Football Is in a Groove on the Tube

News Item: Fox Network Bids Boggling $1.58 Billion for NFC Broadcast Rights. Upstart Network Unseats Longtime Rights-Holder CBS, Which Now Has No Pro Football Presence. Official at Columbia Declares Self “Shell-Shocked” by What He Dubs as “Drunken Sailor” Bid.

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It’s hard to believe now, but it was not too long ago when professional sports viewed broadcasting as an evil empire bent on the destruction of the game as we knew it.

“Giving away the product” is the way they saw it. In those days, they believed that sport was totally dependent on ticket sales. If radio poked its microphones in, they would be encouraging fans to stay home.

Gradually, commercialism crept in. Wheaties breakfast cereal subsidized the sport more substantially than ticket-holders ever did. The Gillette razor blade people bought the World Series for an incredible $100,000--incredible today because it was so little, but incredible then because it was so much.

When television came along, moguls were still in a resistant mood. After all, radio was for one sense only--hearing. TV was the same as being there.

They never saw their sport as being a studio event beamed not to a stadium capacity of 50,000 but to a worldwide audience of millions. Boxing was the first to get in on this form of pay-TV by tapping into theaters all over the globe.

Pro football, oddly enough, was light-years ahead of other sports. While baseball stayed mired in 1910, pro football welcomed any form of promotion and publicity. The New York Giants’ football games were broadcast to a cult audience by a New York sportswriter named Caswell Adams. The club charged nothing for the rights, Adams made $25 per game and nobody worried about lowering the live audience because it was low to begin with.

The media made all sports what they are today, a lesson that’s largely lost on today’s practitioners of the art, but the electronic media can take a low bow for what it did for professional football.

In the first place, if you sat up nights, you couldn’t design a more perfect sport for the television screen than the rectangular one of football. No diagram is more felicitous for the 52-inch screen than the gridiron.

Television and football were a marriage made in media heaven.

Early on, they thought television, like radio before it, was going to be tied to the advertising budget. General David Sarnoff, who thought the highest and holiest calling of broadcasting was to move America’s goods, resisted any direct pay or subscription system. You had to go through Madison Avenue to get your revenue. He never even visualized cable.

The networks still play his archaic game. But they have priced the product far in excess of the advertisers’ ability to pay.

Or so they tell us. They are a little like that gambler in the play who proposes a dice game in which you bet your money, then throw the dice in his hat, and he shakes it up and looks in and says: “You lose.”

CBS said it lost a half-billion dollars on its major league baseball pact and threw that game out of its schedule. Of course, it was the only one to get a look in the hat, but baseball was, so to speak, called out on strikes.

Football is a far better TV show than baseball. But CBS, going into the negotiations this year, complained it had lost $200 million on the last contract and weighed in with an offer of $265 million per year for a renewal.

When Fox topped that with its offer of $395 million a year--or $1.58 billion for the life of the contract--CBS hurriedly regrouped and bid for the remaining football rights, to the AFC, now held by NBC. It offered $250 million.

It lost again. This time, it lost even though it bid more. The NFL owners instead accepted an NBC offer of $217 million per year.

Can any of these corporate cats recoup that kind of money from the advertisers? Probably not. NBC, after getting a look into the hat, revealed it had lost about $110 million on its last contract.

The NFL, of course, is the big winner. It gets $4.3 billion over four years from all sources--ABC pays $950 million for Monday Night football and a Super Bowl, and ESPN and TNT kick in an additional $450 million. They’ll have to sell a lot of General Sarnoff’s gross national product to make up that cost.

So, don’t think you’re getting “free” TV. The next time you buy a product advertised at the Super Bowl, you’re paying for the telecast.

No one can guess how much this audacious move can cost Fox. CBS thinks about $500 million, but it might be wrinkling its nose because the grapes are sour.

The big winners are a whole bunch of defensive backs, cornermen, wide receivers and quarterbacks and so on. The salary cap, which goes into effect next year, will be boosted to $40 million per team. Those guys who thought admitting the broadcasters was “giving the game away for free” must be red-faced somewhere today. Today’s broadcasters should erect a statue to Caswell Adams (who never had a heated booth but broadcast from the roof of the old Polo Grounds in overcoat and ear-muffs).

As for CBS, don’t worry. It still has figure skating.