TMC
2011-11-03 08:23:40 UTC
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2011-10-27/is-espn-the-force-behind-college-conference-realignment/51019966/1
By Steve Wieberg and Steve Berkowitz, USA TODAY
Gene DeFilippo backpedaled quickly — an old quarterback executing one
more scramble — after suggesting last month that one of the most
stunning shifts in the recent wave of realignment in college sports
had been scripted by ESPN.
The Boston College athletics director apologized, saying he'd
misspoken when he told The Boston Globe that the cable television
titan "told us what to do" before the Atlantic Coast Conference chose
Pittsburgh and Syracuse as new members, plundering the neighboring Big
East.
His retreat did little to quell conspiracy theories. Questions
continue to bubble about whether ESPN — the 32-year-old network that
has become a defining force in sports and the culture around them —
has been a key behind-the-scenes player at a time of high-profile
realignment in college sports. Fueled largely by schools seeking more
money and security in their conference arrangements, the scramble has
touched at least a half-dozen leagues and threatened several
traditional rivalries.
For all that ESPN has lent to the growth of major-college athletics —
through on-air exposure and with rights-fees payouts that schools have
fed into stadium improvements, luxurious locker rooms and huge
contracts for top coaches — there's an undercurrent of concern about
the influence of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports.
It's not just that its tentacles are everywhere: They're everywhere at
once.
As a TV rights holder, ESPN is a business partner to a wide array of
conferences and schools (its total college outlay will average more
than $700 million annually by next year).
And as a leading broadcast, print and online news outlet, ESPN also
reports the news it's often a party to making.
"We've created … I was going to say a blurry line, but I don't think
there is any line anymore as to who's in charge," says Andy Geiger, a
former athletics director at Ohio State University.
"We're doing business with an entertainment company whose only way of
surviving involves the number of eyeballs watching the screen," he
says. "That is the driving force in what I see as all the decisions
being made."
DeFilippo gave at least momentary voice to suspicions that ESPN, the
sole TV rights holder in the ACC, is nudging realignment in the
direction of its choice — a notion ESPN dismisses as myth.
"These (realignment) decisions lie entirely within the conferences and
the universities," says Burke Magnus, ESPN's vice president for
college sports programming.
"We haven't been advocates of change in this realm because our
business interests are best served by stability."
ESPN has, however, been a focus of public discontent in the Big 12,
which a year ago saw Colorado defect to the Pac-12 and Nebraska to the
Big Ten.
The network's 20-year, $300 million partnership with Texas in The
Longhorn Network (LHN) rankled some of the Big 12's remaining schools,
primarily because of ESPN's initial interest in using LHN to carry
high school and other games that league rivals considered out of
bounds.
The Longhorn Network gave Texas A&M a final excuse to bolt the Big 12,
too.
The Aggies are bound for the Southeastern Conference, effective next
year. Big 12 colleague Missouri appears headed down the same path to
the SEC.
Beyond questions about ESPN's influence in college sports are concerns
about its pervasiveness.
With sister network ABC, ESPN holds at least some of the football and/
or basketball TV rights of a vast majority of the NCAA's Division I
conferences and all but two of college football's 35 postseason games
— including the five games in the top-tier Bowl Championship Series.
ESPN is the outright owner and operator of seven lower-level bowls.
"It approaches a monopoly, if it's not literally one," says Stephen
Weber, a former member of the NCAA's Division I board of directors who
retired as president of San Diego State University in July.
"You always have potential issues when you're in a situation like
that."
Can ESPN objectively weigh in on realignment discussions when one
conference stands to gain, another to lose and the network has
contractual ties with both? (The ACC and Big East, for example. Or the
SEC and Big 12.)
"I suppose it is a conundrum for them," Oklahoma athletics director
Joe Castiglione says. "We understand they have multiple partnerships
with institutions and other conferences. We all agree there's a
concern. I'm just not sure how we do anything about it."
ESPN's long reach
One by one, ESPN's Magnus addresses the medley of what he
characterizes as inaccuracies and misperceptions about the network's
role in the reconfiguration of college conferences.
•Believe DeFilippo's retraction, Magnus says, not his initial claim of
ESPN involvement in ACC expansion, which has helped throw the Big
East's future into doubt.
•Magnus maintains, in fact, that ESPN does no talking at all — to a
conference weighing expansion or its consultants — until a league has
chosen to make a move, secured its new schools and is ready to assess
the impact on its TV deal.
