Football and Fox: Big Losses, Huge Gains : Television: Fox could lose as much as half a billion dollars over the course of the deal with the NFL, but the game put it in the big league with CBS, ABC and NBC.

If you spend $1.6 billion on something, you expect it to perform like an F-16, dazzle like the crown jewels of Iran or sell faster than Bill Gates’ software.

Fox bought the Armani of televised sports for all that money, but as its first season broadcasting the National Football League winds toward the seemingly inevitable NFC championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys, the many-pronged payoffs from that massive investment have been both triumphal and disappointing--opening a hole for some to cheer its success while leaving room for others to slam the fourth network for its football failures.

As a stand-alone deal, comparing the cost of football to the advertising revenue it generates, Fox is likely to lose more than the value of several football franchises combined. Ratings for the games themselves are down about 5% from what they were last season on CBS, while ratings for the much less-expensive AFC schedule on NBC have leaped about 13%, placing smaller-market AFC games ahead of the big-city NFC for the first time. Additionally, Fox’s Sunday night lineup, which was supposed to receive a boost from football, has been a disaster.

On the other hand, “there are so many ancillary benefits to having the NFL,” said Paul Schulman, president of the New York ad agency the Paul Schulman Co. “Before this, there were a number of advertisers who perceived the three major networks and then the little rebel, Fox. When Fox got the NFL, it truly became the four networks. It gave them complete credibility. Did they overpay? Probably. But I don’t think that’s of much concern.”

John Mansell, senior analyst for Paul Kagen Associates, confirmed that Fox will lose as much as half a billion dollars over the course of the four-year deal with the NFL, but the real agenda--to build a major domestic and international network--has made that price worth it. “The real value to Fox,” he said, “has been football’s ability to attract stronger affiliates in major markets all over the country. And that is continuing, and will continue in the future.”

Part of the reason Fox’s football ratings are down compared to CBS’ last year is that many of the Fox stations are weak-signaled UHF channels, Mansell speculated. But the buying of football enabled Fox to upgrade the quality of its affiliates by snatching strong VHF stations in big markets like Atlanta, Detroit, Dallas, St. Louis, Cleveland, Kansas City and Phoenix. That not only helps football, but potentially the ratings of all other Fox shows for years to come.

Other than the money drain, football itself really hasn’t been a problem for Fox. In terms of production, despite jokes early on that the network of Bart Simpson would make a mockery of the game, Fox has done well. It hired busloads of former CBS football crews to ensure that the games were covered as professionally as ever. And it has even drawn praise from many fans for creating an entertaining pregame show and especially for the innovation of continually showing the score of the game in the corner of the TV screen.

About the only complaint from fans about Fox’s coverage is that after its first-string announcing team of John Madden and Pat Summerall, the quality of the broadcasters falls off. NBC, by contrast, seems to have more experienced announcing depth. Two Sundays ago, for example, Los Angeles viewers were stuck with the very green team of Merril Hoge and Eric Cleamon on Fox, while NBC trotted out well-known personalities Jim Lampley and Todd Christensen for the last-place battle between Seattle and Houston. Last Sunday, local viewers suffered through Kevin Harlan and former coach Jerry Glanville for the Rams game in Chicago.

“Listening to Glanville repeatedly use the phrase ‘big dog’ to describe everything from a receiver’s feet to the mythical beast a team must psych itself up to crush on every play was almost as painful as watching the Rams’ pathetic play,” said David Goldberg, a longtime L.A. fan. “But I like the Fox pregame show. The guys they have on that make it far more entertaining than any of the other shows.”

Fox is winning the pregame show ratings war with NBC by a wide margin--as younger fans seem to find Fox far more lively with the flamboyant Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and Jimmie Johnson than NBC’s more cerebral analysis with former coaches Mike Ditka and Joe Gibbs. For now, though, Fox’s football game ratings trail NBC’s by a small margin, even though the NFC has more teams in the bigger cities. Last season, CBS capitalized on that population advantage to beat NBC by an average of about 1.5 million households per game. Part of Fox’s problem may be the on-field competition this season. The AFC has it; the NFC--though it boasts of pro football’s two best teams--doesn’t.

“The NFC has two teams that are stick-outs--Dallas and San Francisco,” Schulman said. “But if you ask five people, who is the best team in the AFC, you’re going to get at least five different answers.”

An NBC spokesman pointed out that the high-scoring AFC features more star quarterbacks: Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Jim Kelly, John Elway, Boomer Esaison and newcomers Drew Bledsoe and Rick Meier. Even crummy Cincinnati has a wildly exciting newcomer in Jeff Blake. In the NFC, Dallas and San Francisco are stocked with superstars, but most of the other quarterbacks are uninspiring journeymen. NBC has also thrived on the success of teams that have floundered in recent years, especially New England, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Miami and San Diego.

“It’s a new blood sort of thing,” said Ed Markey, a spokesman for NBC Sports. “With New England doing so well, games are selling out, and that enables us to televise the game into the Boston market for that huge rating where in the past, because the team was awful and no one went to the stadium, the game would have been blacked out.”

Fox’s biggest problem seems to be post-football. In two-thirds of the country, though not in the West, games run right up against prime time and were supposed to jump-start Fox’s Sunday prime-time lineup.

It hasn’t happened. Rookie shows “Fortune Hunter,” “Hardball” and “Wild Oats” were DOA, and veteran shows “The Simpsons” and “Married . . . With Children” have lost viewers from last year, forcing Fox to roll out a revamped lineup next month.

“What obviously we weren’t able to do is find programs that (the football audience) wanted to stay with,” said John Matoian, president of Fox Entertainment Group. “Football is a (great promotional) platform. I just think we needed to get better shows.”

Overall, Fox’s prime-time numbers, especially for its Tuesday night movie, have been up so far this season, and promo spots for its shows during football games have surely had a hand in that.

Conversely, football, or not having football for the first time in about 35 years, has wounded CBS in prime time. Ratings for “60 Minutes” are down 14% overall from a year ago, when football provided a big lead-in for the program, a decline worse than the network expected, said David Poltrack, CBS’ executive vice president, research and planning. But “Murder, She Wrote” has withstood the problem, down just 1%, and Poltrack said that he expects both shows to do better once football ends next month.

But the CBS Sunday night movie has plummeted too, some 7% from a year ago, and Poltrack said the inability to attract adult men, primarily because adult men don’t get to see any promos for CBS shows now that football has moved to Fox, has been a real problem for CBS’ entire program schedule.

The cure is sports, and CBS just paid a record $1.7 billion to extend its contract for NCAA basketball into the next century and it will televise the 1996 Winter Olympics. But none of that is likely to compare to having pro football, despite its drain on the network coffers.

“What I’ve learned in this short time without football is that we really would love to have it back,” Poltrack said. “It’s a great attraction. But we’re not likely to get it back if it continues to be priced as it is. We certainly miss it, but we don’t miss losing a lot of money.”

Schulman predicted that football is too important for Fox ever to lose it no matter how much it costs. If CBS wants back in the game in three years, he said, it will have to outbid NBC for the AFC contract.