Notre Dame, Cornell--Class by Themselves

“The last thing America needs is another football game on television,” Roger Weiss said. So, naturally, Weiss, a 52-year-old partner in the Manhattan investment firm of Weiss, Peck & Greer, went out and bankrolled the second of two national TV networks for a college football team.

At Cornell.

The other coast-to-coast network deal belongs to Notre Dame -- surprise, surprise -- but there are a few million differences in the two. Mostly, the differences are green, with likenesses of dead presidents on them. “Notre Dame is making $38 million on theirs,” said Mike Veley, Cornell’s liaison to SportsChannel America, which is carrying all seven of the Big Red’s Ivy League games this fall. “And we’ll be lucky to make 38 cents.”

Joe Shieh, Cornell Daily Sun sports editor, said, “A lot of people on campus kind of joke about how Notre Dame gets $38 million. And we have to pay for it.”

Anyway, according to all parties concerned, the Cornell project is meant neither to glorify college football -- another thing America can do without more of -- nor to make big bucks. The intention, said Weiss (Cornell ‘61, Cornell Law ‘64), “is to give an idea what goes on” at a school such as Cornell. “If people believe that graduation rates aren’t important and that athletes representing schools should be allowed lower academic standards than the rest of the student body, etc., etc., well, I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m saying that’s a different way of doing business.”

During the first TV production -- Princeton 18, Cornell 0, on Sept. 21 -- a slice of the 27 minutes of advertising time available to Cornell was used for a 3 1/2-minute feature on professor Joe Maas, whose psychology 101 class has an enrollment of 2,100 students per semester. And part of the ad time was used for a feature on a Cornell women’s track star who is an honor student and works with Alzheimer patients.

Jack Krieger of Cornell’s public affairs office, which produces the commercial spots and halftime show, said there are plans for brief features on distinguished Cornell alumni and on the school’s financial aid system, as well as regular addresses by university president Frank Rhodes. Maybe the 13 million SportsChannel America subscribers, in the future, will be treated to a piece on what Shieh describes as one of the more popular courses on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus -- “a wines course in the hotel school. Wine tasting. They pass out bottles of wine to students in class.”

Meanwhile: “The ironic thing” about the football cable contract “is that Ithaca doesn’t get SportsChannel (America),” Shieh said, “except for five or six local bars.”

The whole project began to evolve when Weiss, friend and golfing partner of sports-program packager Barry Frank, learned that ESPN no longer was interested in an Ivy League football game of the week, which Frank’s Trans World International group had produced for four years at ESPN, following three years on PBS. ESPN wanted to replace Ivy League games with Big Ten games -- how much did America need that? -- which disappointed Weiss, who described himself as “a high-class intramural player -- ‘high class’ are my words -- during my years at Cornell.”

Cornell wasn’t exactly a football power during Weiss’ student days, but it did feature a quarterback named Gary Wood and a placekicker from Hungary named Pete Gogolak. Football, to Weiss, always was “a part of the Cornell experience, all of which I very much enjoyed.” So much so that in 1982 Weiss endowed Cornell’s football coaching chair.

So when ESPN wanted out of the Ivy League, Weiss got in, putting up “close to half a million dollars” for the TV project, according to Frank, and agreed to underwrite any shortfall on advertising monies.

“All I said to the university,” Weiss said, “is that, with 75 percent of the student body on financial aid, and with the shortage of teacher salaries, it would be inappropriate for the university to put its own funds into something like this. So we’re trying to bring in advertising revenues (so far, GTE, Bristol-Myers, USAir, Norelco, Primerica, General Motors) and if we’re unable to get enough money that way, then I’ll be responsible.”

It was an easy sell to Cornell officials, who tied the TV project to the university’s 125th anniversary celebration, which includes a large capital fund-raising campaign. And Shieh said the football players universally “like the idea of being on national TV.”

TWI’s Frank feels somewhat limited financially, since he said he can spend “only about one-sixth” of the $150,000 per-game the major networks put into production. But Weiss proudly reads from a letter he received from a Cornell grad in San Francisco, whose response to the Cornell-Princeton production was an emotional thank-you to Weiss for something “more than entertainment.” To see Cornell football and glimpses of the Cornell campus again on SportsChannel America, the old grad wrote, “I envy the freshmen who walk through the Cornell gates each fall. What a great place in which to grow up!”

“Football’s really an anchor sport at any school,” Veley said. “You think back to when you were in school and you have memories of Saturday afternoons at the stadium. This brings back all the good memories of going to college. And that means it will have an emotional response,” which doesn’t hurt fund raising a bit.

“Why shouldn’t alumni be given the chance to go back to campus seven times a year?” Weiss said.

“It’s homecoming,” Veley said, “for seven weeks.”