Big time college sports: Something is happening around here, what it is ain’t exactly clear
http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/04/big-time-college-sports-something-is-happening-around-here-what-it-is-ain%E2%80%99t-exactly-clear/
By Evan Weiner - The Daily Caller 05/04/10 at 2:17 AM
If you’re curious as to why your cable or satellite television bill will go up, this column is for you. The people who bring you the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Men’s Basketball Tournament, the event also known as March Madness, will also be bringing you a higher cable or satellite television bill. But you probably won’t have the rate hike explained to you by your local television provider. The NCAA just got a bump TV contract renewal for one of the crown jewels of American sports – March Madness –and a significant amount of that money will come from the people who pay the bills for cable Internet and wireless video.
You.
There is something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear, to quote Stephen Stills. Big-time college sports is yet again evolving, with the new contract serving as merely a jumping off point. The only certainty is that the cost of delivering college sports to the consumer will be going up, whether it is on cable, satellite TV, or broadband.
The winds of change in big-time college sports will be steered by the jet stream of the recently concluded NCAA-CBS/Turner Broadcasting (Time Warner) agreement that will see the over-the-air network, CBS and the cable/broadband/wireless distributor Turner Broadcasting, showing the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship between 2011 and 2024 on their delivery systems. The distributors, CBS and Turner Sports, will pay the NCAA members about $10.8 billion over the life of that contract. All the tournament games will be shown live across four national networks, beginning in 2010.
CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting will help out on the NCAA’s corporate marketing program.
The good news for college basketball fans, consumers, alumni and gamblers (Like it or not, the gambling community makes up a sizeable portion of audience that follows so-called student-athletes playing games for colleges) is that all of the games will be available on television at the same time. The bad news is that people with no interest in the games will subsidize the $10.8 billion contract, which means they will be unknowingly subsidizing big time college sports to the tune of $740 million annually through 2024.
The new good news for the big-time college programs, as well as the smaller schools in Division II and III,is that they will get a chunk of that $740 million to underwrite their entire intercollegiate sports program, from football to fencing in both men’s and women’s sports. College sports is a financially losing proposition for most schools, with a handful of exceptions, like Michigan and Missouri. It costs an awful lot of money to run full sports programs, even if the students receive just a scholarship and a chance to get an education if they so desire.
The NCAA released a statement trying to clarify what the $10.8 billion will do by pointing out that “approximately 96 percent of the revenue generated from this new agreement will be used to benefit student-athletes through either programs, services or direct distribution to member conferences and schools. Further, the agreement ensures student-athletes across all three NCAA divisions will continue to be supported in a broad range of championship opportunities, access to funds for personal and educational needs, and through scholarships in Divisions I and II.”
Only football and basketball are sports moneymakers for college and universities that have decided to swim in the very deep end of the pool.
Just how will CBS and Turner Sports pay the actual bill? Sumner Redstone’s CBS has to hope that there will not be a deep recession anytime in the next 14 years which will scare advertisers away from the TV, because over-the-air TV has just one revenue source to cover the bills — sponsorship or marketing partners — while Turner Broadcasting (Time Warner) has a dual revenue stream, user fees and advertising.
Most of the money needed to pay off the cable/satellite TV bill will come from consumers. Although Time Warner will never give exact figures as to how much they charge consumers for TNT, TBS or truTV, those numbers are believed to be a dollar a subscriber for TNT (which has sports content like the National Basketball Association), fifty cents for TBS (which has a Major League Baseball deal in place, a $310 million, seven year agreement which started in 2007 and ends in 2013 for a package of 26 Sunday games during the season and the first round of the playoffs) and about a dime for the ratings-challenged truTV, which used to be the ratings-challenged Court TV.
Those rates will go up and will be passed onto the consumer. Someone has to pay the freight, and it will not be Redstone or Time Warner. They will play with other people’s money.
Time Warner is actually footing the bill, with CBS paying Time Warner back as much as $670 million a year. CBS will show the Final Four until 2015 and then the over-the-air network, CBS and the dual revenue cable company Time Warner, will alternate coverage on an annual basis.
CBS does own College Sports TV or CSTV, which is a digital cable channel, which will not be part of the CBS-Turner Broadcasting-NCAA deal. CSTV has coverage of NCAA Division’s I, II, and III, that features over 35 men’s and women’s college sports, in addition to nine NCAA championships. CSTV has multi–media and marketing rights for the Mountain West Conference, the Atlantic 10 Conference, Conference USA, the Big West Conference, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Navy athletics. CSTV is another source of revenue for college programs, but it is not the plum that schools are after.
Conferences want to own a network, like the New York Yankees YESNetwork or the Boston Red Sox-Bruins New England Sports Network or the New York Mets SNY (which is partially owned by Time Warner and Comcast) or the Cablevision New York Knicks-Rangers-Madison Square Garden Network or the Chicago Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks ownership with Comcast of the Chicago Sports Net. Or Stan Kroenke Altitude Sports Network, which features Kroenke Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets and Colorado Rapids sports franchises.
That is where the real money can be made.
There is something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.
Just how much will consumers have to pay once 2016 rolls around, and will Congress take a look at big-time sports events migrating to cable, along with lesser events? Time Warner will be renewing a good many of the company’s carriage agreements with multiple system operators (MSOs) like Comcast, Cablevision and Cox. Will Time Warner, which is also a multiple system operator, hold up the major and minor MSOs and demand more money from them because of the major investment in college sports? Will the other MSOs say yes and pass the added cost to consumers?
While Time Warner figures out strategy to maximize revenues on this deal, the big-time college conferences may be in an “expansion” mode. The Southeast Conference is eyeing “expansion” just in case. The “just in case” scenario will be played out if the Big Ten (which has a cable TV network with Comcast, the country’s largest MSO) decides to add a number of schools to reach 16 and go beyond the Midwest.
There is a lot of money available from the Big Ten moves east (perhaps Rutgers or Pittsburgh) or south or west from cable TV. The Southeast Conference isn’t hurting for capital as it has a $3 million, 15-year deal with CBS and ESPN for football games. The old argument of why expand because our new partners will take a share of the TV deal will certainly come up at the next SEC meeting in May. This SEC is not the Security and Exchange Commission. It is a college conference looking for more money.
College conferences have been adding schools because of the possibility of more money for the last decade. The Atlantic Coast Conference poached Big East schools and took Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech, which annoyed Connecticut officials, and the state sued to first block the ACC’s actions and then to get some money for damages. The Big East went after other conference schools to replace the ones that defected. It caused a realignment of conferences.
The Big Ten kicked the tires and thought about adding Rutgers and then Pittsburgh. So far, there is just talk that the Big Ten will go from 11 schools to possibly 12, 14 or 16. To do that, the conference would have to poach possible Big East schools like Rutgers or Syracuse or Pittsburgh or convince Notre Dame to drop being an independent (Notre Dame has a deal with NBC, an entity that will merge with Comcast. Comcast is partners with the Big Ten on a cable TV network) or perhaps go after Missouri of the Big 12 Conference. The college to change conferences will trigger an avalanche of moves, all done for TV revenue, most of which will come from cable TV consumers, whether they like sports or not or watch sports or not.
Something may happen here, but what it is exactly ain’t clear. Big time college sports business is changing or evolving, and because of that it is not out of the question that NCAA officials, over-the-air and cable TV executives and college presidents and chancellors, along with conference commissioners and athletic directors, will be hauled down before Congress to explain the real business of college sports and how “super conferences” could be formed because of TV opportunities. Congress has given big-time college sports a lot of anti-competition protection over the years, including a tax-exempt status.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on “The Politics and Business of Sports” and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/04/big-time-college-sports-something-is-happening-around-here-what-it-is-ain%e2%80%99t-exactly-clear/print/#ixzz0mxcfEskJ
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Could Santa Clara Voters Say Yes to Raising Taxes for a Football Stadium?
Could Santa Clara Voters Say Yes to Raising Taxes for a Football Stadium?
By Evan Weiner
May 2, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m5d2-Could-Santa-Clara-voters-say-yes-to-raising-taxes-for-a-football-stadium
(New York, N. Y.) -- In this day and age of Tea Baggers or the Coffee Party and other rabble rousers jumping up and down and shouting to provide TV and radio producers a chance of showing "Good TV" or providing "Good radio", people in Santa Clara, California may be leaning to saying yes to a proposal that would ultimately provide a partially publicly financed stadium for the San Francisco 49ers.
Stadium stories generally produce "good TV", sound bites that inflame, and that ultimately leads to radio pillaging. It is just how it works because "Good TV" or "Good radio" brings in advertising revenue and may have nothing at all to do with the merits of a story. We expect more from a ten year old than we do from a radio personality like oh say New York's WFAN radio's Evan Roberts who repeatedly called Philadelphia Phillies fans "animals." A ten year old acting up in school is marched to the Principal's office and reprimanded. In radio lying about a hockey player been drunk, calling a political leader in New Jersey after being fired for lying about a hockey player's drunkard state gets you a plum job.
So for all of you who decide what goes on TV news during this important May sweeps or for the barkers on radio, chew on this.
Santa Clara residents may vote to raise taxes for a football stadium which goes totally against the TV "news" chatter shows and the carnival barkers of talk radio's narrative along with tabloid newspapers.
Santa Clara residents may say yes to spending at least $114 million on the project and possibly be on the hook for as much as $444 million on June 8 for the stadium that may house not only the San Francisco 49ers but the Oakland Raiders as well. The reason why Santa Clara voters may say yes may have more to do with a perception that the San Francisco Giants ownership and Major League Baseball are playing a heavy handed role (along with San Francisco officials) in keeping Oakland A's owner from setting up shop in San Jose and that this is their way of getting even.
The National Football League would like both the 49ers and Raiders to share the facility in much the same way as the New York Giants and Jets each put a significant amount of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, into the new Meadowlands football facility which recently opened.
The cash strapped state of New Jersey, whose governor Chris Christie is sparring with teachers and stadiums over draconian cuts in education, is providing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for infrastructure and providing tax breaks and incentives for the two teams.
In Santa Clara, only the 49ers ownership, the York family, is investing in the facility and based on track records in Vancouver and Minneapolis, that might not be the wisest decision the Yorks ever made if the stadium referendum does pass. The original owners of the Minnesota Timber Wolves, Harvey Ratner and Marvin Wolfenson, could not swing buying an National Basketball Association expansion team for $32.5 million in 1987 and then funding an arena in Minneapolis that had a corporate sponsor's name attached to the building. By 1994, Ratner and Wolfenson had enough and sold the team to a group led by boxing promoter Bob Arum who wanted to move the team to New Orleans.
The NBA blocked the move as league officials felt that moving from the bigger Twin-Cities market to the Crescent City was a step backwards. Eventually the state legislature worked out a deal that allowed Minneapolis to take over the building and the Timber Wolves franchise was sold to a local businessman who kept the team in Minneapolis.
