Sports Media Watch

In his blog yesterday, GoDaddy celebrity-prez Bob Parsons reported that ABC had rejected GoDaddy’s 10th submission for a Super Bowl ad. This is not all that surprising; we imagine that GoDaddy is just producing incrementally less flagrant ads each time, and they’ve got a few weeks left before they have to cave completely.

What was more shocking was the indication that the NFL had specifically demanded to review any ABC-approved GoDaddy submission. Parsons lays out two possible reasons for this: either the NFL truly cares about making its content family-friendly, in which case ABC’s review process should suffice; or, the NFL is still pissed about last year’s GoDaddy ad, and wants to exact some revenge.

For the record, when Mediaweek followed up on this story, it found no NFL official willing to corroborate Parsons’ claim of a threatened review process. But if Parsons is reporting accurately, he is certainly within his rights to say that the move would be highly unprecedented.

Yes, the NFL has been known to make their displeasure known to networks that run afoul of the league’s good wishes (ask an ESPN Playmakers producer about this one, or any Fox exec during last year’s GoDaddy spectacular).

But outright control isn’t really their style. It’s not like Tags to just out and out demand a more centralized role in outside media coverage, not like this – which is why it’s hard to believe, and why it’s completely unprecedented, and why we can’t help but be skeptical that such powers are even written in to the broadcast contract that ABC would have signed for the event itself.

Though it’s not like we’re privy to that kind of information.

Which leads us, in its own way, to rumor #2: that the NFL Network has landed the NFL’s coveted late-season Thursdsay-Saturday eight-game package. First reported on Ben Maller yesterday, and then bounced around Deadspin, but – as far as we know – has gotten no further traction or substantiation.

This game package is the package that comprises eight games beginning the weekend after Thanksgiving and going through the end of the regular season – all of those December Saturday games, which draw massive ratings points even with crappy matchups. It was the leftover package after Fox, CBS, ESPN, and NBC had divided up the league earlier in the fall.

At this point, we’re treating this as nothing more than rumor – hell, it could still be bargaining ploy. Maller reports that Comcast had made a major offer – the likelihood of which we had reported in this space last month. This is the same package that Richard Sandomir had estimated to be worth something in the $400 million range in this November article, where he also reported that the NFL was not opposed to the option of launching an all-sports network to be run in conjunction with the all-football NFL network, and then of using those two stations in tandem to negotiate better cable distribution deals (the NFL Network, as it stands, is not available in many local cable packages, and when it is, it is often placed in higher-tier options).

So let’s be the first with some open speculation here, and it comes in the form of two non-mutually-exclusive options:

Option #1: The NFL rejected massive offers (let’s ballpark it around the $400 mil projected by Sandomir) from, at the very least, Comcast, if not also from Turner. The league decided that that revenue stream was less important than the chance to develop its own media empire whose revenue flows right into the general pot. Let’s even speculate that the NFL was reading analysis of Major League Baseball Advanced Media and realized that additional horizontal leverage had major advantages throughout the corporate empire. That is: $400 million could begin to look like chump change compared to the possible net worth of the NFL Network, with or without its hypothetical all-sports companion, given that an actual football package would massively boost the NFL Network’s cable distribution situation and give it big-time credibility in the cable world.

Option #2: Offers for NFL broadcasts were actually not as high as Sandomir predicted. Everybody loves the league in public; however, in private, networks are growing concerned about the lack of a collective bargaining agreement for next year – which we’re now beginning to see more coverage of as the season ends and teams start working on offseason contract extensions, etc. The fact that the NFL is growing increasingly ornery about its own image and its media control (see above) isn’t helping this situation; networks are no longer as willing to stake their own future (see Fox circa the early 90’s) on a league whose reputation for friendliness is quickly expiring.

It’s worth remembering: NFL players get about 65% of a salary pool collected from the NFL’s total gate receipts and media contracts; if the league walked away from a $400 million offer, that’s $260 mil in potential player salary taken off the table right in the middle of a labor negotiation minefield. The NFL Network could be good news for the NFLPA down the road; if it succeeds like MLBAM, the potential revenue stream is huge, and gets put back into that general pot. But that only works under the current CBA, which is now set to expire ... short-term, the vanishing $260 mil just seems like a slap in the face to the union.

Again, we’re not convinced that this is really happening. But if it is, it’s big news, and we’ll be tracking it closely.

As a final thought, we’d like to mention something about the death of ESPN Hollywood. But we don’t really like mentioning ESPN Hollywood. We’re much more interested in seeing Mike Tice’s analyst audition tapes (one paragraph, well buried). Bootleg copies anyone?

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