Skip to: Content Skip to: Site Navigation Skip to: Search  What
Price Football?  By HN / March 21, 1990  SPORTS has its place.
Athletic competition highlights talent, demands commitment, and
teaches the value of teamwork. It's an element of vigor and
balance in the all-too-sedentary lives led by many Americans.
But headlines from the world of athletics/business make us
wonder if things haven't swung wildly out of balance.  Skip to
next paragraph  First, the NFL's new contracts with the TV
networks. True, we all knew this was big business. The league,
after all, was only angling for what it thought the market would
bear. The networks see pro football as one of the few sure
things left - a vehicle advertisers can't resist. So the $3.6
billion paid by ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN, and Turner Entertainment
makes sense, right?  Only, and not even necessarily, in the
narrow business sense. Some ad executives suspect the networks
may have set themselves up for a fumble - that advertisers will
finally rebel at paying up to $1