TV Deal Could Open Pandora’s Box

Who should be more frightened? The NFL? Or the networks that recently paid $17.6 billion for the TV rights to pro football over the next eight years? Let’s call it a dead heat. If they have any sense of history--baseball’s history anyway--they both should be terrified.

This decade began with the most stunning and unexpected TV contract signed by a sports league. CBS paid $1.06 billion to televise baseball for four years. ESPN kicked in another $400 million for its piece of the action. Industry insiders said the CBS bid was $400 million too high. But ESPN copied them. The NFL and NBA could only gasp and hope to catch up.

At the time, the first billion-dollar TV deal seemed sane. Sort of. Baseball’s popularity had boomed for 15 seasons and the economy was on an eight-year roll. What could go wrong? Only everything.

Before the first TV check was in their pockets, baseball owners tried to see if they could give every penny to the players. Salaries went up 50% by the next Opening Day.

Ring a bell? The NFL Players Association will likely get two-thirds of the new TV money--minimum--for player salaries. That’s a $12 billion pay raise for players in a league that just suffered its worst combined television rating since before the NFL-AFL merger in 1970. Some cynics even think the NFL’s glory days are passing with too many mediocre teams and too many boring, low-scoring, field-goal-infested games.

Why would a TV network inflate the going price by 130% for a sport with declining ratings? With CBS, who knows? They drove this week’s bidding war. That’s exactly what they did with baseball in 1990, too. Even though ABC’s “Monday Night Baseball” had just been a flop.

The NFL should hope its timing is better than baseball’s. Just as big league salaries rocketed in 1991, the nation was in a recession. Players on the field got million-dollar raises just as fans in the stands got fired. Ticket prices jumped. A nationwide bitterness toward “rich, ungrateful athletes” centered itself on baseball. The top dog gets kicked.

Downturns in industry cut into TV ad budgets. In the first year of its glamour baseball deal, CBS took a $200-million bath. Could the TV industry now lose a billion dollars in one sufficiently horrible year?

“(The AFC package) was not worth holding on to at the risk of catastrophic losses,” said NBC sports president Dick Ebersol after CBS outbid him earlier this week. Catastrophic isn’t a word you hear too often, is it?

Instead of spending its cash on a sport that sometimes sends people to the emergency room, NBC immediately bought the rights to “ER”--the Warner Bros. TV drama--for $858 million for three years. Of course, that is several times the annual budget of some real-life emergency rooms. But maybe NBC figured that a TV show won’t go on strike.

No, don’t forget strikes.

Baseball’s ’90 TV deal had as direct an influence on the game’s strike in ’94 as any single factor. The TV deal tempted owners to bid player salaries through the roof. The bosses assumed that spigot of seemingly free money would keep flowing faster forever. Instead, the networks hemorrhaged red ink, then demanded rebates and, finally, made it clear that future contracts might be for far lower, not higher, sums.

So, baseball panicked. How could the owners correct their salary miscalculation and get back in the black? Why not try to bully the union into a salary cap? If the players wouldn’t take it, then force a strike and try to break the union. High stakes lead to crazy tactics.

Does that ring another bell? Right now, there are already sharp words between the NFL and its union. Why shouldn’t there be? Their labor deal expires in 2000--right in mid-TV deal. Replacement Teams, Part II?

On the day baseball became the first billion-buck TV sport, nobody dreamed it marked a top for the game. If you’d mentioned a salary explosion, public backlash, declining popularity, rebates, huge losses at CBS and ESPN as well as a season-destroying strike, you’d have been a laughing stock. Baseball was in high cotton. When it recovered from the strike in autumn of 1995, it signed a five-year, $1.7 billion TV deal--no small change, but not a huge increase over the 1990 deal.

Perhaps the NFL will learn from baseball’s mistakes. Doesn’t everybody get to learn from baseball? The former national pastime has been the canary-in-the-coal-mine of sports for 20 years. Even with fair warning, however, something akin to baseball’s disaster can happen again. If anything, the current CBS, ABC, Fox and ESPN football deals are even riskier than the baseball ones CBS and ESPN signed eight years ago. Network viewership is falling as cable channel choices proliferate. Is that the smell of desperation in the air?

Until now, NFL players were perceived as relatively underpaid, since Steve Young made $7.5 million compared to Michael Jordan’s $33 million or Albert Belle’s $11 million. That won’t last long. No NFL player will think twice about making a ridiculous salary demand. Maybe God actually did give Sean Gilbert’s agent the right contract number--just a year early.

The next time an NFL team raises its tickets by a penny, there’ll be outrage. And there should be. When chips get cheaper, computer prices plummet. Why not NFL tickets?

And what will happen the next time an NFL team begs for tax money to build a luxury stadium full of gaudy sky suites? The vote on that referendum ought to be: 1,000,000 to 0. The Ravens had better enjoy their new playpen. Other franchises, such as the Broncos, will find it harder to get inside the public’s wallet.

Will the public enjoy the three timeouts that will be added to games next year to placate TV? Maybe football can get as lugubrious as baseball. It’s pretty close now. Cable TV rates will increase. Book it. Most of that $18 billion will come from us, one way or the other.

Let’s not overlook the benefits of the new TV deal. The networks may get hammered and executives fired. NFL owners may make no more money than before, while facing a labor crisis. Fans will pay most of the freight. But the players--ah, the layers--they’re going to make stacks of cash so tall you couldn’t kick an extra point over them. You’d have to go for two.

When you think of your favorite NFL hero these days, remember, money may not buy happiness. But you can always rent or lease.