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Sports and the Media
Author: Robert Jacobson
Date: 2010
From: Sports in America: Recreation, , Education, and Controversy(2010 ed.)
Publisher: Gale, a Cengage Company
Series: Information Plus Reference Series
Document Type: Topic overview
Length: 7,974 words
Content Level: (Level 4)
Lexile Measure: 1230L

Full Text:
Sports and the media are so thoroughly intertwined in the United States that it is difficult to think of them as two distinct industries.
The financial relationship is complex and reciprocal. Media enterprises, mostly broadcast and cable television stations but also Web
based, pay the sports leagues millions of dollars for the rights to broadcast their games. Leagues distribute this money to their
member teams—the distribution formula varies from sport to sport—which then transfer most of this money to their players in the
form of salaries. The media outlets try to recoup their huge expenditures by selling advertising time during sports broadcasts to
companies that believe their products will appeal to the kinds of people who like to watch sports on television. These consumer
product companies also pay large sums to individual athletes to endorse their products, or in some cases to teams to display their
company logos on their uniforms or, in the case of auto racing, on their cars. Consumers then purchase these products, providing the
money the companies use to buy advertising and pay for celebrity endorsements. The more people who watch a sport, the more the
station can charge for advertising. The more the station can charge for advertising, the more it can offer the league for broadcast
rights. The more the league gets for broadcast rights, the more the teams can pay their players.

The History of Sports on Television

In “Sports and Television” (2004, http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/sportsandte/sportsandte.htm), Harry Coyle, a
pioneering television sports director, states that “television got off the ground because of sports. Today, maybe, sports need
television to survive, but it was just the opposite when it first started. When we [NBC] put on the World Series in 1947, heavyweight
fights, the Army-Navy football game, the sales of television sets just spurted.”

Even though it may be an exaggeration to credit the explosive growth of television in its early days solely to sports, sports certainly
played a significant role. The first-ever televised sporting event was a baseball game between Columbia and Princeton universities in
1939. It was covered by one camera that was positioned along the third base line. The first network-wide sports broadcast came five
years later with the premier of the National Broadcasting Corporation’s (NBC) Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, the first installment of
which featured a featherweight championship boxing match between Willie Pep (1922-2006) and Chalky Wright (1912-1957). Sports
quickly became a staple of primetime network fare, accounting for up to one-third of primetime programming, but other genres began
to catch up during the 1950s, perhaps spurred on by an increase in female viewers. The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports remained on
the air for 20 years, before giving way to a new model in which sports programs were sponsored by multiple buyers of advertising
spots rather than by a single corporation, as the cost of sponsorship became prohibitively expensive in the mid-1960s. The number of
hours of sports programming on the networks continued to increase dramatically well into the 1980s, when advertising dollars
generated by sports began to decline, making them less profitable for the networks to carry.

The amount of money involved in televising sports was growing fast by the 1970s. Stanley J. Baran, writing on the Web site of the
Museum of Broadcast Communications (http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/sportsandte/sportsandte.htm), notes that in
1970 the networks paid $50 million for the right to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games, $18 million for Major League
Baseball (MLB), and $2 million for National Basketball Association (NBA) broadcast rights. By 1985 these numbers reached $450
million for football, $160 million for baseball, and $45 million for basketball. This explosive growth was fueled by a combination of
increasing public interest, better—and therefore more expensive—coverage of events by the networks, and an effort on the part of
the networks to lock in their position of dominance in sports programming in the face of challenges from emerging cable television
networks. These skyrocketing fees did not cause much of a problem during the 1970s, as the networks were able to pass the high
cost of producing sports programs along to their advertisers. However, things began to change during the early 1980s. According to
Baran, between 1980 and 1984 professional football lost 7% of its viewing audience, and baseball lost 26% of its viewers. Meanwhile,
advertisers became hesitant to pay increasing prices for commercials that would be seen by fewer people. The networks responded

by airing more hours of sports. By 1985 the three major networks broadcast a total of 1,500 hours of sports, about twice as many
hours as in 1960. However, by the mid-1980s the market for sports programming appeared saturated, and the presence of more
shows made it harder for the networks to sell ads at top prices.

The first half of the 1980s marked the rise of sports coverage on cable. According to Baran, the all-sports station Entertainment and
Sports Programming Network (ESPN), first launched in 1979, was reaching 4 million households by the middle of 1980. National
stations such as WTBS and WGN, as well as the premium channel Home Box Office (HBO), were also airing a substantial number of
sporting events. By 1986, 37 million households were subscribing to ESPN.

Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s broadcast television ratings for the four major professional sports generally trended
downward. There is no real consensus as to why this happened. Jere Longman, in “Pro Leagues’ Ratings Drop; Nobody Is Quite
Sure Why” (Scott R. Rosner and Kenneth L. Shropshire, eds.,The of Sports, 2004), points to “a growing dislocation
between fans and traditional sports, as players, coaches and teams move frequently, as athletes misbehave publicly, as salaries
skyrocket, and as ticket prices become prohibitively expensive” as possible contributing factors in the decline of ratings during that
period.

The key challenge for all the major sports leagues—beyond the obvious challenge of attracting as many viewers and listeners as
possible—is to balance exposure and distribution of their product against consumer demand. In other words, in an era witnessing the
emergence of new media such as the Internet, satellite radio, and even live feeds to cell phones, at what point does the coverage of a
sport available for consumption outstrip the public’s interest in that sport, thereby becoming a losing financial proposition?

Baseball and Television: The Convergence of Our Two National Pastimes

By 1939 baseball was already known as “America’s national pastime.” Television was still a novelty at the time. The only option for
those who could not attend a baseball game in person was to listen to a live broadcast on the radio. The first televised professional
baseball game, between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds, took place on August 26 of that year. The broadcast used
two cameras: one positioned high above home plate and a second one along the third base line. Such a broadcast would appear
primitive by 21st-century standards. To cover a typical World Series game in the modern era, broadcasters use perhaps a couple
dozen cameras, some of them operated electronically, and at least one mounted on an airborne blimp. In addition, early broadcasts
offered none of the additional features contemporary viewers take for granted, including color, instant replays, and statistics
superimposed on the screen.

NBC was the network that first brought televised baseball to the American public. Because NBC used home-team announcers to call
the World Series, and because the New York Yankees were in the World Series nearly every year, the Yankees announcer Mel Allen
(1913-1996) became the first coast-to-coast voice of baseball. The Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean (1911-1974) became the first
nationwide television baseball announcer when the network premiered the Game of the Week in 1953, thus initiating the long line of
former ball players who have transformed themselves into commentators when their playing careers have ended.

By the 1960s baseball had lost a large share of its audience to other sports, particularly football. Baseball nevertheless remains a
solid ratings draw, especially when teams with well-known stars located in large markets square off in the postseason. However, the
overall ratings for World Series broadcasts have been declining for years. The Associated Press noted in its post-series coverage
(October 30, 2008, http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/27462511/) that ratings for the 2008 World Series, in which the Philadelphia
Phillies triumphed over the Tampa Bay Rays in five games, hit a record low. The series averaged an 8.4 rating (meaning 8.4% of all
households were tuned in) and a 14 share (meaning 14% of those watching something were watching the World Series). These
numbers were considerably worse than those of the 2006 World Series, the previously lowest-rated World Series. The 2006 series
captured an average rating of 10.1 and a 17 share over the five games. These ratings were a far cry from 1980, when the World
Series had a 32.8% rating and a 56 share during the entire series. The AP story attributes the 2008 World Series’ abysmal television
ratings in part to the brevity of the series and the fact that it was played between two fairly small-market teams.

Professional baseball has increased its media income substantially in recent years. MLB is currently operating under a round of
television deals signed in 2005 and 2006. Danielle Sessa reported for the Bloomberg News Service in (July 11, 2006,
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601089&sid=aUWEuWhFjx5M&refer=home) that ESPN agreed to pay $2.4 billion to
start a series of Monday night baseball broadcasts as part of an eight-year contract, which runs through 2013. Under the terms of the
deal, ESPN may televise up to 80 regular-season games per season. The agreement also affords ESPN substantial flexibility to
move some of the games to Sunday nights. MLB also has a deal with Fox for the broadcast rights to the All-Star Game and the World
Series through 2013. MLB’s other major television partner is TBS, which is slated to air all regular-season tiebreaker games, Division
Series games, and a Sunday afternoon regular-season package through 2013.

Baseball has expanded its radio presence in recent years as well. The 2005 season marked the first year of a six-year contract with
ESPN radio worth an average of $11 million per year; a six-year Internet deal with ESPN for an annual average of $30 million; and a
$60 million-per-year deal with XM satellite radio to transmit baseball games for 11 years.