There is a similar tale of woe that also enveloped an NBA owner. Arthur Griffiths owned a National Hockey League team in Vancouver in the 1990s. Griffiths looked at how the economics of the NHL was changing and decided to finance a new arena for his Canucks. The NBA was thinking about expanding in 1995 with Toronto as a primary target but Griffiths was planning a new building and seemed willing to give NBA owners about $100 million in exchange for an NBA expansion team in Vancouver. The NBA liked Vancouver's dynamics even though the Canadian dollar was faltering compared to the US greenback. The NBA had identified Hong Kong as a major non-American supporter of the league and with many Hong Kong residents moving to the Vancouver area in the anticipation of China taking over the area; the NBA figured Vancouver would be a strong 21st century franchise.
It did not work out for Griffiths who was saddled by too many bills. The NBA expansion fee along with the $160 million price tag, that in Canadian dollars, for the arena. Griffiths sold the Canucks, the NBA expansion team, the Grizzlies, and the arena. The NBA team would eventually move to Memphis where it is a financial liability.
The Yorks may not have the money to run a football team and build a stadium that could cost as much as $937 million particularly if the corporate naming rights train runs through Santa Clara and leaves the Yorks looking for a corporate naming rights partner like Jerry Jones in Arlington, Texas and the woody Johnson-Mara/Tisch partnership in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Jones' Dallas Cowboys Cowboys Stadium has a gaping hole where a corporate sponsor should be hanging a shingle at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas and so far no one has stopped up and replaced Allainz as the naming rights holder at the new Giants-Jets Meadowlands Stadium.
Allainz dropped out of the running as the Meadowlands naming rights partner in September 2008 after media stories appeared in the greater New York area about Allianz’s candidacy as a stadium sponsor. These stories covered the naming rights talks and in that context also addressed Allianz history as a major German company during the Nazi era. After the stories appeared, The Meadowlands Stadium Company decided not to pursue further talks thereafter bowing to pressure from various groups who had highlighted Allainz's activities with the Nazi Government in Germany.
There were reports that Allainz was willing to pay the Giants/Jets ownership somewhere between $25 and 30 annually to put the company name on the stadium.
The Yorks might be able to defer some of the stadium's annual costs if they can persuade Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders to join them if the stadium is built. So far the Yorks intend to go it on their own and Davis is saying nothing. But clearly a corporate sponsor will help. The go it alone route is something Ed Roski in Los Angeles or, more precisely, in the City of Industry is not an avenue he would like to pursue. Roski would like to attract an NFL owner to move to his proposed stadium to share in a real estate deal to make a stadium work.
It will be a tough road to hoe if the York family decides to build the stadium with no help. But Santa Clara residents seem willing to be York's partner and that doesn't fit the media narrative of no more taxes but that may not be "Good TV" or "Good radio" which is what journalism is all about these days.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
May 2, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m5d2-Could-Santa-Clara-voters-say-yes-to-raising-taxes-for-a-football-stadium
(New York, N. Y.) -- In this day and age of Tea Baggers or the Coffee Party and other rabble rousers jumping up and down and shouting to provide TV and radio producers a chance of showing "Good TV" or providing "Good radio", people in Santa Clara, California may be leaning to saying yes to a proposal that would ultimately provide a partially publicly financed stadium for the San Francisco 49ers.
Stadium stories generally produce "good TV", sound bites that inflame, and that ultimately leads to radio pillaging. It is just how it works because "Good TV" or "Good radio" brings in advertising revenue and may have nothing at all to do with the merits of a story. We expect more from a ten year old than we do from a radio personality like oh say New York's WFAN radio's Evan Roberts who repeatedly called Philadelphia Phillies fans "animals." A ten year old acting up in school is marched to the Principal's office and reprimanded. In radio lying about a hockey player been drunk, calling a political leader in New Jersey after being fired for lying about a hockey player's drunkard state gets you a plum job.
So for all of you who decide what goes on TV news during this important May sweeps or for the barkers on radio, chew on this.
Santa Clara residents may vote to raise taxes for a football stadium which goes totally against the TV "news" chatter shows and the carnival barkers of talk radio's narrative along with tabloid newspapers.
Santa Clara residents may say yes to spending at least $114 million on the project and possibly be on the hook for as much as $444 million on June 8 for the stadium that may house not only the San Francisco 49ers but the Oakland Raiders as well. The reason why Santa Clara voters may say yes may have more to do with a perception that the San Francisco Giants ownership and Major League Baseball are playing a heavy handed role (along with San Francisco officials) in keeping Oakland A's owner from setting up shop in San Jose and that this is their way of getting even.
The National Football League would like both the 49ers and Raiders to share the facility in much the same way as the New York Giants and Jets each put a significant amount of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, into the new Meadowlands football facility which recently opened.
The cash strapped state of New Jersey, whose governor Chris Christie is sparring with teachers and stadiums over draconian cuts in education, is providing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for infrastructure and providing tax breaks and incentives for the two teams.
In Santa Clara, only the 49ers ownership, the York family, is investing in the facility and based on track records in Vancouver and Minneapolis, that might not be the wisest decision the Yorks ever made if the stadium referendum does pass. The original owners of the Minnesota Timber Wolves, Harvey Ratner and Marvin Wolfenson, could not swing buying an National Basketball Association expansion team for $32.5 million in 1987 and then funding an arena in Minneapolis that had a corporate sponsor's name attached to the building. By 1994, Ratner and Wolfenson had enough and sold the team to a group led by boxing promoter Bob Arum who wanted to move the team to New Orleans.
The NBA blocked the move as league officials felt that moving from the bigger Twin-Cities market to the Crescent City was a step backwards. Eventually the state legislature worked out a deal that allowed Minneapolis to take over the building and the Timber Wolves franchise was sold to a local businessman who kept the team in Minneapolis.
There is a similar tale of woe that also enveloped an NBA owner. Arthur Griffiths owned a National Hockey League team in Vancouver in the 1990s. Griffiths looked at how the economics of the NHL was changing and decided to finance a new arena for his Canucks. The NBA was thinking about expanding in 1995 with Toronto as a primary target but Griffiths was planning a new building and seemed willing to give NBA owners about $100 million in exchange for an NBA expansion team in Vancouver. The NBA liked Vancouver's dynamics even though the Canadian dollar was faltering compared to the US greenback. The NBA had identified Hong Kong as a major non-American supporter of the league and with many Hong Kong residents moving to the Vancouver area in the anticipation of China taking over the area; the NBA figured Vancouver would be a strong 21st century franchise.
It did not work out for Griffiths who was saddled by too many bills. The NBA expansion fee along with the $160 million price tag, that in Canadian dollars, for the arena. Griffiths sold the Canucks, the NBA expansion team, the Grizzlies, and the arena. The NBA team would eventually move to Memphis where it is a financial liability.
The Yorks may not have the money to run a football team and build a stadium that could cost as much as $937 million particularly if the corporate naming rights train runs through Santa Clara and leaves the Yorks looking for a corporate naming rights partner like Jerry Jones in Arlington, Texas and the woody Johnson-Mara/Tisch partnership in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Jones' Dallas Cowboys Cowboys Stadium has a gaping hole where a corporate sponsor should be hanging a shingle at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas and so far no one has stopped up and replaced Allainz as the naming rights holder at the new Giants-Jets Meadowlands Stadium.
Allainz dropped out of the running as the Meadowlands naming rights partner in September 2008 after media stories appeared in the greater New York area about Allianz’s candidacy as a stadium sponsor. These stories covered the naming rights talks and in that context also addressed Allianz history as a major German company during the Nazi era. After the stories appeared, The Meadowlands Stadium Company decided not to pursue further talks thereafter bowing to pressure from various groups who had highlighted Allainz's activities with the Nazi Government in Germany.
There were reports that Allainz was willing to pay the Giants/Jets ownership somewhere between $25 and 30 annually to put the company name on the stadium.
The Yorks might be able to defer some of the stadium's annual costs if they can persuade Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders to join them if the stadium is built. So far the Yorks intend to go it on their own and Davis is saying nothing. But clearly a corporate sponsor will help. The go it alone route is something Ed Roski in Los Angeles or, more precisely, in the City of Industry is not an avenue he would like to pursue. Roski would like to attract an NFL owner to move to his proposed stadium to share in a real estate deal to make a stadium work.
It will be a tough road to hoe if the York family decides to build the stadium with no help. But Santa Clara residents seem willing to be York's partner and that doesn't fit the media narrative of no more taxes but that may not be "Good TV" or "Good radio" which is what journalism is all about these days.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Friday, April 30, 2010
Why isn’t Sonny Werblin in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
Why isn’t Sonny Werblin in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010 13:42
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
A quick exchange with Joe Namath this week got me to thinking. Why isn't Namath's old boss David A. "Sonny as in Money" Werblin enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio? Werblin, the New Jersey guy, is pretty much a forgotten figure in the history of pro football even though both Werblin and Namath helped create the Super Bowl as a non-official national holiday in the United States.
Both the New York Giants and Jets are looking at draft picks and free agents and will have mini-camps this month at multi-million dollar training complexes in East Rutherford and Florham Park. The two teams have built a new stadium that cost over a billion dollars and will manage a real estate around the facility. Werblin's fingerprints 19 years after he died are all over the place within the businesses of the Jets, the Giants and the National Football League.
Sonny Werblin along with his partners Leon Hess, Townsend Martin, Donald Lillis and Philip Iselin bought the bankrupt American Football League New York Titans franchise in 1963, renamed the team the Jets, and changed pro football although the quintet didn't alter the history of the game the minute they bought the franchise. That would not happen for about a year and it was circumstance that brought Werblin to the forefront.
The National Football League or the initials NFL of the days prior to Werblin's arrival in pro football, and today have just one thing in common — the name or the initials. As the David Letterman frequent guest and Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive tackle Arthur J. Donovan (by way of the Grand Concourse in da Bronx) who played for the original Baltimore Colts in 1950, the New York Yankees in 1951, the Dallas Texans in 1952 and the Colts again from 1953-61 (the original Colts, the Yankees and Texans all folded) pointed out.
National Football League owners had a 12 team league in the 1950s and none of the 12 owners could figure out what to do with their business. Chicago's George Halas and Pittsburgh's Art Rooney along with Bert Bell have been glorified as football deities over the decades but the truth is that without Lamar Hunt the game might have strangled itself financially.
There was no forward thinking from Halas, Rooney, the Giants Tim Mara or NFL Commissioner Bert Bell in those days. They put a shingle up, "Football on Sunday" six times a year for six home games except in Chicago where there were two teams.
Hunt was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Dallas. Bud Adams was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Houston. Neither Hunt nor Adams could get an NFL expansion franchise in Dallas and Houston even though Halas and Rooney chaired an expansion committee starting in 1956. By 1959, Hunt decided he had enough and asked Adams if he wanted to join him in forming the fourth American Football League.
