More Big 10 football telecasts means more diplomacy, especially at the conference office.
ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and Creative Sports are scheduled to share a piece of the Big 10 pie starting this season. SportsChannel, for instance, will air as many as four live Big 10 contests this fall as part of a three-year deal with Creative Sports. There also is the likelihood a local over-the-air station could wind up with another set of Big 10 football telecasts.
“Some people think there’s a risk of overexposure,” says Big 10 assistant commissioner Mark Rudner. “Some wanted protection of the home gate. So we built in a level of home-game protection.”
At the same time, adds Rudner, “we felt we’re a national conference and need the national exposure. We try to balance the two. But we understand the gate is our most important source of income.”
– The SportsChannel-Creative Sports package also includes six Big East football telecasts and a minimum of 24 college basketball games.
More football: ABC has selected its early-season Big 10 college football matchups, including double-headers Sept. 2 (Michigan-Illinois, 2:30 p.m.; Colorado-Wisconsin, 7 p.m.) and Sept. 9 (Nebraska-Michigan State, 11 a.m.; Notre Dame-Purdue, 2:30 p.m.) and a single contest Sept. 16 (Washington-Ohio State, 2:30 p.m.) for WLS-Ch. 7. ABC opens its season with the Kickoff Classic (Virginia-Michigan) at 11 a.m. Aug. 26. . . . ESPN has picked the first meeting between the last two Big 10 Rose Bowl representatives–Wisconsin and Penn State–for its college football schedule at 4:45 p.m. Sept. 30, to be followed by Colorado-Oklahoma at 7:45 p.m. ESPN begins a fifth season of Thursday night telecasts Aug. 31 with a Big Eight matchup between defending national champion Nebraska and Oklahoma State. In addition, the cable network has added the Sept. 16 Michigan-Boston College game to its Saturday night schedule.
Going online: Following the lead of ABC and ESPN, SportsChannel takes to the information superhighway Friday night with its White Sox-Indians telecast. A special chat room has been set up on America Online to allow viewers to communicate with Ken Harrelson and Tom Paciorek, aided by an AOL producer, during the contest. AOL users can connect by clicking on the AOL Sports icon and entering “Broadcast Booth.” Other Internet users can respond through e-mail addressed to [email protected]. SportsChannel Ohio earlier this month let viewers send questions to the Indians broadcast crew via e-mail and Home Team Sports in Baltimore will try it Saturday for the Orioles-Red Sox game. . . . ABC Sports has expanded its area on ABC Online to include its coverage of baseball, including the ability to vote on the All-Star teams.
Radical, dude: ESPN begins its multimillion-dollar investment in the Generation X Olympics, otherwise known as the Extreme Games, with a preview at 3 p.m. Saturday. The actual competitions begin Sunday, with ESPN and ESPN2 carrying 45 hours. But while most of the sports involved–such as street luge, sport climbing, kiteskiing–are unfamiliar to the general viewing public, ESPN coordinating producer Rich Feinberg is planning his telecasts “for a broad-based audience.” Adds Feinberg, “We know Generation X is going to watch us. If the Extreme Games are to be a successful television entity, we have to expose, inform and entertain on a much broader level.” To that end, Feinberg is pulling out all the production stops, from point-of-view cameras to audio enhancements to heart monitors on many of the athletes in the eight-day festival in the Newport-Providence, R.I. area. “Our approach has been very aggressive,” he says. The technical aspects will “allow viewers to see what it’s like to participate in these sports. We’ll capture viewers’ interest through the technology.”
Games telecast co-hosts Chris Fowler and Suzy Kolber already have their own interests in the sports, one of which (mountain biking) already has achieved real Olympics status. “The athletes don’t look at these sports as extreme,” says Kolber. Adds Fowler, “I’ve read that Kolber and Fowler drew the short straws. That’s ludicrous. You have to be insane not to want to be associated with the kind of quality television this is going to be.”
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Other stuff: John McEnroe has been hired by CBS as analyst for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, where he will work with old adversary Mary Carillo on the men’s semifinal and final matches. . . . So much for the soccer surge: Last Sunday’s ABC telecast of the U.S.-Mexico match got only a 1.3 national rating and a 4 share, down nearly 76 percent from the 5.3 average for the network’s 11 World Cup telecasts last year. Locally, last Sunday’s telecast on WLS-Ch. 7 had a 2.1 rating.