In “Is MLB Extending Its Reach or Overreaching?” in the Sports Journal (March 28, 2005,
http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.feature&featureId=1561), Russell Adams observes that the 2005
MLB season marked “a critical juncture for MLB officials, who are charged with managing a perfect storm of peaking demand for
content, the emergence of new technologies for delivering it, and the growing number of media outlets demanding a larger piece of
both.” Adams describes a situation in which baseball clubs’ local television partners are clamoring for more content from a sport that
has more games to offer than any other. Opportunities abound, many of them in new media, for a sport that has long been criticized
for “underutilizing its product”; that is, not showing enough games in sophisticated enough ways, and for neglecting the younger

portion of its potential audience. This neglect and underutilization no longer seem to be the case. According to Adams, the Internet
division of MLB, known as MLB Advanced Media, has built a thriving subscription business by streaming live video of more than
2,300 regular-season games and live audio of all games, and by packaging and selling video on an on-demand basis once the game
has ended. Television contracts do not apply to these sales, because broadcast rights revert to the league once the game has taken
place. Meanwhile, players, sports journalists, and other sports personalities have short circuited the process of bringing content to
fans through the use of social media tools, such as blogging, Facebook, and most recently, Twitter.

Football: Biggest Athletes, Biggest Audience

Professional Football

It is not an exaggeration to say that television put football where it is today. Before the era of televised sports, baseball was much
more popular than football. Stirring television moments such as the 1958 NFL Championship, a thrilling overtime victory by the
Baltimore Colts over the New York Giants, helped establish professional football as a big-time spectator sport. A few years later,
when Time put the Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi (1913-1970) on its cover in 1962—accompanied by the
pronouncement that football was “The Sport of the ’60s”—it was clear that the sport had come of age as a media phenomenon.

In April 2005 the NFL signed a deal for $1.1 billion per year to move Monday Night Football from its long-standing home with the
American Broadcasting Company (ABC)—which was paying about half that sum under its expiring contract—to ESPN from 2006

through the 2013 season. (See Table 1.4: .) Under the terms of the deal,
ESPN would continue to make its NFL games available on regular broadcast television in the markets of the participating teams each
week. However, unlike basketball, which experienced a loss of casual viewers when games were moved to cable in 2002, regular
network television would continue to play a large role in bringing football to the viewing public.

The same day it shook hands with ESPN, the league reached an agreement with NBC, which had not broadcast NFL games since
1997. The NBC contract provides $600 million per year for the rights to carry 17 Sunday night games each season through 2011.

(See Table 1.4: .) Meanwhile, the NFL had agreed in November 2004 to
extend its existing relationships with CBS and Fox to carry regular-season American Football Conference and National Football
Conference games, respectively. The new CBS agreement included two Super Bowls and guaranteed $622.5 million per year
through 2011; the new Fox contract called for five years at $712.5 million per year, with two Super Bowls included in the deal. The
league received another $700 million from DirectTV in a five-year agreement covering satellite transmission rights.

What do the networks get for all this money? They get plenty because advertisers know how firmly football is entrenched in U.S.
households and sports bars. Football is by far the most popular sport to watch on television in the United States. In a December 2008
poll by the Gallup Organization, 41% of Americans named football as their favorite sport to watch. (See Table 1.1:

.) This is nothing new; football has topped polls consistently since the
early 1970s, when it overtook baseball as the public’s favorite sport to watch. (See Figure 2.3:

.) In the December 2008 survey,
baseball was a distant second at 10%, with basketball close behind at 9%. The preference for watching baseball has been on the
decline since its peak in 1948, when 39% said it was their favorite sport to watch.

According to data from Nielsen Media Research, as reported in Sports Daily (February 3, 2009,
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/article/127428), two of the three top-rated U.S. television shows of all time have been Super
Bowls. Nielsen data show that with 98.7 million viewers, Super Bowl XLIII in February 2009 was the most watched Super Bowl in
history, and the second most watched television show of any kind ever, trailing only the final episode of the long-running comedy
series M*A*S*H in 1983. Super Bowl XLII in 2008 was a close third at 97.4 million.

College Football

Televised college sports have nearly as much appeal as professional sports for American audiences, and since the 1980s they have
become the subject of large media contracts as well. In the early days of televised sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association
(NCAA) determined which college teams could play on television. Officially, the NCAA’s goal in making these decisions was to
protect the schools from the loss of ticket-buying fans who were lured by the glowing screen in a warm home. The NCAA’s
dominance over the right to broadcast football games went virtually unquestioned for years. According to Welch Suggs in “Football,
Television, and the Supreme Court” (Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 50, no. 44, July 9, 2004), the only case of a college losing its
membership in the NCAA came in 1951, when the University of Pennsylvania was dismissed for attempting to schedule its own
broadcasts in defiance of the NCAA. The school quickly repented, and its membership was restored.

