DAY 1 - 2006 COVERAGE

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum I: Assessing The Industry

Brand Says Business Of College Sports Tied To Academic Mission

The 5th annual Street & Smith’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum kicked off yesterday at the Intercontinental, The Barclay, in N.Y. with a panel titled “An Assessment of Intercollegiate Athletics.” Univ. of Arizona President Emeritus Peter Likins said, “The management of intercollegiate athletics is properly in the AD’s job. But making sure that we have acceptable long-term trends, that’s the responsibility of the CEO (the president). And we have some concerns.” Likins chaired the Presidents Task Force on the Future of Intercollegiate Athletics, which issued a report recently on the state of the industry, and he said it was “largely a challenge to the entire athletic community — coaches, ADs, presidents, chancellors and boards — to think through what we’re about.” Likins: “The presidents have to reach beyond the machinery of the NCAA and take responsibility for support from boards and ADs for curbing some of the excess.” Univ. of Michigan Programs for Educational Opportunity Dir Percy Bates said, “Different people see the report in different ways. Many people feel that the problems outlined there don’t apply to them, but clearly the problems really apply to someone in the industry, and I think they made every effort to cover that.” Vanderbilt Univ. professor and Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics co-Chair Ginny Shepherd added, “Faculties need to be brought into this. ... I don’t think that the presidents can do this in a vacuum.”

Swofford Weighs In On Debate Over Whether Or Not To Pay Student-Athletes

BUSINESS MODEL: NCAA President Myles Brand said the business issues in intercollegiate athletics are made difficult by several constraints. Brand: “The business of college sports has to be done within the context of the academic missions of the institutions. It’s not a free-standing business enterprise. If it were, frankly, it’d be a lot easier. ... It isn’t like a small company somewhere where you can make decisions behind the scenes.” Likins took issue with the classification, saying, “It’s not a business, damn it. If you think of it as a business, you’re going to eliminate the track team and eliminate the volleyball team and focus on those revenue-generating sports. That’s not what we’re about. ... The purpose of a university is to maximize social benefits while operating within financial restraints.” But ACC Commissioner John Swofford said, “I would describe it, at the major college level, as running a sports business in an educational setting.” Swofford also said there needs to be more accountability by the schools. “We need to get back to presidents, faculties, athletics directors on the individual campuses making sound decisions that are in the best interest of the institutions,” Swofford said.

PAYING ATHLETES: The issue of paying athletes was discussed, and Brand said, “I think that’s the death knell of intercollegiate athletics if you turn student-athletes into employees.” Brand noted need-based opportunities are available for student-athletes in cases where grant-in-aid is not enough. “But once you turn them into employees, you become a third-rate professional league,” he said. Swofford added, “People tend to forget the value of a free college education.” Bates: “If you want to get paid to play football, play for the Lions. If you want to get paid to play baseball, talk to the Tigers.”

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum II: Behavior Of Athletes

Yow (l) And Alden Address Issue Of Athletes Setting Up Personal Web Sites

During a panel discussion titled “Athletic Department Culture and the Influence on Student-Athlete Behavior” yesterday at Street & Smith’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, Univ. of Maryland AD Debbie Yow said, “I don’t think there is an issue that is more important on the landscape of college athletics than the behavior of student-athletes.” NAIA President & CEO Jim Carr said the NAIA has a program called “Champions of Character” where coaches try to instill positive character traits in their players. Carr: “If you can try to manage it on the front side, you can hope to eliminate some of the problems on the back end.” NCAA VP/Education Services Ron Stratten said, “We need to focus more on education. ... While there is more complexity on what coaches are doing today, they have to remember they’re educators.” Carr added, “It’s not the job of the institution to raise a kid, but it is the job of the institution to help that kid grow up and develop and become a productive citizen.”

SOCIAL NETWORKING: In recent years, social networking Web sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com have created another avenue where student-athletes can run into trouble. Univ. of Missouri AD Mike Alden said, “We needed to educate ourselves first of all as to what they are. A year ago I didn’t know anything about that. We needed to educate ourselves internally on what’s on there, and then to be able to communicate to our kids. It may be simple, but our approach was, let’s not set up MySpace and Facebook accounts that your parents wouldn’t want to see. Also, we’re going to keep an eye on it.” Yow said, “The most naïve responses were revealed when we first attacked this. Our student-athletes would say, ‘That’s personal.’ It’s on the Internet, guys, it’s not personal.”

