Big-time sports in America - including big-time college sports - are ruled by television.
That may not be fair, but it's a fact.This point was dramatically illustrated this past week when Fox outbid CBS for the rights to the NFL's NFC games. Fox's money talked, and the NFL walked.
So much for more than three decades of partnership between the NFL and CBS.
And that's but one example. Major league baseball is in the midst of going to three-division lineups and adding another round of playoffs with a wild-card team in each league. And this isn't driven by the need to sell tickets - baseball attendance has never been better - but the need to add more television coverage - and revenue.
Professional sports are not alone. The NCAA basketball tournament was expanded to 64 teams in large part to satisfy television.
Coaches from Bobby Knight to Roger Reid aren't particularly thrilled about playing games in the middle of the night, but when ESPN pays, the college boys play whenever the cable network wants.
How many times in the past few years has BYU played Thursday-night football games at the behest of ESPN?
It's all a matter of money. College athletic programs need that TV money to survive.
It's also television that's driving the current talk of realignment among the nation's major collegiate conferences.
This is not a topic about which there can be debate. If you don't have television sets to bring to the party, you're not going to be invited when big-time football undergoes changes.
The Big 10 recently added Penn State and is talking about adding Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Texas - or some combination of those teams.
The Atlantic Coast Conference added Florida State and is talking about expanding further.
The Big East became a football league with the addition of teams like Miami and West Virginia.
The Southeastern Conference expanded to 12 teams by adding Arkansas and South Carolina and is talking about expanding even further. (Texas A&M is often mentioned.)
The Pac-10 hasn't made much noise about expanding, but Texas and Texas A&M are also bandied about.
The Big Eight and the Southwest Conference are discussing creating a new league - and Brigham Young University has been talked about as a member.
None of this has been done or will be done without an emphasis on television contracts. By adding teams where there are a lot of TV sets - Penn State, Miami, Florida State - those leagues made themselves more attractive to broadcasters.
It wasn't that ACC schools wanted to bring in Florida State to beat them up every year, but it sure added a lot of TV sets to their mix.
And all the noise we're hearing about this realignment and expansion is fueled by one thing - the fact that the colleges' network football contracts as well as the bowl contracts expire at the end of the 1994 season.
Leagues want to make themselves as attractive as possible for fear of coming up empty when the TV bucks are passed out.
Which is why here in Utah, BYU is in pretty fair shape, the University of Utah is hurting and Utah State appears destined to be odd man out.
BYU is rather attractive to a Big Eight-Southwest combination because it brings a new television market. The Utah market isn't huge - ranked 38th overall - but it is growing.
BYU can also bring a big stadium and large attendance - in 1992 only Nebraska in the Big Eight and Texas in the Southwest averaged more fans - but if all those fans lived in the 100th television market, nobody would be courting the Cougars.
And the fact is that BYU can bring the Utah market without any help from either Utah or Utah State. Even with their worst season in two decades, the Cougars still attract lots of local viewers, while the ratings for Utah and USU are anemic at best. (Unless, of course, they're playing BYU).
Which is why Utah's problems extend beyond a small stadium and smaller attendance. The BYU-Utah situation is analogous to Colorado and Colorado State - at various times, both the Pac-10 and the Big 10 have expressed interest in Colorado but not in CSU. They can grab the Denver TV market just by grabbing the Buffaloes, so who needs the Rams?
Utah State's problems are even more dire. USU administrators have loudly and frequently expressed a desire to get out of the Big West Conference and into the Western Athletic Conference with BYU and Utah, but that's never going to happen. The last thing the WAC needs is a third school in the nation's 38th largest television market.
USU athletic director Chuck Bell's frequent refrain is that former Big West member Fresno State expanded its stadium to 40,000 and soon found entrance into the WAC, so if USU expands its stadium the WAC will be interested in the Aggies, too.
There's no doubt that FSU's bigger stadium (and the fact that the Bulldogs can fill it) was a factor in the conference switch. But what Bell ignores is that Fresno also brought along the nation's 57th largest television market - adding about 464,000 homes to the WAC.
That's not big by Big 10 or Pac-10 standards, but to a league that includes Laramie, Wyo., and Fort Collins, Colo., that's not bad.
Bell has also been quoted as saying that USU's lack of a television market won't hurt them because there are other small-city schools in the WAC. But, again, that ignores the fact that Wyoming joined the league in 1962 and Colorado State in 1967 - long before television became the motivating factor that it is today.
And there is no television motivation at all for the WAC to add Utah State.
Utah State's only realistic chance to join the WAC would be if BYU left the league behind - and even then the Aggies aren't a sure bet.
Is this emphasis on television contracts fair? No.
But it's a fact.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Little exposure
Utah State officials, local sportscasters and local sportswriters raved on and on about the "national exposure" that last week's Las Vegas Bowl brought to the Aggies.
But that exposure was minimal at best.
According to ESPN, which broadcast the game, the USU-Ball State matchup drew a 1.5 rating.
But even that's a bit deceptive. Because ESPN reaches only about two-thirds of the nation's households (not exactly a "nationally televised game"), a rating point on ESPN equals only about two-thirds of a national ratings point.
Translated, the Las Vegas Bowl was seen in 940,500 homes nationwide - less than 1 percent of the nation's 94.2 million homes.
By means of comparison, the lowest-rated show in prime time network TV last week, Fox's already-canceled "Townsend Television," was seen in almost 2.5 million more homes than the Las Vegas Bowl.