Jon Skipper, former ESPN president and current CEO of Meadowlark Media, has not been shy about sharing his thoughts on the future of sports content and broadcasting. Along with a lot of talk about “blanks” in sports programming, Skipper said he anticipates the Super Bowl pay-per-view and the alleged role that ESPN plays in shaping college football. To say nothing of all the extensively talked about changes that DAZN was going to bring to the United States, many of which didn’t happen.
Skipper recently joined fellow Meadowlark Dan Le Petard and former Miami Marlins chief David Samson on an episode of South Beach Sessions Audio notation. A major part of the conversation started with a discussion about the skyrocketing college football salary and how that relates to TV rights.
#SouthBeachSessions Two powerful sports executives, Jon Skipper and Tweet embed, spoke about the insides at work with expertise and honesty that is not often heard in this field.
? https://t.co/VUF88fV9dh? https://t.co/2BPJyMITBN pic.twitter.com/iodp4ZiF4zDan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) December 8, 2021
“I think they deserve the money they get,” Skipper said. “It may seem strange to some people who earn $53,000 a year and don’t understand why you pay a football coach five or six times more than you pay a president. But relative success on the football field excites donors, leads to increased acceptance, and leads to Lots of people show up in your town for football matches. The value of 12-0 Miami is more than $8 million more than 7-5 Miami.”
“The reason football coaches make that much money is because universities realize they are getting fewer and fewer students to pay the full shipping fee,” Samson said. They are operationally powerless in a way never seen before. What they’ve found is that people like you who run streaming empires are willing to pay the rights fees in perhaps irrational numbers, but based on the need for live content. Live sports content in the college area generates so much revenue that if you can have an engaging program at an engaging conference, it will generate much more revenue than anything you can do in any other department. University presidents believe coaches are the main tutor for this money and that’s why they’re doing it.”
Skipper then noted that his first television deal was with the Big Ten. The conference pushed back a significant increase in rights fees, which caused ESPN to decline. This caused the then Commissioner of the Big Ten, Jim Delany, to initiate the process of what would become the Big Ten Network, something Skipper seems to regret letting happen.
“The first conference deal I worked on was the Big Ten, which came out in 2005,” Skipper said. “We were competing with FOX. We did a $1 billion deal for 10 years. That was the first billion dollar deal in college esports to get the rights to most of the Big Ten games. They kept some games for the Big Ten Network. We shouldn’t have let the Big Ten happen at ESPN.” It wasn’t good for our business that those games dropped out of the system, but Jim Delany had a clever idea to launch a network with FOX and that was also a good job, although it was a rough start.”
Given how motivated Delaney was at the time, it’s hard to think that ESPN could have prevented the move, without paying the King’s ransom. And if Skipper thought the rights deal was a big deal, he might shy away from the next deal Big Ten is likely to negotiate.
The Big Ten network led to the Pac-12 network which led to the SEC network, the ACC network, etc. And now a lot of college sports content has been broken down into specific services and broadcasters where audiences have to pay more in order to get access to it all, assuming those specific networks have deals with your specific cable provider. Skipper sees an ultimate shift to the traditional cable model when viewers get tired of scrambling to find the games they want to watch.
“You’re going to have a very difficult period in the next five to 10 years where people won’t be able to find the game they want to watch as easily as they did in the 2000s,” Skipper said. “I’d risk guessing that people are going to be nostalgic about pay TV before long because it was such a great system and so much value because whatever you want to watch, I paid Spectrum or Comcast and every college football or baseball game was working.
“You can find them all with one remote and one service. You’re going to enter a confusing time where people don’t know where their game is because five of them will be on NBC broadcasts, three of them will be on ESPN+, two of them will be on Paramount+ and one of them will be on ACC. Every week. You’ll have to figure out where the hell they’re playing this week… It’s going to be more expensive, and it’s hard to find.”
Probably. It is also possible that these growing pains can be accounted for as the industry adapts to the new era of streaming services, content providers and rights holders. We continue to see how the impending death of regional sports networks, the rise of Amazon, the introduction of new players, and the expansion of streaming services affect the world of media rights.
[South Beach Sessions, transcription via Barrett Sports Media]