ESPN-BCS Marriage Might End Up Hurting Football

The voracious cable television wolf known as ESPN made another big, bad move last week in pouncing on the rights for the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), outbidding Fox by $100 million to secure the national title game as well as the Sugar, Fiesta and Orange bowls for four years starting in 2011.

ESPN paid $500 million for those valuable properties, taking all of those postseason games away from free network television and placing them on what still must be considered pay TV, even if most of us have become so used to ESPN's all-encompassing reach we sometimes forget we're shelling out money every month to our cable and satellite providers for the right to watch.

ESPN's parent company, Disney, also owns the rights to the Rose Bowl, now aired on ABC, but it can only be a matter of time before the granddaddy of them all also gets moved to the so-called Worldwide Leader, even if 14 percent of the nation (let alone vast corners of the globe) still isn't hooked into cable or satellite.

There's been plenty of criticism directed at ESPN (and the BCS) since news of the deal first broke last week, most of it centered on the continuing trend of big-time sports events long aired on free network TV constantly migrating over to cable, mostly to ESPN.

They've already acquired a wide variety of marquee events, only last month announcing that it would be carrying the British Open, another cable first after years of airing on corporate cousin ABC. There also is Thursday-Friday coverage of The Masters and U.S. Open, "Monday Night Football", a significant schedule of Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, large chunks of the four major championships of tennis and big-time horse racing. ESPN also has said it will bid aggressively for Olympic rights for 2014 and 2016.

"The over-the-air-networks have got to hope that at some point ESPN runs out of program hours," CBS Sports Jim Nantz told USA Today this week. "Leave us a little something. Leave us a few windows...It's almost like if ESPN wants it, they're going to get it."

Certainly, if they can get college football's title game on cable, is there any doubt that one of these days the NFL also might be tempted to do the same with its mega-valuable postseason events -- the playoffs and Super Bowl -- in the not too distant future?

Despite an economy in crisis, ESPN certainly has all the cash it needs, from both cable subscriber fees and its own advertising sales, to be a player in any competitive rights bidding. Its ability to relentlessly cross-promote (occasionally ad nauseum) over a wide-variety of platforms, from its Web site, magazine, radio affiliates and various positions on the cable dial also makes it a most attractive carrier to any sports entity.

Nevertheless, I suspect we're still many years from an NFL playoff and Super Bowl scenario on ESPN, at least as long as Congress has anything to say about it. If you think Arlen Specter has been a tad miffed over his Pennsylvania constituents' inability to get the NFL Network on anything but an extra pay cable tier, wait until he and the rest of his colleagues start hearing from the voters about a Super Bowl heading in that same direction say, by the middle of the next decade.

At the moment, 98 million U.S. homes get ESPN, but there are also huge pockets in markets around the country where 20 percent or more do not subscribe. That would include Houston (22.7 percent without ESPN) and Dallas (20.6). Imagine the outcry if Texas or Texas Tech (when they get a defense) happened to be playing in the BCS Championship game in 2011 and a fifth of the local television universe in the two largest cities in the Lone Star state might not be able to watch at home.

ESPN also has been taking it on the chin for not insisting that the next BCS contract finally include a potential scenario for a national playoff system, or at least a plus-one system, when the two best teams after all the bowls are played would then meet for the national title.

CBS sportscaster Tim Brando, the host of his network's college football gameday show and rarely known as being particularly outspoken, put on a Bill O'Reilly-like game face this past Saturday in commenting on the new ESPN deal, and why it bodes badly for a playoff system. To his credit, he pointed the finger not so much at the BCS as he did the networks bidding for the broadcast rights to the games.