The AFL started play in 1960 and pushed the stodgy old football men into a different business plan, one they never wanted to explore. The AFL went to new cities and had a better TV plan. There were now two leagues and the older National Football League played follow the leader to the new league when it came to television. The AFL was able to sign a contract with the American Broadcasting Company, ABC, with each team sharing revenue equally. The AFL deal technically violated antitrust laws and was not originally a Hunt idea. Hunt borrowed a concept from Branch Rickey who was out of baseball and trying to form a third major league, the Continental Baseball League, and one of Rickey's ideas was for the 12-team Continental League owners to share national TV revenue equally.
Rickey's idea died but there are three living monuments to his league. The New York Mets, the Houston Colt 45s (now Astros) and the National Football League's "leaguethink" business plan.
The old line NFL owners didn't know what to do with TV as late as 1960 and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had to persuade Giants owner Jack Mara along with the Chicago Bears Halas and the Los Angeles Rams owner Daniel Reeves that sharing TV revenues instead of having teams have their own networks was economically better for the league. He did just that and got Congress to approve the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which allowed the NFL to sell all 14 teams as one to a TV network.
In those days, it was just CBS and NBC.
Rozelle worked out a deal for the 1962 season which brought the 14 NFL owners more than $4 million that year and beyond. In late 1963 Rozelle pitted CBS against NBC in a battled for a long term TV agreement and this is where circumstances came into play. The NFL was in a battle with the AFL for players and control of football and a big money TV deal would give them cash to go after talented players coming out of college. Rozelle signed a big money deal with CBS and William Paley in 1964 and that deal infuriated NBC's David Sarnoff.
Sarnoff wanted revenge.
Sarnoff had worked with Lew Wasserman's MCA where Werblin was employed. MCA was placing TV shows on Sarnoff's network. Sarnoff and Werblin had a relationship and Werblin became the point guy between the AFL and NBC. Werblin knew TV and entertainment inside out and knew that football was more than just a game play, it was entertainment and it was TV programming. That was not something that was an easy sell to football men who in those days viewed football as a game. It was easy to understand the football owners mentality of the day. Football business operations were open between July and December. In the 1950s, if someone wanted to buy a Chicago Bears season ticket package in April, they would have to hunt down George Halas at his sporting goods store. Nobody protected team logos because no one was thinking of selling t-shirts, underwear and hats with team logos.
Werblin got the deal done with Sarnoff, which brought the AFL $7 million annually between 1965 and 1969. Sarnoff also advanced money to AFL teams so they could sign players out of college, which Sarnoff knew would enhance the AFL on NBC. With some of that money (and revenues Werblin and his fellow Jets owners suddenly got from larger crowds at the new Shea Stadium starting in 1964), Werblin signed Namath to a three-year $427,000 deal, the largest contract ever given to a player at that point.
Namath was going to be the face of the Jets and ultimately the face of the American Football League. The Werblin-Sarnoff connection changed football and for that alone, Werblin should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Werblin changed the dynamics of pro football and eventually the two leagues merged with the formation of the Super Bowl as one of the after effects of the June 8, 1966 accord between the warring leagues.
Ironically, Werblin, Hess, Martin, Lillis and Iselin were not interested in joining the NFL because the merger agreement required them to pay the Giants $10 million for "invading" the New York territory. Werblin never did see the Jets win the Super Bowl as one of the team owners as he was bought out prior to the 1968 season, the year Namath led the Jets to a Super Bowl championship.
Namath's guarantee that the Jets would beat Baltimore in Super Bowl III was the foundation that built the Super Bowl franchise.
Werblin was permanently exiled from pro football but the story didn't end there. In 1971, the New Jersey guy Werblin was back but this time as a state employee and again Werblin changed the NFL. Werblin convinced Giants owner Wellington Mara to commit to move the Giants across the river to wetlands off of Route 3. The deal was inked in November 1972. Yankee Stadium was slated to be rebuilt and Mara's Giants played at the Yale Bowl in New Haven in 1974 and shared Shea Stadium with the Jets in 1975. Mara had a new stadium in 1976 and Giants revenues exploded.
Werblin left the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority in 1977. Hess moved his Jets to the Meadowlands in 1984.
Werblin's pro football career was rather short as an owner compared to those of Mara, Halas and Rooney, the NFL's Mount Rushmore, but he was far more a visionary than any of the faces on the NFL's Mount Rushmore. Halas last had a real idea in 1925 when he signed Red Grange and put him on tour with the Bears. Grange's appearance before more than 70,000 people at the Polo Grounds in a game against the Giants gave Tim Mara the money he needed to keep the Giants solvent and in business. Rooney was a grand old guy of the game but in the 1950s, his Pittsburgh Steelers franchise was the last stop for a player. If a player was cut by Pittsburgh, his football career probably was at an end. Ironically because of Werblin, Pittsburgh eventually was able to spend top dollars on players. Rooney was paid three million dollars to move the Steelers from the NFL to the American Football Conference prior to 1970. Rooney used that money to invest in players and scouting and won four Super Bowls.
Werblin is in the New Jersey Sports Hall of Fame, but there should be a bust of him in Canton. Without Werblin, Namath might have ended up in St. Louis or maybe the New York Giants. The Titans might have been sold to someone who knew football but not the TV business and the Super Bowl might have just been another championship game without the "wow" factor which Namath as the Jets quarterback, who was signed to a record contract by Werblin, gave the game. Without Werblin, the Giants might not be in New Jersey and Hess might have looked elsewhere for a stadium with clean bathrooms.
Werblin is more than a footnote in NFL history. He was a game changer.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator, and lecturer on the "Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010 13:42
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
A quick exchange with Joe Namath this week got me to thinking. Why isn't Namath's old boss David A. "Sonny as in Money" Werblin enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio? Werblin, the New Jersey guy, is pretty much a forgotten figure in the history of pro football even though both Werblin and Namath helped create the Super Bowl as a non-official national holiday in the United States.
Both the New York Giants and Jets are looking at draft picks and free agents and will have mini-camps this month at multi-million dollar training complexes in East Rutherford and Florham Park. The two teams have built a new stadium that cost over a billion dollars and will manage a real estate around the facility. Werblin's fingerprints 19 years after he died are all over the place within the businesses of the Jets, the Giants and the National Football League.
Sonny Werblin along with his partners Leon Hess, Townsend Martin, Donald Lillis and Philip Iselin bought the bankrupt American Football League New York Titans franchise in 1963, renamed the team the Jets, and changed pro football although the quintet didn't alter the history of the game the minute they bought the franchise. That would not happen for about a year and it was circumstance that brought Werblin to the forefront.
The National Football League or the initials NFL of the days prior to Werblin's arrival in pro football, and today have just one thing in common — the name or the initials. As the David Letterman frequent guest and Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive tackle Arthur J. Donovan (by way of the Grand Concourse in da Bronx) who played for the original Baltimore Colts in 1950, the New York Yankees in 1951, the Dallas Texans in 1952 and the Colts again from 1953-61 (the original Colts, the Yankees and Texans all folded) pointed out.
National Football League owners had a 12 team league in the 1950s and none of the 12 owners could figure out what to do with their business. Chicago's George Halas and Pittsburgh's Art Rooney along with Bert Bell have been glorified as football deities over the decades but the truth is that without Lamar Hunt the game might have strangled itself financially.
There was no forward thinking from Halas, Rooney, the Giants Tim Mara or NFL Commissioner Bert Bell in those days. They put a shingle up, "Football on Sunday" six times a year for six home games except in Chicago where there were two teams.
Hunt was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Dallas. Bud Adams was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Houston. Neither Hunt nor Adams could get an NFL expansion franchise in Dallas and Houston even though Halas and Rooney chaired an expansion committee starting in 1956. By 1959, Hunt decided he had enough and asked Adams if he wanted to join him in forming the fourth American Football League.
The AFL started play in 1960 and pushed the stodgy old football men into a different business plan, one they never wanted to explore. The AFL went to new cities and had a better TV plan. There were now two leagues and the older National Football League played follow the leader to the new league when it came to television. The AFL was able to sign a contract with the American Broadcasting Company, ABC, with each team sharing revenue equally. The AFL deal technically violated antitrust laws and was not originally a Hunt idea. Hunt borrowed a concept from Branch Rickey who was out of baseball and trying to form a third major league, the Continental Baseball League, and one of Rickey's ideas was for the 12-team Continental League owners to share national TV revenue equally.
Rickey's idea died but there are three living monuments to his league. The New York Mets, the Houston Colt 45s (now Astros) and the National Football League's "leaguethink" business plan.
The old line NFL owners didn't know what to do with TV as late as 1960 and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had to persuade Giants owner Jack Mara along with the Chicago Bears Halas and the Los Angeles Rams owner Daniel Reeves that sharing TV revenues instead of having teams have their own networks was economically better for the league. He did just that and got Congress to approve the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which allowed the NFL to sell all 14 teams as one to a TV network.
In those days, it was just CBS and NBC.
Rozelle worked out a deal for the 1962 season which brought the 14 NFL owners more than $4 million that year and beyond. In late 1963 Rozelle pitted CBS against NBC in a battled for a long term TV agreement and this is where circumstances came into play. The NFL was in a battle with the AFL for players and control of football and a big money TV deal would give them cash to go after talented players coming out of college. Rozelle signed a big money deal with CBS and William Paley in 1964 and that deal infuriated NBC's David Sarnoff.
Sarnoff wanted revenge.
Sarnoff had worked with Lew Wasserman's MCA where Werblin was employed. MCA was placing TV shows on Sarnoff's network. Sarnoff and Werblin had a relationship and Werblin became the point guy between the AFL and NBC. Werblin knew TV and entertainment inside out and knew that football was more than just a game play, it was entertainment and it was TV programming. That was not something that was an easy sell to football men who in those days viewed football as a game. It was easy to understand the football owners mentality of the day. Football business operations were open between July and December. In the 1950s, if someone wanted to buy a Chicago Bears season ticket package in April, they would have to hunt down George Halas at his sporting goods store. Nobody protected team logos because no one was thinking of selling t-shirts, underwear and hats with team logos.
Werblin got the deal done with Sarnoff, which brought the AFL $7 million annually between 1965 and 1969. Sarnoff also advanced money to AFL teams so they could sign players out of college, which Sarnoff knew would enhance the AFL on NBC. With some of that money (and revenues Werblin and his fellow Jets owners suddenly got from larger crowds at the new Shea Stadium starting in 1964), Werblin signed Namath to a three-year $427,000 deal, the largest contract ever given to a player at that point.
Namath was going to be the face of the Jets and ultimately the face of the American Football League. The Werblin-Sarnoff connection changed football and for that alone, Werblin should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Werblin changed the dynamics of pro football and eventually the two leagues merged with the formation of the Super Bowl as one of the after effects of the June 8, 1966 accord between the warring leagues.
Ironically, Werblin, Hess, Martin, Lillis and Iselin were not interested in joining the NFL because the merger agreement required them to pay the Giants $10 million for "invading" the New York territory. Werblin never did see the Jets win the Super Bowl as one of the team owners as he was bought out prior to the 1968 season, the year Namath led the Jets to a Super Bowl championship.
Namath's guarantee that the Jets would beat Baltimore in Super Bowl III was the foundation that built the Super Bowl franchise.
