NFL kicks one through the uprights
Football learns from basketball, reaps windfall from both broadcast and cable
But while ESPN's deal was eye-popping (richer than the TV fees for every other sports league), the lesson of the deal is more about the continued co-dependence between the NFL and broadcast TV.
NBC, which carried the first televised football game in 1939, abandoned the league in 1997 after determining the league had simply become too expensive. Now it returns, snapping up Sunday night football and two Super Bowls for a relative bargain -- $600 million per year.
NBC, which has always held that it would get back into football when the price was right, ended up paying less than ESPN, Fox ($712.5 million), CBS ($622.5 million) or DirecTV ($700 million).
"It brought one of the largest smiles to my face in a long, long time," says NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, who is still recovering from a plane accident that took the life of his son. "The only way we were able to strike a deal was that Disney passed on it at lunchtime (April 15)."
Beyond that, NBC was able to get the deal because the NFL desperately wanted to keep a primetime package on broadcast TV. The NFL, unlike the other professional leagues, has managed to avoid migration to cable while still enjoying hefty fee increases.
Professional basketball's near-total shift to cable in 2002 is a cautionary tale -- the NBA lost its buzz and much of its ratings because the casual basketball viewers that used to tune in when NBC carried marquee matchups every week did not follow the league to cable.
Now ABC is facing an NBA Finals series after a season in which viewers have been winnowed to the hardcore fans who tune in to TNT and ESPN for the regular-season games.
"What happens when you move from broadcast to cable is you lose the more casual viewer," says Steve Sternberg, exec VP of Magna Global. "Once you lose them, it's hard for the sport to continue growing."
By staying on broadcast TV, the NFL makes itself appointment-viewing for both the hardcore and casual fans.
Likewise, network TV without the NFL is a risky business. When CBS dropped football in 1993, ratings fell off a cliff as young male viewers went elsewhere. The drop-off took longer for NBC, which for years had a strong enough primetime to resist erosion.
"After seven years, NBC is beginning to experience the kind of problems that CBS experienced when they lost the NFL," says former CBS Sports prexy Neal Pilson. "Their primetime was getting soft and they're having trouble reaching male viewers."
Producer Gavin Polone ("Revelations") has his own theory on NBC's reasons for spending so much on pigskin. "This football deal shows that NBC has conceded its inability to compete in primetime series television and ABC's confidence that it can ," he says. "As series television can be very profitable and is the mainstay of any network, only a company in a desperate situation would turn to an option that has proven itself to be uniformly unprofitable during the last decade."
But the NFL had another strong incentive to get into business with NBC and corporate parent GE: The league wanted to do substantial business with at least four of the five major media congloms, and now it does.
Disney retains an NFL presence, even though it effectively shifted its package from ABC to ESPN. Viacom's CBS has the Sunday AFC package. News Corp.'s Fox has the Sunday NFC package; Fox and corporate sibling DirecTV pay the NFL a combined $1.4 billion for their games.
The NFL may yet sign the fifth and biggest conglom -- Time Warner -- if TNT successfully bids for the Thursday-Saturday package, the only remaining games in play.
The NFL shuffle among ABC, NBC and ESPN sets up some interesting matchups of their own.
First will be for the services of Al Michaels and John Madden. ESPN wants to sign them to maintain continuity for the look and feel of "MFN." They may not match ESPN's younger demo, but Madden represents the face of football to the PlayStation and Xbox generation as spokesmodel for EA Sports.
If NBC steals either or both, it would boost its claim that "MFN" was effectively moved to Sunday night. Both NBC and ESPN say there's no rush to sign Michaels and Madden, who will be calling ABC's games in the coming year.
The second -- and likely more vicious -- matchup is the coming gender battle for the remote on Sunday nights. It's now firmly clenched in female hands, but what happens when "Desperate Housewives" competes with primetime football?
"Guys are not going to control the set as much on Sunday night (as Monday)," Sternberg says.
Throw in a new episode of HBO's "The Sopranos" and CBS' "60 Minutes" and you have the kind of matchup executives at TiVo like to see.
