Sports Marketing

When it comes to sports television what you can see on certain stations has become a very specific and high money motivated system. Whether the sport is baseball, football, the Olympics, NASCAR or college sports the industry has grown in leaps and bounds. But in order to see this concept fully grow into a big business situation you must first look at its humble and less complicated beginnings.

In the beginning the NCAA was just a mere thought in somebodies head. In 1905 a meeting between the then President Roosevelt and 13 athletic institutions directors sparked the debate over college football schedules and who was going to play whom. Of course with this conversation football playing rules were discussed. Because of this and other meetings the IAAUS (Intercollegiate Athletics Association of the United States) was formed. In 1906 the program was changed to its now famous name of the NCAA. In 1952 a program to control live television of football games was approved, the annual convention delegated enforcement powers to the Association's Council and legislation was adopted governing post season bowl games. The Association's membership was divided into three legislative and competitive divisions in 1973 at the first special Convention ever held. Five years later, Division I members voted to create subdivisions I-A and I-AA in the sport of football.

Nearly 25 years later the program was making billion dollar deals to just sell the rights to show a particular championship games. In 1999 the negotiation of a comprehensive championships rights agreement with CBS was worth potentially $6 billion dollars payout over 11 years.

This was not always the way as you can already tell by the previous history on the NCAA, the mom and pop concept was gone to a big business, corporate event. In the beginning coaches came together, in the NCAA, to decide which schools within their conference would play against other schools in the conference. Certain schools later on would extend invitations to join conferences or to have conference playoffs but none the less things were decided by the individuals rather than big business. In the early 90's negotiations became more and more and the coaches had the scheduling taken out of their hands and it was out into the hands of big business.

Next we can tackle the kinds of schedules that exist for sports and which are used most often. There are two types of schedules for sports programming, temporally constrained schedules and temporally relaxed schedules. A temporally constrained schedule is , the number of slots, or time periods in which a game may appear, is equal to the number of games that each team must play plus any necessary byes for leagues with an odd number of teams. A temporally relaxed schedules make it possible to assign games sequentially and end up with a feasible schedule. Furthermore, local improvement heuristics seem prevalent in this environment. Now a days a schedule that is temporary relaxed with a usage of trial and error has become adopted even though once in a while you see the error part. But with sports it is like they always say, when it is good its great.

Next you have think about what scheduled sports do certain stations play? Who schedules sports now is the question at hand. In today's media each major station has its own sports division who handles the contracts between teams and conferences when it comes to determining who gets who. A few examples that were brought up were about the big 4 televison companies.

To start with a widely known one NBC Sports was chosen and has control of very large and powerful commodities. They get the rights to every Olympic game through 2012. NASCAR Winston cup racing , including the Daytona 500, The Ryder cup, the PGA tour, including the Players Championship and Presidents Cup. Horse racing's Visa Triple Crown ( Kentucky derby, Preakness, Belmont stakes) and Breeders cup World Thoroughbred Championships. Also last but not least a small college's (Notre Dame) football games.

The second station chosen was ABC this company has control of some major televised properties. These include Monday Night Football, Bowl Championship Series also known as the BCS, certain NHL teams ( such as Rangers, Flyers ,Bruins , Blackhawks and so on)and most of the NBA team games.

The third station was Fox which has control of many large assets. These include certain NFL teams such as San Francisco 49ers, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, New Orleans Saints, New York Giants , and the Philadelphia Eagles. They also cover certain MLB teams along with complete post season coverage from playoffs to world series games. They like NBC can carry only certain NBA games with teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, Chicago Bulls, Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons, Minnesota Timberwolves, and the Sacramento Kings. Also they hold control of certain NCAA basketball teams such as the following 8. Them being North Carolina Tar Heels, Ohio Bobcats, Indiana Hoosiers, Arizona Wildcats, Stanford Cardinals, Denver Pioneers, Maryland Terrapins, and the Duke Blue Devils. They control certain NHL teams such as Calgary Flames, Detroit Red Wings, Colorado Avalanche, Edmonton Oilers, New York Islanders, and the Vancouver Canucks. In addition they have power over certain NASCAR events, certain horse racing events, certain golf events, and also Fox sports world covers soccer matches.

The last company to be examined was CBS. CBS controls the use of certain

NCAA basketball teams. For example Gonzaga ,Michigan State, UCLA, Indiana,

Kentucky, Syracuse, and Connecticut. They also have the sole rights to these teams,