SoCal
11/1/2011, 09:47 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2011-10-27/is-espn-the-force-behind-college-conference-realignment/51019966/1
Gene DeFilippo backpedaled quickly — an old quarterback executing one more scramble — after suggesting last month that one of the most stunning shifts in the recent wave of realignment in college sports had been scripted by ESPN.
As college conferences continue to shift, some question the influence of ESPN, which has contracts with many conferences, schools and tournaments.
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The Boston College athletics director apologized, saying he'd misspoken when he told The Boston Globe that the cable television titan "told us what to do" before the Atlantic Coast Conference chose Pittsburgh and Syracuse as new members, plundering the neighboring Big East.
His retreat did little to quell conspiracy theories. Questions continue to bubble about whether ESPN — the 32-year-old network that has become a defining force in sports and the culture around them — has been a key behind-the-scenes player at a time of high-profile realignment in college sports. Fueled largely by schools seeking more money and security in their conference arrangements, the scramble has touched at least a half-dozen leagues and threatened several traditional rivalries.
For all that ESPN has lent to the growth of major-college athletics — through on-air exposure and with rights-fees payouts that schools have fed into stadium improvements, luxurious locker rooms and huge contracts for top coaches — there's an undercurrent of concern about the influence of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports.
It's not just that its tentacles are everywhere: They're everywhere at once.
As a TV rights holder, ESPN is a business partner to a wide array of conferences and schools (its total college outlay will average more than $700million annually by next year).
And as a leading broadcast, print and online news outlet, ESPN also reports the news it's often a party to making.
"We've created … I was going to say a blurry line, but I don't think there is any line anymore as to who's in charge," says Andy Geiger, a former athletics director at Ohio State University.
"We're doing business with an entertainment company whose only way of surviving involves the number of eyeballs watching the screen," he says. "That is the driving force in what I see as all the decisions being made."
DeFilippo gave at least momentary voice to suspicions that ESPN, the sole TV rights holder in the ACC, is nudging realignment in the direction of its choice — a notion ESPN dismisses as myth.
"These (realignment) decisions lie entirely within the conferences and the universities," says Burke Magnus, ESPN's vice president for college sports programming.
"We haven't been advocates of change in this realm because our business interests are best served by stability."
ESPN has, however, been a focus of public discontent in the Big 12, which a year ago saw Colorado defect to the Pac-12 and Nebraska to the Big Ten.
The network's 20-year, $300 million partnership with Texas in The Longhorn Network (LHN) rankled some of the Big 12's remaining schools, primarily because of ESPN's initial interest in using LHN to carry high school and other games that league rivals considered out of bounds.
The Longhorn Network gave Texas A&M a final excuse to bolt the Big 12, too.
The Aggies are bound for the Southeastern Conference, effective next year. Big 12 colleague Missouri appears headed down the same path to the SEC.
Beyond questions about ESPN's influence in college sports are concerns about its pervasiveness.
With sister network ABC, ESPN holds at least some of the football and/or basketball TV rights of a vast majority of the NCAA's Division I conferences and all but two of college football's 35 postseason games — including the five games in the top-tier Bowl Championship Series. ESPN is the outright owner and operator of seven lower-level bowls.
"It approaches a monopoly, if it's not literally one," says Stephen Weber, a former member of the NCAA's Division I board of directors who retired as president of San Diego State University in July.
"You always have potential issues when you're in a situation like that."
Can ESPN objectively weigh in on realignment discussions when one conference stands to gain, another to lose and the network has contractual ties with both? (The ACC and Big East, for example. Or the SEC and Big 12.)
"I suppose it is a conundrum for them," Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione says. "We understand they have multiple partnerships with institutions and other conferences. We all agree there's a concern. I'm just not sure how we do anything about it."
ESPN's long reach
One by one, ESPN's Magnus addresses the medley of what he characterizes as inaccuracies and misperceptions about the network's role in the reconfiguration of college conferences.
•Believe DeFilippo's retraction, Magnus says, not his initial claim of ESPN involvement in ACC expansion, which has helped throw the Big East's future into doubt.
•Magnus maintains, in fact, that ESPN does no talking at all — to a conference weighing expansion or its consultants — until a league has chosen to make a move, secured its new schools and is ready to assess the impact on its TV deal.
