BCS is Looking to Boost Price for Bowl Games
The Sports Business Journal is reporting that the BCS is searching for a 60 percent increase in price for the rights to its four bowl games. BCS officials have entered into negotiations with Fox who currently has rights to the four championship games. According to the journal, Fox would have to pay $800 million dollars over a six year contract, or approximately $132 million dollars a year. This is a huge amount of money for Fox to pay especially during this economic time. Fox executives were not expecting such a dramatic increase in the price for the rights to the games, so there is going to be a lot of negotiation going on.
The BCS is supposedly doing this in order to open up the rights for the championship games to other networks such as ABC/ESPN. If ABC/ESPN were to outbid fox and obtain the television rights to the games, they would have a stronghold on all of college football. This will also give them the chance to move the games to their cable network ESPN which could in fact limit the number of viewers. That is something that the BCS executives are going to have to look at carefully because after all they want everyone to be able to view the game. At any rate, this story will be interesting to see how it all turns out and see if Fox is willing to drop a huge amount of money for four college football games. And if not, then see who is willing to match the asking price from the BCS. Just another reason in my opinion to move to a playoff style in college football.
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I agree that the BCS is trying to open up the rights to the games to an open market where more then one network can compete for the rights. The main reason for doing this is that an open competition for the rights to the games would definitely push the price way up to where the BCS wants it. Even thought it does make sense to open it up, I feel like in the end they may be disappointed for the time being because of the state of our economy. Many networks may not be willing to pay the steep asking price that the BCS is asking for.