All Sports Are Local

"My entire career is based on the idea that all sports are local."

Jim Heckman, the man who founded Scout.com, wrote that in an e-mail addressed to me a couple of years ago. He was responding to my blog entry regarding Fox's purchase of Scout, but I bring it up now after watching the 2007 NBA Finals.

Perhaps "not watching" is more appropriate, because I think I spent about five minutes total on the Cavs and Spurs. Clearly, I am not alone, as these were the lowest rated Finals since the Lions took the Christians in five, and just about as competitive.

NBA Commissioner David Stern, who I consider to be utterly brilliant and potentially lethal, has been oddly obtuse when speculating on the cause of the low ratings. The media has offered a variety of explanations: the methodical blandness of the Spurs, the overwhelming odds against the Cavaliers, the gazillion other options out there in TV land, and the complete absence of personality or relevance among the television hosts assigned to the pregame and postgame shows.

Okay, I added that last part.

I would also add this: the games start too late, and they take too long.

I picked up the Orlando Sentinel this morning expecting to read the story of Game 4. Instead, I got a note informing me that said game was too late for the Sentinel's print deadline. Orlando is an NBA city, for the love of Terry Catledge. If fans in NBA cities can't get coverage of a Finals game on the morning after, how can the league expect anyone else to give a crap?

Is a 9pm eastern time start really necessary? Is the NBA so concerned about its West Coast audience that it's willing to alienate the East Coast fans that live in the same neighborhoods where the game was born? Wait, scratch that -- forget the question of who "deserves" the better start time. Just run the numbers, like any other business:

There are roughly 49,000,000 people who live in the Pacific time zone of the US, with 36 million of those living in California. The Central and Eastern time zones, on the other hand, are home to nearly 227 million people. I have never -- ever -- understood why "national" sports events like the NBA Finals, the World Series, and Monday Night Football started at 9pm eastern, catering to an audience that is one-fourth the size of those closer to the East Coast.

Start the games at 8 eastern, or -- gasp -- play one or two during the afternoon on a weekend. It's not that hard.

But back to the opening paragraph. "All sports are local."

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Mike Helton, the president of NASCAR, for an episode of "In My Own Words." In preparing for the interview, I learned that NASCAR is the most popular spectator sport in America; in terms of television ratings, it trails only the NFL nationally. But does it really?

NFL games on Sunday afternoons, as we all know, are regionalized. Fans who watch the network coverage in Florida will see a different slate of games from those who watch in California, or in Michigan. With Monday Night Football now on ESPN, the only truly "national" NFL game each week on broadcast television is the Sunday night game on NBC; while their ratings on Sunday night were very strong in 2006, we're still only talking about 14 to 16 events each year, all of which begin at 8pm eastern time or later on Sunday nights.

NASCAR, on the other hand, will have 25 events live on broadcast television this season between FOX and ABC, almost all of which take place in daylight hours on the weekend. While the remaining races are indeed on cable (either TNT or ESPN), they, too, start for the most part at 1pm or 3pm, and always on a weekend day. If you ever wonder why NASCAR is so popular in this country, start there: it's on TV at a convenient time, and the majority of races are available to those without cable television. Pretty simple. Perhaps the NBA could learn from Those Who Turn Left.

With the vast majority of NFL regular-season games offered as regional coverage -- and the marquee Monday Night Football matchup shifted to cable -- we are left with one, and only one, truly national sport on broadcast television: NASCAR. Everything else -- the NFL included -- has become "local."

That, by the way, is the very principle behind the creation of networks like Sun Sports and FSN Florida. Mr. Heckman's guiding mantra is the same philosophy that has compelled FOX to expand the reach of its regional networks to the point that 62 of the 82 teams in America's "major sports" -- other than the NFL -- play games on FOX regional sports networks like Sun Sports and FSN Florida. Interestingly, our parent company's biggest rival at the moment is not ESPN, which has focused itself exclusively on being all things to all people, but rather Comcast, which is aggressively pursuing regional sports network opportunities in the FSN vein. This same philosophy is also behind the growth of team-owned networks like YES and NESN, and the continuous exploration by other pro franchises into creating their own regional nets, like the Cleveland Indians and Sports Time Ohio, which launched last year.

It's not just pro sports, either: the Big Ten conference has launched its own regional cable network, hiring my friend Dave Revsine away from ESPN as lead studio anchor. The Mountain West has done it, and the SEC is talking about it. Teams and conferences that create their own networks are indeed subscribing to the theory that "all sports are local," but they have added incentive that doesn't apply to networks like Sun Sports: the Yankees, Red Sox, SEC, and Big Ten can maintain editorial control of how their product is presented by owning the network. There's little chance that the host of, say, an NBA franchise-owned network studio show will rip a coaching decision on the air the way Screamin' A. Smith feels obligated to do so on ESPN. From that standpoint, it's smart business for the teams in question, even if it's a little Orwellian at times.

When I first moved back home to Orlando in 2003 to join Sun Sports (then Sunshine Network), people used to ask me why I would ever leave ESPN. You're starting to see why this was not only the best decision I ever made, but perhaps (unwittingly) the smartest. For this is the direction we're heading: a universe of cable television networks completely dedicated to the teams and programs that you actually care about, with the broadcast networks fighting mightily to sell a fraction of that same product nationally. Consider the 2007 NBA Finals an early casualty in a war for your attention that has just begun.

"All sports are local." Unless you're NASCAR, I guess.