College-Sports TV Networks Offer Payouts—and Headaches

New York—Don’t be fooled by the Big Ten Network’s success: Starting a college-sports television channel is not for the faint of heart.

That was the message Wednesday afternoon from media executives at the Intercollegiate Athletics Forum here. They warned that despite the Big Ten’s good timing in launching its network, the venture’s handsome profits so far have not come without a great deal of heartburn for nearly everyone involved.

“One thing that people forget about the Big Ten Network is that they went through a considerable period of discomfort and difficulty to get that channel up and running,” said Burke Magnus, senior vice president for college-sports programming at ESPN.

“I’m not suggesting that other networks can’t come up and succeed,” he quickly added. “But everybody has to take a step back and think about how difficult it was.”

Tom Cullen, executive vice president at Dish Network, was more blunt: “You don’t just add water and say, ‘I’m in the network business.’”

The warnings come as one of college sports’ most successful programs, the University of Texas, inches closer toward its goal of starting a so-called Longhorn Network. Chris Plonsky, women’s athletic director at Texas, said here earlier today that Texas officials hope the channel, which she described as “a gift to our institution,” will be a reality by the end of the year.

Texas, with its successful programs and loyal—and extensive—fan base, is probably in a better position than most to pull it off. But Barry Frank, executive vice president at IMG Media, said that the allure of having a conference- or program-specific network often overshadows the challenges of keeping it afloat.

“Everyone would like to have their own channel. It’s like the messiah has arrived,” he said. “But it’s not that simple. It’s expensive. You have to fill it 24 hours a day. And the cost of production [and] staffing is huge.”

This was not news for Karen Weaver, athletic director at Penn State-Abington, who was in the audience during the discussion on media rights on college sports. Weaver, who does on-air commentary for the Big Ten Network, wrote her dissertation on the creation of the channel.

“You have to have an understanding that you’re going to have a lot of losses up front,” she told me afterward. In the Big Ten’s case, it was their partner in the arrangement, Fox SportsNet, that absorbed most of the financial losses, she pointed out. But for programs that attempt to start a channel without that kind of backup, she said, it would be tough going.

“If you’re running at the margin all the time,” Weaver said, “it’s going to be really hard to function.”