Werblin was permanently exiled from pro football but the story didn't end there. In 1971, the New Jersey guy Werblin was back but this time as a state employee and again Werblin changed the NFL. Werblin convinced Giants owner Wellington Mara to commit to move the Giants across the river to wetlands off of Route 3. The deal was inked in November 1972. Yankee Stadium was slated to be rebuilt and Mara's Giants played at the Yale Bowl in New Haven in 1974 and shared Shea Stadium with the Jets in 1975. Mara had a new stadium in 1976 and Giants revenues exploded.
Werblin left the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority in 1977. Hess moved his Jets to the Meadowlands in 1984.
Werblin's pro football career was rather short as an owner compared to those of Mara, Halas and Rooney, the NFL's Mount Rushmore, but he was far more a visionary than any of the faces on the NFL's Mount Rushmore. Halas last had a real idea in 1925 when he signed Red Grange and put him on tour with the Bears. Grange's appearance before more than 70,000 people at the Polo Grounds in a game against the Giants gave Tim Mara the money he needed to keep the Giants solvent and in business. Rooney was a grand old guy of the game but in the 1950s, his Pittsburgh Steelers franchise was the last stop for a player. If a player was cut by Pittsburgh, his football career probably was at an end. Ironically because of Werblin, Pittsburgh eventually was able to spend top dollars on players. Rooney was paid three million dollars to move the Steelers from the NFL to the American Football Conference prior to 1970. Rooney used that money to invest in players and scouting and won four Super Bowls.
Werblin is in the New Jersey Sports Hall of Fame, but there should be a bust of him in Canton. Without Werblin, Namath might have ended up in St. Louis or maybe the New York Giants. The Titans might have been sold to someone who knew football but not the TV business and the Super Bowl might have just been another championship game without the "wow" factor which Namath as the Jets quarterback, who was signed to a record contract by Werblin, gave the game. Without Werblin, the Giants might not be in New Jersey and Hess might have looked elsewhere for a stadium with clean bathrooms.
Werblin is more than a footnote in NFL history. He was a game changer.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator, and lecturer on the "Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Monday, April 26, 2010
Rutgers basketball does not live in the world of academia
Rutgers basketball does not live in the world of academia
MONDAY, 26 APRIL 2010 13:17
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rutgers-basketball-does-not-live-in-the-world-of-academia
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
It was a rather interesting week in New Jersey educational circles. Voters said no in many locations to approving new school budgets and a subsequent tax hike yet at one of New Jersey's schools of higher education, Rutgers, it was business as usual. Rutgers got rid of head basketball coach Fred Hill after four losing seasons and gave Hill a rather hefty going away present in the vicinity of $850,000. Hill won just 47 games and lost 77. Rutgers was near the bottom of the Big East during his tenure and to make matters worse, Hill apparently started yelling at University of Pittsburgh baseball coaches during a Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball game after the season. Hill's father coaches the Rutgers baseball team.
The Rutgers athletic director, Tim Pernetti, didn't particularly appreciate Hill's
"discussion" with the University of Pittsburgh's coaches and ordered Hill to stay away from the Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball series. Hill didn't and Pernetti found a reason to get rid of his failing basketball coach. In a state that is billions of dollars in the hole, where education is suddenly a major budgetary item for both the Governor Chris Christie and voters, Rutgers found money to say goodbye to Hill.
This is the same university that may have to accept a merger with Thomas A. Edison State College under a budget plan proposed by Christie. This is a university that is pumping money into sports while there are budget cutbacks that will impact students at the school. College sports happens to be a part of the educational system although in the money making sports, football and basketball, the sports programs seem to trump the academics in many instances.
Big time college sports lives in a world separate from the ivy covered walls of academia although school presidents, chancellors, and board of trustees provide cover for the activities of athletic directors, coaches and manipulating television networks, sneaker companies, boosters, alums and even politicians who know that sports is a business in academia ... not an extracurricular activity.
The catch phrase "student-athlete" is sold to college sports fans but the truth is that most of the college scholarship recipients at big time college sports program are athletes first and if they have time and a want to get an education that is a plus.
The big-time college/university sports programs no longer want average fans and alums supporting them. They want customers who will spend money for premium seating and will buy junk from the concession stands and dine in stadium restaurants. Schools want well-heeled alum to support the program. Fans can watch on TV, they really are not welcomed in a stadium although there is the charade of "student-athlete" and amateurism with the college kids playing for the love of the game.
Rutgers wants to be a major player in big-time college sports. The state built a stadium with lots of gadgets for the football team and is paying Greg Schiano very handsomely, roughly $1.5 million annually through 2016. To be fair, the university doesn't pick up the entire bill - some of Schiano's money comes from TV, deals with a sneaker company and other marketing partners. The Rutgers football stadium is not just a place where football fans show up six times a year on Saturdays during the fall. The football team doesn't play all of their games on Saturday, to get additional exposure; Rutgers has played Thursday night home games during the school week to get on national TV on ESPN. Rutgers' football facility has been built with maximizing revenue in mind. Just take a look at how the stadium has been expanded over the past two years.
In 2008, club seating and lounge was added. Those seats are not cheap. In 2009, the South end zone was closed in adding 11,000 seats with a "state-of-the-art Hi-Definition scoreboard and sound system." The stadium had new concession areas (designed to get customers to spend more money) and facilities.
The next new money making area will be the 7,656-square-foot football recruiting lounge and welcome center which will be built on the mezzanine level in the new south end zone of the expanded Rutgers Stadium.
According to the Rutgers stadium website, "anticipated uses of the facility, which will seat more than 300, include: Year-round football recruiting functions. In-game entertaining of appropriate groups. High end athletics fundraising opportunities and events. Recruiting tours for all other sports on non-football recruiting days. High-end fundraising for senior level university officials and the Rutgers University Foundation."
This is serious business which seems to have very little to do with the educational side of the school.
Rutgers men's basketball team has a long way to go in matching the success of the women's team led by Vivian Stringer. The Rutgers women's team, which is one of the best programs in college sports, was slammed by a remark by radio personality Don Imus and his sidekicks in 2007 which caused CBS and MSNBC to fire Imus and elevated Stringer into a more prominent national role as the national media decided to probe into the Imus "comedy bit."
Schiano and Stringer are two of the best paid New Jersey state employees. The next men's basketball coach will join them at the top of the Garden State's employees earning list.
Rutgers now needs to replace Hill and probably will hire an experienced coach and that coach will have to more than likely break his ties with a college or university to take the Rutgers job. Big time college sports has an ethics problem. Schiano twice was approached by other schools while under contract to Rutgers but decided to stay although he did get a major extension and money upgrade from the school.
There is also something rather interesting about the Athletic Director Tim Pernetti. The Rutgers AD is not really an athletic guy. His background is television and to understand college sports, you need to understand how television has a great deal of leverage in college programs. After all, ESPN, CBS-Turner Sports, FOX and various regional sports channels are paying top dollar for college sports which really is TV programming not unlike American Idol or Glee or Dancing With the Stars or Oprah. College sports contests fill hours of programming needs.
Pernetti joined ABC Sports in 1994 and within two years, Pernetti was overseeing ABC Sports' relationship with various college conferences. In 2003, Pernetti left ABC for the new College Sports TV network and signed programming deals for the fledgling entity with numerous college programs. Pernetti joined Rutgers as the Director for Intercollegiate Athletics in April 2009.
Pernetti, the TV guy, understands the college sports industry. Rutgers is now a member of the Big East Conference but the New Brunswick university has the only big time college football program in the nation's most populated market, New York, and in the past other sports conferences have expressed an interest in adding Rutgers, not for the university's football and basketball programs, but for the market. Rutgers is an entree into the New York market. When college conferences go through the next phase of realignment to satisfy television and broadband needs, Rutgers can be a pivotal player.
New Jersey has an education problem, Rutgers has a men's college basketball problem that might have nothing to do with education and grade point averages and graduation statistics but has everything to do with wins and losses. Fred Hill is taking more than $800,000 of someone's money, whether it is state dollars, alums, boosters, sponsors, marketing partners or sneaker money or even TV money to go away. Hill would still be running the Rutgers program despite his shouting match at a baseball game had his record been 77 wins and 47 losses along with appearances in the NCAA Men's Championship Tournament.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics and Business of Sports" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
MONDAY, 26 APRIL 2010 13:17
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rutgers-basketball-does-not-live-in-the-world-of-academia
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
It was a rather interesting week in New Jersey educational circles. Voters said no in many locations to approving new school budgets and a subsequent tax hike yet at one of New Jersey's schools of higher education, Rutgers, it was business as usual. Rutgers got rid of head basketball coach Fred Hill after four losing seasons and gave Hill a rather hefty going away present in the vicinity of $850,000. Hill won just 47 games and lost 77. Rutgers was near the bottom of the Big East during his tenure and to make matters worse, Hill apparently started yelling at University of Pittsburgh baseball coaches during a Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball game after the season. Hill's father coaches the Rutgers baseball team.
The Rutgers athletic director, Tim Pernetti, didn't particularly appreciate Hill's
"discussion" with the University of Pittsburgh's coaches and ordered Hill to stay away from the Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball series. Hill didn't and Pernetti found a reason to get rid of his failing basketball coach. In a state that is billions of dollars in the hole, where education is suddenly a major budgetary item for both the Governor Chris Christie and voters, Rutgers found money to say goodbye to Hill.
This is the same university that may have to accept a merger with Thomas A. Edison State College under a budget plan proposed by Christie. This is a university that is pumping money into sports while there are budget cutbacks that will impact students at the school. College sports happens to be a part of the educational system although in the money making sports, football and basketball, the sports programs seem to trump the academics in many instances.
Big time college sports lives in a world separate from the ivy covered walls of academia although school presidents, chancellors, and board of trustees provide cover for the activities of athletic directors, coaches and manipulating television networks, sneaker companies, boosters, alums and even politicians who know that sports is a business in academia ... not an extracurricular activity.
The catch phrase "student-athlete" is sold to college sports fans but the truth is that most of the college scholarship recipients at big time college sports program are athletes first and if they have time and a want to get an education that is a plus.
The big-time college/university sports programs no longer want average fans and alums supporting them. They want customers who will spend money for premium seating and will buy junk from the concession stands and dine in stadium restaurants. Schools want well-heeled alum to support the program. Fans can watch on TV, they really are not welcomed in a stadium although there is the charade of "student-athlete" and amateurism with the college kids playing for the love of the game.
Rutgers wants to be a major player in big-time college sports. The state built a stadium with lots of gadgets for the football team and is paying Greg Schiano very handsomely, roughly $1.5 million annually through 2016. To be fair, the university doesn't pick up the entire bill - some of Schiano's money comes from TV, deals with a sneaker company and other marketing partners. The Rutgers football stadium is not just a place where football fans show up six times a year on Saturdays during the fall. The football team doesn't play all of their games on Saturday, to get additional exposure; Rutgers has played Thursday night home games during the school week to get on national TV on ESPN. Rutgers' football facility has been built with maximizing revenue in mind. Just take a look at how the stadium has been expanded over the past two years.
