Menu

SBJ College: NIL Headlines NCAA Convention


David Stern’s memorial in New York today captured the attention and emotions of the sports business world. SBJ had three members of our editorial team -- Abe Madkour, Terry Lefton and John Ourand -- at the service to pay tribute to the best commissioner in sports.

Here's what's cooking on campus.

       

NCAA DESCENDS ON ANAHEIM WITH NIL THE PREVALENT ISSUE

  • “Whatever the issue has been, whether it was 115 years ago with the crisis of football or any of our issues today, this organization since its beginning has always stepped up. It’s been a century of collective progress. … We’re an agency for change.” Those were NCAA President Mark Emmert’s words 12 months ago when he delivered his annual “State of Sports” speech at the NCAA Convention. As the 2020 version of the convention opened today, it was more critical than ever that the NCAA lived up to those words.

  • A year ago when Emmert was making that speech, the issue of name, image and likeness was merely a topic of debate -- not a law as it will be in California by 2023. More than 20 states have followed California’s lead in an effort to permit college athletes to make money from their own rights. The NCAA said in October that it supported a highly limited version of NIL for athletes that came with a lengthy list of restrictions, which seemed to satisfy no one.

  • The convention this week in Anaheim, where Emmert will deliver his 2020 speech on Thursday, is the new ground zero for this debate. It “marks the first time that the vast, sprawling NCAA membership -- Divisions I, II and III -- can come together and discuss the course college sports should take toward student-athletes' getting more of the pie,” SI’s Pat Forde wrote. But as Dan Wolken pointed out in USA Today: “The number of voices could also be the biggest hurdle to building cohesion within the NCAA, while also satisfying lawmakers’ demands.”

  • Ultimately, this shapes up as a crucial week for determining if the NCAA will “step up” and be that “agency for change” that Emmert described last year. Or if it will continue to give up ground grudgingly.

 

 

 

PLAYING THE LONG GAME

  • The next time you sit down for a CFP Championship game, settle in -- you’re going to be there a while. In a review of the six title games played so far, they’ve gone past midnight on the East Coast five times. The 2017 Clemson-Alabama game was the greatest test of endurance, running 4 hours, 8 minutes. LSU’s win on Jan. 13 ranks second at 3:56, not surprising given that some TV timeouts now go longer than 3 minutes.

  • Those CFP game lengths are considerably longer than the average regular-season game, which in 2019 lasted 3:18. While that still surpasses the three-hour standard by a long shot, 3:18 is the shortest average length of game since the 2013 season, when it was 3:17, based on data collected by the NCAA.

  • It’s easy to blame interminably long TV timeouts for making the games last longer. For regular-season games, the longest timeouts run 3 minutes, 25 seconds during quarter breaks. The first timeout of the first and third quarters run 3:05. Halftime lasts 20 minutes. The rub, of course, is that these long TV timeouts provide the time for networks to make their hefty rights fees back on advertising.

  • One of the recent developments that doesn’t get enough credit is the on-field timer that shows fans how much time is left during the break. It’s the red countdown timer that’s held by the red-hat official on the sideline. ADs I’ve talked to from Texas, Kentucky and Florida say the timer appeases the fans, who previously didn’t know how long the timeouts would be, and has reduced complaints.

DURATION TREND FOR CFP NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP
YEAR
MATCHUP
GAME LENGTH
TIME ENDED (ET)
2020
LSU-Clemson
3:56
12:14am
2019
Clemson-Alabama
3:27
11:44pm
2018
Alabama-Georgia
3:50
12:09am
2017
Clemson-Alabama
4:08
12:27am
2016
Alabama-Clemson
3:45
12:18am
2015
Ohio State-Oregon
3:37
12:10am
Download the
CFP Championship Durations

 

 

WOMEN'S FINAL FOUR GETS FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

  • ESPN again showed its commitment to NCAA women’s basketball by saying it will move both Final Four semifinal games to the flagship channel on Friday, April 3. On top of that, there will be no NBA games that night. Friday nights are typically an NBA night for the cable network, but in the three years that the women’s semifinals have been played on a Friday, those games have outdrawn the NBA despite being on ESPN2.

  • The women’s semifinals have appeared on the Deuce for the past three seasons, while the NBA was on ESPN. The last women’s semifinal to air on ESPN was in 2016 with UConn-Oregon State (Syracuse-Washington in that year’s late window was on ESPN2). With the games moving back to ESPN, the semifinals could deliver a nice viewership boost.

 

This year's NCAA Women's Final Four games will move from ESPN2 to ESPN

 

 

SPEED READS 

  • Count Tennessee AD Phil Fulmer as a proponent of expanding the CFP. Appearing on "The Paul Finebaum Show," Fulmer cited recruiting as a reason to grow the number of teams beyond the current four. "I’m almost to the point where it could be eight or even 12. … There’s a lot of conversation about where those top football players are going in the country. They migrate to those four teams that have played in the [CFP]. … If it means you expand it a little bit, that is probably a good thing for all of us.”

  • CBS Sports' "Cover 3" podcast had an interesting segment where co-host Tom Fornelli compared P5 conferences to European soccer leagues. At the top was the SEC, which got compared to the EPL. "Last year in the [UEFA] Champions League, the two finalists were both Premier League teams, which is kind of like Alabama and Georgia playing in the College Football Playoff title game," he said. The rest of the pairings: the Big Ten and Serie A (Italy); ACC and LaLiga (Spain); Big 12 and Bundesliga (Germany); Pac-12 and Ligue 1 (France). Fornelli went further and compared the Group of 5 schools in FBS to England's second division, the Football League Championship, since "there is a ton of parity."

  • Anyone who’s spent time around Kentucky athletics has probably met UK Sports & Campus Marketing President Kim Shelton and VP Kim Ramsay, two veterans of collegiate sports marketing, whose roots go back to the Host Communications days. In SBJ College last week, I mistakenly referred to one Kim when I meant the other Kim. The bottom line is that Shelton ran point on the groundbreaking, 14-year Rupp Arena naming-rights deal with Central Bank.

 

 

 

 

Enjoying this newsletter? We've got more! Check out SBJ Media with John Ourand on Mondays and Wednesdays for insights into all the latest news around the world of sports media. Also check out SBJ Football from Ben Fischer on Friday afternoons.

Something on the College beat catch your eye? Tell us about it. Reach out to either me (msmith@sportsbusinessjournal.com) or Austin Karp (akarp@sportsbusinessjournal.com) and we'll share the best of it. Also contributing to this newsletter is Thomas Leary (tleary@sportsbusinessdaily.com).