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum III: Marketing Programs

Wardle Presents Research On Differences Between NFL And College Football Fans

A key to creating marketing and communications programs that engage fans is to understand the factors that drive their passion for sport, Octagon VP/Research Simon Wardle said during a presentation at Street & Smith’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum titled “Understanding College Sports Fans.” Wardle: “Start with your greatest asset — the fans — and try to understand why fans are so passionate about a particular sport. What are the emotional connections? What passions drive them?” To the casual observer, the similarities between college and pro football are far more prevalent than the differences. But Wardle said when it comes to marketing programs, college and pro football are very different because tribalism is at the heart of college sports. Wardle: “College fans are more similar to international fans. They are more tribal and team-driven. The major league sports in the U.S. are nowhere near as tribal as the sports in Europe or South Africa or Australia. You see more of that tribal aspect in the fan relationship in college sports [in the U.S.]” Octagon’s Woody Thompson: “For all of what we are able to deliver in terms of understanding the fan, what we really have to begin with is where should we take our clients in the world of college sports and in the world of college sports sponsorships, and what are the best opportunities for them.”

Turer (l) And Paddock Discuss Marketing Benefits Of College Sports

ACTIVATION: During a later panel titled “Innovative, Creative and Revenue-Generating Marketing Ideas,” Gatorade Sports Marketing Senior Manager Scott Paddock said, “We believe college athletics provide the most powerful marketing platform within the sports landscape. ... We want to tap into the emotions that fans feel for their institutions and the college environment and wrap our brand around that.” Checkers VP/Marketing Rich Turer said, “College marketing for us is a perfect fit. We have a very important footprint in the state of Florida ... and the best localism we can have is to provide a point of difference.” Turer discussed briefly the company’s sponsorships of the Univ. of Florida and Florida State Univ., noting the use of the competition between the two rivals. Gatorade’s Paddock said, “Historically, we have used college athletics as a showcase for our product on the sidelines. But we kind of had an epiphany a couple years ago, where we said, ‘Why aren’t we activating these college relationships in a promotion sense like we would a professional sports property?”

AREAS OF FOCUS: When panelists were asked about the most undersold areas in college sponsorships. Univ. of Kansas Associate AD Brandon Macneill said, “At Kansas, it’s definitely licensing. We’re not taking advantage of a lot of things.” FishBait Marketing President Rick Jones said promotional advertising is an area of major growth waiting to be tapped. Jones: “Most major colleges have really interesting technology like LCD projectors, and you can change messages. ... In the old days, you put up a static sign and it says the same thing. Now, you’ve got 75,000 people in your stadium that can now go buy [a partner’s item] by giving them that message as they leave the stadium.” Sanders said the growth of naming rights “is a big-ticket item.”

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum IV: Jim Boeheim Opines

Boeheim Offers Insight Into Issues Of Being College Basketball Coach

“The only people who don’t have to win every year are faculty people. They’re going to be there next year whether they have a good year or not,” said Syracuse men’s basketball coach Jim Boeheim. That drew a rise from the luncheon audience at Street & Smith’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, but Boeheim was emphasizing a point about the ever-present pressure on college coaches to win. It’s a subject the Naismith Memorial Basketball HOF coach is familiar with, having won over 700 games in 29 years. Boeheim: “I had a teacher once in an advanced senior history course. There were 22 of us. One guy got an A, I got a B and four people got C’s. Everybody else failed. And he [the teacher] was so happy. If I coached like that, I wouldn’t be here. I don’t think it’s a mark of a good teacher when people flunk. I think it’s a mark of a pretty piss-poor teacher. ... If a guy’s flunking in what we’re trying to do, then we’re bad. I’m a teacher. If my players aren’t doing what we need to do to win, I’m not doing a good job. I tell young coaches, ‘You better win, or sooner or later, you’re going to be in trouble.’ The money’s different now — [Boeheim said he earned $2,000 his first seven years in coaching, and then $25,000 in his first year at Syracuse] — but it’s the same thing: You’ve got to win.”

