cincibuck
You kids stay off my lawn!
Great find. I love this sidebar as it explains a great deal about the open SEC bias shown by ESPN in the last 15 years at the same time that it demonstrates the consumer power of the Big 10 schools:
An amiable session in which the Big Ten and ESPN cleaned up “housekeeping matters” — schedules and announcers — took a nasty turn at the one-hour mark. That’s when talk turned to a contract extension, a negotiating session that went nowhere. Fast.
“The shortest one I ever had,” Delany told the Tribune. “He lowballed us and said: ‘Take it or leave it. If you don’t take our offer, you are rolling the dice.’ I said: ‘Consider them rolled.’ “
Delany had warned ESPN officials that without a significant rights-fee increase, he would try to launch a new channel that would pose competition both for TV viewers and the Big Ten’s inventory of games: the Big Ten Network.
“He threw his weight around,” Shapiro said in a telephone interview, “and said, ‘I’m going to get my big (rights-fee) increase and start my own network.’ Had ESPN stepped up and paid BCS-type dollars, I think we could have prevented the network. In retrospect, that might have been the right thing to do. Jim is making a nice penny on that.”
Said Delany: “If Mark had presented a fair offer, we would have signed it. And there would not be a Big Ten Network.”
Also paints an interesting picture of Mark Shapiro, an elitist prick in a crowd of elitist pricks. Dropping the big bucks on Wimbledon and trying to lowball Big Ten Football suggests that his thinking runs along the "all my cool east coast friends follow tennis and who gives a shit about a bunch of pumpkin shuckers in fly-over country?" Not satisfied with that, he goes on to piss off the NFL, NBA, and MLB brass. Perfect guy to put in charge of a sports network.
Upvote
0
