SEASON OF THE SWITCH

BY ANTHONY CRUPI

Trying to predict the NFL team that will emerge as the Super Bowl champion when the preseason has barely begun is as doomed and foolhardy a notion as they come, akin to handicapping the race for the Democratic Party nomination eight months before Super Tuesday. Sure, the Detroit Lions would probably be better off staying at home this year, as would the Rev. Al Sharpton. The same principle applies equally to the Cincinnati Bengals and Dennis Kucinich; the Arizona Cardinals and Carol Moseley Braun. Until the campaign begins in earnest, everyone is essentially in the same boat.

That's a function of the parity born of the league's realignment strategy and its restrictive salary cap. Unlike baseball, where the plutocracy makes it nigh-on impossible for small market teams to win a World Series ? essentially, the Yankees and a handful of other loaded teams are the only real contenders; everybody else is strictly from Bengalsville ? in the NFL, everyone has a shot at the Lombardi trophy.

Preseason games are no barometer of a team's eventual success, either. Tampa Bay's 30-14 drubbing of the New York [sic] Jets in last week's America Bowl exhibition only proved that the defending champs are still hungry, but it cost the Bucs the services of running back Tony Taylor, who blew out his ACL and is out for the season. Taylor's injury is far from a deal-breaker for the Bucs ? he's a reserve ? but it is a painful reminder that no player is guaranteed any playing time in the NFL. A debilitating injury to a marquee player like DT/emotional linchpin/human wrecking ball Warren Sapp or Jets' QB Chad Pennington, however, could kill their respective teams' chances in the amount of time it takes to snap a piece of cartilage.

Luckily for cable, all the indicators for this year's NFL season are as sunny as Pennington's aw-shucks disposition. While network ratings have slid in the last few years, ESPN's Sunday Night Football numbers have jumped appreciably. Last season, the network featured eight games that earned an 8.0 household rating or higher. In fact, ESPN said its NFL telecasts drew an average 7.42 rating for the season, an increase of 17% from the previous year. Each week, Sunday Night Football was the highest-rated program on ad-supported cable.

If this season's Sunday Night slate is anything to go by, ESPN has certainly convinced the NFL of its intrinsic value (though some cable operators say they remain unconvinced). The network's 16-week, 18-game schedule features an impressive array of inter-conference matchups, most between bitter rivals such as the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears. The opening weekend alone could well break the 9.0 HH mark, as Super Bowl also-rans the Oakland Raiders travel to Tennessee to take on the Titans in a rematch of last year's AFC Championship game.

Thus far, ad sales have been brisk, says Ed Erhardt, president of customer marketing and sales for ESPN/ABC Sports. ?We are very well sold with Sunday Night Football,? he reports, estimating sell-through in the high 90s. ?As it stands now, we have more people interested in inventory than there is inventory available.?

While ESPN declined to reveal its spot pricing for its Sunday Night telecasts, buyers say that Fox is getting $250,000 to $300,000 per spot for its Sunday afternoon games, while ABC is bringing in between $275,000 to $325,000 for Monday Night Football spots.

That success may have been more of an uphill climb than Erhardt lets on. Some media buyers have remarked that because NFL CPMs are already much higher on average than network prime-time inventory, there's little room for any substantial growth. What's more, the NFL's leading advertising categories, automotive and financial services, continue to struggle.

Others say that the rise in ESPN's ratings will jibe with a similar rise in ad dollars hauled in. ?The NFL is still a steady market,? says one senior media buyer. ?They'll see some slight increases ? somewhere around 5% to 8%.?

Erhardt says the network looks to fill out its inventory beyond the cars and banks category. ?What's really kind of reemerged is men's grooming,? he says. ?Facial creams, razors, hair stuff, cologne, products that historically have not been marketed that aggressively but now are.?

Many of the well-groomed young men that marketers hope to reach via ESPN aren't always accurately accounted for. Because sporting events are huge out-of-home draws ? more than 17 million men watch TV each week in unmeasured out-of-home locations ? ESPN and ABC Sports are adding data on the audience gathered in locations like bars and college dormitories. Montesano Marketing Research's Total TV Audience Monitor (T-TAM) has already helped ESPN lay claim to an additional 1.5 rating points by counting out-of-home viewers.

?I believe that this kind of research will boost our ability to monetize an extraordinary audience,? Erhardt says. ?We can confirm what everyone already knows.?