In 2008, club seating and lounge was added. Those seats are not cheap. In 2009, the South end zone was closed in adding 11,000 seats with a "state-of-the-art Hi-Definition scoreboard and sound system." The stadium had new concession areas (designed to get customers to spend more money) and facilities.
The next new money making area will be the 7,656-square-foot football recruiting lounge and welcome center which will be built on the mezzanine level in the new south end zone of the expanded Rutgers Stadium.
According to the Rutgers stadium website, "anticipated uses of the facility, which will seat more than 300, include: Year-round football recruiting functions. In-game entertaining of appropriate groups. High end athletics fundraising opportunities and events. Recruiting tours for all other sports on non-football recruiting days. High-end fundraising for senior level university officials and the Rutgers University Foundation."
This is serious business which seems to have very little to do with the educational side of the school.
Rutgers men's basketball team has a long way to go in matching the success of the women's team led by Vivian Stringer. The Rutgers women's team, which is one of the best programs in college sports, was slammed by a remark by radio personality Don Imus and his sidekicks in 2007 which caused CBS and MSNBC to fire Imus and elevated Stringer into a more prominent national role as the national media decided to probe into the Imus "comedy bit."
Schiano and Stringer are two of the best paid New Jersey state employees. The next men's basketball coach will join them at the top of the Garden State's employees earning list.
Rutgers now needs to replace Hill and probably will hire an experienced coach and that coach will have to more than likely break his ties with a college or university to take the Rutgers job. Big time college sports has an ethics problem. Schiano twice was approached by other schools while under contract to Rutgers but decided to stay although he did get a major extension and money upgrade from the school.
There is also something rather interesting about the Athletic Director Tim Pernetti. The Rutgers AD is not really an athletic guy. His background is television and to understand college sports, you need to understand how television has a great deal of leverage in college programs. After all, ESPN, CBS-Turner Sports, FOX and various regional sports channels are paying top dollar for college sports which really is TV programming not unlike American Idol or Glee or Dancing With the Stars or Oprah. College sports contests fill hours of programming needs.
Pernetti joined ABC Sports in 1994 and within two years, Pernetti was overseeing ABC Sports' relationship with various college conferences. In 2003, Pernetti left ABC for the new College Sports TV network and signed programming deals for the fledgling entity with numerous college programs. Pernetti joined Rutgers as the Director for Intercollegiate Athletics in April 2009.
Pernetti, the TV guy, understands the college sports industry. Rutgers is now a member of the Big East Conference but the New Brunswick university has the only big time college football program in the nation's most populated market, New York, and in the past other sports conferences have expressed an interest in adding Rutgers, not for the university's football and basketball programs, but for the market. Rutgers is an entree into the New York market. When college conferences go through the next phase of realignment to satisfy television and broadband needs, Rutgers can be a pivotal player.
New Jersey has an education problem, Rutgers has a men's college basketball problem that might have nothing to do with education and grade point averages and graduation statistics but has everything to do with wins and losses. Fred Hill is taking more than $800,000 of someone's money, whether it is state dollars, alums, boosters, sponsors, marketing partners or sneaker money or even TV money to go away. Hill would still be running the Rutgers program despite his shouting match at a baseball game had his record been 77 wins and 47 losses along with appearances in the NCAA Men's Championship Tournament.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics and Business of Sports" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Sports and Arizona's Relationship is Going to Become Quite Complicated Soon
Sports and Arizona's Relationship is Going to Become Quite Complicated Soon
By Evan Weiner
April 24, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d24-Sports-and-Arizonas-relationship-is-going-to-become-quite-complicated-soon#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Has Arizona once again risked losing the Super Bowl?
No, this is not about the Arizona Cardinals football team bowing to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2009 Super Bowl and returning to the “Big Game”. That is merely a game on the field. But off the field there is now a big question.
How will the sports world react now that the Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the state's two legislative bodies have passed a tough immigration law? Could Arizona lose major sporting events like the Super Bowl? The National Football League is in the midst of the league's draft and probably will not get around to comment on the new Arizona law but given the very political nature of the league and how the league is very sensitive to the NFL's image, it is probably a good thing that Glendale, Arizona is not in the running for the 2014 Super Bowl.
The new Arizona law will go into effect sometime this summer assuming that there are no court orders to stop it.
The National Football League has a history of pulling a Super Bowl from Arizona and putting the political weight of the entity known as the NFL into a lobbying position. Arizona "celebrates" Martin Luther King Day as the result of direct intervention by the National Football League in terms of dangling a Super Bowl in front of voters. In 1987, newly elected Arizona Governor Evan Mecham's first act in his new job was to erase Martin Luther King Day from the Arizona calendar as an official state holiday. That decision set off a boycott of the state with entertainers like Stevie Wonder refusing to perform in any venue in Arizona.
Governor Mecham's reasoning was simple. The Arizona legislature in 1986 and Governor Bruce Babbitt, in Mecham's opinion, created the holiday illegally.
The National Football League, in an attempt to help the Phoenix Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill to sell more seats after he misread the Phoenix-area market following the move of his Cardinals from St. Louis to Tempe in 1988, awarded Tempe the January 31, 1993 Super Bowl. But Mecham's decision created a number of problems for the league, specifically the National Football League Players Association was not too keen on playing the NFL's showcase game in a state where a governor took away the holiday and the action was supported by Senator John McCain.
In 1989, the Arizona state legislature approved a law making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday but voters needed to approve the measure. In 1990, Arizonans went to the polls and rejected the making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday. Shortly after the voters said no, the NFL said no to Arizona and pulled the January 31, 1993 game from Tempe.
The Super Bowl allegedly pumps money into the local economy although in the Phoenix-area's case it is not as much as say putting the "Big Game" in Pontiac, Michigan or Detroit or Minneapolis since a good number of "snowbirds" vacation or spent winters in warmer climates like the Phoenix-area, South Florida or the Tampa, Florida area. What the Super Bowl does do is bring "high rollers" into town and the local community hopes that the "high rollers" such as corporate CEOs like a local area and will leave a piece of their business in the area and open up a local headquarters and create jobs.
That rarely happens but it is a selling point for the local group hoping to land a Super Bowl.
The National Football League after pulling the 1993 game went back to Arizona and laid the cards out on the table telling voters if they approved the holiday in a November 1992 vote, the NFL would award the next available Super Bowl to Tempe. Arizona voters approved the 1992 ballot initiative and five months later the NFL lived up to their part of the bargain and granted Tempe the January 28, 1996 game.
The next available Super Bowl is the 2014 game but Glendale and Arizona officials are not bidding for that event which is probably a good thing for everyone involved at this point. The NFL also holds a spring meeting once every four years or so at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix.
There is another real sports prize that could impacted by the new Arizona law. The Glendale, Arizona stadium, that is the home to the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and hosted the 2008 Super Bowl, is one of the 18 cities that has been proposed for use by USA Bid Committee in an effort to win the FIFA World Cup in either 2018 or 2022.
The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sports event on earth.
The new law will not play well with the FIFA delegates or some of the members of the USA Bid Committee which include Houston Dynamo and Los Angeles Galaxy owner Philip Anschutz, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, comedian and Seattle Sounders FC part-owner Drew Carey, former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman (Asia) Carlos Cordeiro, U.S. Men’s National Team player Landon Donovan, Executive Director David Downs, U.S. Soccer CEO and General Secretary Dan Flynn, U.S. Soccer Foundation President Ed Foster-Simeon, Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber, U.S. Soccer President and USA Bid Committee Chairman Sunil Gulati, U.S. Women’s National Team former player Mia Hamm, Walt Disney Company President and CEO Robert Iger, former U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, New England Revolution and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Motion Picture Director Spike Lee, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, University of Miami President Donna Shalala, ESPN Executive Vice President for Content John Skipper, Univision CEO Joe Uva and Washington Post CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth.
The Glendale stadium hosted the highest attended soccer match in the state of Arizona on February 7, 2007 when 62,462 fans watched the U.S. National team defeat Mexico, 2-0. Will the new Arizona law put a halt to international football "friendlies" in Arizona featuring Mexican teams?
Major League Baseball might be keeping a close eye on the developments in Arizona. The Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers are looking for improvements at spring training bases in Mesa and Maryvale for their teams. Naples, Florida officials have made an offer to Cubs ownership to relocate the team's spring training facilities from Mesa to Naples.
If the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes remain in Glendale, the franchise's new owners could be to host the 2012 or 2013 NHL All-Star Game. Glendale was supposed to venue of the 2011 event but the club's bankruptcy filing and financial uncertainty forced the league to move the game to Raleigh, North Carolina.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association held a "March Madness" men's basketball tournament event in Glendale in 2009. Will the NCAA bypass Glendale because of the new law?
Then there is another issue. Will athletes speak up either in favor or against the new law? Athletes now tend to shut up on issues with the exception of a handful of performers like then Dallas Mavericks basketball player Steve Nash who spoke out against the Iraq War. Wayne Gretzky supported the Iraq War. Ironically Nash now plays in Phoenix and Gretzky coached in Glendale.
Arizona is a hub of sports activities. Glendale is the home of the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes. The NBA Suns and Major League Baseball's Diamondbacks reside in downtown Phoenix. There is a NASCAR event along with golf and tennis events. Fifteen Major League Baseball teams hold spring training in the Phoenix area, there are major college football, basketball and baseball programs along with minor league baseball and hockey teams scattered throughout the state. The United Football League holds training camp in Casa Grande.
There is a belief that sports is the "toy store" of life and that it is just a game, an entertainment diversion. The truth is that the toy store yarn that is constantly spun is a lie. The NFL proved that in 1991 and 1992 in Arizona. There will be a sports reaction to the legislation signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, it is just a matter of time before a powerful sports group reacts and it just might cost Arizona a big event if history is any indication.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and "Sports in Society." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
April 24, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d24-Sports-and-Arizonas-relationship-is-going-to-become-quite-complicated-soon#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Has Arizona once again risked losing the Super Bowl?
No, this is not about the Arizona Cardinals football team bowing to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2009 Super Bowl and returning to the “Big Game”. That is merely a game on the field. But off the field there is now a big question.
How will the sports world react now that the Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the state's two legislative bodies have passed a tough immigration law? Could Arizona lose major sporting events like the Super Bowl? The National Football League is in the midst of the league's draft and probably will not get around to comment on the new Arizona law but given the very political nature of the league and how the league is very sensitive to the NFL's image, it is probably a good thing that Glendale, Arizona is not in the running for the 2014 Super Bowl.
The new Arizona law will go into effect sometime this summer assuming that there are no court orders to stop it.
The National Football League has a history of pulling a Super Bowl from Arizona and putting the political weight of the entity known as the NFL into a lobbying position. Arizona "celebrates" Martin Luther King Day as the result of direct intervention by the National Football League in terms of dangling a Super Bowl in front of voters. In 1987, newly elected Arizona Governor Evan Mecham's first act in his new job was to erase Martin Luther King Day from the Arizona calendar as an official state holiday. That decision set off a boycott of the state with entertainers like Stevie Wonder refusing to perform in any venue in Arizona.
