If
you’ve been looking for ways to pass the time on Saturdays, look no more. The
college football season has started and our institutions of higher learning are
papering the TV walls with their games, offering a buffet whose end is tough to
spot.
On September 3, the season’s first weekend
date, 28 games were on the television schedule in the Phoenix area, beginning
with a 4:30 a.m. contest from Ireland pitting Boston College against Georgia
Tech and ending with Northern Arizona versus Arizona State, which started at 8
p.m. and ended around midnight. Last Saturday, the 10th, topped that
figure with 40. And this in the
out-of-the-way, lower-left-corner on the country, where traffic of all kinds is
sparser than normal for our land.
And as the TV pitchmen say, “Wait!
There’s more!” The Saturday games were in addition to ones that were aired on
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday that first week, and there were three more on
Sunday. The sport that used to be reserved for Saturdays so as not to interfere
with classroom schedules now has regularly slopped into Wednesday and Thursday
nights, and the colleges’ “gentleman’s agreement” to leave Friday nights to the
prepsters has been trashed. These days, when a TV network phones an athletics
director to inquire if his school’s team could fill an empty air slot, the
answer is likely to be “Yes!” before the day or time is revealed. When you’ve
in showbiz, the box office (in whatever form) calls the shots.
The subservience of academics to entertainment
shows up in other ways. The football season starts before classes begin at many
schools, so some freshmen play a game or two before they’ve attended a class,
and these same kids can complete a full season of eligibility before they’ve
earned a credit. Basketball season starts later, so prodigies at least have to
show up for one semester, but many blow off the second before heading for the
pros in this one-and-done era.
If you’re older than 40 you can
recall when college football was a limited TV treat. The NCAA controlled it and
parceled it out stingily, allowing a national game or two of a fall Saturday
and/or a few regional games. After several evolutions its policy was governed
by a rule that limited any school’s appearances to six in a two-season period.
In 1981, though, the U’s of Oklahoma and
Georgia sued, asserting that the practice violated Federal anti-trust laws, and
after the case rattled around the courts for three years the Supreme Court
agreed with their claim. That opened the box, with consequences that quickly
went beyond the confines of the tube. In 2004, 20 years later, Wayne Duke, the
longtime Big Ten commissioner and one of the NCAA’s original employees,
declared that “the state of college football today is the direct result of that
decision, including the arms-race mentality, conference realignments, money
pressures and the dilution of the rules and regulations.” Nothing that’s happened in the 12 years since
in any way negates that judgement.
Wide-open televising certainly has
caused the money side of college sports to mushroom, and with it the stakes for
staying on top. Realignment has scrambled traditional conference makeups and
put each of the five so-called “Power Conferences” into the TV business
directly. Four of them (the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and PAC-12) now have their own
television networks and the fifth (the ACC) will go on air with theirs in 2019.
Each of the 14 SEC members nets a
reported $37.6 million a year from their league’s network, and the 11 oldest
Big Ten schools are right behind at $32 m per (new members Rutgers, Maryland
and Nebraska have to wait for full shares). And that’s only for the airing of
“second-tier” football and basketball games; the best games of all the big
conferences draw additional millions from separate rights sales to ESPN, Fox
Sports and the on-air networks.
Notre Dame has its own television
football contact (for seven games a year, with NBC, worth $15 million a year
from 2016 through 2025) and the University of Texas has a TV network devoted
exclusively to its various athletic teams that will pay it $300 million over
the deal’s 20-year term. Again, that’s just part of the total TV take for both
schools.
To fill the air time
college-football regular seasons have lengthened, from nine games in the 1950s
when I went to college to the present 12 games. Add in conference playoffs and
“offshore” games in places like Hawaii and that can grow to 14, and to 15 when
the bowls are added.
Ah yes, the bowls. There were nine
of them in 1959 and 41 last season, including such classics as the Bahamas Bowl
and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. It used to be that a team needed a winning
regular-season record to qualify, but in 2010 a 6-6 mark came to suffice, and
in 2012 that was dropped to 5-7. Last season 15 bowl teams had records of 6-6
or worse. Of necessity, that figure will grow if (when) more bowls are
approved. Ireland, Australia and Dubai (?!) all have bids to add them.
What does it add up to? According
to USA Today, 24 schools had athletics revenues that topped $100 million in
2014-15, led by Texas A & M’s $192 million. The Aggies’ ranking is a
one-shot, buoyed by the $54 million it raised to build a new football stadium,
but numbers 2 through 5 on the list (Texas at $183 m, Ohio State at $167 m.
Michigan at $152 m and Alabama at $148m) are hardy perennials that needed no
special boosts. Notre Dame also is up there, although the newspaper included
only public u’s in its surveys.
With stakes that high the rewards
for cheating are obvious, and the phone-book-sized NCAA rule book stands as
evidence that the sports big-timers don’t trust one another. They’re all part
of the same hypocrisy, and know it. You should, too.
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