In the middle of a muddy field elsewhere in Connecticut, three men met with big dreams and no pre-planned plan to come up with a deal that would change the overall landscape of college athletics. At the time, Michael Trangis and Bill Duffy, the daring Big East Conference, needed a megaphone to announce the budding league’s arrival, and Bill Rasmussen, owner of the bold new round-the-clock sports network, needed content. The pairing proved enchanting, as Big East and ESPN grew up in full swing, each legitimizing the other.
Rasmussen put so many ESPN eggs in the college basket (a ball) that made perfect sense. Not only did it offer a lot of games to fill your airtime. Months before, it was the 1979 National Title game, which featured Magic Johnson Michigan State Versus Larry Bird Indianarated 24.1, an estimated 35 million tunings to watch the epic showdown.
Men’s college basketball was the gold of television.
It’s impossible to pinpoint a single moment when things turned out, when college basketball became an afterthought for college football. It’s like a constant stream of events - added the SEC Arkansas In 1990, the Pennsylvania state jump into the Big Ten in the same year; First Conference Football Championship match in 1992; College GameDay first appeared on the site in 1993, with Notre Dame Reverse Florida; The launch of the BCS Championship game in 1998 - which prompted people to stop thinking of college football as a regional sport, and instead view it as a money-making empire.
“Maybe five years ago, people would say the rating between football and everything else was 75-25; now it’s closer to 90-10.” “This is the water we swim in.”
Swimming upstream and how to navigate the choppy waters prompted a conference call Wednesday morning between Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren and the league’s basketball coaches, several sources said. the athlete. Described as more intriguing than controversial, the call gave coaches a chance to ask questions about their concerns, not only about the new TV deal, but the future addition of USC And the University of California. “There is a lot of uncertainty, and the more uncertainty there is, it makes people uncomfortable,” says one coach. Warren didn’t have many concrete answers—there wasn’t a secret bombshell about the expansion, for example—but the concerns voiced by Big Ten coaches aren’t dissimilar to questions from many people interested in college basketball.
running games
Life was simple: turn on the TV, tune in to the bunny ears and choose from a few channels to find a game. Back in November 1980, with the advent of ESPN, a stunned columnist wrote of the abundance of televised basketball games: “When the air finally gets off the ball at the end of March, ESPN will have run 130 games, USA 70, and NBC 14 national broadcasts and 10 ECAC games.
Last season, ESPN alone streamed more than 3,400 games - 2,600 of which were on broadcast platforms ESPN3, SEC Network+, ACCNX, and ESPN+.
“Live is here to stay,” says an insider.
Live sports streaming platforms are demanding. (Michael Wade/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
But the real essence of the broadcasting problem is simple: How much money are people willing to pay to watch sports? College basketball is asked to be the guinea pig to answer that question. There are only many actual linear broadcast windows available. The sheer size of the hoop stock requires that some games go digital. For example, the new Big Ten/Fox deal stipulates that 47 men’s games in the regular season (32 conference and 15 non-conference) will be played by Peacock compared to just eight football matches. (Peacock Premium - which you need to watch live sports - is free with some cable providers. Otherwise, the price is $4.99 per month.)
This is not hideous. Each of the 14-member schools played 20 conference games last year, so you’re looking at maybe two league games for each school on Peacock. Indeed, a league insider insisted that none of these “skys are falling” as some people fear. Last season, ESPN broadcast 30 games of the Big Ten on one of its networks. Now Fox/FS1 will likely pick up many of the Saturday games that were on ESPN, and CBS is filling in the rest.
In fact, many people are less concerned about this than others, remembering the fear people had with ESPN during the 1980s and the Big Ten in the 2000s. “We all survived,” says an insider. “It’s a change, and I get it. Change is scary. But this isn’t the sky falling people think it is.”
However, there are some logical questions. “What happens if we add two, four or six more teams? What does that look like?” Says one of the coaches. “The number we got is 20 percent on Peacock, but does that change?” The secondary question to that is who gets which games? There will be eclecticism, with networks taking the top marks, but live broadcasts are meant to be a money maker and the way you get consumers to go live is to give them something worth watching. “If they put Duke-Carolina on something other than traditional TV, would people pay to watch it? ‘I think they would,” says a former conference official. ‘But are people paying for North Carolina State Wake Forest? Probably not.’