Much as the NFL reaps the benefits of its contracts with the networks ? ESPN's Sunday Night Football package brings in a tidy $600 million per year ? the league is always game to dig into a new revenue opportunity. To that end, it will launch its 24/7 NFL Network on Nov. 4, the Tuesday following week nine of the season. The net will hit the airwaves with what it's calling its signature program, NFL Total Access, which will be hosted by SportsCenter vet Rich Eisen.

(News of the NFL Net launch prompted Conan O'Brien to crack in a recent monologue, ?This is good because, up until now, the only channel to find 24-hour coverage of NFL players was Court TV.?)

Seth Palansky, director of media services for the NFL Network, says the channel will leverage the league's storied 84-year history with a mix of original programming supported by NFL Films' vast library. (Cue John Facenda as the Voice of God.) NFL Net will also offer an HD game of the week and a condensed VOD highlight selection.

?Ad dollars primarily out of the gate will come from current NFL sponsors,? Palansky says. One of these is IBM, which recently announced a three-year deal with the NFL. Under the terms of the agreement, Big Blue becomes the NFL's ?official information technology partner,? helping to support next-generation digital media and other new business applications for the league.

Carriage hasn't been nailed down yet. Palansky says the fledgling net is ?just going out to the MSOs now,? and that the cost of adding NFL Net to any given tier will be ?a matter of pennies.? That said, the NFL has already signed a pact with DirecTV. ?All DirecTV subs get us. It's not like NBA TV, where they say they're available in 20 million homes, but are only beamed to about 2 million.?

Of course, DirecTV has a stranglehold on the most attractive programming package in sports. NFL Sunday Ticket, which allows DirecTV subs to view every game played on any given Sunday, remains unavailable to digital cable subscribers in the United States. Disturbingly enough, Rogers subs in Canada ? the land of three-down possessions and the 110-yard field ? can opt in for the package for $159.99 for the season, which is what the average American football fan spends in a sports bar in the course of a mere three weekends.

And if that all weren't a forearm shiver to the cable biz, DirecTV is also planning to offer the marquee CBS game in HD each week. ?Only DirecTV has NFL Sunday Ticket and only DirecTV will offer NFL games in HDTV nationwide,? says Roxanne Austin, president and COO of the DBS company. ?Try as it might, cable just can't match us.?

Cable is trying, for what it's worth. Comcast recently agreed to make ESPN HD available in markets where it currently offers HDTV service as well as on a broader level as additional HD markets are launched this year. The MSO says it presently offers HDTV to 11.5 million subs.

(In another twist, Comcast said that it wouldn't carry CBS's HD signals because the Tiffany Network has failed to make them available at no additional cost, according to a late July filing with the FCC. CBS, in turn, said that carriage of its HD signals is tied in with retrans issues with Comcast.)

Although ESPN and ABC continue to offer a compelling national product, the strong regional ties fans have with their favorite franchises means, to paraphrase Tip O'Neill, all football is local. Affiliates normally have 12 minutes of air time (24 30-second spots) to work with, and in the case of the Time Warner Cable divisions that host NFL teams, much of the inventory is gone.

Larry Fischer, TWC's president of advertising sales, says that local NFL games can bring a goodly amount of money into an operator's coffers. ?We used the first Houston Texans game last year as leverage to close Tony Sanchez's gubernatorial account,? Fischer says. ?He bought out the game and of course we charged a premium.?

A particularly fierce meeting between division rivals can yield two or three times the standard fees. ?Back when I used to run the ad sale business in New York, we used to lick our chops whenever we saw a Giants or a Jets game on the schedule,? Fischer says.

In fact, the only football programming that doesn't rake in the cash are the obligatory coaches' shows, which usually consist of a less-than-telegenic head coach jawing with a local sports anchor, and answering calls from his team's addled fan base. (Most coaches' shows air on Saturday nights, when the hard-core fan base has already begun tailgating for Sunday's game.)

?No, those coaches' shows don't rate well at all, unless you tie them in with some kind of NFL-themed ad packages,? Fischer says. ?We'd much rather sell SportsCenter or NFL Primetime. But it's all television. We're held to the same standard as network; ratings transfer to big dollars for us.?

True enough, but there's no question that Sunday nights in the fall belong to cable.

Oh, and for the record, the Philadelphia Eagles are the Howard Dean of the National Football League. You heard it here first.