SBJ College: ESPN Exec Goes Down Memory Lane

My son turned 21 last week. I asked him if he’s ready to start paying for his own auto insurance. He laughed.

Here's what's cooking on campus.

ROSALYN DURANT WRAPS UP 20 YEARS AT ESPN

• Rosalyn Durant is a saver, and after 20 years with ESPN, she had saved a lot. She keeps special items or cards in what she calls a memory box. That made packing her belongings at her office in Charlotte a lot more time-consuming. “I kept stopping to read cards and old letters,” she said. “I just took the time to be reflective as I took pictures off the wall. I was at the office a lot later than I thought I’d be.” The boxes stacked up quickly as she packed up her office on Tuesday, her last day as Senior VP in charge of its college networks. On Monday, she starts her new job outside Orlando overseeing Disney Springs and other properties.
  
  
• I caught up with Durant by phone this afternoon. She was driving to Charleston, S.C., to meet her mother and stepfather for a special weekend. Friday is Durant’s birthday; Saturday is her mother’s birthday. They almost always spend it together. Just like each one of those keepsakes from her office have meaning, so do important dates on the calendar. She purposely wanted to start at Disney on March 9, because that’s the anniversary date of her father’s death 12 years ago. “I wanted my start date to mean something,” she said.
  
  
• Earlier this week, Durant spent some time with Ilan Ben-Hanan, who was promoted into her former role. Ben-Hanan will be based in L.A. and have oversight of ACC Network, SEC Network and Longhorn Network. I asked Roz what advice she’d give him. “Trust the people around you,” she said. “He’s really well-positioned because he’s got people around him who know the college space like no other. That will give him the space he needs because this job will be unlike any position he’s ever had.”

Rosalyn Durant now moves to Disney after 20 years working at ESPN

COLLEGE LEADERS STUDY GOOGLE'S TACTICS

• ADs and senior administrators from seven of the biggest brands in college athletics gathered Tuesday for a first-of-its-kind seminar at Google’s Room 98 in L.A. to talk about what fans might look like in the future. Florida, Maryland, Michigan, USC, Texas, Texas A&M and Virginia Tech were the schools represented. Ohio State was invited but couldn’t make it. 

• Room 98 is typically an innovation hub where business leaders would be found trying to solve a company’s main challenges. On one wall hangs a saying that sets the tone: “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.” For Tuesday’s daylong session, Google reached out to many of the most influential leaders in the college space. When I saw them tweeting about their unique experience, I contacted several to get their takeaways.

• Drew Martin, Texas: “As an industry, we must adjust to a shifting demographic of consumers over the next 5-10 years if college athletics is going to continue to thrive. Google helped us focus on how Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z are interacting with teams and athletes using the massive amount of data they generate from their search engine.”

• Scott Stricklin, Florida: “Lots of talk about supporting student athletes and engaging fans ... that forced you to look at ideas in unconventional ways."

• Ross Bjork, Texas A&M: “What impressed me was how Google approaches innovation ... and leading through change.”

• Several people, including USC AD Mike Bohn and Brad Wurthman from Virginia Tech, were intrigued by Google’s approach to “roof shots” vs. “moon shots.” Roof shots are attainable ideas that improve business by 10%, compared to moon shots (like a long shot) that could boost business by 10x. Driver-less cars are an example of a moon shot. “There was a lot of talk about how to be disruptive within your industry,” Wurthman said. “It really made you think differently. It was probably the best workshop I’ve been to.”

ESPNU HITS 15-YEAR MILESTONE

• The 15th anniversary of ESPNU’s launch was yesterday, and it was a reminder of the network’s catchy tagline -- “03-04-05” -- which made up in number sequence what it lacked in imagination. ESPN Exec VP Burke Magnus oversaw ESPNU’s launch at the time and he reminisced about the relationships that are made while working on such a major project with my colleague John Ourand. “There’s nothing like a network launch," Magnus said. “There’s a bond there that you share forever.”