Asked whether ESPN is strictly an observer in the process, Magnus
says, "I wouldn't put it that way. We have lots of conversations with
our partners through the day-to-day relationships that we have with
them. Do we have specific meetings where expansion possibilities are
evaluated and formally discussed and schools ruled in and ruled out?
"I'm telling you, it doesn't work that way."
•The network has no monopoly on college sports, he says.
Although ESPN is tied to varying degrees into every one of the
colleges' six marquee conferences — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big
12, Pac-12 and SEC — Magnus points out that the network is the sole TV
rights holder only in the ACC.
ESPN lost to Turner Sports and incumbent rights holder CBS last year
in the bidding for a key property, the NCAA Division I men's
basketball tournament. That deal was for $10.8 billion over 14 years.
Acknowledging questions about the network's role and influence in
reshaping college sports, a member of ESPN's ombudsman team weighed in
last week. Kelly McBride, a media ethics specialist and member of a
faculty panel attached to the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based
journalism organization, talked with another ESPN executive, John
Wildhack, and Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott about expansion
deliberations in that conference a year ago.
Scott said it was he who drew up the strategy leading to the Pac-12's
acquisition of Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the Mountain
West.
However, Scott and Wildhack acknowledged a close association between
the Pac-12 and ESPN as the conference was working on expanding.
Based on the appearance of their working relationship, McBride wrote
"it seems reasonable that members of the ACC expansion committee were
routinely bouncing information off the network" before the conference
invited Pitt and Syracuse.
ESPN's Magnus disputes that. A former university president, however,
seconds it.
"Are (conference) commissioners talking to ESPN? All the time," says
Louis Caldera, president at the University of New Mexico from 2003 to
2006. "If I'm a president, I want the commissioner to be having that
conversation.
"You want to hit the bull's-eye if you're going to fire that arrow
(toward expansion or realignment). 'If we're looking at Louisville and
you really like Cincinnati, tell me which one. Don't make it a
mystery. Tell me which combination (is best). What are the trade-offs
if we have a (conference) championship game or we don't have it?'"
Often among those trade-offs: geographic fit, increased travel and
missed class time for athletes and the interruption or abandonment of
longtime rivalries.
In her ombudsman column, McBride addressed another concern that
predates the current round of realignment: ESPN's on-air and online
journalists working on one side to report the network's business
dealings on the other.
While noting "even some of the network's executives call the company
'a walking conflict of interest,'" she concluded that ESPN is keeping
the line properly drawn.
Conspiracy theories
Gauging the depth of outside concern about ESPN's role in realignment
is difficult.
Most critics ask for anonymity, particularly when they're still
working on campuses or in league offices and dealing with — and
frequently relying on — the network.
ESPN's defenders are more forthright.
One theory on ESPN's involvement in the Pitt-Syracuse move to the ACC
— a serious blow from which the Big East still is trying to recover —
goes like this:
The network has been a Big East partner since 1979 and, in May,
tendered a new nine-year, $1.4 billion offer that the league rejected,
preferring to see how much more it could score in an open market that
also includes NBC and Fox Sports. ESPN countered by selling the ACC on
the two Big East schools as expansion targets, extolling their value
to television.
The ESPN-affiliated ACC is strengthened, and a weakened Big East is
left to competing networks or available at reduced cost to ESPN.
Several highly placed college athletics officials laid out that
scenario for USA TODAY, none willing to speak publicly because of its
sensitivity.
But even within the Big East, there are rebuttals to that scenario.
"I saw (DeFilippo's) comments," says West Virginia athletics director
Oliver Luck, whose school is leaving the Big East to join the Big 12.
"I'm not sure I subscribe to any particular theory in that regard."
Connecticut President Susan Herbst likewise dismissed the theory to
USA TODAY.
Former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe says, "I would tread very
cautiously with any assumption that ESPN is indicating to conferences
which schools they should add to enhance their value.
"It's been my experience with them, and any network, that they're very
worried and concerned about going down that road and they try to keep
a clear distance," Beebe adds.
The dust-up in the Big 12 over The Longhorn Network is better
documented, ignited by an ESPN vice president, Dave Brown, who talked
during a June interview with an Austin radio station about plans to
broadcast high school games and feature Texas recruits.
Some rival Big 12 coaches, led by Missouri's Gary Pinkel, cried foul,
saying such an arrangement would give Texas an unfair advantage over
their schools in recruiting athletes.
There were other complaints about LHN's plans to carry one of Texas'
conference football games each year.
In lower-echelon conferences, there's a different kind of discomfort.
Weber spent 15 years as president at San Diego State, many of them
chafing at the BCS and a format that separates college football's
haves from have-nots.
