Tagliabue: 'It all starts with ESPN'

In his new role as a special adviser to the Big East Conference, Paul Tagliabue last week cited ESPN as the key to the league's future.

Tagliabue, in 17 seasons as NFL commissioner, had a reputation for occasionally splitting hairs and dancing around hot buttons.

But on this particular topic, the 69-year-old Georgetown alum marched straight to the stand and spoke the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the bottom line.

Where college football and men's basketball are concerned entering the second decade of the 2000s, ESPN quickly is becoming the be-all, end-all of one and all.

The ever-expanding network already owns the ACC and the Southeastern Conference for so far into the future that few people directly associated with those 24 schools will even be around when their recently negotiated rights contracts expire.

Although it hasn't been officially announced yet, the ACC has a deal with the cable giant for $1.8 billion for a 12-year period that will begin in the 2011-12 school year. The SEC signed over its birthright for $2.25 billion for 15 years.

Now, the Big East is begging to become ESPN's next domino.

Discussing the league's future at a sports symposium in Wisconsin, Tagliabue said "it all starts with ESPN."

"It has to start with ESPN," he said. "That's where others have ended up. The SEC ended up there. The ACC ended up there. Beyond that, it's hard to speculate [where the Big East could find a big-money deal]."

Current Big East football and basketball TV contracts end after the 2013-14 school year. In order to stave off possible raids by other leagues, Tagliabue understands the Big East must move quickly to land a new contract that's lucrative enough to keep its roster intact.

There's no strong reason to think ESPN will bypass the Big East bait. The league may have only eight football-playing members, but with 16 basketball teams in dense population centers, there's a ton of program inventory.

And once you get past Duke and North Carolina, the Big East easily has the basketball edge over the ACC and will maintain it unless three or four other ACC teams start winning NCAA tournament games on a regular basis.

In time, it's easy to envision ESPN owning and operating virtually all college sports through its conference rights contracts.

The network then could arrange the daily buffet as it wishes.

If a conference was told to stage two or three Saturday football kickoffs at 10 a.m. and a couple of others at 10 p.m., then that's the way it would go.

So what if virtually no one is in the stadium to watch? As long as everyone else interested in the game is watching the ESPN, that's what matters most to the network.

Eventually, of course, the conference contract business model will outlive its income usefulness. Even if there's so much expansion that only two or three super mega-conferences are left, TV networks will reach a point of diminishing returns on conference deals.

That's when the landscape will be revamped radically. Each school would then resort to negotiating its own contract in the same manner Notre Dame has handled football for decades. There still would be conferences, but only in the most technical definition of the word, because the schools with the most powerful basketball and football programs would see no sense in continuing athletic socialism.

Think of it.

If Duke's medical folks could figure out a way to clone Mike Krzyzewski, the Blue Devils one day would make so much money off their own private TV basketball contracts that they could lend millions to other league cohorts at an interest rate normally demanded of credit-card customers.

By that time, ESPN's corporate logo would be something more appropriate: E$PN.