I have an inkling that the Southeastern Conference is not going to launch its own television channel when its TV contracts are up next year.
I came to this conclusion March 15, when I found out that CBS asked ESPN2 to carry the SEC Championship game after a storm caused damage to the arena hosting the conference tournament. That forced the SEC to move its start time for its championship game back a couple of hours, where it coincided with the Big Ten Conference’s championship, which also was being broadcast on CBS.
So CBS wound up moving the game to ESPN2, while keeping the game on over-the-air broadcast in the home markets of the two schools playing for the championship.
But why would CBS Sports move the game to a Disney-owned network rather than keep it on its own cable channel, CBS College Sports Network? By all accounts, CBS made the decision, not the SEC.
But the decision, which was supported by the conference, speaks to the way the SEC views the media, according to insiders privy to the conference’s thinking.
School presidents do not want to run into the same distribution fights that have plagued the Big Ten Network, sources say. They want the maximum level of distribution for their games.
If the SEC partners with Comcast on a channel, for example, what guarantee does it have that DirecTV will carry it? After all, it took the satellite operator more than a year to carry Comcast’s other college conference network, The mtn.
CBS’s decision validates this point.
The Southeastern Conference moved its
tournament to the campus of Georgia
Tech and its title game telecast to ESPN2.
If I were advising CBS, I would have suggested that it put the game on CBS College Sports and deal with the inevitable complaints that follow. It wouldn’t matter to me that CBS College Sports is in just 25 million homes compared to ESPN2’s 92 million.
I would have offered the channel to all cable and satellite operators as a free preview over the weekend. And I’d expect several of those operators to show renewed interest in carrying the channel after the tournament.
Mike Aresco, CBS’s senior vice president of programming, said network executives considered moving the game to CBS College Sports. But he said ad sales considerations, not to mention the SEC’s wishes, made ESPN2 a better choice.
“We wanted to get the broadest distribution possible,” he said. “We thought about CBS College. But ESPN2 seemed to make more sense for distribution. Our interests were aligned.”
CBS’s first choice was to ask the Big Ten to move its game up by two hours, but Big Ten officials balked at that idea. They told CBS that such a move would create too many on-site logistical problems with tournament tickets.
The weekend’s problems reminded Aresco of the NCAA tournament in 2003, when the Iraq War started. CBS devoted its schedule to war coverage and had ESPN carry many of the opening-round games.
Ever since then, CBS has developed contingency plans around the NCAA tournament, but it didn’t have any for the conference finals. This year, CBS will use ESPN and Versus as backups during the big tournament, if needed.
Once CBS College Sports gets more distribution, it will become more of a viable option for the network.
But it looks like the SEC won’t have that kind of patience. I expect the conference to cut deals with CBS and ESPN, which would keep its games in front of the widest possible audiences from the get-go.
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