Football's six marquee leagues — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12,
Pac-12 and SEC — automatically place their champions into a BCS bowl
game, where the payouts to conferences of affiliated teams reach as
high as $26 million-plus.
The five lower-echelon leagues in the NCAA's bowl subdivision must
hope one or two of their teams meet minimum-ranking criteria to
qualify for a BCS bowl. San Diego State and the Mountain West
Conference fall among the non-automatic qualifiers (or non-AQs).
That dividing line is based partly on the leagues' and their member
schools' historical performance on the field — and partly on their
attractiveness to TV.
San Diego State and others in non-AQ leagues are effectively branded
as second-class, Weber says, raising the question of "the role that
ESPN plays in the general positioning of your university."
He prefers to scrap the BCS and set up a major-college football
playoff to which all leagues have access, something the Mountain West
has formally proposed.
Weber regards ESPN as "a co-conspirator" with the BCS in frustrating
previous efforts in that regard.
He says the network fears the exorbitant rights fees a major-college
football playoff could fetch and the possibility of losing such prime
property to a higher-bidding rival.
Counters ESPN's Magnus: "We don't determine the format. We leave that
to the stewards of the sport."
The bright light of ESPN
Whatever their misgivings, officials across college athletics say it's
difficult to swear off ESPN, stepping away from its money and cachet.
The Mountain West is one of the few conferences to do that, creating
its own MountainWest Sports Network in 2006 to avoid the Tuesday and
Wednesday night football games ESPN wanted Mountain West teams to
play.
Beyond that, the conference didn't think ESPN was offering its schools
enough money.
Even so, Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson says, "There was a
football coach in our league who said, 'I'd rather play one Tuesday or
Wednesday game a year on ESPN than all 12 on Versus, CBS Sports
(Network) and The Mountain.'
"I said, 'That's ludicrous.' But that's what coaches think because
kids watch ESPN."
The moth-to-a-flame lure of ESPN has led some conference officials to
point fingers at themselves when discussing the realignment chaos.
"I don't put it on them," Beebe says of the anxiety over ESPN's reach
and clout. "I put it on us … the college community.
"They're businesspeople. They're going to tell you what it's going to
take for you to be on their network and how much they're willing to
provide for that.
"If you're all about the money — and it seems like we've shifted more
and more to the commercial side — and that's the route you want to go,
that's the way you've made your bed."
By Steve Wieberg and Steve Berkowitz, USA TODAY
Gene DeFilippo backpedaled quickly — an old quarterback executing one
more scramble — after suggesting last month that one of the most
stunning shifts in the recent wave of realignment in college sports
had been scripted by ESPN.
The Boston College athletics director apologized, saying he'd
misspoken when he told The Boston Globe that the cable television
titan "told us what to do" before the Atlantic Coast Conference chose
Pittsburgh and Syracuse as new members, plundering the neighboring Big
East.
His retreat did little to quell conspiracy theories. Questions
continue to bubble about whether ESPN — the 32-year-old network that
has become a defining force in sports and the culture around them —
has been a key behind-the-scenes player at a time of high-profile
realignment in college sports. Fueled largely by schools seeking more
money and security in their conference arrangements, the scramble has
touched at least a half-dozen leagues and threatened several
traditional rivalries.
For all that ESPN has lent to the growth of major-college athletics —
through on-air exposure and with rights-fees payouts that schools have
fed into stadium improvements, luxurious locker rooms and huge
contracts for top coaches — there's an undercurrent of concern about
the influence of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports.
It's not just that its tentacles are everywhere: They're everywhere at
once.
As a TV rights holder, ESPN is a business partner to a wide array of
conferences and schools (its total college outlay will average more
than $700 million annually by next year).
And as a leading broadcast, print and online news outlet, ESPN also
reports the news it's often a party to making.
"We've created … I was going to say a blurry line, but I don't think
there is any line anymore as to who's in charge," says Andy Geiger, a
former athletics director at Ohio State University.
"We're doing business with an entertainment company whose only way of
surviving involves the number of eyeballs watching the screen," he
says. "That is the driving force in what I see as all the decisions
being made."
DeFilippo gave at least momentary voice to suspicions that ESPN, the
sole TV rights holder in the ACC, is nudging realignment in the
direction of its choice — a notion ESPN dismisses as myth.
"These (realignment) decisions lie entirely within the conferences and
the universities," says Burke Magnus, ESPN's vice president for
college sports programming.
"We haven't been advocates of change in this realm because our
business interests are best served by stability."
