Dollars and Sense

Anybody catch this piece of news regarding NASCAR's television contract?

According to Mediaweek, the racing series has reached eight-year deals with ABC/ESPN and Turner Sports, and is expected to finalize an agreement with Fox, the parent company of Sun Sports, in short order. Under the new deal, Fox will air 13 races to start every NASCAR season, including the Daytona 500, which they shared with NBC in the previous contract. Turner gets six Nextel Cup events, and ABC/ESPN gets 17 in the second half of the season, including the final ten in the "Chase for the Championship." In between the financial terms ($350 million dollars per year for Disney and Turner's share, plus an expected $200 million per annum from Fox once they pony up), the part that caught my eye as a former ESPN employee was this:

As part of the ABC/ESPN agreement, all ten of the "Chase" races will be televised on ABC. Having ESPN back in the racing game is one thing, but I was mildly blown away to see Disney's broadcast network get involved.

When NASCAR left ESPN after the 2000 season, the rumor around the building in Bristol was that NASCAR wanted races on broadcast television, not just cable, and that Disney, owners of ABC and ESPN, wouldn't guarantee it. Never mind that roughly two-thirds of all television households in this country now have at least basic cable - those 74,000,000 homes were not enough for NASCAR, which fancied itself a direct competitor to the NFL, and still does. They wanted the whole enchilada - the 110,000,000 U.S. households with any kind of TV. Disney wouldn't give up the time on ABC, the story went, so NASCAR went. Now, they're back.

If there's one thing I've learned in my fifteen-plus years in broadcast media, it is this: be nice to everyone, because you never know who you'll be working for someday. The production assistant you pass in the hall could well end up becoming your boss at your next gig. Clearly, this lesson was not lost on ABC/ESPN.

Who gets the better end of the deal? Fox, and not because they keep a roof over my head. The Daytona 500 is the Super Bowl of motorsports, and now they don't have to share it. While the year-end Chase did create a whole new stream of media coverage for the series, it was still a slog to the end, and decidedly anticlimactic.

Want to make the Chase interesting? Reset the ten "playoff" drivers to zero, just like they do in baseball, the NBA, the NHL, and every other sport that conducts an honest-to-goodness playoff - even the mighty NFL, the benchmark against which NASCAR measures itself. Odds of this happening are also "zero," because the drivers and teams would absolutely despise it, but we'd sure watch, wouldn't we?

Speaking of money, and theories: my Big Five Theory, which, I've noticed, has now been comped by many in the state media, received a healthy boost last week when the University of South Florida announced that it had extended head coach Jim Leavitt's contract through 2012.

Under the terms of the new deal, Leavitt, the only coach USF has ever known, will nearly double his annual salary to one million per, and more importantly, his buyout is raised from $50,000 dollars to half a million. Take that, Kansas State. Leavitt commented that he had been saying all along that USF was one of the best jobs in the country. Well, it is now.

With Leavitt locked up, the Bulls no longer have to worry about losing recruits to the prospect of a regime change - the sort of tactic that many schools (allegedly) use against Bobby Bowden at Florida State or Joe Paterno at Penn State. I've seen comments on the boards from Gator and Seminole fans opining that USF can compete against UF and FSU for top recruits "somewhere down the line." That line just got a little closer. The first shot has been fired in the creation of an honest Big Five.

The second volley will come when UCF athletic director Steve Orsini huddles with George O'Leary, the Conference USA Coach of the Year, and takes a gallon of White-Out to their contract. O'Leary arrived in Orlando with a five-year deal through 2008 that pays him $700,000 dollars in base salary, with incentives that can push him over a million per. Since then, all O'Leary did was shake off an 0-11 season, put UCF into the Conference USA championship game, preside over the announcement of a new on-campus football stadium, and win two national Coach of the Year awards (and counting). More importantly, he's created a nationwide buzz around this program for the first time since the Daunte Culpepper years - consider the staggering ticket sales for the C-USA title game, and the votes the Knights received last week in both the coaches' poll and the AP poll.

Rumblings from east Orange County suggest that UCF is already considering re-writing O'Leary's contract to keep him around even longer - perhaps as long as Leavitt's deal in Tampa. Just rumor for now, but if it happens, UCF can shoo away O'Leary's suitors just as USF did with Leavitt. And then, sports fans, the Big Five is yet another step closer to reality.

See you after Championship Saturday.