GRADUATION RATES: Boeheim also addressed the graduation rate by which schools are measured, and some of the misperceptions therein. Carmelo Anthony left Syracuse for NBA riches after winning an NCAA title in his freshman year. “That counts as an 0-for-1 against us,” Boeheim said. Anthony’s teammate Gerry McNamara stayed for four years and earned his degree. That small sample represents a 50% graduation rate, Boeheim said. Former Syracuse players Derrick Coleman and Pearl Washington went back to school years after competing to obtain their degrees, yet they do not count in their classes’ graduation rate. Boeheim: “If you take the first six or seven players from the top 50 schools, 95% of them think they can play in the NBA, when only less than 5% will. The top 40 college freshmen [players] are marginal students who are being asked to graduate in four years at good schools.” He cited the statistic that the average student takes 4.6 years to graduate. Boeheim added, “Every coach wants every kid to graduate. Why would we not want [that]! Everything reflects back on us. We’ve promised these kids’ parents that we’re going to help their child.”

PLAYING BY THE RULES: Boeheim confessed to a frustration over some rules that seem to defy common sense. Boeheim: “What world do these people live in who make these rules? From May 1 to September 1, we cannot coach our players. Is the cellist being told he cannot practice in the summer? How do the players get better on their own! Playing Division I basketball isn’t easy. We want to help them; we want to have the ability to help them. For the first time in my 40 years, we are talking to an NCAA president [Myles Brand], and we have made some strides. And I’m convinced that if we could talk to other groups involved in the process, we could make more strides. And that’s all we want as coaches. We want to be more involved.”

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum V: Administrative Issues

Livengood Discusses Rising Issues In Managing Athletic Department

Managing the allotted budget of any university's athletic program is perhaps an AD’s most unenviable job. How to best approach that task was an issue during an Intercollegiate Athletics Forum panel titled “Painting an Accurate Picture of Intercollegiate Athletics Finances,” which was comprised of six ADs from Division I schools. Arizona’s Jim Livengood said, “We’re caught in a world right now where many of us are going to have to look at, ‘Can we afford to still keep doing what we’re doing right now?’ Bottom line, we’re trying to present and provide, for student-athletes, as many collegiate experiences from this aspect of their education as we can. I’m not sure that’s possible.” As expenses become greater, providing the best experience while operating inside a budget was a concern among the panel members. “I think the expectations bar for us among our student-athletes has risen significantly with regard to what they expect coming into a college environment,” said James Madison’s Jeff Bourne. Obtaining permission to spend money from a university president can also prove to be a problem. “All I can do is recommend to my president what the salary is going to be and who I’m going to hire, and he or she is going to say yes or no,” said Kansas’ Lew Perkins.

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum VI: College-Specific TV Nets

Magnus (l) And Aresco Part Of “The Future Of College Sports On Television” Panel

The proliferation of college sports-specific TV networks will not have a significant impact on the content that is on major broadcast and cable networks, but will help boost exposure for non-revenue generating and Division II and III sports, according to media executives who participated on “The Future of College Sports on Television,” the panel that closed Day One of Street & Smith’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum. “We have a particular segment of the market that I don’t think will be affected by this,” said CBS Sports Senior VP/Programming Mike Aresco. “The product that went into the Big Ten [Network] didn’t come from the high-end network side. If the SEC, where we have a football deal, ultimately decides to do a channel, I doubt it will have any impact on our product.” FSN President Bob Thompson said of the possibility of creating a Big 12 network similar to that of the Big Ten, “[FSN] has the football rights until 2012 and the exclusive national cable rights. Anything they do on the cable side of things, there’s certainly going to have to be some discussion with us in order for that go forward. [And] many of the schools have individual deals, and in many cases those deals are with us, so to populate a channel with product we’re basically taking from ourselves, I have to figure that out. ... On the flip side, our RSNs are carrying more and more professional product, so the collegiate product in many cases can be moved around.”

