With the annual college football bowl season upon us, and the first-ever four-team national championship playoff weeks away, it may be time to declare then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin’s 2011 remark to be prophetic. “I think,” Martin said then to the watchdog Knight Commission, which was considering the mad scramble for alignment with the richest conferences, “we could end up with two enormous conferences—one called ESPN and the other called Fox.”
Martin understood that this is all about television programming and athletic departments selling to the highest bidder, virtually beyond university presidents’ control. And the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader in Sports”—ESPN—is the Pancho Villa in this revolution, with lots of pesos to spend. That network shelled out $12.3 billion over seven years for rights to the three-bowl championship series, which will drag into mid-January.
Plus, ESPN has plenty left over to be able to guarantee $100,000 apiece to Bowling Green (a humble 7-6 this season) and South Alabama (6-6) to fill three hours of air time in the new Montgomery, Ala., Camellia Bowl. As stalwart New York Times reporter Richard Sandomir informed us last week, the made-for-TV Camellia Bowl is the 11th of 39 bowl games owned by ESPN.
Meanwhile, for either Bowling Green or South Alabama to dream of ever playing in, say, the Rose Bowl—$23.9 million payout per team next month—is to buy into ancient Roman playwright Plautus’ line that one has to “spend money to make money.” That endless keeping-up-with-the-Alabamas game is what caused Alabama-Birmingham (wisely) to give up its football program last month, just as it has precipitated recent break-ups of old conference ties.
Because ESPN or Fox—or CBS, through its deal with the mighty SEC—continually offer more money and exposure to the likes of Nebraska over an Iowa State, they encourage the former in search of more generously compensated conference packages (Nebraska from the Big 12 to Big Ten). Eventually, though (if not true already): How can these upwardly mobile teams avoid the inherent risks of ratcheted-up professionalism?
In 2012, a Knight Commission survey found 56 athletic-department operating budgets to be above $20 million annually, and two to be $100 million or more. “Powerful interests that benefit financially from big-time sports, as well as fans and booster clubs with emotional investments,” the commission concluded, “can distort the clarity of mind required for effective governance.”
OK, a declaimer: I love college football and quite enjoyed that the gridiron representatives of my alma mater—the University of Missouri—made a second straight appearance in the SEC title game this year. (So our lads lost again; our acclaimed journalism school students still had something to report.)
Here’s how I rationalize my spectating interest: No less a wordsmith than F. Scott Fitzgerald considered that “the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Yes, big-time college sports, for all its fabulous entertainment value, is blatantly hypocritical, and I am under no delusion about the mercenary aspect of the Missouri football roster. But I do root for the Knight Commission to have more impact in its work to better align athletic programs with the academic missions of their respective schools.
I don’t need to have my school win a television-ministered version of the Super Bowl. And I hope more reasonable associations such as the Ivy League can hang in there against Michael Martin’s understandable ESPN-Fox Conference fears.