CBS Sports and NCAA Make $1.7-Billion Deal

CBS Sports, the big loser of 1993, topped off its comeback year Tuesday with a $1.725-billion NCAA deal that keeps the Final Four on CBS through 2002.

Carrying the highest total price tag of any TV sports rights deal, it replaces a seven-year, $1-billion deal that still had three seasons to run.

The NCAA deal comes nearly 12 months after CBS lost the NFC portion of the NFL contract to Fox, capping a year in which CBS also lost the rights to major league baseball.

“There was a terrific and genuine sense of loss at this time last year,” CBS Sports President David Kenin said, “but it was tempered with a lot of professional activity . . . . I think we felt that anything was possible.”

This year, CBS has acquired rights to SEC football and basketball; Big East football; the Fiesta, Orange and Cotton bowls; the Army-Navy game, and the 1998 Nagano Olympics, for which it paid a Winter Games-record $375 million.

In addition, the network extended its contracts with Big Ten basketball, and the PGA Championship and PGA Tour, both for four more years through 1998. CBS also created boxing and figure skating series for its Saturday “Eye On Sports” anthology.

Besides the men’s Division I basketball tournament, the new NCAA agreement includes rights to the College World Series final, the Division II men’s basketball tournament, NCAA outdoor track and field and women’s gymnastics.

CBS will televise the Division I women’s basketball championship this season but will drop it thereafter. The women’s championship is expected to be picked up by ESPN beginning in 1996.

In total price, the new CBS-NCAA deal breaks the record of $1.58 billion Fox paid for the NFC.