Asked whether ESPN is strictly an observer in the process, Magnus says, "I wouldn't put it that way. We have lots of conversations with our partners through the day-to-day relationships that we have with them. Do we have specific meetings where expansion possibilities are evaluated and formally discussed and schools ruled in and ruled out?
"I'm telling you, it doesn't work that way."
•The network has no monopoly on college sports, he says.
Although ESPN is tied to varying degrees into every one of the colleges' six marquee conferences — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC — Magnus points out that the network is the sole TV rights holder only in the ACC.
ESPN lost to Turner Sports and incumbent rights holder CBS last year in the bidding for a key property, the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament. That deal was for $10.8 billion over 14 years.
Acknowledging questions about the network's role and influence in reshaping college sports, a member of ESPN's ombudsman team weighed in last week. Kelly McBride, a media ethics specialist and member of a faculty panel attached to the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism organization, talked with another ESPN executive, John Wildhack, and Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott about expansion deliberations in that conference a year ago.
Scott said it was he who drew up the strategy leading to the Pac-12's acquisition of Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the Mountain West.
However, Scott and Wildhack acknowledged a close association between the Pac-12 and ESPN as the conference was working on expanding.
Based on the appearance of their working relationship, McBride wrote "it seems reasonable that members of the ACC expansion committee were routinely bouncing information off the network" before the conference invited Pitt and Syracuse.
ESPN's Magnus disputes that. A former university president, however, seconds it.
"Are (conference) commissioners talking to ESPN? All the time," says Louis Caldera, president at the University of New Mexico from 2003 to 2006. "If I'm a president, I want the commissioner to be having that conversation.
"You want to hit the bull's-eye if you're going to fire that arrow (toward expansion or realignment). 'If we're looking at Louisville and you really like Cincinnati, tell me which one. Don't make it a mystery. Tell me which combination (is best). What are the trade-offs if we have a (conference) championship game or we don't have it?'"
Often among those trade-offs: geographic fit, increased travel and missed class time for athletes and the interruption or abandonment of longtime rivalries.
In her ombudsman column, McBride addressed another concern that predates the current round of realignment: ESPN's on-air and online journalists working on one side to report the network's business dealings on the other.
While noting "even some of the network's executives call the company 'a walking conflict of interest,'" she concluded that ESPN is keeping the line properly drawn.
Conspiracy theories
Gauging the depth of outside concern about ESPN's role in realignment is difficult.
Most critics ask for anonymity, particularly when they're still working on campuses or in league offices and dealing with — and frequently relying on — the network.
ESPN's defenders are more forthright.
One theory on ESPN's involvement in the Pitt-Syracuse move to the ACC — a serious blow from which the Big East still is trying to recover — goes like this:
The network has been a Big East partner since 1979 and, in May, tendered a new nine-year, $1.4 billion offer that the league rejected, preferring to see how much more it could score in an open market that also includes NBC and Fox Sports. ESPN countered by selling the ACC on the two Big East schools as expansion targets, extolling their value to television.
The ESPN-affiliated ACC is strengthened, and a weakened Big East is left to competing networks or available at reduced cost to ESPN. Several highly placed college athletics officials laid out that scenario for USA TODAY, none willing to speak publicly because of its sensitivity.
But even within the Big East, there are rebuttals to that scenario.
"I saw (DeFilippo's) comments," says West Virginia athletics director Oliver Luck, whose school is leaving the Big East to join the Big 12. "I'm not sure I subscribe to any particular theory in that regard."
Connecticut President Susan Herbst likewise dismissed the theory to USA TODAY.
Former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe says, "I would tread very cautiously with any assumption that ESPN is indicating to conferences which schools they should add to enhance their value.
"It's been my experience with them, and any network, that they're very worried and concerned about going down that road and they try to keep a clear distance," Beebe adds.
The dust-up in the Big 12 over The Longhorn Network is better documented, ignited by an ESPN vice president, Dave Brown, who talked during a June interview with an Austin radio station about plans to broadcast high school games and feature Texas recruits.
Some rival Big 12 coaches, led by Missouri's Gary Pinkel, cried foul, saying such an arrangement would give Texas an unfair advantage over their schools in recruiting athletes. There were other complaints about LHN's plans to carry one of Texas' conference football games each year.
In lower-echelon conferences, there's a different kind of discomfort.
Weber spent 15 years as president at San Diego State, many of them chafing at the BCS and a format that separates college football's haves from have-nots.