Governor Mecham's reasoning was simple. The Arizona legislature in 1986 and Governor Bruce Babbitt, in Mecham's opinion, created the holiday illegally.
The National Football League, in an attempt to help the Phoenix Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill to sell more seats after he misread the Phoenix-area market following the move of his Cardinals from St. Louis to Tempe in 1988, awarded Tempe the January 31, 1993 Super Bowl. But Mecham's decision created a number of problems for the league, specifically the National Football League Players Association was not too keen on playing the NFL's showcase game in a state where a governor took away the holiday and the action was supported by Senator John McCain.
In 1989, the Arizona state legislature approved a law making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday but voters needed to approve the measure. In 1990, Arizonans went to the polls and rejected the making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday. Shortly after the voters said no, the NFL said no to Arizona and pulled the January 31, 1993 game from Tempe.
The Super Bowl allegedly pumps money into the local economy although in the Phoenix-area's case it is not as much as say putting the "Big Game" in Pontiac, Michigan or Detroit or Minneapolis since a good number of "snowbirds" vacation or spent winters in warmer climates like the Phoenix-area, South Florida or the Tampa, Florida area. What the Super Bowl does do is bring "high rollers" into town and the local community hopes that the "high rollers" such as corporate CEOs like a local area and will leave a piece of their business in the area and open up a local headquarters and create jobs.
That rarely happens but it is a selling point for the local group hoping to land a Super Bowl.
The National Football League after pulling the 1993 game went back to Arizona and laid the cards out on the table telling voters if they approved the holiday in a November 1992 vote, the NFL would award the next available Super Bowl to Tempe. Arizona voters approved the 1992 ballot initiative and five months later the NFL lived up to their part of the bargain and granted Tempe the January 28, 1996 game.
The next available Super Bowl is the 2014 game but Glendale and Arizona officials are not bidding for that event which is probably a good thing for everyone involved at this point. The NFL also holds a spring meeting once every four years or so at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix.
There is another real sports prize that could impacted by the new Arizona law. The Glendale, Arizona stadium, that is the home to the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and hosted the 2008 Super Bowl, is one of the 18 cities that has been proposed for use by USA Bid Committee in an effort to win the FIFA World Cup in either 2018 or 2022.
The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sports event on earth.
The new law will not play well with the FIFA delegates or some of the members of the USA Bid Committee which include Houston Dynamo and Los Angeles Galaxy owner Philip Anschutz, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, comedian and Seattle Sounders FC part-owner Drew Carey, former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman (Asia) Carlos Cordeiro, U.S. Men’s National Team player Landon Donovan, Executive Director David Downs, U.S. Soccer CEO and General Secretary Dan Flynn, U.S. Soccer Foundation President Ed Foster-Simeon, Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber, U.S. Soccer President and USA Bid Committee Chairman Sunil Gulati, U.S. Women’s National Team former player Mia Hamm, Walt Disney Company President and CEO Robert Iger, former U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, New England Revolution and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Motion Picture Director Spike Lee, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, University of Miami President Donna Shalala, ESPN Executive Vice President for Content John Skipper, Univision CEO Joe Uva and Washington Post CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth.
The Glendale stadium hosted the highest attended soccer match in the state of Arizona on February 7, 2007 when 62,462 fans watched the U.S. National team defeat Mexico, 2-0. Will the new Arizona law put a halt to international football "friendlies" in Arizona featuring Mexican teams?
Major League Baseball might be keeping a close eye on the developments in Arizona. The Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers are looking for improvements at spring training bases in Mesa and Maryvale for their teams. Naples, Florida officials have made an offer to Cubs ownership to relocate the team's spring training facilities from Mesa to Naples.
If the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes remain in Glendale, the franchise's new owners could be to host the 2012 or 2013 NHL All-Star Game. Glendale was supposed to venue of the 2011 event but the club's bankruptcy filing and financial uncertainty forced the league to move the game to Raleigh, North Carolina.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association held a "March Madness" men's basketball tournament event in Glendale in 2009. Will the NCAA bypass Glendale because of the new law?
Then there is another issue. Will athletes speak up either in favor or against the new law? Athletes now tend to shut up on issues with the exception of a handful of performers like then Dallas Mavericks basketball player Steve Nash who spoke out against the Iraq War. Wayne Gretzky supported the Iraq War. Ironically Nash now plays in Phoenix and Gretzky coached in Glendale.
Arizona is a hub of sports activities. Glendale is the home of the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes. The NBA Suns and Major League Baseball's Diamondbacks reside in downtown Phoenix. There is a NASCAR event along with golf and tennis events. Fifteen Major League Baseball teams hold spring training in the Phoenix area, there are major college football, basketball and baseball programs along with minor league baseball and hockey teams scattered throughout the state. The United Football League holds training camp in Casa Grande.
There is a belief that sports is the "toy store" of life and that it is just a game, an entertainment diversion. The truth is that the toy store yarn that is constantly spun is a lie. The NFL proved that in 1991 and 1992 in Arizona. There will be a sports reaction to the legislation signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, it is just a matter of time before a powerful sports group reacts and it just might cost Arizona a big event if history is any indication.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and "Sports in Society." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The NFL Draft: A Celebration of the Restraint of Trade
The NFL Draft: A Celebration of the Restraint of Trade
By Evan Weiner - The Daily Caller 04/22/10 at 1:43 PM
http://dailycaller.com/2010/04/22/the-nfl-draft-a-celebration-of-the-restraint-of-trade/2/
(New York, N. Y.) -- Sometime after 7:00 EST on Thursday night, the celebration of something totally un-American, a restraint of trade, will start when the National Football League’s St. Louis Rams announce which player they want as the first pick in the annual NFL Draft.
Corporate America, everyday Americans and Sunday afternoon couch potatoes celebrate the NFL Draft. It is an off-season party for football fans. Once the season ends, the NFL’s worst team is “on the clock,” and a more than four-month long publicity blitz starts with the league’s worst team in the spotlight, as the talent evaluators from that franchise rate the best college talent ready to join the workforce.
It all culminates in the big party in New York, “The Draft,” a celebration of the stopping of the free market. But it’s all part of the sports package.
Normally, the best 225 college graduates can talk to a number of companies and businesses looking for their services and shop around for a job, but that is not the case for the most talented people coming out of college. The flip side is that the best 225 can look forward to making anywhere in a range of hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions annually during the life of the contract they sign. But the contracts are not guaranteed, and the freshly out-of-college players may end up with a really nice bonus, sometimes in the millions. But if they are cut or fired, they will have to look for another job in a relatively closed field with less than 1,900 positions, many of which have already been taken.
The odds of landing a full-time job in the NFL are slim for a good many of those whose names will be called on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, even if they are the top 225.
The NFL Draft is an accepted part of American life (as are the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League drafts). But no one ever really questions the mechanism. In a few weeks, the non-football members of the class of 2010 will hit the streets looking for jobs. The graduates will be able to look for positions wherever they want, whether it is in Seattle, Washington or Dallas, Texas or Miami, Florida or down the northeast I-95 corridor from Foxboro, Massachusetts to East Rutherford, New Jersey to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D. C.
They can apply for jobs and go for interviews and hope they get an opportunity and possibly leverage the offers. College football players have a slightly different entry into their profession. NFL teams begin scouting players as soon as they hit college campuses, although they know about the players from high school.
NFL personnel people watch them for at least three years (the NFL requires players to play college football for three years and be on a college campus; whether the individual goes to classes or not is immaterial, despite the presence of the Wonderlic test, which allegedly measures a players intelligence). The college football games are the SATs for NFL scouts. But there are other factors that go into deciding whether the individual coming out of college is good enough. The players go to what is called a scouting combine in Indianapolis in the final semester of their four or five year college career for interviews and to see what the player looks like in a t-shirt and shorts. The players also run a variety of sprints.
Then a team makes a decision and puts names on a list. Only 225 or so get drafted. The 230th-rated player has more bargaining power than the last few players taken in the draft. There are some really good players who aren’t drafted, and they can shop around their services and get more money than, say, the “Lowsman Trophy” winner, the last player taken in the grab bag. The NFL slots money for each pick, but the players in the upper echelon of the draft can negotiate a higher bonus, the money they can keep if there are fired.
Very few players can beat the system and play where they want. John Elway wanted no part of playing in Baltimore in 1983 and signed a contract with the New York Yankees to play baseball and used that as leverage to get his way and forced a trade to Denver. Bo Jackson decided to play baseball instead of signing with Tampa Bay in 1986. Jackson would eventually play football for the Los Angeles Raiders after the Major League Baseball season ended. Eli Manning didn’t want to play for the San Diego Chargers even though he was the NFL and the Chargers’ first pick in the 2004 draft and was immediately traded to the New York Giants.
There are just a few players who can work the system.
The “free-agents” or non-drafted players carry a stigma, though. They are “free-agents” and they have to work harder to get a permanent job. Just because a player is drafted, that doesn’t guarantee a permanent position.
The National Football League is what one-time NFL quarterback and the 1996 Republican Vice-President candidate Jack Kemp once called, “the gold standard” in the industry. There are other football businesses, the United Football League, the Canadian Football League and various indoor football leagues but, and this is meant with no disrespect, for football players getting out of college, that is like working at a fast food restaurant.
It is a job, but not the job they want. The UFL, CFL and other leagues might give some players a second opportunity,but NFL teams know within three to four weeks of the opening of training camp how many of the top 225 are legitimate employees. The NFL personnel guys make very few mistakes; the vetting process is pretty good. Most of the 225 won’t have a career that lasts more than three years.
The NFL Draft is a legally sanctioned restriction of the free market, as it is collectively bargained between the NFL owners and the National Football League Players Association. The draft is a celebration for football fans, Christmas in April, as each NFL team selects players that are gift-wrapped for the fans of each of the 32 teams and come with the promise of making the team perform better.
The actual draft in New York is a rather boring affair. The NFL jazzes up the proceedings with smoke and mirrors, literally, as there are video presentations and loud music while fans dress in their “Sunday” (most NFL games are played on Sunday) best complete with the colors of their favorite teams, uniforms and face paint. But the actual selection of players is a boring and tedious process with a lot of wasted time as NFL personnel directors, coaches and general managers’ fight with scouts in a “war-room” at the team’s headquarters scattered around the country. They call into league headquarters the name of the player they want.
On Thursday night, the heavily choreographed NFL Draft kicks off with a big “tailgate” party inside Radio City Music Hall on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Of course, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not going to close off a major artery like Sixth Avenue, so the festivities have to take place inside. ESPN, with more people on camera than were available for either the Democratic or Republican Party national conventions, is capturing every nuance of the crowd as the talking heads assess the gravity of the situation. The NFL Network, also armed with an array of experts, provides another point of view although it is virtually the same as ESPN, just with different talking heads.
