Weekly Preview

The Sports Professor’s Weekly Preview 
May 9-15, 2011

 

Golf Biz at The Players Championship

Five months into the 2011 PGA season, still no win from Tiger Woods.  Are golf fans still on board?  Not on board with the PGA Tour’s proposed changes to golf’s end-of-season qualifying process are an elite group of pros who attended a presentation in New Orleans last week.  The proposal includes a “three-event, season-ending series mixing Tour players outside the top 125 in earnings with the top 50 Nationwide Tour finishers,” according to GolfWeek ,  as well as adjusting Q-School to award Nationwide cards alone.  The revised qualifying proposal “has received preliminary approval from the Tour’s Policy Board, but the board must vote on it again before the proposal can be finalized.”  For international golf pros, further clouding their decisions on how much time to spend on America’s PGA Tour are increasing can’t-say-no opportunities overseas. In 2012, South Africa will hold its first World Golf Championship event, known as the Tournament of Hope, and by offering prize money of $10 million, making it the richest tournament in international golf.  The five-year agreement to host the event was cemented after meetings at The Masters between South Africa’s Sunshine Tour Commissioner, the PGA Tour, and the International Federation of PGA Tours.  Its philanthropic focus will be on increasing awareness of HIV/AIDS and poverty in Africa.

College Football Conference Networks

The Pac-10 has agreed to a 12-year television contract with Fox and ESPN that is the most valuable in college sports. The contract will be worth more than $225 million per year and includes football, basketball and Olympic sports rights. The previous richest deal for a conference is the $220 million a year that the Big Ten currently earns. And while most of the high-profile football and men’s basketball games will be on channels owned by Fox or ESPN, the conference is interested in starting its own network. The conference will become the Pac-12 on July 1 with the additions of Utah and Colorado. The deal is a blow to Comcast/NBC, which was vying to pick up the rights for Versus, but pulled out last week. Comcast/NBC still is in play to operate a conference channel.

Soaring Rights Fees

As the NBA Playoffs advance, the NBA is thriving with star power and marquee teams like the Heat, Celtics and Lakers and ad sales for all playoff telecasts are pacing way ahead of 2010. Meanwhile, the Stanley Cup Playoffs are also experiencing their best results in years on corporate siblings NBC and Versus. More people are watching hockey on NBC than on any network since 2004. Hockey on cable and Versus is experiencing its greatest ratings since 1994. As a byproduct of the resurgence of interest in watching hockey on television, the NHL has landed a 10-year, 1.9 billion TV deal with NBC and Versus. The current agreement expiring this year paid about $70 million a year from Versus and no rights fee from NBC.  Comcast, which now owns NBC and Versus, sees the NHL as the foundation of a new sports channel it is attempting to build at Versus, with the help of NBC Sports, that will rival ESPN. The two are going toe-to-toe for rights with the battle soon expected to explode when the International Olympic Committee takes bids this summer on the next two to four Olympics, something that NBC has owned since 2000.

Cost Of A Lost Season

NFL officials say that the league would still spend and essentially lose almost $2 billion dollars on staffing alone if the 2011-2012 season is canceled. The league and teams must maintain staff to be ready to play a full season. If there is no football, there is no revenue coming in. Even though the lockout and its related court battles continue on, nobody has set a season-canceling “drop dead” date. Contingency plans are already being made to extend the season deeper into February if necessary, including moving the Super Bowl in Indianapolis to one week later.

Star Power Boosts Wrestling Audience

The return of The Rock to World Wrestling Entertainment helped lead to more than a million pay-per-view buys, a 30% increase in North America and 15% overseas over 2010. In 2009, the buy rate neared 1 million with 960K buys, but numbers were down to 885,000 in 2010, which inspired WWE to seek more star power this year.  WrestleMania is the company’s single biggest moneymaker each year. Last year’s PPV earned $19 million; ticket sales to the Phoenix show chalked up another $5.8 million. But that was down from previous years. In 2008, Orlando’s Wrestlemania earned nearly $24 million from PPV buys and another $6 million in ticket sales.