Shaheen Says Division II And III Games Of The Week Are Coming

OPPORTUNITY FOR SMALLER SPORTS: ESPNU VP & GM Burke Magnus said one result from the increasing number of outlets carrying college sports is “you’ve got to dive deeper into the content; and there’s a passionate following for a lot of sports out there, and we’re always on the lookout for what the next big deal is. ... The same thing goes for divisions. There’s ultimately going to be more opportunity for [Divisions II and III].” NCAA Senior VP/Basketball & Business Strategies Greg Shaheen added Divisions II and III are “starting to invest their funds into production. We’re going to have game of the week in Division II this season both in football and basketball. Division III, as well, is doing more streaming of earlier rounds of championships that otherwise wouldn’t get coverage.”

CARRIAGE: When the discussion turned to whether the Big Ten network would be willing to be placed on digital sports tiers within the conference’s footprint, Thompson, whose company is partnering on the network, said, “No, I don’t believe this channel warrants that type of carriage. We will be seeking expanded basic carriage in the footprint; certainly outside of the footprint, we would settle for something less than that.” When asked about the notion of niche sports networks getting on the same page and accepting carriage on sports tiers in order to drive penetration of the tiers, Magnus said, “We all have our individual businesses to run. ... Our proposition to the cable operators is we have an ESPN-branded network that we want to put on digital basic carriage that will help you drive the sales of digital.”

DAY 2 - 2006 COVERAGE

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum: A United Front

Renfro (l) And White Feel Getting Education Should Be Primary Goal Of College Athletes

The focus of any collegiate student-athlete should first and foremost be to obtain a higher education, according to the panelists on a session titled, “Creating a United Front When it Comes Your Athletic Program.” NCAA Senior Advisor to the President Wally Renfro said, “We have to have a better understanding ... about the role of intercollegiate athletics on our campus.” Nathan Tublitz, a neurobiologist at the Univ. of Oregon, said, “I think we all understand that coaches’ salaries are driven by the marketplace. Faculty, however, get a little perturbed when coaches’ salaries are at a level that suggests that there’s an over-emphasis on certain aspects of the university.” SUNY-Oswego Assistant to the President for Special Projects & Campus Communications Lorrie Clemo proposed better communication throughout each campus, “beginning with discussions and informing all the campus constituency groups about why coaches’ salaries are at the levels they are. Why it’s important to have the facilities that we are building for student-athletes. If we had people at the table discussing what the benefit is ... to the campus, or the university, we can begin to move forward.” Notre Dame AD Kevin White, who agreed with the need for open communication on campuses, added, “So many of these constituency groups see athletics through their own particular lens, and to somehow get people to see it out of the same lens, ... I think that’s the challenge.”

KEEPING FOCUS: Each panelist stressed that schools need to get on the same page, or view intercollegiate athletics through the same “lens.” “There really is only one fundamental lens, and that lens is to make sure that every enterprise within that university meets the university mission, and that mission is education,” said Tublitz. “I think it’s the responsibility of all of us ... to try and be in a consensus on what the goal is for our student-athlete’s, which is providing them with not only an athletic experience but a sound educational training.” Clemo: “You’re in an institution of higher education, and we need to begin to have these discussions as a group.”

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum: Driving Revenue

Betros (l) And Eccker Describe How XOS-Digital Orchid Deal Came Together

New media and new media technology generating significant new revenue streams was the theme of a panel titled “Driving Revenue Growth From New Media and New Media Technology.” XOS Technologies co-Founder & Exec VP/Business Development Randy Eccker and Digital Orchid Founder & CTO Bobby Betros discussed how the XOS-Digital Orchid deal came together and the goals for the initiative. “Our goal at XOS is to help our partners, which in this case is a lot of the college athletic departments with their online business and Internet platforms,” Eccker said. “We hope to help them take their content, which is already a byproduct of their day-to-day operation, and help them to repurpose that so it can be distributed and made available to their fans on various digital distribution platforms,” Betros said. “The college sports content that we’ve launched so far is attracting an incredible consumption from the consumers out there who are interested in those schools. There’s such a pent-up demand for content on cell phones related to the college sports that finding a way to get it out there on the market has been the real challenge.”