Football's six marquee leagues — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC — automatically place their champions into a BCS bowl game, where the payouts to conferences of affiliated teams reach as high as $26 million-plus.
The five lower-echelon leagues in the NCAA's bowl subdivision must hope one or two of their teams meet minimum-ranking criteria to qualify for a BCS bowl. San Diego State and the Mountain West Conference fall among the non-automatic qualifiers (or non-AQs).
That dividing line is based partly on the leagues' and their member schools' historical performance on the field — and partly on their attractiveness to TV.
San Diego State and others in non-AQ leagues are effectively branded as second-class, Weber says, raising the question of "the role that ESPN plays in the general positioning of your university."
He prefers to scrap the BCS and set up a major-college football playoff to which all leagues have access, something the Mountain West has formally proposed.
Weber regards ESPN as "a co-conspirator" with the BCS in frustrating previous efforts in that regard.
He says the network fears the exorbitant rights fees a major-college football playoff could fetch and the possibility of losing such prime property to a higher-bidding rival.
Counters ESPN's Magnus: "We don't determine the format. We leave that to the stewards of the sport."
The bright light of ESPN
Whatever their misgivings, officials across college athletics say it's difficult to swear off ESPN, stepping away from its money and cachet.
The Mountain West is one of the few conferences to do that, creating its own MountainWest Sports Network in 2006 to avoid the Tuesday and Wednesday night football games ESPN wanted Mountain West teams to play.
Beyond that, the conference didn't think ESPN was offering its schools enough money.
Even so, Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson says, "There was a football coach in our league who said, 'I'd rather play one Tuesday or Wednesday game a year on ESPN than all 12 on Versus, CBS Sports (Network) and The Mountain.'
"I said, 'That's ludicrous.' But that's what coaches think because kids watch ESPN."
The moth-to-a-flame lure of ESPN has led some conference officials to point fingers at themselves when discussing the realignment chaos.
"I don't put it on them," Beebe says of the anxiety over ESPN's reach and clout. "I put it on us … the college community.
"They're businesspeople. They're going to tell you what it's going to take for you to be on their network and how much they're willing to provide for that.
"If you're all about the money — and it seems like we've shifted more and more to the commercial side — and that's the route you want to go, that's the way you've made your bed."
Gene DeFilippo backpedaled quickly — an old quarterback executing one more scramble — after suggesting last month that one of the most stunning shifts in the recent wave of realignment in college sports had been scripted by ESPN.
As college conferences continue to shift, some question the influence of ESPN, which has contracts with many conferences, schools and tournaments.
EnlargeClose
The Boston College athletics director apologized, saying he'd misspoken when he told The Boston Globe that the cable television titan "told us what to do" before the Atlantic Coast Conference chose Pittsburgh and Syracuse as new members, plundering the neighboring Big East.
His retreat did little to quell conspiracy theories. Questions continue to bubble about whether ESPN — the 32-year-old network that has become a defining force in sports and the culture around them — has been a key behind-the-scenes player at a time of high-profile realignment in college sports. Fueled largely by schools seeking more money and security in their conference arrangements, the scramble has touched at least a half-dozen leagues and threatened several traditional rivalries.
For all that ESPN has lent to the growth of major-college athletics — through on-air exposure and with rights-fees payouts that schools have fed into stadium improvements, luxurious locker rooms and huge contracts for top coaches — there's an undercurrent of concern about the influence of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports.
It's not just that its tentacles are everywhere: They're everywhere at once.
As a TV rights holder, ESPN is a business partner to a wide array of conferences and schools (its total college outlay will average more than $700million annually by next year).
And as a leading broadcast, print and online news outlet, ESPN also reports the news it's often a party to making.
"We've created … I was going to say a blurry line, but I don't think there is any line anymore as to who's in charge," says Andy Geiger, a former athletics director at Ohio State University.
"We're doing business with an entertainment company whose only way of surviving involves the number of eyeballs watching the screen," he says. "That is the driving force in what I see as all the decisions being made."
DeFilippo gave at least momentary voice to suspicions that ESPN, the sole TV rights holder in the ACC, is nudging realignment in the direction of its choice — a notion ESPN dismisses as myth.
"These (realignment) decisions lie entirely within the conferences and the universities," says Burke Magnus, ESPN's vice president for college sports programming.
"We haven't been advocates of change in this realm because our business interests are best served by stability."
