The latest racial flap at ESPN only bears home the point: ESPN is too big. Too powerful, “too big to fail,” an inappropriately oversized part of the economy of sports. ESPN has immense power, which generally gets used in the service of (in no particular order) the Yankees, the Red Sox, Duke basketball, Brett Favre, Tim Tebow, USC football, the BCS, Boise State football, UConn women’s basketball, the NFL generally, SEC football teams with 10 or more wins…and now Jeremy Lin, who has the peculiar luck to be a massive novelty – an Ivy League point guard of Asian descent in the NBA – who just happens to be having his hot streak in New York.
You frequently hear it said that ESPN doesn’t care about anything past the East Coast, or south of the Meadowlands, or outside the New York-Boston axis. And if you’re not on the chosen list, you probably have a case. But ESPN has the BCS, Monday Night Football, they operate the SEC Network, they have the NBA, they more or less own the entire bowl game system, they have a lot of major league baseball, and they have a disproportionately huge grip on coverage of college sports. Contractually, there’s no way for Fox Sports, or Comcast Sports Net, or the NBC Sports Network Formerly Known As Versus to keep up.
The Big Ten went first, creating their own channel, but the Pac-12 is out to do them one better. In six months, they will launch not one, not two, but SEVEN networks – a national Pac-12 channel and one regional channel for each of the traditional pairings (Washington, Oregon, Arizona, NorCal, SoCal, and now Mountain for Colorado/Utah). They will be available on the four largest cable systems in the country from launch day. They will be available for streaming to your computer, or iPhone, or iPad. And they will make it possible for a fan of a Pac-12 school, in theory at least, to literally see every single sporting event in which his school participates.
This is no small undertaking, and the repercussions are huge. The Pac-12 owns 100% of the network – it’s operated by Fox but the money is going to Walnut Creek. It will immediately have a hammerlock on coverage of possibly the best Olympic sports league in the world – if Cal alone were its own country it would have easily been a top-10 medal winner in each of the last two summer Olympics – and the right and ability to sell that coverage abroad. It can generally feature a national contender in almost every collegiate sport – Stanford alone boasts a total of 101 NCAA national championships to date. Your history, or geography, or comparative strength, nothing matters – if you’re a Pac-12 athlete, you’re going to be playing for a potential national audience every time out.
Five years ago, the Pac-10 was perhaps the most lackadaisically-run conference in college football. The cable contract was with Fox Sports, and if you weren’t the Pac-10’s number one football game, nobody in the country was likely to see you. Top-5 teams were relegated to Saturday nights at 10:30 PM Eastern time on a channel in the high 600s. And bowl games? Aside from the Rose Bowl, the Pac-10 couldn’t care less.
Now, every Pac-12 football game will be televised. The conference has the most electrifying broadcaster in college sports, Gus Johnson, as its number-one play-by-play man. Bowl tie-ins go deeper than fifth place. And just in time for the 2012 football season, there’ll be a way for anyone with an Internet connection to see the games. And all of this depends on ESPN not at all.
When someone expressed incredulity that the Pac-12 studios would be in San Francisco, Spencer Hall – the best living college football writer – replied “Of course, that’s where Starfleet headquarters is.” He knows. The Pac-12 has run out to the leading edge of the future of college athletics broadcasting, and they’re going to jump.