The networks, however, aware of the potential audience for games between large universities with esteemed football programs, kept
courting college athletic departments. By the 1970s several universities with top football programs had become frustrated with the
limits the NCAA was placing on their television exposure. In 1977 five major conferences, along with a handful of high-profile
independents, formed their own group, the College Football Association (CFA), to fight for their interests within the NCAA. A few
years later the CFA signed its own television agreement with NBC, the second-largest sports television contract ever signed up to
that time. Naturally, the NCAA was unhappy about this development and moved to ban the teams involved from all championship
events. The University of Georgia and Oklahoma University sued the NCAA, and the case was eventually decided by the U.S.
Supreme Court in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma et al. (468 U.S. 85, 1984). In the end, the NCAA was
found to be in violation of antitrust laws. Thus, the NCAA’s stranglehold on television broadcast of college football was broken.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, the CFA took on the role of coordinating the television coverage of most of the nation’s
leading football conferences. Still, some teams found the arrangement too restrictive. Following the defection of a handful of teams
and conferences, the CFA folded in 1994, and the conferences were on their own to negotiate television contracts with the networks.
The dollars began to flow in an ever-greater volume during this period. Suggs notes that the Southeastern Conference (SEC) signed
a contract in 1990 that brought in $16 million to be divided among its members. In 2008 the SEC signed broadcast contracts with
CBS and ESPN that extended for 15 years and guaranteed such participating schools as the University of Alabama, University of
Florida, and Louisiana State University an estimated $20 million each per year (August 25, 2008,
http://blogs.tampabay.com/gators/2008/08/sec-espn-agree.html).

With about a thousand universities participating in over 150,000 sporting events each year, competition for the right to put these
events on television is fierce. In 2003 a network devoted strictly to collegiate athletics was launched under the name College Sports
Television (CSTV). According to CSTV (http://www.cstv.com/online/), in 2009 the network was available in more than 21 million
homes via cable and satellite. CSTV also operates a network of 215 official athletic Web sites for top colleges, and streams audio
and/or video for thousands of events per year on high-speed Internet to online subscribers. CSTV was purchased by CBS in January
2006, and is now called CBS College Sports Network. As often happens in the media world, success has bred competition. In March
2005 ESPN launched ESPNU (2009, http://espn.go.com/college-sports/), its own version of a college-only sports station, available
through many cable and satellite television systems.

Basketball

NBA regular-season games have never drawn the kind of television audiences that NFL games routinely attract, simply because
there are so many of them—the NBA season lasts 82 games, whereas the NFL’s lasts just 16. In basketball, viewership increases
significantly during the playoffs and is greatly influenced by the specific teams or personalities involved in a game. The NBA’s
television ratings have generally been sliding since Michael Jordan (1963-) retired in 1999, though there are signs that ratings have
begun to rebound in the waning years of the first decade of the 2000s. Ratings for NBA regular-season broadcasts were up sharply in
2008-09 over the previous season, according to Time Warner, with an average rating of 2.3. (April 16, 2009,
http://www.espnmediazone.com/press_releases/2009_04_april/20090416_NBAAudienceGrowthAcrossESPNPlatforms.htm).
Although this was a significant improvement over the past few years, it paled in comparison to the NBA’s best years. A decade
earlier, during the peak of the Jordan era, it had a 5.0 rating, according to Kevin Downey, in “‘Monday Night Football’ Takes a Hit”
(Media Life, October 9, 2001). A low point came in 2006, when a game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Los Angeles
Lakers—pitting two of the sport’s brightest stars in LeBron James (1984-) and Kobe Bryant (1978-) against each other—recorded
lower ratings than a rained-out National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) race being broadcast simultaneously on
another network. Evidence of a rebound showed during the 2009 NBA finals, featuring a battle between the same two dynamic stars.
That matchup between the Lakers and Cavaliers set all-time NBA playoff records for ratings and viewership (8.7 million), according to
Sports Daily (June 2, 2009, http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/article/130613).

A possible rebound notwithstanding, basketball’s television ratings have been plummeting for a variety of reasons. Industry analyst
David Carter of the Sports Group has placed part of the blame on the slower pace of the game compared to the 1980s.
Several recent championship teams have featured stifling defenses, which many viewers find more boring to watch. There is also the
issue of the widening gulf between players and fans. Peter Roby, the director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at
Northeastern University, notes in the Christian Science Monitor (June 23, 2005, http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0623/p11s02-
alsp.html), “There is a lack of connection between players and fans because the players make so much money now. … Players in the
1960s and 1970s used to live in the same neighborhoods as the fans. Now there is a wedge between fans and players, so there is no
empathy.”

