For the better part of the last 63 years, the NFL has steered clear of scheduling Saturday games while school is in session, only to watch in bemusement as college football’s expansionist impulses have undone a lifetime of studied avoidance. That two of the first-round CFP games are on a collision course with a pair of NFL contests with significant postseason implications is one thing, but the fact that the very Law of the Land effectively put college football in this no-win situation—and with a key assist from Pete Rozelle, no less—is worth a closer look.
Way back in 1961, when the NFL was about to expand to 14 teams with the launch of the Minnesota Vikings and Westerns ruled the dial (the three highest-rated shows were Wagon Train, Gunsmoke and the typographically exasperating Have Gun – Will Travel), a young Rozelle flew down to D.C. in a bid to save the league and its TV fortunes. After signing a $9.3 million rights deal with CBS that April, a revenue-pooling arrangement which Rozelle believed would be crucial in order to allow the small-market Green Bay Packers compete with the likes of the New York Giants and Chicago Bears, the commish was all but poleaxed when a federal judge struck down the plan a few months later. Convinced that the judicial overstepping would hamstring his ambitions for the NFL, Rozelle took his case to Capitol Hill.
In a lobbying effort which Vince Lombardi would later credit with saving the Packers organization, Rozelle managed to get key members of Congress to put their legislative weight behind what would become known as the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. But the NFL wasn’t the only football organization with skin in the game. As Rozelle was cornering his quarry on the Hill, the athletic director from a school in one of those giant rectangle states Out West managed to get a hand-written note to one of the functionaries in President Kennedy’s Oval Office. The gist: Feel free to rubber-stamp this new TV bill, but for the love of Pete don’t let these NFL guys invade our fall Saturdays.
As a result of all this Beltway intrigue, the NFL was prohibited from scheduling games within 75 miles of a college football contest played “on any Saturday during the period beginning on the second Saturday in September and ending on the second Saturday in December.” Viewing it as a minor concession, Rozelle readily agreed to this non-compete clause, and the bill passed into law the day before Week 3 of the 1961 season kicked off. With a few strokes of JFK’s pen, the NFL was effectively granted an exemption to the Sherman Antitrust Act and college football could rest easy knowing that the pros wouldn’t be allowed to get their grubby meat hooks on Saturdays in autumn.
As much as it’s nice when everybody gets what they want and nobody has their feelings hurt, the Saturday No-Fly Zone hasn’t aged as well as the principals might have imagined three generations ago. While the college football season has retained much of its classical contours, the expansion of the postseason has more or less invalidated the Act’s duration clause. This year, the first Saturday at the NFL’s disposal happened to fall on Dec. 21, a day in which the league has scheduled two nationally televised games that will go head-to-head with two CFP outings in a new expanded format.
Sometime in the second quarter of the SMU-Penn State game, which kicks off at noon ET on TNT (sublicensed from Disney for a hefty sum), NBC will counter with a matchup between the 9-5 Texans and the 13-1 Chiefs. (January playoff implications aside, Patrick Mahomes & Co. are the NFL’s second-biggest draw, trailing the Dallas Cowboys by a margin of just 210,000 viewers.)
After that battle for hearts, minds and ratings share, Clemson and Texas will have had barely enough time to get a few offensive series in on TNT’s second sublicensed offering before Fox lowers the hammer at 4:30 p.m. ET with Steelers-Ravens. Baltimore is the league’s sixth-biggest national draw, and this battle for the AFC North is going to be a must-watch for people who enjoy smashmouth football and bad blood.
But don’t touch that dial! After the NFL runs roughshod over the afternoon college games, ABC/ESPN/ESPN2 will close out the day with a primetime showing of Tennessee-Ohio State. Disney’s nightcap will almost certainly command the largest audience of its slot—up against a clash of women’s college hoops titans on Fox (UConn-USC) and some local NBA and NHL action. Advantage: Mouse House.
As it happens, the two earlier CFB games are those which ESPN is sublicensing to WBD’s T-suite of basic-cable networks (TNT/TBS/truTV). In what may well prove to be the savviest deal of its kind since CBS and NBC agreed to loan out the likes of Telly Savalas and Robert Conrad to ABC for use on Battle of the Network Stars, ESPN not only offloaded its two weakest matchups, but also managed to wriggle out of any run-ins with its biggest league partner.
While financial terms remain obscure, ESPN valued each first-round playoff game at around $25 million during its wranglings with the CFP powers-that-be. So not only is Bristol bringing in a nice bag of cash in exchange for not getting stampeded by the Thing That Eats TV, but the rightsholders are also keeping all the advertising revenue generated by the Disney sales team during the two WBD games.
And that’s just the beginning of the spree that is ESPN/ABC’s early-winter slate. After neatly side-steeping the inevitable ratings-gobbling crash with the NFL, the Disney nets have two more Monday Night Football games in the hopper (Saints-Packers, Lions-49ers), plus the unencumbered CFP semifinals on Jan. 9 and 10. The season culminates with the title tilt in Atlanta on Jan. 20, and if you’re a marketer who’s been thinking about investing some coin in any of the latter three events, the time to get on the horn to Rita Ferro or Jim Minnich was probably yesterday.
The CFP is now 95% sold out, and the cost of entry is going up: A single 30-second championship game unit that would have fetched around $1.5 million in September is now going for as much as $2 million. And while sellers always price their inventory somewhat above their internal ratings projections—better to have to resort to a few makegoods here and there rather than commit the unpardonable sin of leaving money on the table—Disney is understandably bullish on their chances to rack up some huge deliveries a few weeks from now.
Unless it’s one of those days where Al Davis is giving him a hard time, somewhere Pete Rozelle is laughing.