If we take into the void, then nothing terrible. However, most sports fans don’t watch a single sport or conference. So maybe you get Peacock (and the Premier League bundle) for free, but what if you also want to watch other college hoops games on ESPN+ ($9.99 per month)? Or you want to watch locally NFL Games on NFL+ ($4.99/month) and Thursday Night games on Amazon Prime ($8.99/month)? What if you were one too MLS A fan and need an Apple TV - or do you just want to see Ted Lasso ($4.99/month)? Watching UEFA Champions League football means subscribing to Paramount Plus ($4.99/month). Or how about you love Big Ten lacrosse and need B1G+ ($14.95 a month for the entire conference pass, $9.95 a month for an individual school or $39.99 for all the lax)? And then, of course, there’s Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney+.
The simple choice, of course, is to get smart and bundle, and third-party streaming apps (YouTube TV or Sling, for example) can help, but that’s a lot easier for the younger population than the older ones. “I get it,” says one Big Ten coach. You look at your iPad and think, ‘Wait, why do I have all these apps? What do I do?’ So for the average fan, it will take some time. They’ll wait until there’s a game they really want to see. ”
However, coaches’ concern is not limited to fans’ eyeballs. “What about the recruits?” Another boss says. “When they have to start looking for toys, what happens?”
scheduling
Coaches like to control just about everything and anything they can get their hands on. But there are two things they stick to in particular: their list and their schedule. These two things together, more than any other analysis, will determine the fate of the team (and, by extension, the coach). Get good players, play good games, make the NCAA championship and keep your job. But as leagues continue to inflate their basketball numbers, the schedule for basketball becomes more complex.
The Big Ten already plays 20 league games. What happens when USC and UCLA join? It undoubtedly makes the conference stronger, but if these additions require a schedule of 24 (or more) games, it leaves less wiggle room for the good non-conference games. The selection committee has long assumed de facto that the strictness of a non-conference list is important in public bidding choices. Load up a selection of teams ranked in 200 and 300 and accept your chances goodbye.
More specifically, the coaches pressured Warren about the future of both The Big Ten / ACC Challenge and Japhet Games (with Big East). The former becomes a mixed mess due to the various TV rights holders, while the latter is difficult to navigate when one of the soon-to-be 16-team conference attempts to align with an 11-member league.
Warren did not provide immediate answers to either (Tell the source the athlete that an extension of the Japhet Games through 2023 is under negotiation), but he told the coaches that both were under consideration.
“It will dictate more about who you play, and the illusion of control versus reality,” says one coach. “And people don’t like it.”
expansion
This is the tremor under everything. Further expansion, in the Big Ten or elsewhere, increases the complexity of scheduling and travel, and reshapes linear TV windows and the share of games bound for streaming. “This is the hardest part of this meeting,” the Big Ten coach said. “No one knows what the future will look like.” If Warren had any ideas, he didn’t participate in the conference call.
But odds are good that if any tournaments are going to add a difference, it will be sooner rather than later. Pac-12, Big 12, Notre Dame and Big East all need to renegotiate deals in the next two years - the Big East, set to finally start, will open a renegotiation window in February 2024 (Big 12 just jumped PAC-12). “This is the time to increase,” says one administrator. “You want to get your ducks in a row, so when you go to the networks, you’re offering the most attractive package.” “Attractive packages are no longer centered on TV markets. Norman, Oklahoma, doesn’t bring many eyeballs to the SEC, but Urgent Oklahoma Bring a trademark. The #1 college football program watched is located in Columbus, Ohio; Ohio StateAn allure that has nothing to do with its market. “It’s all about the brand,” says one insider.
There is, of course, only one league in which college basketball drives decisions. The Great East has been relatively purposeful and rational in its expansionist decisions. Even as it expanded its footprint with the addition of Creighton, Xavier and Butler, it chose like-minded schools focused on basketball that, along with DePaul And the market, a job. Not slated to meet until November, League members recently held a call — not to discuss immediate expansion or any expansion, for that matter — but just so everyone can touch the base and discuss the changes that are going on around them. Several sources say the association has no schools in sight, nor anything that comes close to a definitive business plan.
But if we’re talking about the brands that could give Big East a slice at the bargaining table, there’s just one to keep in mind: Gonzaga.
This seems illogical and unlikely due to the commute from the Zags’ Spokane campus to the epicenter of the Great New York earthquake. But 40 years ago, meeting in a muddy field seemed an inconsequential and unlikely place to change the college sports landscape.
Sometimes deviations from the norm happen out of necessity. And sometimes it works too.
(Top image: M. Anthony Nesmith/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)