8 The Tv Time-out

FACT: Television money is essential to the successful operation of pro franchises.

Back in the days of Buffalo Bob and Uncle Miltie, when Pete Rozelle was cranking out press releases for the Los Angeles Rams and Franklin Mieuli was hustling ads for a San Francisco brewery, sports moguls had a notion that the new-fangled contraption called television might be a good way to publicize their product. But who could afford to pay for it?

Then Mieuli, whose brewery account sponsored 49ers games on radio, approached team owner Tony Morabito in the early 1950s with a proposition: why not telecast the 49ers' home-and-home series with the Rams? One game would be beamed to L.A., one to S.F., and the host team's game would be blacked out locally. Pete would beat the drum in L.A., Franklin would handle the hype in S.F., and who knows, both teams might wind up selling a few more tickets. Mieuli explained that he could only offer $10,000 for the package but....

Morabito was incredulous. "You mean you'll give me $5,000 to show us here in Northern California when we're in Los Angeles? Hell, I ought to pay you for the exposure." So he gave back his half of the 10 grand, feeling like a profiteer and a philanthropist all at once.

Today Mieuli owns the Golden State Warriors and Rozelle owns television—and no one is giving anything back. Indeed, the staggering $656-million contract that Pete the Shark engineered with the three networks late last year is easily the biggest deal in TV history. And talk about your double whammies; the TV bonanza is not only the NFL's largest source of income, but as Tony Morabito noted, it is also its greatest means of promotion. Football gets hours and hours of free publicity that other advertisers paid for at an average of $70,000 a minute last season.

Six hundred and fifty-six million dollars. How to wrestle with such a monster number? To say that it exceeds the gross advertising revenues of all TV sports in 1976 is just a beginning. It is the equivalent of 44 Louisiana Purchases or the national debt of Canada in 1915. But what does it mean in the ledger books, on the field and for the future?

NFL owners and their envious peers in the other leagues have it figured. So vital are network TV revenues to their financial well-being that they know to the decimal point what everyone's share of the bounty is. The bosses of the NHL find their cuts achingly easy to compute. They all come out to zero. Having lost its national TV contract in 1975 because of low ratings, hockey is like an urchin with his nose pressed to the picture tube. What he sees inside are the network contracts of the other leagues—all of them for four years. Meanwhile in the 1977-78 season the NHL had to make do with a piddling sum derived from a one-year deal it had with a string of independent stations.

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]

Knowing how much the NFL is beholden to television, why did the networks agree to boost their previous four-year contract, worth $240 million, by 150%? Because TV is just as beholden to pro football, if not more so. As Rozelle says, the game has consistently been able to "deliver the numbers," which means ratings in layman's talk and lots of sponsors' dollars in Madison Avenuese. Networks need to be thought of as big league, too, and nothing insures the loyalty of their affiliates like a healthy infusion of the All-American game. "A TV schedule without football is like mom's apple pie without the apples," says one programmer.

That is why the NFL is the only league that has the clout to peddle its product to all three networks. Enter the triple whammy. Under the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act, which allows the teams to sell their national TV rights as a group without being subject to the antitrust laws, the NFL can bargain as a monopolist with three competing customers. As a result, the networks actually bid against one another, not against Rozelle, and the competition is for real, as indicated by ABC's willingness to snap up any Sunday games that NBC and CBS did not want.