• Magnus is reminded of ESPNU’s launch every year on March 4 by a text message from Mike Hall, the net’s first anchor by virtue of winning a “Dream Job” contest. Every year since he left ESPN for Big Ten Network in 2007, Hall texts Magnus about the launch. Magnus said he also hears from CBS Sports’ Bess Barnes, another ESPNU alum. The pride ran so deep with Magnus that he ordered a personalized “ESPNU” license plate for his car. “I still have it, but I have long since taken it off my car.”

• Even though ESPNU hit the airwaves with one just distribution deal with DirecTV, good for about 2.5 million households, it provided many ancillary benefits. “This was a slow build, but it created many opportunities for people professionally and from a content and production standpoint.” Besides that, ESPNU provided a TV home for many smaller conferences, women’s events and Olympic sports, which previously weren’t broadcast at all. “That was key to us going so deep with NCAA championships,” Magnus said.

Burke Magnus oversaw the launch of ESPNU back in March 2005

INSURANCE PLANS & CORONAVIRUS

• Stanford established new attendance guidelines today for each competition venue in order to allow fans the opportunity for what the school called “social distancing.” Public attendance will be limited to approximately one-third of each venue's capacity through April 15.

• Attorney Tim Browne joins SBJ's Bill King on a podcast to discuss the potential financial ramifications on the U.S. sports industry if an outbreak leads to the cancellation of games, as it has elsewhere, and looks at the likelihood that insurance would cover any of those losses.

SPEED READS

• The NCAA is bracing for lower viewership next month as the basketball tournament's title game will run on TBS/TNT/truTV for the third time. Cord cutting has hit the number of people that get these channels. TBS is now in 86.3 million U.S. homes, while TNT has 85.9 million and truTV has 81.3 million (for a comparison, ESPN is at 82.4 million), according to March figures from Nielsen Media. When three networks first aired the NCAA title game in 2016, TNT had 92.5 million homes, TBS had 93.8 million and truTV had 89.1 million.

• My colleague John Ourand reported yesterday on Golf Channel and NBC Sports centralizing their operations and production, and it made me think about ESPN’s huge facility in Charlotte. ESPN’s offices and studios are home to the SEC Network, where “The Paul Finebaum Show” and other studio programming originate, as well as ESPN Events. Given the expense of running that office, that the ACC Network runs out of Bristol and that new college networks chiefwill stay on the West Coast, it’ll will be interesting to see what the future holds for ESPN in Charlotte.

• North Carolina's Bubba Cunningham, Appalachian State's Doug Gillin, SMU's Rick Hart and Baylor's Mack Rhoades were named winners of Under Armour's AD of the Year award at the FBS level for 2019-20. Click here for the full list of the seven divisions honored by the NACDA.

• No. 8-ranked Seton Hall men’s basketball drew 16,863 fans to Prudential Center last night for a game against Villanova, marking a Pirates record at the venue (the school moved into the Newark arena for the 2007-08 season) and bumping average attendance to 10,328 for the season. That will be the program’s best average since 10,667 for the 2000-01 season, when the team played at Meadowlands Arena.

• One of the coolest sponsor activations I’ve heard about during basketball season came courtesy of Colorado State and its official healthcare partner, UCHealth. In a home game against Fresno State recently, CSU players wore their normal white jerseys, but instead of their name on the back, the jersey carried the name of a cancer patient from the UCHealth system. It was part of Coaches vs. Cancer Week. The patients and their families attended the game and were on the court pregame to form a tunnel when the Rams took the floor. CSU’s multimedia rights partner, Learfield IMG College, led by GM Erik Antico, facilitated the activation.

Colorado State players recently wore jerseys that carried the name of a cancer patient from the UCHealth system

------- 4 Commissioners Confirmed to Speak at World Congress of Sports -------

The NFL's Roger Goodell and WNBA's Cathy Engelbert are now confirmed to speak at the CAA World Congress of Sports, March 25-26 at the Monarch Beach Resort in Dana Point, CA. They join MLB's Rob Manfred and MLS' Don Garber on this year’s speaker roster. To view the agenda and to register, go to www.WorldCongressofSports.com.

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).