SMW Top 20 of the 2010s: #20-#16

There may be no bigger jewel in college sports than the SEC, and no better TV partnership than the one between the SEC and CBS. In the final days of the decade, Sports Business Daily broke the news that CBS was walking away from negotiations with the conference, leaving its package of top-tier games to a competitor (likely ESPN/ABC). While CBS intends to air the remaining games of its SEC contract, which does not expire until 2023, the impending change will reshape college football on TV.

The SEC on CBS generated four of the seven largest college football audiences during the recent regular season and, excluding bowls, five of the sport’s six largest audiences since 2006. If and when ESPN picks up the rights, it will more than make up for the company’s loss of Big Ten inventory.

Stephen A. Smith did not work at ESPN when this decade started. As the decade ends, he is the face and voice of the company. In 2005, such an outcome would not have been overly surprising. The ESPN of the Mark Shapiro era was trending in the direction of loud voices yelling about sports, and Smith had his own nightly show on ESPN2. Post-Shapiro, however, the network seemed to be quieting down, notably letting Smith’s contract expire in 2009.

What changed? After Smith returned in 2011, Shapiro’s spiritual successor Jamie Horowitz steered ESPN back on the course of “embracing debate,” taking the network’s 2005 format of loud voices yelling about sports into the social media era. Smith would be paired with Skip Bayless on First Take, and during an era of cord-cutting and viewer erosion, the hosts’ bombast resonated on Twitter if not in the Nielsen ratings. After Bayless left ESPN in 2016, First Take became Smith’s vehicle. While the show remains a middling Nielsen draw, Smith’s social media presence is substantial and he is easily ESPN’s most recognized employee. He will begin the new decade with a massive new contract. Smith is now as big as he has ever been, and as big as anyone has ever been at ESPN. Make of that what you will.

It is easy to forget in 2019 just how much labor-management conflict defined the early years of this decade, with the NBA, NHL and NFL each experiencing owner-imposed lockouts in a two-year span. The two former leagues each lost games, with the 2011-12 NBA season shortened to 66 games per team and the 2012-13 NHL season shortened to just 48. The NFL lost its Hall of Fame Game, but nothing more.

Lockouts are not just relevant for the games lost, but for the deals eventually struck. As has been the case in every work stoppage since the 1994 MLB players’ strike, the owners started fights they knew they would win. In the NBA, for example, all the talk of exorbitant player salaries after the league’s massive 2014 TV deal neglected the substantially greater growth in franchise values — a development attributable to the owners’ dramatic redistribution of wealth in the 2011 CBA.

Scarcity has long been key to the NFL’s success, but the league’s ethos in the Roger Goodell era has been ‘more is more.’ Case in point, the expansion of Thursday Night Football from eight games on NFL Network at the start of this decade to 18 across multiple networks by the end.

At its most bloated, Thursday Night Football aired on three different networks in 2016 and 2017, with seven games exclusively on NFL Network, five simulcast by NFL Network and CBS, and six simulcast by NFL Network and NBC. The glut was not borne of demand (the expanded schedule was greeted with middling ratings and numerous player complaints) but of greed. The league got CBS to pay $275 million for TNF rights in 2014 and that price tag has since doubled to well over $600 million between FOX and digital partner Amazon.

ESPN struggled for years to figure out how to program the Midnight ET hour. From Mohr Sports to Olbermann, there was no shortage of short-lived attempts. The breakthrough came in 2015, when the network gave the timeslot to Scott Van Pelt for a version of SportsCenter tailored specifically to him. SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt was a success almost instantly, supplanting the 11 PM ET edition as the go-to SportsCenter after big games. In an era of embracing debate and sticking to sports, his “One Big Thing” essays are a throwback to an era when which sports TV execs had enough faith in their viewers to go beyond the box score.