ESPN Doesn’t Hate You: The Devil Made Them Do It
“Well sir, we’re two hours and forty-five minutes into the pre-game show, and we’ve got ourselves a special guest, actor Troy McClure whose new sitcom is premiering tonight, coincidentally enough right after the game.” - Brent Gunsilmen
“Thanks Brent, my new show’s called ‘Handle with Care’. I play Jack Handle a retired cop who shares an apartment with a retired criminal. We’re the original odd couple.” - Troy McClure
Once upon a time there was enough football for all three networks. NBC had the AFC, CBS had the NFC, and ABC had Monday Night Football. Every Sunday you got your local game, plus a couple of national games and that was it. If you happened to turn the game on twenty minutes late, you had to wait for a commercial break to see the score. Then the Fox Network came along and all of a sudden there weren’t enough dates to the dance.
In 1993 Fox outbid CBS for the NFC package of games (they started broadcasting during the 1994 season), forcing the Tiffany Network out of football and making way for the FoxBox and it’s ever more intrusive successors. Four years later CBS got back into the game by outbidding NBC for the AFC package in a deal that CBS outright admitted would lose money for them. The NFL had become such a status symbol for the networks that it was believed (correctly or not, I have no idea) that no network could be taken seriously without broadcasting pro football and to hell with the cost.
Ever since the 1994 season there has always been one network bereft of football and the NFL has brilliantly used that scarcity in television rights negotiations. Their prices are now almost unfathomably huge; it costs NBC $600 million per year for those marquee Sunday night games, CBS and Fox pay $622.5 million and $712.5 million respectively for the afternoon games and ESPN pays a whopping $1.1 billion per year for Monday Night Football.[1] Those amounts, staggering as they are, pay for little more than a few pieces of paper that say you may broadcast NFL football. Network coffers are still responsible for all the people and equipment it takes to broadcast one of these games, costs that have only increased with the advent of high definition. It’d be easy and fun to just blame Fox for a lot of this, but if they hadn’t done it, someone else would have. The great expansion of media outlets that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades has been an enormous boon to providers of premium sports content like the NFL.
These astronomical prices have put the networks in a terrible position. They are no longer impartial conduits of content; they are now advertisers who happen to also be broadcasters. (I’m not even going to try to get into the way all those commercials and coverage have changed the way the game is played.) With NFL telecasts leading the way, broadcasting sports of all stripes has become less about making money directly and more about attracting those desirable sports demographics to other programs. In a world where DVRs threaten to all but annihilate advertising breaks on recorded programs, popular, live programming is all the more valuable. Caught in the middle are the viewers (I assure you, they do not think of us as fans). You can trace a line directly from those outrageous 1998 broadcast contracts to celebrity guest stars in the booth, ads popping up during play, and all that other relentless cross promotion that many fans find so aggravating.
It doesn’t help that football season coincides with the start of the television season. There are a lot of new shows to promote and even though the networks know that most of them will never see a second season, they have to try as hard as they can to promote them during those first crucial months. There is almost no limit to the amount of money a hit show can make, and the people running the networks would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t do everything they could to increase the chances that a new series becomes one. Unfortunately, one of their tools is saturation advertising during football broadcasts.
The fundamental problem here is that ordinary people don’t watch the NFL on Sunday afternoons to learn about the new fall schedule on CBS and Fox. Fans watch to see the game, to see a contest that is truly unscripted. The people who plan these broadcasts see sports as leverage to push the rest of their schedule. We do not have each other’s interests at heart.
NFL broadcasts were the vanguard of this movement, but it’s no longer just them. Having hauled Keith Jackson out of retirement for the 2006 Rose Bowl, ABC executives must’ve cringed when he hilariously stuttered through a promo for the illogically titled “Emily’s Reasons Why Not”. I’d assume that TNT makes money showing all those NBA games, but they feel no shame at all about shrinking the game down to a fraction of my screen, during play no less, to show endless commercials for “The Closer”. Then, of course, there is ESPN. Depending on your point of view they are either the masters of wringing every dollar out of sports or a blundering corporate entity whose right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. The full ESPN post is coming on Sunday.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/22/commentary/column_sportsbiz/sportsbiz/
