College Football Playoff’s greedy move to cable is backfiring

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See those NFL playoff TV ratings? Going through the roof as usual. It seems like every weekend offers games that break viewing records. More of the same is in store this weekend with Tom Brady-Peyton Manning XVII coming up.

Say this about the NFL: It might be evil, devious and even tone-deaf sometimes, but the one thing The Shield won’t do is turn away customers by making its product inaccessible.

It’s the exact opposite of the approach the College Football Playoff has taken.

Never mind that the CFP is still very much in its infancy, having just concluded its second season. It’s acting as though it’s been around for 100 years and everyone should just do what they’re told.

The CFP’s power brokers decided that it would be a good idea to hold the semifinal playoff games on New Year’s Eve, a workday no less. This despite an open Saturday on Jan. 2 when playoff games could have been held without competition. But no, the pooh-bahs decreed that they wanted to start a “new tradition.”

The fans responded by not watching. The playoff games experienced a near 40 percent drop in ratings, a loss CFP executive director Bill Hancock tried to spin as “moderate” (translation: catastrophic). The championship game was also dragged down, with a 25 percent drop in audience numbers from a year ago.

ESPN, which begged the CFP to move this year’s playoff games to Jan. 2 as a one-time exception, ended up paying for CFP’s stubbornness, having to reimburse advertisers $20 million on future advertising. Things won’t improve considerably next season with the semifinals again scheduled for New Year’s Eve.

But we’ll go a step further: CFP’s problem isn’t just with these New Year’s Eve playoff games, it starts with its relationship with ESPN.

Alabama coach Nick Saban can smile after his latest national title, but low ratings are serious business. Alabama coach Nick Saban can smile after his latest national title, but low ratings are serious business. Photo: Christian Petersen, Getty Images Photo: Christian Petersen, Getty Images Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close College Football Playoff’s greedy move to cable is backfiring 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

CFP signed a 12-year, $7.3 billion deal to have all of its games — playoffs and all “New Year’s Six Bowls” — televised exclusively by the network through the 2025-26 season. But the partnership actually dates to 2010, when the Bowl Championship Series (the CFP predecessor) moved from Fox to ESPN for the final four years of its existence.

For the first time since its 1952 game became the first televised college football game, the 2011 Rose Bowl was shown only on cable. All BCS games, as well as a vast majority of the bowl games, were exclusively on ESPN and its networks. Thus began the virtual monopoly that the Worldwide Leader has over college football.

While ESPN offered top dollar for the most desirable games, the decision to dump the broadcast networks has proved to be shortsighted, especially considering that there were considerable red flags about the health of the cable industry. Sure enough, cord-cutting went from speculation to a fast-and-furious phenomenon.

This month, for the first time since September 2007, the number of cable TV households in the U.S. dropped below 100 million. The pay-TV industry has lost 5.6 million homes in 4½ years, and its biggest loser is ESPN, which has lost 8.7 million homes in that time span. Today, it’s in just 91.4 million homes, compared with 116.4 million homes with broadcast TV.

That’s 25 million households (with more sure to join their ranks) that don’t have access to college football. But you know what they’re watching? The NFL.

Hate The Shield all you want, but Roger Goodell and NFL owners are shrewd businesspeople. The NFL is the only pro sports league that ensures that every game in a team’s home market is available on broadcast TV. It’s also the only league where every playoff game is on free TV.

Even though ESPN had the rights to one of the wild-card games this season, the NFL demanded that it also be broadcast on ABC. While Disney-owned ESPN monopolizes college football, the NFL would never allow that, as its TV rights are spread across all four major broadcast networks as well as DirecTV for the Sunday Ticket package.

College football could have had all this. It could have stayed on broadcast TV and made a better decision about when and where to showcase its most important games. But its power brokers went for the cash grab and acted with arrogance and contempt toward its customers.

And the customers have responded by casting their eyes elsewhere.

Samuel Chi is the managing editor of RealClearSports.com. Twitter: @ThePlayoffGuru