ESPN’s slide may slow college sports spending

Chris Berman, the jovial sportscaster who was one of ESPN’s first on-air personalities, became known for his description of a breakaway dash by a football running back. With a rising inflection, Berman would chant: “He... could... go... all... the... way!"

Now the same might be said for ESPN, except where it’s going is down. And if it goes, the bloated and hypocrisy-ridden edifice of big-time college sports may fall, too.

ESPN’s recent layoffs of scores of reporters and on-air talent might look like a modest adjustment for a multibillion-dollar enterprise that started out at the dawn of cable TV as the no-frills C-Span of sports. But these layoffs – a second wave after the network laid off 300 in October of 2015 – feel like another tremor in a quake that could topple the sports network now owned by The Walt Disney Co.

ESPN is built on cable TV contracts and that business model is crumbling. More customers are quitting cable and turning to the internet for entertainment and sports. Since it peaked in 2011 with 100 million subscribers, ESPN has lost 12 million subscribers and the shedding is continuing at a rate of about 300,000 subscribers a month.

People who don’t care about sports, and even some who do, are tired of being forced to pay extra for a package that includes ESPN or pay for cable at all. They’ll get their shows elsewhere for free, or close to it.

This isn’t just bad news for the well-dressed TV men and women commenting around the clock on highlight reels or debating draft picks and stars. This is trouble for major college revenue sports.

ESPN contracts have been a major building block of modern-era college revenue sports. ESPN owns rights to the new college football playoffs and Thursday night college football.

The Atlantic Coast Conference has locked part of its TV future to ESPN. It has joined with ESPN to launch a new ACC TV channel in 2019. League officials say the deal will go forward, but there are doubts about whether ESPN wants to expand its college commitments as its customer base is shrinking, and it has committed to giant pro sports contracts, including paying $1.9 billion a year to carry 17 NFL games.

This is a case of modern technological disruption that could bring an ancient dose of biblical justice for the three parties involved – the cable companies that exploited their monopolies with inflated prices and lousy service, a sports network so influential and pervasive that it exerted scheduling, travel and financial control over college sports and grew rich on athletes turned into unpaid actors and the ranks of college officials who sold their academic souls for TV fame and treasure.

Now they look up and there’s a flaming sword in the sky. An angry God is wielding it and he’s come to cut the cord. SportsCenter, which lost 12 percent of its viewership last year, may no longer be the center of sports.

To consider this comeuppance is to also wonder about those who prophesied doom for colleges and universities that surrendered their values for TV money. Bill Friday, a former University of North Carolina system president, and the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame, were two of those. They founded the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in 1989 after a series of college sports scandals. The commission held hearings and recommended controls, but nothing could stop the power and allure of TV contracts. Chasing and using that revenue, colleges and universities altered their schedules, played football games during the week, vastly expanded their stadiums, undermined their academic integrity, paid their coaches millions and millions, stretched their conferences to capture TV markets, and, in basketball, recruited players who would stay only one year before leaving for the NBA.

In his old age before he died at 92, Friday would tell reporters, “Keep after it,” keep raising questions and revealing the cost of warped values. But even he tired of being the Jeremiah. When there was another incident of excess or duplicity in the revenue sports, he said it was wearying to be the one reporters called to provide a moral judgment. The reformers didn’t know that the force that would curb the excess of big-time college sports might not be preaching better morality, but simply waiting on better technology. The explosion in revenue that fed the arms race and skullduggery in college sports was the rise of television and the expansion of cable networks. Now cable’s lucrative business model is being displaced by digital at minimal cost.

Friday, Hesburgh and other reformers tried in vain to bring major college sports back into balance. How surprised they would be that a new way of bringing images to a screen – digital streaming – may be what finally cools college sports’ spending fever.

This story was originally published May 6, 2017 at 4:45 PM with the headline "ESPN’s slide may slow college sports spending."