Cashing in on Exposure
Multimedia deals cater to coaches

By Michael McCarthy, Gannett News Service

November 16, 2006

AUBURN- Like many Southern football fans, Arkansas native Tommy Tuberville can tell you the exact time his favorite college coach's TV show aired when he was growing up: The Razorbacks' Frank Broyles came on at 3:30 p.m. every fall Sunday.

Now that Tuberville is Auburn's football coach, he stars in his own weekly half-hour show, "The Auburn Football Review." He views it not as a folksy highlight-and-commentary show but as an infomercial to sell his program to prospective students, parents, alumni, fans and sponsors.

"It's not like the old days when it took an hour and the coach talked about every play. This is more of a promotional film to get your program out to recruits and parents," Tuberville says after shooting a recent version of his show in the end zone at Jordan-Hare Stadium here.

"You have to have players to win games. All the TV shows go directly to selling your program. Because that's what I am. I'm not a football coach. I'm a salesman."

In more ways than one. While Tuberville thinks recruiting, Auburn views his show as part of what is becoming the latest way to help generate the tens of millions of dollars it spends on athletics -- including the increasing amounts it annually pays Tuberville.

Across the nation, schools are combining media and marketing rights with their entire athletic programs -- from coaching shows to radio broadcasting rights for football, men's and women's basketball and other sports to Web sites -- and selling them to the highest bidder.

Take the nine-year, $51.3 million deal between Auburn and ISP Sports signed in April. Starting in 2008, Auburn's guaranteed annual rights fee will rise 138 percent to $5.7 million annually. That would easily pay Tuberville's annual salary, plus those of his assistants, says Jay Jacobs, Auburn's athletics director.

"They pay us a nice sum -- so we can give that to our coaches. It's a win-win for everybody," Jacobs says.

Tuberville is a big winner. He is being paid an average of $1.5 million a year under provisions related to Auburn's deal with ISP -- TV, radio and related personal appearance work -- during his seven-year contract, which began in 2005. (Tuberville also gets $885,000 annually for assigning Auburn "all personal endorsement rights he possesses or might possess" during the contract's term; this provision expressly includes Auburn's right to make shoe and apparel contracts such as the one it has with Under Armour.) Those amounts are in addition to his $210,000 annual base salary, his basic benefits and an array of perks and potential bonuses.

Tuberville led Auburn to an undefeated 13-0 season and Southeastern Conference championship in 2004. Jacobs asks: How much is that exposure and publicity worth in recruiting efforts?

"When you have a guy who's won as many SEC games as (Tuberville) has, it's easy for me to justify his salary," Jacobs says.

Outsourcing for income.

Schools have had TV and radio deals for decades, but in many cases their athletic departments had been responsible for making deals with local affiliates to carry games, selling ad time, hiring on-air talent and so on. Over the last decade -- just as schools have learned with student cafeterias, campus bookstores and other services -- they have begun to realize they can make more money with fewer headaches by outsourcing most or all of their athletics media and marketing.

In the typical arrangement, the sports marketing firm pays the school a guaranteed annual rights fee, then attempts to recover its money -- and more -- by selling advertising and sponsorships.

The sports marketing firm sets up a branch office of four to 10 people to produce and edit the coaches' shows and game broadcasts, pay the on-air talent, create the school's athletic website, line up sponsors, sell commercial time and in-stadium signage, even print the thousands of game-day programs. The setup lets school officials focus on ticket sales and fundraising.

LSU, for example, used to handle marketing in-house while splitting media duties among several local TV and radio firms, says Herb Vincent, senior associate AD. But the school signed a 10-year, $74.5 million deal last year to consolidate everything with CBS Collegiate Sports Properties.

The move is already boosting the bottom line, Vincent says. LSU will get $7.3 million in rights fees this year, a 33 percent increase over last year's take.

The competition among marketing media firms has become increasingly fierce, leading to increasingly creative -- and potentially lucrative -- contracts for the schools.

Greg Brown, president of Learfield Sports, says most deals now include a revenue-sharing component that gives schools additional money, often a 50-50 split, of advertising and sponsorship revenue above a certain amount.

Texas, the defending national football champion, takes a high risk-high reward approach with its multimedia rights. It is in the second year of a 10-year, multimillion-dollar deal with Host Communications that's almost all revenue-sharing, says Chris Plonsky, director of women's athletics.

Under this arrangement, Texas takes a "huge chunk" of the $10 million a year generated by Host's Austin-based unit, the Longhorn Sports Network, unit general manager Scott Willingham says. How much? "It's a lot more than 50-50," Plonsky says.

The next frontier: so-called campus-wide deals under which schools bundle everything from soft drink rights in stadiums to overnight shipping rights for every campus office with their existing media and marketing rights.