Husker athletics and NET
Broadcast rights and expense limit coverage
We are often asked why NET does not provide broadcast coverage of more Husker athletic events. After all, they say, taxpayers support both. Unfortunately, the answer is complex. To understand why, you must first understand how broadcast rights for intercollegiate athletics work.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was organized in 1905. Forty years later their charge was expanded to include the sale of television broadcast rights for college football games. Contracts negotiated by the NCAA as the exclusive selling agent for college football television broadcast rights led to growth in revenues of college and university athletic departments from 1951 through 1984.
Incidentally, in my research on the subject I found that the first live college football game was broadcast in 1938 to six viewers. As the number of households with televisions grew, individual universities increasingly arranged to televise their games. These broadcast contracts created conflict among NCAA members.
Several universities contended that when games of other institutions were broadcast into their local markets during one of their games, gate receipts declined as fans stayed home and watched television rather than buy a ticket to a home game. Today’s research shows that televised games add exposure to the sport and helps to generate ticket sales.
In 1951 the NCAA revoked its policy allowing each individual institution complete control over the marketing of its athletic events.
The NCAA signed its first Association-wide college football television contract with a broadcast network in 1952. It was a one-year contract with NBC to pay the NCAA $1.14 million, in return for which NBC could select a game to broadcast on Saturday afternoons with assurance that no other NCAA college football broadcast would appear on a competitive network. Exclusivity was the key to the agreement. The NCAA restricted the games to one per week to add value to the broadcast rights.
The NCAA received between 4 percent and 12 percent of the revenues to defray the expenses that otherwise would have been covered by member dues; the bulk of the rights fees were distributed to the schools that appeared on television and were chosen by the network. In order to broaden support among the NCAA’s members for the centralized sale of the rights, the contracts limited the number of times an individual institution could be selected for the game of the week, thereby expanding the number of different teams appearing.
Beyond appearance limitations, the selection of games to be broadcast was left to the networks in order to maximize the value of the contract to the winning bidder. The result was a concentration of appearances among a limited number of "big-time" football programs. Many teams never appeared on the game of the week. The distribution of the rights revenues created tension among member institutions from the beginning, but more complaints arose from the teams that appeared frequently than came from those that seldom or never appeared. The teams whose games were selected frequently were the ones constrained by the maximum appearance limitations. They argued that they were the attraction of the contract and should receive an even larger proportion of the revenues than was allocated to them.
Over time, appearance limitations were relaxed to appease the institutions with big-time football programs, but not relaxed sufficiently to placate the institutions with popular teams. The numerous smaller and less popular programs coalesced to maintain the appearance limitations in the democratic NCAA. They understood that uncapping appearances would divert almost all of the rights fees to a few popular programs with a large following.
In 1977, 62 of the largest college football programs formed the College Football Association (CFA). All CFA members were also members of the NCAA. The initial purpose of the CFA was to coordinate internal NCAA lobbying efforts on behalf of major college football interests.
The CFA included the universities who were members of the Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference,Western Athletic Conference, Big Eight Conference and the Southwest Athletic Conference, as well as many independents. The group thus included Penn State, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Miami, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A & M, Arkansas, Louisiana State, Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, Florida, Florida State and Clemson. Because Big Tell and Pac Ten Conferences did not join, Ohio State, Michigan, Southern California and UCLA were not in the CFA.
The CFA hoped to increase the demand for college football and to insure that the most popular programs received a larger share of the revenues.
The power shifted back to the large conferences and subsequently led to the formation of the super conferences, like the Big 12. Today, there is a good deal of interest not only in football and basketball, but baseball, volleyball and other Olympic sports. Each conference was empowered to negotiate its own television rights packages. Individual schools continued to control radio and broadband rights for the regular season. The CFA also negotiates the bowl coverage— including the BCS.
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