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television has an enormous impact and it was a surprise to me to discover that the
television money isn't you know the single largest a factor
in in a revenues for the major programs but but it
%um
but but overall it is both the source of revenue and the fuel for other revenues
that is all important and
you know the two things most important to point out here I suspect are one
the lawsuit filed by the college football association that led to a supreme court
decision in nineteen eighty four which took
%uh on anti-trust grounds away from the NCAA the right to negotiate
television right television fees for the entire
membership and
gave that right to individual institutions and conferences the only individual institution that
could capitalize on this was notre dame
and notre dame famously notoriously signed its own
contract with NBC
in nineteen eighty nine or so to the outrage of everybody else on the assumption that notre
dame would now have an advantage over everybody else
because their games are always on TV and within a couple years
everybody's games were always on TV so that advantage was not real
it just sort of opened the flood gates
for then the SEC to sign more
lucrative contracts and so on
the immediate impact of of losing exclusive rights over
television
by the NCAA
was a plummeting of of the
total rights fees paid to the institutions but then as
those came back they came back entirely to the major conferences and programs so that helped
tip the balance between the haves and have-nots the other thing that's going on simultaneously
is that ESPN
which is created in
nineteen seventy nine and goes to twenty four hours a day
in nineteen eighty or eighty one
but remains a kind of
something like a joke
you know with tractor pulls
and
and those sorts of sporting events and
until you know the the the turning point for ESPN was nineteen eighty seven when they
first got the NFL that gave them credibility and
so on
but
so ESPN and plus other cable channels
suddenly provide
competition with the three major
broadcast networks
and a lot more available funding for these games and so
what you have is an enormous proliferation of the number of games which devalues every
individual game
but creates a much larger pool of money most of which goes to the major conferences
everybody wanted an ever bigger piece of that
it was part of the commercialization that was taking place exactly and and and because the major
conferences have the main contracts and so on the lesser conferences are left with the leavings
on cable
which means that okay we have an open Tuesday night or Thursday night or Friday night you know
when I played
you know football was the easiest sport to play as a student because you miss classes
only
Friday's before away games which meant you know five fridays a year that was the most
but now
you know football becomes more like basketball or baseball where you can miss lots classes
during the week you know in order to get on television before really tiny audiences you
know compared to
you know say an NFL game but still bigger audiences than that
college could ever perform in front of so you know there's lots of implications of this