ESPN has, however, been a focus of public discontent in the Big 12, which a year ago saw Colorado defect to the Pac-12 and Nebraska to the Big Ten.
The network's 20-year, $300 million partnership with Texas in The Longhorn Network (LHN) rankled some of the Big 12's remaining schools, primarily because of ESPN's initial interest in using LHN to carry high school and other games that league rivals considered out of bounds.
The Longhorn Network gave Texas A&M a final excuse to bolt the Big 12, too.
The Aggies are bound for the Southeastern Conference, effective next year. Big 12 colleague Missouri appears headed down the same path to the SEC.
Beyond questions about ESPN's influence in college sports are concerns about its pervasiveness.
With sister network ABC, ESPN holds at least some of the football and/or basketball TV rights of a vast majority of the NCAA's Division I conferences and all but two of college football's 35 postseason games — including the five games in the top-tier Bowl Championship Series. ESPN is the outright owner and operator of seven lower-level bowls.
"It approaches a monopoly, if it's not literally one," says Stephen Weber, a former member of the NCAA's Division I board of directors who retired as president of San Diego State University in July.
"You always have potential issues when you're in a situation like that."
Can ESPN objectively weigh in on realignment discussions when one conference stands to gain, another to lose and the network has contractual ties with both? (The ACC and Big East, for example. Or the SEC and Big 12.)
"I suppose it is a conundrum for them," Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione says. "We understand they have multiple partnerships with institutions and other conferences. We all agree there's a concern. I'm just not sure how we do anything about it."
ESPN's long reach
One by one, ESPN's Magnus addresses the medley of what he characterizes as inaccuracies and misperceptions about the network's role in the reconfiguration of college conferences.
•Believe DeFilippo's retraction, Magnus says, not his initial claim of ESPN involvement in ACC expansion, which has helped throw the Big East's future into doubt.
•Magnus maintains, in fact, that ESPN does no talking at all — to a conference weighing expansion or its consultants — until a league has chosen to make a move, secured its new schools and is ready to assess the impact on its TV deal.
Asked whether ESPN is strictly an observer in the process, Magnus says, "I wouldn't put it that way. We have lots of conversations with our partners through the day-to-day relationships that we have with them. Do we have specific meetings where expansion possibilities are evaluated and formally discussed and schools ruled in and ruled out?
"I'm telling you, it doesn't work that way."
•The network has no monopoly on college sports, he says.
Although ESPN is tied to varying degrees into every one of the colleges' six marquee conferences — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC — Magnus points out that the network is the sole TV rights holder only in the ACC.
ESPN lost to Turner Sports and incumbent rights holder CBS last year in the bidding for a key property, the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament. That deal was for $10.8 billion over 14 years.
Acknowledging questions about the network's role and influence in reshaping college sports, a member of ESPN's ombudsman team weighed in last week. Kelly McBride, a media ethics specialist and member of a faculty panel attached to the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism organization, talked with another ESPN executive, John Wildhack, and Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott about expansion deliberations in that conference a year ago.
Scott said it was he who drew up the strategy leading to the Pac-12's acquisition of Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the Mountain West.
However, Scott and Wildhack acknowledged a close association between the Pac-12 and ESPN as the conference was working on expanding.
Based on the appearance of their working relationship, McBride wrote "it seems reasonable that members of the ACC expansion committee were routinely bouncing information off the network" before the conference invited Pitt and Syracuse.
ESPN's Magnus disputes that. A former university president, however, seconds it.
"Are (conference) commissioners talking to ESPN? All the time," says Louis Caldera, president at the University of New Mexico from 2003 to 2006. "If I'm a president, I want the commissioner to be having that conversation.
"You want to hit the bull's-eye if you're going to fire that arrow (toward expansion or realignment). 'If we're looking at Louisville and you really like Cincinnati, tell me which one. Don't make it a mystery. Tell me which combination (is best). What are the trade-offs if we have a (conference) championship game or we don't have it?'"
Often among those trade-offs: geographic fit, increased travel and missed class time for athletes and the interruption or abandonment of longtime rivalries.
In her ombudsman column, McBride addressed another concern that predates the current round of realignment: ESPN's on-air and online journalists working on one side to report the network's business dealings on the other.
While noting "even some of the network's executives call the company 'a walking conflict of interest,'" she concluded that ESPN is keeping the line properly drawn.
