The road to riches

Sporting News, The, August 19, 1996 by kevin Sherrington

In a quest to gobble up money, schools have made themselves more attractive to television by joining forces in superconferences

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth in houndstooth hats, college football was a simple and fairly economical industry. Take bowl pairings, for example. A fellow in Tuscaloosa, Ala., would pick up a telephone and call a fellow in, say, Lincoln, Neb., and something like this exchange would follow:

"Bob," the Alabama fellow would rumble, "why don't y'all come on down to Miami and let's have some fun this year?"

And the Nebraska fellow would reply, "Now, Bear, that'd be just fine."

And, that done, the rest of the bowls would fall in line like good soldiers. No board meetings, no network lunches, no fiscal breakdowns. Careers are salvaged, boosters are soothed and college football moves on at the pace of a church league softball game.

"Coaches did what they wanted to do," says Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. "Right now, it's a different game."

The game began changing about the time television was invented. Or at least television as we now know it, which is no longer the little box glowing in the den but a stereophonic jumboscreen that makes cheering for Old State U. a moving experience.

The plot line picked up about a dozen years ago with the breakup of the NCAA's television contract. Over the years, it would lead to the advent of 12th games, bowl sponsors, league championship games and even a national championship game. But it was the last stage of evolution that's responsible for the current state of affairs: the superconference.

Some think the genre will save college sports, which has bills to pay. Others think it's just football's grab for more power. Most simply wonder what happened to college football as we once knew it, a sport that has strayed far from its provincial upbringing and what seemed to sustain it all those years in its rivalry with professional football.

But not everyone is confused.

"Who the heck are they foolin?" asked Jerry Tagge, the quarterback of Nebraska's AP national champions in 1970 and '71, an era before any athletic director worth his MBA could give you the monetary value of a No. 1 ranking. "It's all about money."

Conferences used to be little cloisters of schools from the same region. They were run by men who generally knew their place, which was somewhere behind the football coach in the team picture.

Conference members were not created equal, and they didn't trust each other any further than Oklahoma could throw a football. But it was family, dysfunctional as it may have been. They knew each other's strong and weak points and knew where to apply the pressure, maybe with no more than a phone call.

Change came in the power structure when someone realized they'd been playing football all these years for championships and trophies and glory, and something just wasn't right. Then someone realized everyone could be playing for money.

So they did. A couple of schools, Oklahoma and Georgia, got together and sued the NCAA to break its monopoly on the network television contract, which it had held since 1952. The schools won in 1984. The immediate upshot was that rights fees were cut in half, meaning that it took at least twice as many games on television to reap the same benefits. But no one had any problem being on television more.

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In the old days, a Saturday afternoon of college football would feature one national game and maybe a regional offering. "Now," former Southwest Conference commissioner Fred jacoby says, "we can see games from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m."

The result is overexposure, which hurts schools at the gate. But they're willing to make that sacrifice because they can make more money off television, which is where most boosters and recruits see them on a Saturday--or a Tuesday or Thursday.

They don't make nearly as much money per game, but so many games are on TV it doesn't matter. They made so much money by the early 1990s that they were choking on it. They made so much that banks weren't big enough and they had to put it somewhere, so they hid it in great athletic dormitories and arenas and weight rooms and stadiums.

And, of course, it wasn't enough. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't hide all of it. Women found out about it and demanded their share. So did the track coaches and baseball coaches and swimming and golf coaches.

Frank Broyles can remember when those coaches didn't even have full-time jobs. The year before he became Arkansas' athletic director, in 1973, the only full-time coaches at the university were in football and basketball. The rest were part-time. Arkansas didn't have a tennis or swimming team. The school didn't sponsor women's sports.

A team went to a bowl game in those days for the prestige of it. Maybe for fun. Occasionally, it came back with a national title. "Money was not a factor," Broyles says.

But that was before what Broyles calls "the arms race." Somebody built an indoor practice facility and then a bigger weight room. You couldn't sit still, Broyles says, or somebody would build something over you. Recruits wouldn't stand for those dinky, dingy facilities any more.