As the revelers revel, their thoughts will turn to the St. Louis Rams. Will Sam Bradford, the Oklahoma quarterback or will Nebraska defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh get the call? National Football League Commissioner will make his appearance; there will be a hush over the crowd. Bradford or Suh? Or will it be someone else?
It is high drama at the old building in midtown Manhattan.
Eventually the hometown Giants and Jets will get their chance. Giants fans booed the selection of quarterback Phil Simms in 1979. And then there’s the “J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets” chant that waffles through the building.
The three day affair leads to rookie mini-camp, which features the lower round picks and players looking to just get a chance to get onto the 80-man training camp roster as the top picks skip the sessions because they haven’t signed a contract. Then there will be the training camp “holdouts” with some rookies haggling for better signing bonus, and eventually the players gear up for a 16 game season.
But that takes place after the best three days of the off-season for the fans. The celebration of an illegal restraint of trade, made legal by two parties (the owners and players) with no relationship to the injured party (the incoming college grads, well not grads except they graduate the football system either after three, four or five years). Football celebrates a system that is really un-American — but no one really seems to care or notice.
After all, it’s only football.
Evan Weiner is a radio-TV commentator, columnist, author and lecturer on “The Politics of Sports Business” and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner - The Daily Caller 04/22/10 at 1:43 PM
http://dailycaller.com/2010/04/22/the-nfl-draft-a-celebration-of-the-restraint-of-trade/2/
(New York, N. Y.) -- Sometime after 7:00 EST on Thursday night, the celebration of something totally un-American, a restraint of trade, will start when the National Football League’s St. Louis Rams announce which player they want as the first pick in the annual NFL Draft.
Corporate America, everyday Americans and Sunday afternoon couch potatoes celebrate the NFL Draft. It is an off-season party for football fans. Once the season ends, the NFL’s worst team is “on the clock,” and a more than four-month long publicity blitz starts with the league’s worst team in the spotlight, as the talent evaluators from that franchise rate the best college talent ready to join the workforce.
It all culminates in the big party in New York, “The Draft,” a celebration of the stopping of the free market. But it’s all part of the sports package.
Normally, the best 225 college graduates can talk to a number of companies and businesses looking for their services and shop around for a job, but that is not the case for the most talented people coming out of college. The flip side is that the best 225 can look forward to making anywhere in a range of hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions annually during the life of the contract they sign. But the contracts are not guaranteed, and the freshly out-of-college players may end up with a really nice bonus, sometimes in the millions. But if they are cut or fired, they will have to look for another job in a relatively closed field with less than 1,900 positions, many of which have already been taken.
The odds of landing a full-time job in the NFL are slim for a good many of those whose names will be called on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, even if they are the top 225.
The NFL Draft is an accepted part of American life (as are the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League drafts). But no one ever really questions the mechanism. In a few weeks, the non-football members of the class of 2010 will hit the streets looking for jobs. The graduates will be able to look for positions wherever they want, whether it is in Seattle, Washington or Dallas, Texas or Miami, Florida or down the northeast I-95 corridor from Foxboro, Massachusetts to East Rutherford, New Jersey to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D. C.
They can apply for jobs and go for interviews and hope they get an opportunity and possibly leverage the offers. College football players have a slightly different entry into their profession. NFL teams begin scouting players as soon as they hit college campuses, although they know about the players from high school.
NFL personnel people watch them for at least three years (the NFL requires players to play college football for three years and be on a college campus; whether the individual goes to classes or not is immaterial, despite the presence of the Wonderlic test, which allegedly measures a players intelligence). The college football games are the SATs for NFL scouts. But there are other factors that go into deciding whether the individual coming out of college is good enough. The players go to what is called a scouting combine in Indianapolis in the final semester of their four or five year college career for interviews and to see what the player looks like in a t-shirt and shorts. The players also run a variety of sprints.
Then a team makes a decision and puts names on a list. Only 225 or so get drafted. The 230th-rated player has more bargaining power than the last few players taken in the draft. There are some really good players who aren’t drafted, and they can shop around their services and get more money than, say, the “Lowsman Trophy” winner, the last player taken in the grab bag. The NFL slots money for each pick, but the players in the upper echelon of the draft can negotiate a higher bonus, the money they can keep if there are fired.
Very few players can beat the system and play where they want. John Elway wanted no part of playing in Baltimore in 1983 and signed a contract with the New York Yankees to play baseball and used that as leverage to get his way and forced a trade to Denver. Bo Jackson decided to play baseball instead of signing with Tampa Bay in 1986. Jackson would eventually play football for the Los Angeles Raiders after the Major League Baseball season ended. Eli Manning didn’t want to play for the San Diego Chargers even though he was the NFL and the Chargers’ first pick in the 2004 draft and was immediately traded to the New York Giants.
There are just a few players who can work the system.
The “free-agents” or non-drafted players carry a stigma, though. They are “free-agents” and they have to work harder to get a permanent job. Just because a player is drafted, that doesn’t guarantee a permanent position.
The National Football League is what one-time NFL quarterback and the 1996 Republican Vice-President candidate Jack Kemp once called, “the gold standard” in the industry. There are other football businesses, the United Football League, the Canadian Football League and various indoor football leagues but, and this is meant with no disrespect, for football players getting out of college, that is like working at a fast food restaurant.
It is a job, but not the job they want. The UFL, CFL and other leagues might give some players a second opportunity,but NFL teams know within three to four weeks of the opening of training camp how many of the top 225 are legitimate employees. The NFL personnel guys make very few mistakes; the vetting process is pretty good. Most of the 225 won’t have a career that lasts more than three years.
The NFL Draft is a legally sanctioned restriction of the free market, as it is collectively bargained between the NFL owners and the National Football League Players Association. The draft is a celebration for football fans, Christmas in April, as each NFL team selects players that are gift-wrapped for the fans of each of the 32 teams and come with the promise of making the team perform better.
The actual draft in New York is a rather boring affair. The NFL jazzes up the proceedings with smoke and mirrors, literally, as there are video presentations and loud music while fans dress in their “Sunday” (most NFL games are played on Sunday) best complete with the colors of their favorite teams, uniforms and face paint. But the actual selection of players is a boring and tedious process with a lot of wasted time as NFL personnel directors, coaches and general managers’ fight with scouts in a “war-room” at the team’s headquarters scattered around the country. They call into league headquarters the name of the player they want.
On Thursday night, the heavily choreographed NFL Draft kicks off with a big “tailgate” party inside Radio City Music Hall on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Of course, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not going to close off a major artery like Sixth Avenue, so the festivities have to take place inside. ESPN, with more people on camera than were available for either the Democratic or Republican Party national conventions, is capturing every nuance of the crowd as the talking heads assess the gravity of the situation. The NFL Network, also armed with an array of experts, provides another point of view although it is virtually the same as ESPN, just with different talking heads.
As the revelers revel, their thoughts will turn to the St. Louis Rams. Will Sam Bradford, the Oklahoma quarterback or will Nebraska defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh get the call? National Football League Commissioner will make his appearance; there will be a hush over the crowd. Bradford or Suh? Or will it be someone else?
It is high drama at the old building in midtown Manhattan.
Eventually the hometown Giants and Jets will get their chance. Giants fans booed the selection of quarterback Phil Simms in 1979. And then there’s the “J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets” chant that waffles through the building.
The three day affair leads to rookie mini-camp, which features the lower round picks and players looking to just get a chance to get onto the 80-man training camp roster as the top picks skip the sessions because they haven’t signed a contract. Then there will be the training camp “holdouts” with some rookies haggling for better signing bonus, and eventually the players gear up for a 16 game season.
But that takes place after the best three days of the off-season for the fans. The celebration of an illegal restraint of trade, made legal by two parties (the owners and players) with no relationship to the injured party (the incoming college grads, well not grads except they graduate the football system either after three, four or five years). Football celebrates a system that is really un-American — but no one really seems to care or notice.
After all, it’s only football.
Evan Weiner is a radio-TV commentator, columnist, author and lecturer on “The Politics of Sports Business” and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Major League Baseball's cable TV problem
Major League Baseball's cable TV problem
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 23:12
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/major-league-baseballs-cable-tv-problem
COMMENTARY
It is not very often that anything that comes out of talk radio is worth a follow up discussion but a rare nugget of information came out of the Colin Cowherd show on New York's WEPN on Monday morning.
Cowherd was in a discussion with ESPN baseball reporter Tim Kirkjian about the economics of Major League Baseball and how that the discrepancy between "haves" (the Yankees) and "have nots" (Kansas City, Baltimore, Cleveland) was widening. Kirkjian agreed with the host and said Major League Baseball is trying to increase revenue sharing between the "haves" and have nots" but Major League Baseball would never have a salary cap because of the players union.
But, Kirkjian assured Cowherd that the owners and players will address the issue during the negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement which will begin presumably sometime in 2011 as the existing players/owners accord ends in December 2011.
There are a number of owners, men who live and die in their "real" businesses as free market capitalists, who would like to see more revenue sharing or wealth redistribution from the big market teams (i.e. the Yankees) to the game's financially weaker franchises (the soon to be renamed Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Milwaukee and others) to level the financial playing field and allow teams like Cincinnati to bid on big ticket free agents.
The owners want more Major League Baseball socialism and that would start by forcing the Yankees franchise to pay an even larger percentage of "luxury" tax on the team's payroll than the Steinbrenner family does presently and those extra revenues would be sent to the most neediest in Major League Baseball.
Here is the rub with Major League Baseball financial parity plan. If baseball fans only were paying for a regional sports channel's bills like the YES Network or SNY, then Major League Baseball financial woes should be taken care of with baseball fans' money.
But, a lot of the dollars the Steinbrenner Yankees generate comes from people who have no interest in either the Yankees or Major League Baseball - about 95 percent of the subscribers - yet they have to pay for the channel anyway because of the 1984 Cable TV Act.
That leads to the following question.
Is it fair that cable money — which comes from non-interested subscribers from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut that should be going to the Yankees (and for that matter the Mets) and should stay in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — ends up in the pocket of say the owners of the Florida Marlins, Kansas City Royals or the Baltimore Orioles?
The question of cable TV wealth distribution can be is easily answered.
In 1984, Congress passed the Cable TV Act, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and assured the survival of ESPN, the Weather Channel, MTV, WTBS and CNN. Multiple System Operators (MSOs) were able to sign deals with cable networks and then bunch the networks together in a package and sell the package as one to cable subscribers.
Consumers had no say in what networks were thrown into the basic expanded tier but if they wanted a special channel, say CNN or CNN Headline News, they would also have to take ESPN, the Weather Channel and MTV. The legislation gave cable consumers three options. They could take the entire package, basic and basic expanded, just basic ... or quit cable.
ESPN would not be the business as it is today without federal government intervention. Major League Baseball teams were slowly moving games to cable TV in the 1970s and by the 1980s, all sorts of regional sports networks were popping up nationally.
