, in addition to whatever you do pick the Independence Bowl is a good investment.

 

If you go with the Big 10 and Big East, a lot depends on your third conference. Align with the Big 12, and the Alamo becomes a must. Even without it that and the Holiday are good choices, though the Outback is an option as well. In the second tier the Meineke Car Care bowl is almost a must-have, just to be sure you have a Big East bowl; the Big East’s other non-broadcast bowl tie-ins fall below the cut line. The Champs Sports becomes a must if you’re aligned with the Big 12, unless ESPN throws you an SEC or ACC bone (unless you’re with Conference USA, as we’ll get to later); otherwise the Emerald Bowl is also an option. Pick up the Big 12 and the Insight is a good investment, maybe even imperative (they’ll certainly be begging to be taken off NFL Network), as well (the Big 10 and Big 12 have a lot of bowl tie-ins with each other). With the Big Ten, the Motor City becomes very interesting indeed.

 

A note on non-BCS conferences, because if you have just three BCS conferences ESPN can still push itself as the leader in college sports (and you can’t launch a college sports channel to compete with ESPNU). Non-BCS conferences become especially important with the splitting of the BCS conferences, because they could well get more play as gap-fillers. (Especially if you launch a competitor to ESPN2.) In football, there are four non-BCS conferences that matter: the Mountain West, WAC, MAC, and Conference USA. The Sun Belt is too crappy to matter, although taking away one conference like the Mountain West to Versus arguably means we should put the Sun Belt back in to replace it. But before splitting the difference we need to consider the very different scenario in college basketball.

 

The goal in college basketball, in my view, is to render BracketBusters meaningless outside of what we might call the “low-majors” or even “minors”. A comparison of four-year average RPI shows that, despite the lack of distinction I make in my annual “mid-major conference”, there is a distinction between one “higher” class of mid-major conference, and most of the other conferences, not as large as the gap between the majors and the mid-majors, but significant nonetheless – and in fact there’s a definite spectrum, where some conferences are fairly objectively better than others, even if the rankings of the conferences in-between are far from clear.

 

The Mountain West, mired on Versus, doesn’t participate in BracketBusters. Is that because they want to see themselves as a major conference, or because ESPN is excluding a conference that doesn’t have a deal with them? If someone took away enough mid-majors, you wouldn’t want ESPN to put conferences into BracketBusters far ahead of the rest of the field simply because they had a deal with them, would you? That would appear to be favoritism.

 

Three conferences in particular are strong enough to occasionally approach the status of the major conferences. I dare you to find a conference since the shake-up of Conference USA to finish first among the mid-majors not named the Missouri Valley, the Mountain West, and the Atlantic 10. The Mountain West is mired on Versus and ESPN sometimes seems unnaturally obsessed with the A-10 in mid-major terms, leaving the Valley for EK – although after several years of the Valley occasionally finishing ahead of the major conferences in conference RPI, they finished behind the A-10 last year and similarly have only one serious at-large contender this year, so they may be on the decline.

