UCLA Signs New Radio Package to Increase Coverage Statewide

Nashville-based American Network Group Inc. has signed a five-year, $4.5-million agreement for radio rights to UCLA football and basketball, starting next fall.

KMPC (710) will remain the flagship station for Bruin games, but the key to the deal is American Network’s plan to expand the network of UCLA stations to cover the entire state, company president Robert J. Williamson said Thursday.

“We think there’s a market there that hasn’t been tapped,” Williamson said, noting that the Bruins aren’t carried on San Diego, Sacramento or Bay Area stations. “UCLA is a full-state phenomenon, but nobody ever tried to wire the state,” he said.

The deal, signed Wednesday, starts out at $750,000 for the 1992-93 sports season and increases to $1,050,000 in 1996-97. There is a one-year extension option, if both sides agree.

American Network, which claims to be the largest radio broadcaster of collegiate sports, has radio rights to the universities of Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and South Carolina, plus Penn State and Vanderbilt.

The UCLA rights are cheaper than the $1.5 million per year that American Network pays Georgia, Williamson said, but the Georgia deal includes the right to broadcast weekly coaches’ shows on television, which are popular in the South.

While TV sports rights fees have reversed course and started dropping recently, with the networks complaining of huge losses, radio rights fees have been more stable, said Jim Carnegie, publisher of the newsletter Radio Business Report.