[Vision2020] How ESPN made the Broncos

[Ron Force]

>From a series in the NY Times on the influence of ESPN on college football:

Winners, Losers and the WAC
On Sept. 18, 2010, ESPN announced its “GameDay” site for the following Saturday: Boise State.
That a university in a place so distant, geographically and psychically, from the national consciousness would become a national television draw would have been unimaginable in the world before ESPN. The story of Boise State’s rise, and how it played out across one college football conference, is a vivid demonstration of ESPN’s role in the making of winners and losers in this era of realignment.
In the mid-1980s, desperate for visibility, Boise State went so far as to install blue turf at Bronco Stadium. Although the team was often a winner, it was not a member of the N.C.A.A.’s Division I-A until 1996.
Things began to change five years later, when Boise State joined the Western Athletic Conference. The Broncos’ wide-open passing offense immediately caught the eyes of ESPN executives. The team’s willingness to play on weeknights won their hearts.
Boise State’s coach at the time, Dan Hawkins, told The Idaho Statesman that while he preferred to play at midday Saturday, “the kind of exposure that you’re able to get by being on TV, that’s tremendous in recruiting.”
The athletic director, Gene Bleymaier, said he was hoping for one nationally televised game a year. But ESPN provided much more than that, and Boise State began to sprint up the rankings, becoming a regular in the top 25 and reaching two B.C.S. games, including the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, where the Broncos upset Oklahoma, 43-42, in overtime.
Boise State’s emergence as a football powerhouse was assisted by its frequent appearances on ESPN. The team’s wide-open offense and its willingness to play on weeknights made it attractive to network executives.Left, Matt Cilley/Associated Press; Boise State University/Getty Images
“To the extent that Bronco Nation is defined by people outside our area and our blue field, it’s ESPN’s coverage over recent years that allowed this to happen,” Boise State’s president, Bob Kustra, said.
ESPN, in turn, was able to spruce up its midweek schedule with an attractive product that got even better as recruits flocked to Boise State after seeing the Broncos play in prime time.
What was good for Boise State and ESPN was also good for the WAC, a middle-of-the-road conference whose prominence was dependent on one or two teams breaking out.
ESPN’s rights payment to the WAC reached $3.4 million in 2010, federal tax statements show, and Boise State’s bowl appearances brought more money to the conference. In less than a decade, ESPN had helped establish Boise State as a national brand. It had also made the university, in effect, too successful for the WAC. So in 2010, Boise State looked for more advantageous financial arrangements. It found them in the Mountain West.
The extent of ESPN’s involvement in the reordering of conferences has been the subject of much debate. N.C.A.A. rules forbid television networks from dictating what they want conferences or colleges to do, but they are free to offer an opinion if asked.
Mr. Skipper, ESPN’s president, acknowledged that conference officials frequently consulted him.
“I had, on occasion, two conference commissioners ask me about adding the same school,” Mr. Skipper said, “and I said to both of them: ‘Yes, you should add that school. If you can add that very prominent school, it would be good for your conference. But I’m not telling you to do it.’ I don’t provide leading advice, and I don’t say, ‘Wink, wink, I’ll pay you more money if you do that.’ ”
ESPN executives have argued that realignment has been bad for the network’s balance sheet because of a contractual incentive known as the composition clause, which allows conferences to reopen a rights deal, and get more money, if valuable colleges come on board. (ESPN can also reopen a contract if universities leave.)
“If we could go back to the day conferences were aligned in 2009, we would do so in a minute,” said Burke Magnus, ESPN’s chief of college sports programming. “Almost every move has cost us money.”
Boise State and the Folding of the WAC
ESPN helped Boise State become a national brand — and a marquee team for the Western Athletic Conference, a league long in flux. Ultimately, Boise State became such a success that it left the conference. In the turmoil that followed, the WAC gave up football.
Source: sports-reference.com
Still, there is no question that the riches paid by ESPN and its competitors have been the oxygen of realignment. And many educators worry that the shakeout is having a corrosive effect on college athletics at large.
To Mr. Schmidly, the former president at New Mexico, “what’s emerging is a select set of 50 to 60 schools” and everyone else.
The winners, Mr. Schmidly said, “will all have stadiums that seat more than 50,000. They’ll all have TV contracts that bring in $20 million to $30 million a year. And because they have all that money, they will be good in all sports.”
Meanwhile, he added, “The rest of the institutions will be struggling because they don’t have the same set of opportunities.”
Over the years, the WAC has been front and center in realignment. There are more than 20 former WAC programs. After Boise State’s departure, the conference became much less desirable to ESPN, and its annual television fee plummeted to $1 million, tax statements show. That caused more teams to leave.
The WAC had a long and strong football tradition, but it could not weather the financial hit that followed Boise State’s exit. In August 2012, its membership down to seven universities, the WAC announced that it would abandon football at year’s end.
This season, two former WAC universities, New Mexico State and Idaho, are stranded without a football conference, forced to cobble together schedules as independents, though they will be joining the Sun Belt Conference in 2014 for football.
Eight years ago, after ESPN televised a New Mexico State game, the university’s president, Michael V. Martin, explained the event’s significance to the faculty senate. “I will tell you, last Saturday we hit a home run,” he said, “not because we had the biggest crowd in the history of N.M.S.U. football, not because we had the first sellout before game day, but because we were on ESPN nationally.”
But Mr. Martin, who last year became the chancellor at Colorado State, recently said: “ESPN treated the WAC as marginal cannon fodder. The contract was ridiculously small, and they made you play Thursday night at 8 if you wanted any exposure at all.”
Jeff Hurd, the WAC commissioner, said, “There is certainly a reality to the collegiate athletic world; the business side is very much there.” He added, “For lack of a better way to say it, it does become survival of the fittest.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 25, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: College Football’s Most Dominant Player? It’s ESPN.
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