CBS Takes NCAA Basketball Tournament, but Will Affiliates?

Remember those old movies in which a group of youngsters faces a financial calamity and Mickey Rooney or somebody says, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show?”

Well, if Hollywood were making one of those today, Fred Savage would come up with a new solution: “Hey, kids, let’s start a sports league. CBS will pay us a billion bucks.”

Tuesday, CBS again dipped into the deepest pockets this side of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s jeans and shelled out $1 billion for seven years of the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament, starting in 1991. By the time the new contract runs out, CBS will have carried the NCAA tournament for 17 consecutive years.

The money certainly is noteworthy enough, but the real surprise of the deal was the elimination of cable television from the tournament. For the last several years, ESPN has become the focus of college basketball fans for a few days each March, as it whips around from one region to the next, bringing viewers the upsets and routs that make up the early rounds of the tournament.

But, after 1990, no more -- at least from ESPN.

CBS promises to cover every game of the tournament, but, even though it will devote five hours of air time each afternoon on the opening two days, the network can’t provide the kind of coverage all-sports ESPN could. As CBS Sports president Neal Pilson said Tuesday, “We have a different audience. We broadcast through affiliates.”

During Tuesday’s news conference, when a reporter mentioned that CBS couldn’t give viewers the wall-to-wall coverage that ESPN has, Pilson seemed to bristle a bit. Pilson was saying, in effect, that critics have attacked the CBS-ESPN baseball deal for taking games away from the non-cable viewer, and now some are complaining that CBS can’t provide the same extensive basketball coverage of ESPN.

Pilson was right. We can’t have it both ways. It should be good enough that most of the NCAA tournament will be available to the entire country, that the early rounds won’t be just the domain of the 58 percent of the television households with ESPN.

ESPN apparently was surprised to lose the basketball tournament; indeed, this deal bucks the trend toward more cable-television involvement in everything from baseball to pro football to the Olympics.

Pilson said the single-network aspect of the new deal was the NCAA’s idea, not that it exactly had to be forced on the networks -- not only CBS, but also ABC was said to have made a strong bid for an exclusive package. With sports going so much to cable television, though, one has to consider the possible reasons for the NCAA to swim against the tide.

Maybe it was a matter of getting more money by awarding exclusive rights. Or maybe the NCAA just wanted to let more of the country see its tournament. But perhaps there was another motive at work.

The proliferation of major sports on cable television has done more than lead to a spate of articles on the subject in TV Guide. Among those who are concerned about the division among sports fans between the cables and the cable-nots are members of Congress, who recently held hearings on that very topic. The NCAA-CBS deal should please Congress, then. And the NCAA might believe that pleasing Congress isn’t too bad an idea right now.

Why? Well, Congress has considered legislation that would require schools to make available data on the academic performance of their athletes, such things as graduation rates, in order to help recruits make their college choices. The NCAA doesn’t like this idea very much.

So, the NCAA makes Congress happy with a new television deal for the masses, and when this graduation-rate business comes up again ... you get the idea, a little quid pro quo (or, given that this is college athletics, let’s call it quid amateur quo).

Meanwhile, back at CBS, Pilson said, as he does each time his network acquires another sports property, “It’s part of our major-event strategy.

“One of the main functions of the sports division is to assist the rest of the network.”

He didn’t mean assisting CBS in spending money -- although Pilson certainly has done that -- but rather giving the network’s third-place prime-time schedule a boost.

Speaking of prime time, a heartening aspect of the NCAA negotiations was that ABC was a prime-time player, or PTPer, as ABC’s own Dick Vitale would say. After sitting on the sidelines while CBS and NBC competed for the big sports contracts, at least ABC was in there trying -- as Vitale might put it -- to swipe the rock.

But CBS, after an in-your-face from NBC on the National Basketball Association rights earlier this month, this time ripped through the paint for a sky-high dunk. Slam jam bam, baby.