 
The other true mid-majors are Conference USA, the WAC, the WCC, the CAA, the MAC, and the Horizon League. The Sun Belt is in a weird in-between state between the mid-majors and the low-majors, though they’re closer to the low majors. Obviously, those six should be split half and half, but use caution. Conference USA and the WCC are both more valuable than the middle-pack teams in their league would suggest, because of the presence of major-caliber programs Memphis and Gonzaga respectively. (C-USA actually has a very slight lead over the A-10, in fact.) We’ve seen just how much Gonzaga adds to the value of the WCC to ESPN. Taking at least one of those is imperative, even if you otherwise discount the value of the mid-majors, and no way ESPN is letting you take both.
On the flip side, there’s a danger in putting both West Coast leagues on one network, especially paired with the Mountain West (the MWC and WAC together is enough of a concern for football), and getting branded as a “West Coast” network. So: either C-USA and WAC or WCC and MAC, with the CAA and Horizon split whichever way works out (although the Horizon is on average worse than the other mid-majors, except for Butler which may be joining Memphis/Gonzaga as major programs). The remaining conferences are like minor bowls: go after them, but don’t make them a priority.
(While you’re at it, pick up that “College Basketball Invitational” oddity to make it stronger – they’re trying to be an NIT competitor, not the third-tier tournament – and balance ESPN’s coverage of the NIT.)
Those are the important parts. But there are other things you should keep in mind if you really want to create a viable competitor to ESPN:
  • Golf often gets forgotten in the “major sports”, with all the talk of the modern Big Four (NFL, NBA, MLB, NASCAR) and the two college sports, but its ratings are on par with any other, even for certain non-majors Tiger doesn’t attend, and it even gets coverage on par from ESPN and others, even if it sometimes seems Tiger-centric. The whole sport has been moving to Golf Channel in recent years on all levels, increasing the importance of the majors. ESPN just claimed the entire British Open for its cable network, and the other majors could follow; even for those majors that stay on broadcast, coverage of the first two rounds is important. Split them half and half, and make sure it’s not a situation where you have two first-two-rounds contracts and ESPN has two whole-tournament contracts.
  • The NHL and IRL (along with tennis) are significantly ahead of most of the other detritus, like MLS and the WNBA, that make up the high-minor sports. These sorts of things are the mid-majors, and both of these two in particular are ESPN’s bread and butter. But ESPN may be smarting from losing the IRL and the NHL may be smarting from losing ESPN. We can allow ESPN to reclaim one, but not both.
  • Soccer has a lot of levels and competitions, and ideally there should be plenty for you. In fact true soccer connosieurs have plenty of options for their soccer palate beyond ESPN, including Fox Soccer Channel, which currently has US rights to the English Premier League and Italy’s Serie A. ESPN is making a solid play for the Premier League, and it may appear that EK’s best approach is the third European major league, the Spanish league. But both Spain and the German Bundesliga have their outpost on GOL TV, and those who have it, from what I’ve read, like it far better than Fox Soccer; the problem is it has limited distribution, and because of a bilingual gimmick is often consiged to Spanish-language packages. I don’t think it’s owned by a larger conglomerate at the moment, so trying to hitch your wagon to it and trying to grow its distribution might be a good idea. (ESPN was once rumored to be turning ESPN Classic into its own soccer network.) If all else (including, if need be, France or Mexico) fails, there’s always MLS.
  • But really, all these pale in comparison to the major soccer competitions worldwide: the World Cup, the European Championship (the title game of which, which the US has no stake in, registered on my chart, thus more than doubling almost any MLS game), and the UEFA Champions League. And all three run on ESPN. That needs to change.
  • Tennis is the same as golf. ESPN just triumphantly claimed all four of tennis’ Grand Slams, inheriting the US Open after USA pulled out of sports. The US Open considered an offer from Versus, which would have been great for Versus, bad for the USTA, and good for anyone looking for an ESPN competitor. (Now that we know Versus is the wrong place to look for one, it’s just all bad.) As with golf, split the difference.
  • Other sports: MMA? (UFC runs on Spike and sister promotion WEC runs on Versus. Various competitors keep springing up.) Horse racing? (NBC runs two Triple Crown races and ABC runs one, while ESPN runs the Breeder’s Cup.) Poker? (Look up Poker on Wikipedia and, along with ESPN’s World Series of Poker, the World Poker Tour is credited with poker’s rise in popularity. After getting placed on odd networks like the Travel Channel and GSN, it’s now on once-ESPN competitor FSN.) Lacrosse? (Split between ESPN’s outdoor MLL and the indoor, and barely covered stateside, NLL.) “Action sports”? Outdoor programming like fishing? Rodeo? (The PBR already runs on Versus.) Volleyball? Bowling? Cricket? Rugby? Don’t forget those high minors of MLS, WNBA (probably hitched to the NBA), and Arena Football (which ESPN partially owns right now and which is collapsing anyway).

This is really more important than any other consideration right now: it’s even harder to rise up to the level of ESPN right now. ESPN will stumble through the recession like any other business, but to try and start a competitor from scratch may be suicide. In retrospect, the last glimmer of a window for at least several years, maybe ever, for a competitor to ESPN may have closed this past fall with the SEC and BCS deals; for there to not even be a network on the rise, the closest things being FSN and Versus (and Turner if they wanted to become a full-fledged sports destination), does not bode well for any real challenger to ESPN to show up anytime soon. The one saving grace is that an ESPN stumbling through recession is an ESPN with less money to spend on rights fees, but chances are a potential ESPN competitor is hemmoraging money as well, or doesn’t have any and is finding it hard to get any starting capital. Although it’ll claim it’s not a monopoly because of the existence of the broadcast networks and competing sports sites, all things considered, it’s ESPN’s world and we’re all just paying the rent, and realistically, that’s not changing in the near future.