Battle of the network stars - television entities NBC and TNT want to start new football league

That talk of a new football alliance by media powers DICK EBERSOL and HARVEY SCHILLER might not be as harebrained as former attempts would indicate

A television network gets shut out of high-stakes rights negotiations with the National Football League. When the red fight goes off for the last time, the problem remains: How to fill the programming void on Sunday afternoon. A plan for a rival football league emerges, and network executives have to decide if it's worth taking a tremendous chance on.

Does any of this sound familiar?

We've been here before. After CBS lost rights to Fox in 1994, former longtime Vikings executive Mike Lynn presented network executives with the "A League," a detailed plan for a professional football league to rival the NFL. Lynn, still known best for trading an obscene amount of draft picks to the Cowboys for Herschel Walker while general manager of the Vikings, had recently been fired from his post as president of the World League. But based on experience, Lynn absolutely believed that, if done correctly and with enough startup money from advertisers and the network, a rival league would be successful.

"We knew why other leagues failed, and we had a structure that would make sure that wouldn't occur," says Lynn, now semiretired. "But we had to have a certain number from television mid without that number, we would not, and did not, go ahead with the league."

Four years later, CBS is back dancing with the prom queen of TV sports, leaving NBC and Turner to decide whether to sit outside and sulk--or try to cut in on the action.

Would NBC and Turner seriously try to take on the NFL with an alternative league? One advertising executive told USA Today it looked like "one of the 10 dumbest ideas of all time." But there's too much money and business savvy involved to laugh it off. If they go through with it, and they probably will, it will be because the idea isn't actually all that crazy.

Officials at the two networks are very tightlipped about their plans, but the details that have leaked make it sound very similar to Lynn's concept: Ten to 12 teams in major media markets, possibly supported or even owned by corporate sponsors, competing head-to-head with the NFL in the fall. However, the NBC/ Turner league might play May-to-September, at least initially.

Although the problem that torpedoed Lynn's idea--convincing a television network to commit gobs of money and airtime to alternative football--is irrelevant here, Turner and NBC still face a difficult task in selling the idea to advertisers and other investors.

"Naturally, I'm skeptical," says Bruce Blair, director of sports media for Starcom, a division of ad firm Leo Burnett. "But you'd have to say that with people with a track record and NBC and Turner, you have to take it seriously."

We're talking about NBC's Dick Ebersol and Turner Sports president Harvey Schiller, two of the most respected people in sports television. Ebersol was named TSN's most powerful person in sports in 1996. Schiller reportedly was once a candidate to succeed Pete Rozelle as commissioner of the NFL. "If anybody can pull this off from the sports side of the house, it would be Schiller," says David D'Alessandro, president and CEO of John Hancock Mutual Life, which is a top Olympic sponsor. "He's one of the few people I would give any confidence in doing so."

But don't take that to mean D'Alessandro thinks forming a rival league is a rational move. "I think it's still about people being burned and about egos," he says.

Is it all really a bunch of sour grapes? Or did NBC and Turner take a calculated risk in passing on a rights deal that, while guaranteeing prestige and ratings, certainly doesn't guarantee a profit?

"This will impact the economics of our league dramatically, and it remains to be seen just how it plays out," Bengals president Mike Brown recently told the Baltimore Sun. "(The NFL) invited this by the way they went about doing the television contracts."

"Sometimes, I wonder why it took the networks so long," says Bob Caporale, former owner of the USFL's Boston Breakers. Caporale now heads Game Plan Inc., a company planning to launch a spring football league in 1999. Those plans are on hold until the big boys make their intentions more clear.

"If back last fall you offered every team owner $400 million for their team, that would have cost you $12 billion, and you would have owned MI the teams, and, hence, the TV rights forever," Caporale says. "The networks, in the aggregate, with these new contracts, are paying $17.6 billion to rent TV rights for (eight) years. If you look at it that way, it's not a surprise that NBC and Turner are thinking about forming their own league."