Table 3.1: shows the history of the NBA’s television contracts since 1953. The rate
at which the money involved has increased is striking. The set of deals the league signed in 1990 with TNT and NBC were worth well
under $1 billion for four years. The most recent contracts, signed in 2007 with TNT and ABC/ESPN, cover eight years (from the
2008-09 season through the 2015-16 season) and have a total value of $7.4 billion. Under these contracts ABC airs 15 regular-
season games and the entire NBA finals, along with several earlier round playoff games. ESPN broadcasts up to 75 regular-season
games and one of the conference finals, as well as some early-round playoff games. TNT airs 52 regular-season games, the All-Star
Game, and playoff games, including one of the conference finals (June 27, 2007,
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?sectionnba&id=2918075).

In 2003 Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, and Cablevision Systems teamed up on a multiyear agreement with the NBA for
distribution of NBA TV, the league’s own 24-hour network, which as of 2009 was available via cable systems across the United
States and in 79 other countries. In January 2008 Turner Sports, part of Time Warner, took over management of all of the NBA’s
digital assets, including both NBA TV and nba.com, under a deal to run through 2016. Turner Sports launched an ambitious
“rebranding” campaign for NBA TV in the fall of 2008 that featured the new slogan “The game happens here.”

Hockey

The National Hockey League (NHL) has experienced a downturn in television viewership since the 1990s. So apathetic was the
viewing public in 2004 that the conference finals of the Stanley Cup Playoffs did not even draw a large enough share of the potential
viewing audience to crack the top-15 program list for the week of May 17 through May 23. As with the NBA, however, there are signs
that viewers are coming back. In “Revivals in Chicago and Washington Help Hockey Break Attendance Mark” (April 20, 2009,
http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/article/62238), Tripp Mickle wrote that “average ratings were up at each of the league’s

national broadcast partners (in 2008-09). In the United States, average viewership on Versus [a Comcast-owned network] increased
14 percent to 310,000 viewers and a 0.3 cable rating, and NBC’s ratings rose from a 1.0 to a 1.1 household rating through nine
telecasts.” Viewership in Canada increased as well.

Given its sketchy performance as a television draw, it is not surprising that the NHL has the least lucrative national television deals
among the major sports. NBC currently pays no fee for broadcast rights, and the NHL does not receive any money until NBC recoups
all of its costs. Once this happens, the two entities share advertising revenues equally. In July 2009 NBC and the NHL agreed to
extend the deal through the 2010-11 season. Since 2005, the NHL has also had a deal with the Versus (formerly called Outdoor Life
Network), in which the league received $72.5 million for 2007-08, with inflationary increases since then. That contract has been
extended through the 2010-11 season.

Auto Racing

In “NASCAR TV Deals Done” (December 7, 2005, http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6289818.html), Mike Reynolds reports that
in 2005 NASCAR signed a set of eight-year television rights contracts with ESPN/ABC Sports ($270 million per year) and Turner
Broadcasting’s TNT network ($80 million per year). Soon after these lucrative deals were signed, NASCAR’s television ratings began
to sag. According to Nate Ryan, in “NASCAR’s Growth Slows after 15 Years in the Fast Lane” (USA Today, November 15, 2006), in
30 of the first 34 races of 2006, ratings were lower than they were the previous year. That trend continued into 2009. In “NASCAR’s
Trouble at the Track” (February 9, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/09/nascar-france-advertising-business-
sportsmoney_0209_nascar.html), Jack Gage wrote on Forbes.com that NASCAR’s television ratings had dropped 21% since their
2005 peak.

Extreme Sports

Even though television ratings for extreme sports still have a long way to go before they are in the same league as professional
football and basketball, the audience is growing. More important, at least from the perspective of advertisers, the audience watching
extreme sports is youthful and predominantly male, with a lot of buying power. Not many sports can take credit for completely altering
the public image of a soft drink, but extreme sports have done just that for Mountain Dew. Once perceived as a “hillbilly” drink,
Mountain Dew is now almost universally associated with youth culture as personified by practitioners of extreme sports. In “Going to
Extremes” (American Demographics, June 1, 2002), Joan Raymond states that the transformation started in 1992 with the
appearance of the “Do the Dew” advertising campaign. The campaign, which featured attractive young people engaging in a variety
of extreme activities, helped make Mountain Dew the fastest-growing soft drink during the 1990s.

Raymond notes that by the turn of the millennium, while Monday Night …