Sports In The Year 2001

Once owned by a corporation, everything in college sport became available as prime advertising space for sponsors' products—from players' uniforms to goal posts to referees' shirts to the game ball itself. This has had a very positive effect in that it has eliminated commercials from all NCAA telecasts. However, some loyal alums have found it hard to go to games where every cheer, fight song and marching band formation is being used to sell cars, toothpaste, toasters or disposable diapers.

Of course, the major source of revenue for all sports in the 21st century is pay-per-view television—PPV-TV. Each sports master web has a slightly different approach to PPV, and I will explain some of the others later. Today, tuning into the NCAA's full 24-game program will cost me $7 on my Tele-Pay account. Tele-Pay is a universal charge system that generates a single monthly bill for all the pay-per-view programs I buy, including movies, concerts and special events. If I don't want the full NCAA package today and want access only to the No. 1 Bowl, my Tele-Pay charge is $4. If I want access to the lesser bowls, the price range is from 50 cents for the Amtrak/Uncle Ben's Fiesta Bowl to $3 for the Kitty Litter/IBM Rose Bowl. The prices are relatively low, you will notice, but about 40 million homes will be on Tele-Pay with the NCAA today, and since nearly all of them will pay at least the $4 for the super-popular No. 1 Bowl, the total take for the NCAA master web will beat least $160 million.

It is a lot of money, but the NCAA doesn't get it all. I am not going to tell you about that now, though. The bowl games have begun and—uh-oh, I have just been notified of a VEM—a CIPBM, no less. Excuse me.

FEBRUARY 18

In 1998, when die NFL decided on a 20-game season, the Super A Bowl was moved to mid-February. The regular season begins in mid-August and ends in early January, then moves smartly into four tiers of championship playoffs. There are 40 teams now, 10 in each of four conferences, including the Over There Conference with the foreign teams—London, Paris, Berlin, Teheran, Johannesburg, Bombay, Djakarta, Sydney, Auckland and Mexico City.

Today is Super Bowl XXXV, which pits the Cincinnati Bengals against the Anchorage Caribou (there was another gold rush in 1994). The basic Tele-Pay pricing system for NFL games is simple and cheap. On any given Sunday, or sometimes Monday or Thursday night, I can watch my home team—the Minnesota Vikings—play for $1. For $1.501 can include one other particularly interesting game that day. For $5 I can access the entire 20-game schedule that week, including the NCAA-style Very Exciting Moments feature, as well as the usual Home Control Truck stuff, which allows me to call up any shot in any game—from an overhead blimp picture of the whole Twin City area to an intimate sideline minicam view up the bloody nostrils of a 380-pound defensive end with a broken nose.

With some 35 million homes tuned in to one NFL program or another on any given game day, the total revenue is about $262.5 million a week, before the local cable operators take their 20% cut. Playoff game prices range from $2.50 for all eight first-round games to $6 for the Super Bowl. All told, the postseason generates $1.2 billion—and the NFL doesn't get all of that, either. More on that later. Of course, the PPV prices for NFL telecasts are far lower than people predicted they would be years ago. Many thought a PPV Super Bowl would cost at least $50 or even $100 per home. But the masterminds of the NFL master web were smarter than that. They have retained hefty advertising revenues to keep their Tele-Pay prices low.

It works like this: When the networks dropped TV sports, millions of corporate advertising dollars were still available to sponsor NFL games. The league had been flirting with pay-per-view programming in the early '90s, but in 1995 an angry Congress passed legislation declaring that the NFL, baseball and college football and basketball were all "American birthrights," and were thus prohibited from charging the public to view their product on TV. The old commercial sponsorship system continued until 1996 when, abruptly, the Supreme Court overturned the anti-PPV law, ruling that it was a clear obstruction of interstate commerce. The NFL was free to tap into the great PPV treasure trove.

And there was still that lovely supply of advertising money besides. Of course, it didn't take a genius to realize that once a pro football fan began paying up front for his NFL games, he wouldn't stand for being besieged by the same irritating 10 minutes of commercials that the NFL had previously allowed the networks to cram into each hour of each telecast. What to do? As always, the NFL was on the cutting edge. It still sells 10 minutes of commercials during each hour of play. In fact, it sells them to the same companies that bought them before and for the same pre-PPV price of $110,000 per 30-second commercial. However, advertisers are now allowed no more than five seconds for each commercial. At first, advertisers vigorously refused to accept this deal. But soon it became clear that American businessmen simply could not get along without the strange, possibly perverted, macho-commercial relationship they had enjoyed with pro football for decades. And the bite-sized five-second sales pitch ultimately proved to be an irresistible challenge to American advertising ingenuity. Today, the industry's most coveted awards are the Bitty-Bite Awards, given for the best five-second commercials.

Well, the Super Bowl is starting and I must immerse myself. I have already set up my personal Very Exciting Moment program, which today includes VHAFP (Vicious Hits Away From the Play) and SPAL (Sneak Punches Among Linemen). Suffice it to say that working at the post office doesn't fulfill all my emotional needs.