ESPN has, however, been a focus of public discontent in the Big 12,
which a year ago saw Colorado defect to the Pac-12 and Nebraska to the
Big Ten.
The network's 20-year, $300 million partnership with Texas in The
Longhorn Network (LHN) rankled some of the Big 12's remaining schools,
primarily because of ESPN's initial interest in using LHN to carry
high school and other games that league rivals considered out of
bounds.
The Longhorn Network gave Texas A&M a final excuse to bolt the Big 12,
too.
The Aggies are bound for the Southeastern Conference, effective next
year. Big 12 colleague Missouri appears headed down the same path to
the SEC.
Beyond questions about ESPN's influence in college sports are concerns
about its pervasiveness.
With sister network ABC, ESPN holds at least some of the football and/
or basketball TV rights of a vast majority of the NCAA's Division I
conferences and all but two of college football's 35 postseason games
— including the five games in the top-tier Bowl Championship Series.
ESPN is the outright owner and operator of seven lower-level bowls.
"It approaches a monopoly, if it's not literally one," says Stephen
Weber, a former member of the NCAA's Division I board of directors who
retired as president of San Diego State University in July.
"You always have potential issues when you're in a situation like
that."
Can ESPN objectively weigh in on realignment discussions when one
conference stands to gain, another to lose and the network has
contractual ties with both? (The ACC and Big East, for example. Or the
SEC and Big 12.)
"I suppose it is a conundrum for them," Oklahoma athletics director
Joe Castiglione says. "We understand they have multiple partnerships
with institutions and other conferences. We all agree there's a
concern. I'm just not sure how we do anything about it."
ESPN's long reach
One by one, ESPN's Magnus addresses the medley of what he
characterizes as inaccuracies and misperceptions about the network's
role in the reconfiguration of college conferences.
•Believe DeFilippo's retraction, Magnus says, not his initial claim of
ESPN involvement in ACC expansion, which has helped throw the Big
East's future into doubt.
•Magnus maintains, in fact, that ESPN does no talking at all — to a
conference weighing expansion or its consultants — until a league has
chosen to make a move, secured its new schools and is ready to assess
the impact on its TV deal.
Asked whether ESPN is strictly an observer in the process, Magnus
says, "I wouldn't put it that way. We have lots of conversations with
our partners through the day-to-day relationships that we have with
them. Do we have specific meetings where expansion possibilities are
evaluated and formally discussed and schools ruled in and ruled out?
"I'm telling you, it doesn't work that way."
•The network has no monopoly on college sports, he says.
Although ESPN is tied to varying degrees into every one of the
colleges' six marquee conferences — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big
12, Pac-12 and SEC — Magnus points out that the network is the sole TV
rights holder only in the ACC.
ESPN lost to Turner Sports and incumbent rights holder CBS last year
in the bidding for a key property, the NCAA Division I men's
basketball tournament. That deal was for $10.8 billion over 14 years.
Acknowledging questions about the network's role and influence in
reshaping college sports, a member of ESPN's ombudsman team weighed in
last week. Kelly McBride, a media ethics specialist and member of a
faculty panel attached to the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based
journalism organization, talked with another ESPN executive, John
Wildhack, and Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott about expansion
deliberations in that conference a year ago.
Scott said it was he who drew up the strategy leading to the Pac-12's
acquisition of Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the Mountain
West.
However, Scott and Wildhack acknowledged a close association between
the Pac-12 and ESPN as the conference was working on expanding.
Based on the appearance of their working relationship, McBride wrote
"it seems reasonable that members of the ACC expansion committee were
routinely bouncing information off the network" before the conference
invited Pitt and Syracuse.
ESPN's Magnus disputes that. A former university president, however,
seconds it.
"Are (conference) commissioners talking to ESPN? All the time," says
Louis Caldera, president at the University of New Mexico from 2003 to
2006. "If I'm a president, I want the commissioner to be having that
conversation.
"You want to hit the bull's-eye if you're going to fire that arrow
(toward expansion or realignment). 'If we're looking at Louisville and
you really like Cincinnati, tell me which one. Don't make it a
mystery. Tell me which combination (is best). What are the trade-offs
if we have a (conference) championship game or we don't have it?'"
Often among those trade-offs: geographic fit, increased travel and
missed class time for athletes and the interruption or abandonment of
longtime rivalries.
In her ombudsman column, McBride addressed another concern that
predates the current round of realignment: ESPN's on-air and online
journalists working on one side to report the network's business
dealings on the other.
While noting "even some of the network's executives call the company
'a walking conflict of interest,'" she concluded that ESPN is keeping
the line properly drawn.