A question of talent

It's hard to imagine football fans embracing a new league. Sure, TV could dazzle us with technical innovations and we'd tune in once or twice. But to keep fans coming back, the new league would need to compete with the NFL for players worth How might that change the NFL?

The end of restricted free agency. When the Rams stuck the dreaded franchise-player designation on free-agent cornerback Ryan McNeil, agent Bryan Ransom threatened to take his client to the new league. Sure, that's an empty threat meant to browbeat the team into giving McNeil a bigger deal than it owes him under NFL rules--for now. "I think (NBC and Turner are) starting out with more ammunition and more credibility than the USFL, and they attracted Steve Young, Doug Williams and some of the top players we've seen in the league," Ransom says.

Draft eligibility for younger players. "I think the new league, if they want to make a difference, would have to give players an opportunity who want to come out after a year or two of college," Ransom says. While teenagers are making superstar money in the NBA, the NFL probably can't afford to ignore freshmen and sophomores much longer.

Clearly, the overall talent would be less than the NFL. Would a few stars be enough? "So what happens if Deion Sanders goes and plays for, I don't know, the Orlando Orioles?" Blair says. "Is everybody going to rune in to watch that? Is Deion Sanders that great an attraction if he's not playing against players who are that good?"

Money players

General Electric and Time Warner have a deep well of resources to support an alternative football league almost indefinitely. They'd have to brace for heavy initial losses, but they wouldn't be doing it by themselves. "I think it's probably not as much a financial risk in the end, because they're going to try and use as much of other people's money as possible," D'Alessandro says.

That means courting investors and advertisers. But if NBC's goal in announcing the possibility of a new league during a Bulls-Pacers playoff game was to generate a buzz in the corporate world, it didn't work Says D'Alessandro: "I think this is truly an uphill battle, and sponsors and advertisers? I see nothing in it for them. Zero. They may as well not pitch it to us."

However, with ad rates jumping an estimated 20 percent under the new contract, some sponsors will be driven away from the NFL. But why should they spend their money on a new football league when there are plenty of established, reasonably priced sponsorship opportunities that will deliver roughly the same ratings?

Ted's track record. Turner made his billions by taking risks; the Braves on TBS and an all-news cable network come quickly to mind. If he thinks a new football league is a good idea, that could carry a lot of weight with sponsors.

Pre-existing relationships. NBC and Turner can package advertising for the new league with discounts on more attractive commercial slots (such as "Must-See TV" and CNN), so the networks won't have to go around begging for sponsors.

A solid business plan. Under the new league's "single-entity" model, there won't be any Donald Trumps to throw salaries out of whack, like Trump did in the USFL. Modeled after Major League Soccer and the WNBA, Turner and NBC will control every aspect of the league--including signing players to contracts--through a central office and a strong commissioner. "Democracy is messy; dictatorship is very streamlined," says Doug Logan, MLS commissioner and CEO. "If Mr. Schiller and his friends at NBC decide this is the way they want to go, it will allow them to put it in place a lot faster than trying to get independent ownership to come together."

Why even risk it?

But even if this isn't a huge financial risk for Turner and NBC, it's still unclear why they would go to the trouble of creating a new league instead of doing what CBS did: Televise established second-tier sports like tennis, golf and auto racing and wait until the next round of negotiations. Are networks building a platform to research arid develop future trends in the business of sports?

"That's where it makes sense to me," Blair says. "You've got networks who own their own properties, seeing what they can do with it, and maybe corporations owning their own teams or becoming much more a part of their identity. It just might be worth it to them to see what it's like if you have competent partners to work with like NBC and Turner."

Or is it simpler than that? Maybe, as Harvard Business School professor Stephen A. Greyser says, having lesser football is better than no football. "It's certainly a more viable idea than if you or I decided we were going to try to do this and we had like five millionaires ready to put up a bunch of dough but had no television outlet and no direct linkage to sponsorship," says Greyser, who teaches a business of sports course. "But it's a meaningful climb. It may not be the Himalayas, but it's not a walk in the hills."

Chris Jenkins is a projects editor/online for The Sporting News.

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