Conspiracy theories
Gauging the depth of outside concern about ESPN's role in realignment is difficult.
Most critics ask for anonymity, particularly when they're still working on campuses or in league offices and dealing with — and frequently relying on — the network.
ESPN's defenders are more forthright.
One theory on ESPN's involvement in the Pitt-Syracuse move to the ACC — a serious blow from which the Big East still is trying to recover — goes like this:
The network has been a Big East partner since 1979 and, in May, tendered a new nine-year, $1.4 billion offer that the league rejected, preferring to see how much more it could score in an open market that also includes NBC and Fox Sports. ESPN countered by selling the ACC on the two Big East schools as expansion targets, extolling their value to television.
The ESPN-affiliated ACC is strengthened, and a weakened Big East is left to competing networks or available at reduced cost to ESPN. Several highly placed college athletics officials laid out that scenario for USA TODAY, none willing to speak publicly because of its sensitivity.
But even within the Big East, there are rebuttals to that scenario.
"I saw (DeFilippo's) comments," says West Virginia athletics director Oliver Luck, whose school is leaving the Big East to join the Big 12. "I'm not sure I subscribe to any particular theory in that regard."
Connecticut President Susan Herbst likewise dismissed the theory to USA TODAY.
Former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe says, "I would tread very cautiously with any assumption that ESPN is indicating to conferences which schools they should add to enhance their value.
"It's been my experience with them, and any network, that they're very worried and concerned about going down that road and they try to keep a clear distance," Beebe adds.
The dust-up in the Big 12 over The Longhorn Network is better documented, ignited by an ESPN vice president, Dave Brown, who talked during a June interview with an Austin radio station about plans to broadcast high school games and feature Texas recruits.
Some rival Big 12 coaches, led by Missouri's Gary Pinkel, cried foul, saying such an arrangement would give Texas an unfair advantage over their schools in recruiting athletes. There were other complaints about LHN's plans to carry one of Texas' conference football games each year.
In lower-echelon conferences, there's a different kind of discomfort.
Weber spent 15 years as president at San Diego State, many of them chafing at the BCS and a format that separates college football's haves from have-nots.
Football's six marquee leagues — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC — automatically place their champions into a BCS bowl game, where the payouts to conferences of affiliated teams reach as high as $26 million-plus.
The five lower-echelon leagues in the NCAA's bowl subdivision must hope one or two of their teams meet minimum-ranking criteria to qualify for a BCS bowl. San Diego State and the Mountain West Conference fall among the non-automatic qualifiers (or non-AQs).
That dividing line is based partly on the leagues' and their member schools' historical performance on the field — and partly on their attractiveness to TV.
San Diego State and others in non-AQ leagues are effectively branded as second-class, Weber says, raising the question of "the role that ESPN plays in the general positioning of your university."
He prefers to scrap the BCS and set up a major-college football playoff to which all leagues have access, something the Mountain West has formally proposed.
Weber regards ESPN as "a co-conspirator" with the BCS in frustrating previous efforts in that regard.
He says the network fears the exorbitant rights fees a major-college football playoff could fetch and the possibility of losing such prime property to a higher-bidding rival.
Counters ESPN's Magnus: "We don't determine the format. We leave that to the stewards of the sport."
The bright light of ESPN
Whatever their misgivings, officials across college athletics say it's difficult to swear off ESPN, stepping away from its money and cachet.
The Mountain West is one of the few conferences to do that, creating its own MountainWest Sports Network in 2006 to avoid the Tuesday and Wednesday night football games ESPN wanted Mountain West teams to play.
Beyond that, the conference didn't think ESPN was offering its schools enough money.
Even so, Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson says, "There was a football coach in our league who said, 'I'd rather play one Tuesday or Wednesday game a year on ESPN than all 12 on Versus, CBS Sports (Network) and The Mountain.'
"I said, 'That's ludicrous.' But that's what coaches think because kids watch ESPN."
The moth-to-a-flame lure of ESPN has led some conference officials to point fingers at themselves when discussing the realignment chaos.
"I don't put it on them," Beebe says of the anxiety over ESPN's reach and clout. "I put it on us … the college community.
"They're businesspeople. They're going to tell you what it's going to take for you to be on their network and how much they're willing to provide for that.
"If you're all about the money — and it seems like we've shifted more and more to the commercial side — and that's the route you want to go, that's the way you've made your bed."