Conspiracy theories
Gauging the depth of outside concern about ESPN's role in realignment
is difficult.
Most critics ask for anonymity, particularly when they're still
working on campuses or in league offices and dealing with — and
frequently relying on — the network.
ESPN's defenders are more forthright.
One theory on ESPN's involvement in the Pitt-Syracuse move to the ACC
— a serious blow from which the Big East still is trying to recover —
goes like this:
The network has been a Big East partner since 1979 and, in May,
tendered a new nine-year, $1.4 billion offer that the league rejected,
preferring to see how much more it could score in an open market that
also includes NBC and Fox Sports. ESPN countered by selling the ACC on
the two Big East schools as expansion targets, extolling their value
to television.
The ESPN-affiliated ACC is strengthened, and a weakened Big East is
left to competing networks or available at reduced cost to ESPN.
Several highly placed college athletics officials laid out that
scenario for USA TODAY, none willing to speak publicly because of its
sensitivity.
But even within the Big East, there are rebuttals to that scenario.
"I saw (DeFilippo's) comments," says West Virginia athletics director
Oliver Luck, whose school is leaving the Big East to join the Big 12.
"I'm not sure I subscribe to any particular theory in that regard."
Connecticut President Susan Herbst likewise dismissed the theory to
USA TODAY.
Former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe says, "I would tread very
cautiously with any assumption that ESPN is indicating to conferences
which schools they should add to enhance their value.
"It's been my experience with them, and any network, that they're very
worried and concerned about going down that road and they try to keep
a clear distance," Beebe adds.
The dust-up in the Big 12 over The Longhorn Network is better
documented, ignited by an ESPN vice president, Dave Brown, who talked
during a June interview with an Austin radio station about plans to
broadcast high school games and feature Texas recruits.
Some rival Big 12 coaches, led by Missouri's Gary Pinkel, cried foul,
saying such an arrangement would give Texas an unfair advantage over
their schools in recruiting athletes.
There were other complaints about LHN's plans to carry one of Texas'
conference football games each year.
In lower-echelon conferences, there's a different kind of discomfort.
Weber spent 15 years as president at San Diego State, many of them
chafing at the BCS and a format that separates college football's
haves from have-nots.
Football's six marquee leagues — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12,
Pac-12 and SEC — automatically place their champions into a BCS bowl
game, where the payouts to conferences of affiliated teams reach as
high as $26 million-plus.
The five lower-echelon leagues in the NCAA's bowl subdivision must
hope one or two of their teams meet minimum-ranking criteria to
qualify for a BCS bowl. San Diego State and the Mountain West
Conference fall among the non-automatic qualifiers (or non-AQs).
That dividing line is based partly on the leagues' and their member
schools' historical performance on the field — and partly on their
attractiveness to TV.
San Diego State and others in non-AQ leagues are effectively branded
as second-class, Weber says, raising the question of "the role that
ESPN plays in the general positioning of your university."
He prefers to scrap the BCS and set up a major-college football
playoff to which all leagues have access, something the Mountain West
has formally proposed.
Weber regards ESPN as "a co-conspirator" with the BCS in frustrating
previous efforts in that regard.
He says the network fears the exorbitant rights fees a major-college
football playoff could fetch and the possibility of losing such prime
property to a higher-bidding rival.
Counters ESPN's Magnus: "We don't determine the format. We leave that
to the stewards of the sport."
The bright light of ESPN
Whatever their misgivings, officials across college athletics say it's
difficult to swear off ESPN, stepping away from its money and cachet.
The Mountain West is one of the few conferences to do that, creating
its own MountainWest Sports Network in 2006 to avoid the Tuesday and
Wednesday night football games ESPN wanted Mountain West teams to
play.
Beyond that, the conference didn't think ESPN was offering its schools
enough money.
Even so, Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson says, "There was a
football coach in our league who said, 'I'd rather play one Tuesday or
Wednesday game a year on ESPN than all 12 on Versus, CBS Sports
(Network) and The Mountain.'
"I said, 'That's ludicrous.' But that's what coaches think because
kids watch ESPN."
The moth-to-a-flame lure of ESPN has led some conference officials to
point fingers at themselves when discussing the realignment chaos.
"I don't put it on them," Beebe says of the anxiety over ESPN's reach
and clout. "I put it on us … the college community.
"They're businesspeople. They're going to tell you what it's going to
take for you to be on their network and how much they're willing to
provide for that.
"If you're all about the money — and it seems like we've shifted more
and more to the commercial side — and that's the route you want to go,
that's the way you've made your bed."