TOO MUCH FRAGMENTATION? Fragmentation continued to be a theme of the panel. “We’ve noticed the fragmentation,” Getty Images VP/Sports Business Development Carmin Romanelli said. “Collegiate Images has tried to aggregate new media rights, footage rights and still photo rights. And rather than deal with all the fragmentation ourselves, we’ve partnered with Collegiate Images. In essence, they’re running the playbook that Collegiate Licensing started 25 years ago by aggregating the ability to work across all of the schools and providing central services that the schools could probably not do as cost effectively on their own and in essence giving us a property, if you will, to deal with. Through our deal with Collegiate Images we have the rights to 100-plus schools, and that’s growing all the time. So, that’s the tactic we’re taking. They’re the experts in college sports; we’re the experts in managing, producing and delivering visual content out there. It makes it a lot easier to deal with one partner and have them deal with the schools and sports that they know and care about and have us focus on our expertise.”

Jordan (l) And Lynch Talk About Opportunities In New Media

EFFECT OF TV: OnSport Senior VP Dean Jordan said “The other thing that’s going to help this evolve over the next few years is that as TV contracts come up for renewal and new deals get negotiated, one of the challenges is the disparity in TV deals in terms of who owns the copyright. In most cases over the last many years, the networks have retained the copyright, which has limited the schools’ and conferences’ ability to utilize their footage, in some cases footage from games that aren’t even televised by one of the networks. It is becoming more and more of a priority for the conferences in their new deals to retain their TV rights so they can have access to the footage and be able to exploit these opportunities.”

LOOKING AHEAD: What’s the most untapped — among wireless, social media, video, still images — as a potential revenue enhancer? “The highlights,” Romanelli said. Boston Univ. AD Mike Lynch agreed, “The highlight-based stuff is where we’ve seen a lot of our growth. ... We take a number of our highlights per game and distribute those out and get great numbers back. I would think that that’s probably an area that’s going to be continued to be exploited.”

Intercollegiate Athletics Forum: Ari Fleischer Discusses PR

Fleischer Opines On Various College Sports Issues During One-On-One

As the White House Press Secretary during George W. Bush’s first term in office, Ari Fleischer dealt firsthand with crisis management and public response. In a One-On-One interview yesterday at Street & Smith’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, Fleischer shared his experiences and offered opinions on various topics related to college sports. When asked why the House Ways & Means Committee is interested in the NCAA’s tax-exempt status, Fleischer said, “For two reasons: One, because they can raise money from it; two, because they use it as leverage for other issues. Regarding the similarities between politics and sports, and the competitive nature of both, Fleischer said, “There are only two groups I can think of that have [separate] sections in the newspapers ... and whose events are covered live on TV: It’s sports and it’s politics — particularly the White House. Nobody else in our society has the pressures, the influence the media can extend upon you and everything you do for a living, because of live events. Every day, no matter what, that sports section is coming out. You are in it one way or another, whether you like it or not. The same thing is true of my old business. The press is largely the same in politics and sports. And that means you’re constantly going to be under pressure.”

EVENT COVERAGE: Fleischer also addressed the coverage of events, saying, “One of the biggest issues I see constantly in government, politics, Corporate America and sports [is that] there is so much that you do that is worthwhile and good, and there is a frustration with the media because their focus is entirely on conflict and what is wrong and what is bad.” When asked how to get the media to cover what is good, Fleischer said, “I think the key is to succinctly summarize what is good. If you can’t write it in a simple headline to describe it, then you don’t have it yet. Focus on a very simple way to express it. ... If you’ve got a case of some athlete who came from a hard-luck environment, maybe is an immigrant to this country, or grew up in a household with no father, and yet he’s got fabulous grades ... can you tell this one individual story, as opposed to trying to get out your statistics and your aggregate data? The press always likes human examples. We all do. We relate more to it. Players’ stories are compelling ways to force [the press] to cover your statistics.”

ACCESSIBILITY: As for accessibility with the media, Fleischer said it all depends on specific situations. “Sometimes you should be wide-open, and sometimes you have to close it down,” he said. “Public relations is like running a play in sports. Just because [the play] worked one time doesn’t mean it will work another time. You’re reading the defense.” Fleischer added, “So much of public relations is timing. Some