About a month ago, I wrote a pretty heavy harsh piece on Fox’s failed foray into covering college football.
The meat of this blog post was centered around, Fox owned Scout.com’s $5 million lawsuit settlement offer to former publishers.
It still baffles me that no major publication wants to run with this story as Scout’s settlement offer is a stark admission of guilt and relevant on many fronts as it likely inflated their $50-$60 million acquisition price by Fox Interactive Media. If covering rumored layoffs is noteworthy, I don’t understand why a multi million dollar settlement and likely botched acquisition doesn’t tickle any reporters fancy.
Only other coverage was on good friend theWizofodds.com
Enough on that tangent. My blog post also touched on how Fox had lost the bid to renew their broadcasting of BCS games (minus the Rose Bowl), Although they still have next year’s games, rumblings are forming that they are looking to unload those to ESPN.
“Remember that back in 2007 FOX jumped into the BCS sweepstakes and took it away from ABC by paying $80 million a year. When the contract came up for bid last year, ESPN outbid FOX by putting up $125 million a year for 2010-13. FOX has one more season, 2009, on its current deal to televise the BCS games. But there are some rumblings that FOX could sell those 2009 rights to ESPN if the Worldwide Leader made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Because the BCS championship game is being hosted by the Rose Bowl this season, it will be on ABC, of which ESPN is a part. Stay tuned on this one.”
First thought is that this is awesome for the college football fan. Fan polls showed that around 85% of college football fans preferred ESPN coverage to Fox. Fox did a pretty atrocious job in their 3 years with the BCS games, drawing the ire from the blogoshphere, journalists, and your traditional message board addict.
The real question is will ESPN step in here with a solid bid to get the games back before their agreement take effect in 2011? If Fox can unload the games at market value, I could see them taking the money rather then looking feeble yet again. However ESPN knows Fox really doesn’t have any other potential buyers here and has no real incentive to step in as a white knight here.
Somewhere their is a number (even in this economy) that makes sense for an agreement to be made. I have no idea if they’ll get to it though.
In closing, you can put this one on the Benkoo.com prognostication victory list along with Blu Ray’s victory over HD DVD, and Batman breaking box office opening records.
“In the past couple of years, Fox has really swung and miss in terms of harnessing interest in college football. They bought Scout for a whopping $50 million in addition to buying College Football News for an undisclosed amount. Fox also owns about 50% of the Big Ten Network and has had a very public failure of broadcasting the BCS bowl series (Fox has no football games on the network but somehow has the bowl games, which is a recipe for disaster).
With no real growth, functionality improvements, or cool integrations with Scout and CFN, the BTN’s distribution plateauing off, BCS bowl games leaving the network to the delight of college football fans, falling adverting rates and subscriptions, the growth of blogs and other sports networks. and now a multi million dollar settlement, Fox is most likely having a very difficult moment of truth:
We spent a lot of money, we lost a lot of money, our strategy to monetize interest in college football didn’t really make any sense, this economy is going to break the camels back, and we should get our resumes ready.”
