Observations from my three-day visit to Los Angeles last month:
> One of the questions that gets asked most frequently in sports business is whether the NFL will ever relocate a team to Los Angeles. I think the league will have a home team in Los Angeles eventually, but I was struck by the popularity of the dominant football team that already plays in that market. The city already has a pro-style football team in the USC Trojans. I knew USC was popular; I’ll admit that I didn’t realize how big the team’s brand was in Los Angeles, especially considering the NCAA sanctions that banned the team from postseason play for the past two seasons.
I was in the city the week before USC’s loss at Arizona on Oct. 27. Sources say ESPN approached USC about bringing its popular “College GameDay” pregame show to Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum the following Saturday as USC hosted highly ranked Oregon, but only if USC beat Arizona. USC lost, and ESPN opted to send its “GameDay” production to Alabama-LSU instead.
The presence of “College GameDay” matters because it whips up additional corporate interest around the game. But the Oregon-USC game already had drawn a lot of corporate attention. Fox committed to carry the game on its broadcast channel and was looking to put a pregame set on the field. Pac-12 Networks was looking into producing pregame and postgame shows from inside the stadium. Those plans were shelved when USC lost to Arizona. Still, last Saturday’s USC-Oregon game was scheduled to have brands like Muscle Milk, Nissan and Aflac hosting events around the game.
Nobody knows if a Los Angeles-based NFL team will be successful, but the strength of the USC brand in Los Angeles suggests that college football will continue to dominate the market for the foreseeable future.
> At some point, every conversation I had in Los Angeles came back to the Dodgers. The team is in the middle of an exclusive negotiating period with Fox Sports that ends Nov. 30. Nobody knows what will happen with the rights. The team could stay with Fox, move over to Time Warner Cable, align with another media company like DirecTV or launch its own regional sports network.
My prediction is that Fox keeps the rights. It’s clear that Fox wants them. Co-president Randy Freer is handling the negotiations, but sources said that News Corp. President, COO and Deputy Chairman Chase Carey has been active in the discussions, too. Some of the negotiations have gone beyond a strict rights fee approach and could include the team getting an equity stake in Prime Ticket. Fox’s deal to keep the Angels included giving the team equity in FS West.
The rights may go into the open market. In fact, I expect the Dodgers will want to test the waters and see how high their rights fees can climb. Ultimately, though, expect Fox to do whatever it takes to keep them.
> The launch of Time Warner Cable’s two regional sports networks — TWC SportsNet and TWC Deportes — is the biggest story in sports media right now. As detailed in this week’s cover story, the entire industry is keeping a close watch on the channels to gauge how successful they are.
Distributors like DirecTV and Cox publicly have complained about price and at deadline hadn’t cut deals yet. TWC had signed Verizon, AT&T and Charter and expected to land more big distributors last week.
I have little doubt that the networks will be a part of the Los Angeles scene for a long time. I traveled to the offices and studio in an office park in El Segundo, Calif., and they felt fresh and new, as you would expect for networks that had launched just three weeks earlier.
“Everything is a work in progress with two new networks,” said Time Warner Cable Sports President David Rone. “But it’s game time, and we’re ready to go. … There’s been all this noise and hype around these channels, and now it’s actually going to come to life when it matters."
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.
