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SALT LAKE CITY — The college football landscape seems to be on the verge of a major makeover. Fans from every conference scour their respective message boards looking for the next shoe to drop. But is the ultimate outcome as difficult to determine as it seems to be?
The famous exchange from the movie classic “All the President's Men” may hold the answer to the question every college fan wants to know:
*Deep Throat**: Follow the money.*
*Bob Woodward**: What do you mean? Where?*
*Deep Throat**: Oh, I can't tell you that.*
*Bob Woodward**: But you could tell me that.*
*Deep Throat**: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I'll confirm. I'll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that's all. Just follow the money.*
So where does the money take us?
Conferences currently handle negotiations for schools when it comes to TV deals and postseason bowl tie-ins. In most cases, the money gets divided evenly amongst the teams within the conference, a notion that Texas and Oklahoma have already tackled head on within the Big 12.
In reality, every conference is currently seeing the growing disparity between the perennial conference champions and the annual bottom dwellers. There was a time when these geographic alliances made sense and regional rivalries ruled the day. Travel was the biggest cost and tradition was the biggest revenue generator. Today, geography is beginning to be less and less of a restriction — just ask TCU. Last time we checked, Colorado was nowhere near the Pacific coast. Tradition is no longer the biggest source of revenue — just look at any team sporting a pro combat uniform on Saturday as proof.
Lucrative TV contracts may be the new conference makers with teams abandoning fierce rivalries to chase the almighty dollar. ESPN has been and continues to be a major player in the game. Its most recent maneuverings may be either the end of college football as we know it or the opening salvo in the revolution of college sports broadcasts, depending on your point of view.
ESPN controls much of what happens in college sports, and it currently pays conferences for the rights to broadcast their games. What ESPN is really ponying up for are the marquee matchups between the cream of the crop in each conference. What’s keeping them from just buying the broadcast rights for the conference powers? Conferences.
So maybe super conferences are not as inevitable as most fans think.
Enter newly independent BYU. What better place for ESPN to test its experiment for changing college sports. The plan would entail buying the rights to broadcast BYU’s home games that could be produced and broadcast out of BYU’s new state-of-the-art facilities. BYU’s venues were already hardwired for HD and BYU even had its own HD truck. In short, BYU had its own network.
Could independent programs with their own networks be the future of college sports?
Follow the money. ESPN pays a premium for the rights and production to any BYU game it wants. ESPN has no obligation to televise unfavorable or meaningless late-season matchups, but hold the option to do so at a predetermined fixed cost.
BYU shares none of the television revenue with conference partners and is free to rebroadcast ESPN games and unclaimed games on its own network. BYU also has the ability to increase exposure by playing games outside its previous regionally-defined conference.
Of course, independence would come with some difficulties, the greatest of which revolves around the scheduling of games that would have been filled by conference opponents. Enter ESPN as a partner to use its influence to fill the holes in BYU’s schedule. This may be what ESPN wanted all along: The freedom to match its newly-acquired product with conference powers, to which ESPN may hold broadcast rights to boost ratings.
The other major hurdle for an independent program would be the lack of a postseason bowl affiliation. As was mentioned earlier, most bowls are aligned with conferences. ESPN holds the rights for or owns seven postseason bowls, which makes bowl alignment much easier to negotiate. In fact, this past April, BYU was invited to participate in the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl, one of ESPN’s seven bowl games.
BCS access for teams involved in this type of venture might also be a source of uncertainty. However, it's hard to imagine that college football powers, playing made-for-TV schedules and winning, would have much difficulty getting a BCS bowl invitation. There is also the possibility that the BCS would fail to survive if conferences lost their top teams to independence. Independent teams who didn’t have to share postseason revenue could then play in postseason games produced by their TV partners with bigger payouts.
Popular opinion says it's a no-brainer for BYU to accept an invite into the Big 12, but the issue isn’t quite that simple. After a scrimmage during fall camp, Tom Holmoe was asked about the conference realignment and the Big 12. His answer:
"We're doing some things right now, just what we wanted to do. People don't really understand what's in it for us. We have a plan, and it's a good plan, and we want to un-roll that.
"It's a new era of college athletics ... Things are going to change more than they did years ago, and it's mainly because of technology. Things will change; We'll chart our course and stick to it."
So the blueprint is laid out. Texas, in partnership with ESPN and BYU, has been working on its own broadcast network — a move that may be the impetus to the breakup of the Big 12, whose tier-one television rights are not owned by ESPN, but by FOX.
Texas A&M announced intentions to leave the Big 12, and AD Bill Byrne made his own statement on the school’s website.
"You all know the landscape of the Big 12 conference was altered by the creation of the Longhorn Network," Byrne wrote. "We rebuffed an attempt to televise high school games on the LHN, arguing that this type of activity was a clear violation of NCAA rules. The most recent attempt by ESPN is to take highlights of high school games as part of news segments. The NCAA is taking a wait-and-see attitude on the highlights. I disagree with their stance — as do many of my colleagues across the country. We anticipate that ESPN will continue to push the envelope with the Longhorn Network, regardless of Texas A&M's conference affiliation."
An Aug. 30 article by the Washington Post reported that Oklahoma unveiled its SoonerVision HD production rooms that have been expanded through $5 million in improvements, including fiber optic cables wired in the school's athletic facilities connected directly to side-by-side control rooms on campus.
University of Oklahoma official Brandon Meier told the media, “If next year, whatever happens, or years in the future, if there does happen to be a channel or a media partner, we have the ability to do the same thing: Push them good content, whether it be in the studio shows or live games.... Essentially, this is a mobile production truck that never leaves the stadium and goes out to all of the other venues via fiber optic cable.”
In the same article, Oklahoma State President Burn Hargis is quoted as saying, “I think every school is investigating an Internet distribution system.... With the emergence and evolution of Internet television now, it probably behooves us all to get very serious about an Internet network.”
Oklahoma’s investment in building its own distribution platform makes it hard to believe the school is seriously interested in making a move to the Pac-12 — or even staying with the Big 12, for that matter.
What if ESPN was working to unsettle traditional conferences? What if the goal was an alliance of big-name independent programs like Texas, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Penn State and BYU, each with their own networks from which ESPN can select a la carte to fill its family of networks? Would cable networks and satellite providers pay more for the ESPN package to appeal to the consumer already driven by on-demand appetites?
ESPN earns the more desirable piece of the market, decreases its overhead in broadcast and production and increases revenue. Top-level programs maintain more of their television broadcast monies, reduce the cost of administration to conferences and increase the value of their programs through better quality opponents and national exposure.
Of course, like all discussion surrounding conference realignment, an independent alliance is nothing more than additional conjecture. The situation is fluid, and all the parties involved have their own agendas. The concept may sound like something out of a bad conspiracy theory movie, but when you do as Deep Throat suggests and follow the money, the idea does not seem so outlandish.
Charles Kano is a senior writer for truebluecougars.com, a ksl.com partner. He is an avid sports fan with a particular interest in high school and college athletics.
