While NFL Fiddles, College Football and Soccer Get Hot

The NFL may (or may not) ratify a new CBA. Whatever happens, fans can still get excited about college ball and the soccer surge

By Rick Horrow and Karla Swatek

For 132 days now, the National Football League and its players association have held sports fans in a state of suspended animation as to whether a pro football season will actually kick off this fall. This week the suspense has only gotten worse, as each side is reportedly only "hours away" from ratifying a new collective bargaining agreement and making a joint announcement to the people of Earth—and their imaginary fantasy league kingdoms—that life on Sunday as we know it shall continue.

Fellas: Call us when you’ve signed the reams of paperwork. We have much to ponder in the meantime, including the long-term impact of the U.S. national team’s Women’s World Cup run on soccer in America and the upcoming college football season, as conferences around the U.S. hold their kickoff events for media and gridiron-hungry fans.

College Football Media Daze

The granddaddy of all college football conference schmoozefests, otherwise known as SEC Media Days, kicked off on Wednesday in Hoover, Ala. The three-day event, signaling the unofficial start of the Football Bowl Subdivision’s season, features boldface-name football coaches, top players from each team, and somewhere between 900 and 1,000 members of the media. Besides rating the teams’ on-field talent, schedules, and BCS bowl potential, the conference is discussing a proposal by SEC Commissioner Mike Slive: a new minimum requirement of a 2.5 GPA for high school graduates to be eligible to compete in the SEC, as opposed to the 2.0 GPA that represents the conference’s current minimum standard.

The new kid on the FBS block, the newly-christened Pac-12, will try to one-up the SEC by holding its July 26 football media day at the Fox studio lot in LA’s Century City. The expanded conference will welcome new members Colorado and Utah, talk up revenues from its first-ever conference championship game, and no doubt have a few Fox movie and television personalities around to help wow the media as well.

Elsewhere, Big 12 representatives, in addition to telling reporters why the conference now has only 10 teams but hasn’t bothered to change its name, will focus much of its conversations on new school-specific TV networks at the universities of Texas and Oklahoma.

ESPN, which will run Texas’s Longhorn Network, is laser-focused on distribution, reportedly seeking a monthly sub fee of 40¢ for expanded basic carriage from cable carriers in Texas and adjoining states. (In comparison, the Big Ten Network charges between 70¢ and 75¢ in states within the conference’s footprint.) Oklahoma has yet to announce a media company partnership, but its athletic director, Joe Castiglione, insists the school is "trying to position ourselves to be more available on all the emerging platforms the way the digital revolution is taking place" than is its Red River rival to the south.

BOLSTERED BY SUBSIDIES

Overall, USA Today reported last month that more than $470 million in "new money poured into major-college athletics programs last year, boosting spending on sports even as many of the parent universities struggled with budget reductions during tough economic times." While much of the new revenue came from a lesser form of the multimedia rights deals trumpeted by Texas and Oklahoma, as well as higher ticket receipts and donations, schools across the board continued "increasing their subsidies from student fees and institutional funds." Altogether in 2010, about $2 billion in subsidies "went to athletics at the 218 public schools that have been in the NCAA’s Division I over the past five years." Partially thanks to such subsidies, the athletics departments of 22 Division I schools were self-sufficient—meaning they had more revenue than expenses—as compared with 14 schools in 2009.