The Boston Red Sox became a more than just a New England franchise because of exposure on WSBK, Channel 38. The Mets and Yankees were also up on the "bird" as both teams were seen beyond the New York area on WOR and WPIX. The Chicago Cubs became a national team when the Cubs ownership, the Tribune Company, went national with WGN and Ted Turner had his Atlanta Braves on WTBS.
Those teams started pocketing extra revenue and MSOs snapped up the stations has the games brought more subscribers.
(Major League Baseball denied the sale of the Texas Rangers from Eddie Chiles to Edwin Gaylord in 1986 and in 1988 because Gaylord planned to put Rangers games on KTVT, Channel 11 because there were too many games on national cable TV with the Braves, Mets, Yankees, Red Sox and Cubs. Eventually Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth worked with George W. Bush and put together an ownership group that would buy the Rangers in 1989. Major League Baseball has never figured out how to deal with television.)
It was George Steinbrenner who changed the game when he signed a 12-year deal worth nearly $500 million with Charles Dolan's Madison Square Garden Network in 1988. Dolan's network went from about 2.3 million to 7.5 million subscribers thanks to the Yankees deal and gave MSG a summer's worth of programming. Steinbrenner was able to use that money to spend on players and player development.
That cable TV deal put the Steinbrenner Yankees into a different economic class than the rest of Major League Baseball and MLB officials have spent the better part of two decades trying to devise a scheme that would somehow penalize first George Steinbrenner and his partners and now the Steinbrenner family for being in the right place at the right time and agreeing to the MSG deal.
Steinbrenner's Yankees lived up to the MSG agreement and then the team decided it would be so much better to own a network than have a rights deal with MSG. The result was the YES Network and virtually every cable TV subscriber in the tri-state area is paying for the YES Network whether they watch it or not because the YES Network made it to the basic expanded tier. There was one holdout for a while – Charles Dolan's Cablevision – but eventually YES was added to Dolan's MSOs.
Steinbrenner was just following a path blazed by Gulf and Western, an owner of Madison Square Garden back in the early 1970s. Gulf and Western established a hybrid sports and entertainment channel, the MSG Network in the formative days of cable TV networks.
Dolan started SportsChannel after the MSG Network debuted. There were other networks as well. In Philadelphia, there was PRISM, also a sports-entertainment hybrid and an entity that gave the Philadelphia Phillies some additional money in 1979 to sign Pete Rose. The Z-Channel in Los Angeles also played around with a sports-entertainment format.
The cable TV-sports teams nexus slowly took shape in the mid 1980s with virtually all of the teams in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball hooking up with small cable networks that planned to grown expediently. In some cases that happened and in other cases, the regional cable TV network struggled and was swallowed up by another entity.
Steinbrenner's Yankees just cashed checks in the heavily populated New York City area while the owners of the Montreal Expos failed. The Steinbrenners, the Wilpon Mets and Arte Moreno's Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are raking in cable TV cash.
Philadelphia, Boston and Seattle are doing quite well and neither of the Chicago teams is hurting financially from their cable TV deals. Kansas City, Cincinnati and Milwaukee are not sharing in the wealth.
In the next collective bargaining negotiations, the "have nots" will go after the Yankees' TV money and for those who are unaware of just where their cable TV fees go, it might be worth checking with their local municipalities and find out if there are any clauses in the municipality-MSO contract that addresses the issue of whether local subscribers be distributed in other areas.
Cowherd and Kirkjian never did tackle the cable TV revenue issue. Nobody ever does, nobody ever thinks about it in Major League Baseball because they are entitled to that money under United States laws. The negotiators probably have no idea why they get the cable TV money they just know it is there.
Major League Baseball wants "parity" which really means socialism where are the teams are on an even financial playing field. The small market teams have been after Yankees TV money for two decades and the only legitimate argument those teams have is that they are half the TV show and that you cannot have a game which has only one team.
It is understandable that those teams want to share stadium revenues from attendance but there is something wrong when the owners of the lesser revenue markets want Yankees cable TV money when that money is coming from people who are totally unaware that they cable TV fees are being sent to owners in a different area under the guise of revenue sharing. That money should stay in the metropolitan area.
Evan Weiner is an author, columnist, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 23:12
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/major-league-baseballs-cable-tv-problem
COMMENTARY
It is not very often that anything that comes out of talk radio is worth a follow up discussion but a rare nugget of information came out of the Colin Cowherd show on New York's WEPN on Monday morning.
Cowherd was in a discussion with ESPN baseball reporter Tim Kirkjian about the economics of Major League Baseball and how that the discrepancy between "haves" (the Yankees) and "have nots" (Kansas City, Baltimore, Cleveland) was widening. Kirkjian agreed with the host and said Major League Baseball is trying to increase revenue sharing between the "haves" and have nots" but Major League Baseball would never have a salary cap because of the players union.
But, Kirkjian assured Cowherd that the owners and players will address the issue during the negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement which will begin presumably sometime in 2011 as the existing players/owners accord ends in December 2011.
There are a number of owners, men who live and die in their "real" businesses as free market capitalists, who would like to see more revenue sharing or wealth redistribution from the big market teams (i.e. the Yankees) to the game's financially weaker franchises (the soon to be renamed Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Milwaukee and others) to level the financial playing field and allow teams like Cincinnati to bid on big ticket free agents.
The owners want more Major League Baseball socialism and that would start by forcing the Yankees franchise to pay an even larger percentage of "luxury" tax on the team's payroll than the Steinbrenner family does presently and those extra revenues would be sent to the most neediest in Major League Baseball.
Here is the rub with Major League Baseball financial parity plan. If baseball fans only were paying for a regional sports channel's bills like the YES Network or SNY, then Major League Baseball financial woes should be taken care of with baseball fans' money.
But, a lot of the dollars the Steinbrenner Yankees generate comes from people who have no interest in either the Yankees or Major League Baseball - about 95 percent of the subscribers - yet they have to pay for the channel anyway because of the 1984 Cable TV Act.
That leads to the following question.
Is it fair that cable money — which comes from non-interested subscribers from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut that should be going to the Yankees (and for that matter the Mets) and should stay in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — ends up in the pocket of say the owners of the Florida Marlins, Kansas City Royals or the Baltimore Orioles?
The question of cable TV wealth distribution can be is easily answered.
In 1984, Congress passed the Cable TV Act, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and assured the survival of ESPN, the Weather Channel, MTV, WTBS and CNN. Multiple System Operators (MSOs) were able to sign deals with cable networks and then bunch the networks together in a package and sell the package as one to cable subscribers.
Consumers had no say in what networks were thrown into the basic expanded tier but if they wanted a special channel, say CNN or CNN Headline News, they would also have to take ESPN, the Weather Channel and MTV. The legislation gave cable consumers three options. They could take the entire package, basic and basic expanded, just basic ... or quit cable.
ESPN would not be the business as it is today without federal government intervention. Major League Baseball teams were slowly moving games to cable TV in the 1970s and by the 1980s, all sorts of regional sports networks were popping up nationally.
The Boston Red Sox became a more than just a New England franchise because of exposure on WSBK, Channel 38. The Mets and Yankees were also up on the "bird" as both teams were seen beyond the New York area on WOR and WPIX. The Chicago Cubs became a national team when the Cubs ownership, the Tribune Company, went national with WGN and Ted Turner had his Atlanta Braves on WTBS.
Those teams started pocketing extra revenue and MSOs snapped up the stations has the games brought more subscribers.
(Major League Baseball denied the sale of the Texas Rangers from Eddie Chiles to Edwin Gaylord in 1986 and in 1988 because Gaylord planned to put Rangers games on KTVT, Channel 11 because there were too many games on national cable TV with the Braves, Mets, Yankees, Red Sox and Cubs. Eventually Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth worked with George W. Bush and put together an ownership group that would buy the Rangers in 1989. Major League Baseball has never figured out how to deal with television.)
It was George Steinbrenner who changed the game when he signed a 12-year deal worth nearly $500 million with Charles Dolan's Madison Square Garden Network in 1988. Dolan's network went from about 2.3 million to 7.5 million subscribers thanks to the Yankees deal and gave MSG a summer's worth of programming. Steinbrenner was able to use that money to spend on players and player development.
That cable TV deal put the Steinbrenner Yankees into a different economic class than the rest of Major League Baseball and MLB officials have spent the better part of two decades trying to devise a scheme that would somehow penalize first George Steinbrenner and his partners and now the Steinbrenner family for being in the right place at the right time and agreeing to the MSG deal.
Steinbrenner's Yankees lived up to the MSG agreement and then the team decided it would be so much better to own a network than have a rights deal with MSG. The result was the YES Network and virtually every cable TV subscriber in the tri-state area is paying for the YES Network whether they watch it or not because the YES Network made it to the basic expanded tier. There was one holdout for a while – Charles Dolan's Cablevision – but eventually YES was added to Dolan's MSOs.
Steinbrenner was just following a path blazed by Gulf and Western, an owner of Madison Square Garden back in the early 1970s. Gulf and Western established a hybrid sports and entertainment channel, the MSG Network in the formative days of cable TV networks.
Dolan started SportsChannel after the MSG Network debuted. There were other networks as well. In Philadelphia, there was PRISM, also a sports-entertainment hybrid and an entity that gave the Philadelphia Phillies some additional money in 1979 to sign Pete Rose. The Z-Channel in Los Angeles also played around with a sports-entertainment format.
The cable TV-sports teams nexus slowly took shape in the mid 1980s with virtually all of the teams in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball hooking up with small cable networks that planned to grown expediently. In some cases that happened and in other cases, the regional cable TV network struggled and was swallowed up by another entity.
Steinbrenner's Yankees just cashed checks in the heavily populated New York City area while the owners of the Montreal Expos failed. The Steinbrenners, the Wilpon Mets and Arte Moreno's Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are raking in cable TV cash.
Philadelphia, Boston and Seattle are doing quite well and neither of the Chicago teams is hurting financially from their cable TV deals. Kansas City, Cincinnati and Milwaukee are not sharing in the wealth.
In the next collective bargaining negotiations, the "have nots" will go after the Yankees' TV money and for those who are unaware of just where their cable TV fees go, it might be worth checking with their local municipalities and find out if there are any clauses in the municipality-MSO contract that addresses the issue of whether local subscribers be distributed in other areas.
Cowherd and Kirkjian never did tackle the cable TV revenue issue. Nobody ever does, nobody ever thinks about it in Major League Baseball because they are entitled to that money under United States laws. The negotiators probably have no idea why they get the cable TV money they just know it is there.
Major League Baseball wants "parity" which really means socialism where are the teams are on an even financial playing field. The small market teams have been after Yankees TV money for two decades and the only legitimate argument those teams have is that they are half the TV show and that you cannot have a game which has only one team.
It is understandable that those teams want to share stadium revenues from attendance but there is something wrong when the owners of the lesser revenue markets want Yankees cable TV money when that money is coming from people who are totally unaware that they cable TV fees are being sent to owners in a different area under the guise of revenue sharing. That money should stay in the metropolitan area.
Evan Weiner is an author, columnist, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
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