Welcome to a Blitz of Sports Coverage

“He who controls sports controls it all.”

So said a fictitious media mogul in writer Larry Gelbart’s prescient 1997 Home Box Office movie “Weapons of Mass Distraction,” which featured two media barons engaging in a wildly escalating duel over ownership of a pro football team.

Those characters were fake, but the philosophy espoused was real--namely, that sports has gradually transformed from recreational pastime into high-priced software, another program to plug into the massive corporate machinery of companies like Fox, Disney, Time Warner and NBC parent General Electric.

This comes to mind as the National Football League prepares to kick off its season, one in which ABC’s promotional jingle “Are you ready for some football?” has seemingly become misleading. To be more accurate, the song’s chorus should say, “Are you ready to drown in a sea of football-related programming to help defray the astronomical price we paid for TV rights?”

At first glance, this might sound like good news for die-hard football fans, especially those who shun baseball and can’t fathom participating in a rotisserie league or fretting about a pennant race with 49 games left to play in the season. For them, the first whiff of September heralds the end of a long drought--a signal that the crunching sights and sounds of college and pro games wait just around the corner.

After a while, however, even ardent fans will realize the tide of televised sports flowing their way has less to do with their needs than those of the networks, who must justify high rights fees and fill time on cable outlets like ESPN, Fox Sports West and secondary versions of those channels.

Fans, as a result, won’t need to look hard to find football this year; in fact, they may be hard-pressed to escape from it. ESPN will air more than 400 hours of football programming that doesn’t involve playing an actual game, including “NFL 2Night,” “NFL Films Presents” and “Edge NFL Matchup.”

Dick Glover, ESPN’s executive vice president of programming, said the channel is merely seeking to meet demand.

“We try to determine what the viewer need is and how to satisfy it,” he said. “One of the things we believe very, very strongly is by developing multiple distribution platforms, we enhance the ability to serve the viewer, affiliate or advertiser. That’s part of our mission.”

Maybe so, but a simpler answer can be found in “All the President’s Men,” when Deep Throat counseled reporters to “follow the money.” Reviewing a roster of sports fees provides enough uses of the word “billion” to give even the late Carl Sagan pause.

NBC will pay $3.6 billion for the next five Olympic Games, and $1.75 billion more for several years of NBA basketball. CBS shelled out $1.725 billion to retain sports’ most exciting event, the NCAA college basketball tournament, and three networks currently ante up more than $1.4 billion for Major League Baseball.

Football, of course, remains the monetary granddaddy of them all. Beginning this season, the NFL will reap at least $17.6 billion over eight years from CBS, Fox, ABC and cable’s ESPN under agreements reached in January.

The Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC and ESPN, will write checks to the NFL totaling $9.2 billion alone. Just to prove the house of the Mouse had some cheese left over, Disney recently upped the ante substantially for National Hockey League rights, with a five-year, $600-million pact. Not bad for a league that skated well below ratings expectations on Fox.

Now, this may sound obvious, but when you pay $17.6 billion for just about anything, you feel entitled to be first in line at the customer-service window. If that means longer commercial breaks, extending inane pregame shows, shifting kickoff times in a manner likely to annoy some West Coast viewers (“Monday Night” games will now start around 5:20 p.m.)--heck, even rules changes designed to make the action more conducive to television--then eventually, so be it.

*

The networks’ appetite for sports isn’t surprising, since football and basketball remain among the few franchises that reliably assemble people for mass-viewing experiences, such as the 133 million who watched at least part of this year’s Super Bowl.

Networks love to talk about providing such “events,” which represent a unique facet of broadcasting. After the success of NBC’s “Merlin” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” for example, every network has announced grandiose plans to produce more “big event” miniseries.

Still, amid all their 10-figure calculations, the networks need to take a breath and look up the word “special,” which Webster’s defines as “not general or regular; specific or limited.”

In other words, scarcity plays a part. The Super Bowl wouldn’t merit that description (granted, the game itself seldom does, but the ratings consistently have) if they played one every Sunday. While programmers understandably feel tempted to offer a steady supply of “events” to attract viewers, they risk strangling their high-priced golden geese if they become akin to a bus schedule: If you miss one, another will be along in 20 minutes.

The networks clearly have a financial incentive for airing pro football all day Sunday and carpet-bombing college coverage on a half-dozen channels from 8 a.m. straight through Saturday evening.

Yet programmers and sports leagues must realize nothing that ever-present can seem “special”--that it’s naive to expect viewers to tune in with the sense of urgency they once did, when the “game of the week” has multiplied like the water-bearing brooms in “Fantasia.”

ESPN’s Glover cast the economic issue in different terms, citing the opportunity provided by airing all that football fare on ABC, ESPN, ESPN 2 and ESPN News.

“We think that if we create compelling programming that brings in viewers, we can turn that into revenue,” he said.

Besides, those who nostalgically yearn for the past can now--their cable system willing--savor it nightly on ESPN Classic (formerly Classic Sports Network), yet another all-sports channel. This one televises games from the days when basketball shorts were short, pregame shows didn’t begin at the crack of dawn, and football junkies knew if they missed the “Monday Night” high jinks, they’d have to wait six whole days to get their next fix.