March Madness really is madness

The NCAA is looking for more TV money which is why the body is thinking of expanding the field for the championship. NCAA negotiators know that CBS, which does not have a cable TV sports partner, cannot pay them as much as Disney’s ESPN or possibly the Comcast-NBC (Versus and possibly USA, CNBC and MSNBC set up) entity. The negotiators know the Disney (ESPN) has given the Bowl Championship Series a four year, $495 million for five games a year. CBS might turn to Turner Sports as a cable partner. Murdoch has some regional cable sports networks but would need a real partner to land the tourney.

Disney’s ESPN can spend wildly on sports fee because of the Cable TV Act of 1984 which allowed the bundling of then-dying cable TV networks like ESPN, CNN, The Weather Channel to be bundled and sold as one to cable TV subscribers on a basic-expanded tier which means 100 percent of those buying the basic expanded tier are paying for an entity that a fraction of the cable TV universe are using, ESPN. The legislation, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, allows cable networks who manage to land on the basic-expanded tier (multiple system operators (MSO), not consumers, decide what ends up on the basic-expanded tier which is why the National Football League has been fighting with operators like Time Warner and Cablevision for a spot on that vaunted tier, the MSOs have decided the NFL Network is not worth the price that NFL has attached to the network. ESPN is charging subscribers more than $4 a month for the network. ESPN can get high prices despite mediocre ratings because there is a perception that men between 18 and 34 watch a lot of sports and 18-34 year old males are a hard to reach advertising demographic and that advertisers can reach them en masse during a televised sports event.).

ESPN can outspend over the air network rivals because it gets a month fee from more than 95 million subscribers along with advertising dollars.

The various conferences are also chasing more TV dollars. Why else is the Pacific 10 considering expanding with the conference TV contracts with Disney’s ESPN, the Fox Sports Network and Versus ending in two years? The Pac 10 may also want to start a cable TV network like the Big Ten, the Mountain West or the Southeast Conference.

In pursuit of more TV money, the Atlantic Coast Conference raided the Big East in 2003 and took Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech to make the ACC more attractive for a TV network and advertisers. The Big East filled the holes by taking three colleges, Louisville, Cincinnati and South Florida from Conference USA. Other conferences poached other conferences and things have calmed down since 2003 although the Big Ten took a run at Rutgers and may go after the University of Pittsburgh. The state of Connecticut sued the ACC for poaching the Big East and weakening the college sports conference. Eventually the two conferences settled.

Money talks in college sports.

March Madness captivates the sporting public for three weeks and has caused some problems in the workplace on the first Thursday and Friday of the tournament with people at work watching games on the internet instead of doing their job. That is how wrapped up people have become in the tourney. Meanwhile CBS never delves into questions that academia poses privately about the pursuit of a basketball tournament which includes why teams are traveling far away from their campuses to play games which seem to also coincide during the midterm time period.

CBS, the NCAA money partner, never brings up the question of whether players are really student-athletes or if they are merely fund raisers for a program. There is also another component worth pursuing. Are the most talented freshmen who know they are leaving for the NBA following the college tourney attending class during the second semester of the school year?

College routinely holds hearings on the college sports industry, after all the colleges do have a antitrust TV exemptions thanks to the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 and enjoy tax exempt status, but those hearings seem to center around the unfairness of the Bowl Championship Series which prompted Texas Republican Joe Barton to introduce legislation in January 2009, the College Football Playoff Act of 2009 (HR 309).

Barton’s bill was aimed at the BCS’ championship game. HR 309’s language was simple. “To prohibit, as an unfair and deceptive act or practice, the promotion, marketing, and advertising of any post-season NCAA Division I football game as a national championship game unless such game is the culmination of a fair and equitable playoff system.”

The bill went nowhere as did President Barack Obama’s call for a college football championship contest.

The Madness starts soon, and because of the chance of scooping up more money, the Madness will get even bigger in the future and everyone will make a buck except the stars of the show—the players.

Evan Weiner is a radio-TV commentator, journalist, author and lecturer on “the politics of sports business.”