Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [66]
CHET SIMMONS:
I thought they treated Scotty like a slave. It was awful.
BILL GRIMES:
I can’t even remember how Scotty left. Did we fire him or did he quit? Either way, we picked the right horse, that’s for sure.
In 1977, sixty-two NCAA football powerhouse programs from five conferences—including the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Big Eight (now the Big 12), plus a few independent teams, joined forces to form a college football association (CFA) to challenge the NCAA and cash in on rights deals from broadcast networks. By 1981, CFA members were chafing under the NCAA’s tight grip on TV rights. According to NCAA policy, teams like Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas, and Penn State received the same revenue from a televised game as did teams with little national prominence. In addition, broadcast networks were required to schedule games in which at least eighty-two different NCAA teams appeared during a two-year period, but no team could appear nationally more than four times, and those appearances had to be divided equally among the networks. The whole point of the CFA was to wriggle free of NCAA restraints. It found a potential ally in NBC, which offered the CFA a four-year $180 million rights contract. Ever anxious about threats to its power, the NCAA threatened sanctions that would affect other sports in addition to football, and squashed CFA’s efforts to cash in.
By 1984, increasingly apoplectic over what it saw as the NCAA’s unreasonable restraint on trade, the CFA—led by Oklahoma University’s Board of Regents—filed suit against the NCAA in a case that would go all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Court ultimately determined that the NCAA was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and affirmed a Court of Appeals’ judgment that the NCAA plan was “an unreasonable restraint of trade” because of the plan’s “price-fixing and output-limiting aspects.” The ruling held that the NCAA could no longer “limit the number of games that are broadcast on television” or contract for an overall price that has the effect of setting the price for individual game broadcast rights.”
Thus freed from NCAA shackles, teams and conferences were able to negotiate their own TV contracts. Now there were better games and more money to go around. So it would be that ESPN, boosted by its association with ABC Sports, landed the rights to broadcast forty-eight games in the 1984 season. College football finally aired live, all season long, on ESPN.
LOREN MATTHEWS:
Nineteen eighty-four was our first full year of televising live college football, and if you count Sunday, which was a travel day, I was on the road Labor Day until December 10 with a total of only three days off. I would fly in to where we had that week’s game on a Thursday or a Friday, meet with the athletic director or conference commissioner, stay for the game, and fly back on Sunday. We’d pick our games on Monday, and start the whole thing again.
MARC PAYTON:
Paul Maguire is without a doubt the most fun character I’ve ever known in my life. We did college football at ESPN together, then we did USFL games. In those days, pretty much all the teams were in the South, so we were in Florida, Alabama, and Texas a lot, where the weather was warm. The first thing Paul would do when we’d get into a town, even before we checked into the hotel, was stop at a 7-Eleven and buy a Styrofoam cooler with beer so we could have our production meeting at the hotel pool, drinking beer. He would even travel with a blender so he could make frozen drinks for everyone.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
In the early eighties again, there was a big effort to challenge ESPN. Multimedia, which was a big cable operator, TCI, which was at the time becoming the biggest if not already the biggest