In this episode, co-host Micki Maynard discusses the financial aspects of sports rivalries with Mark Remillard. Maynard highlights major college football and basketball rivalries, such as Michigan vs. Ohio State and Duke vs. UNC, noting the significant revenue generated from these matchups, as an example of how business journalists can cover the sports world. She also gives some thoughts on how young journalists can use social media, FOIA requests and city liaisons to get data and understand the financial stories of sports beyond what’s being played on the field.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from Top Journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money: The big business of sports rivalries.
Maynard: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. We’re based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Micki Maynard, Director of the Reynolds Center, and with me is my co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a Cronkite alum and a reporter and anchor at KTAR News. Hello Mark!
Remillard: Hi Micki. Today we bring you Series 2, Episode 8, the money in sports rivalries, and this is one that you are particularly interested in. And so we don’t have a guest this week. Actually, the guest and expert is Micki.
Maynard: It’s me!
Remillard: You were actually recently part of the Reynolds workshop in Chicago that we talked about last week. So tell us about it.
Maynard: Well, I took on one of my favorite topics, which is the huge amount of money that’s spent on sports rivalries. It’s easy to come up with some famous ones. In college football, there’s Michigan-Ohio State and Auburn and Alabama and Notre Dame versus everybody else. In fact, NBC has a $15 million a year contract to broadcast Notre Dame games, and it runs for 10 years.
Remillard: In baseball, there’s the Subway Series between the Mets and the Yankees, and Chicago has a Cross-Town Classic between the Cubs and the White Sox. The NFL, you’ve got matchups like the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers. Obviously, there’s a big rivalry between the Seahawks and the New England Patriots as well.
Maynard: And in college basketball, the most valuable rivalry is between Duke and the University of North Carolina, or UNC. They’re actually the number two and number four most valuable college basketball programs, according to Forbes. When Duke and North Carolina play each other, the number of people watching on ESPN will quadruple.
Remillard: And that’s some big money there. And these are good stories for people to cover, because rivalries are everywhere too. You don’t have to be in one of the ones that we just mentioned. So how do you go about getting the numbers?
Maynard: Well, here reporters are in luck, because public universities generally publish their attendance numbers, and that’s how the Detroit News got a great story recently on the University of Michigan. And I love this story. I was almost clapping when I read it. It found out that Michigan gave away more than 62,000 free tickets to its home games, which assured that it had attendance of 100,000 per game. But those 62,000 tickets represented a lot of lost revenue for Michigan. The average face price of a football ticket was about $100 last year, except for when Michigan played Penn State, and that’s when tickets were selling for up to $200. And remember, this is college football, not the NFL. So the interesting thing about this was that the university provided the numbers, and it defended the practice by saying that it’s important for the stadium to look full.
Remillard: Wow. What other that’s ridiculous, right? But it’s a it’s like reminds me of Seinfeld with seat fillers in the at the Oscars, or the whatever it was, and at the Tony’s, got to have the seats full on TV. You can’t make it look like it was empty,
Maynard: Exactly, well, and the thing about that is that college football is no longer amateur football. I mean, this is big time. We talked about Notre Dame, the value of that contract. And anytime these schools are on national television, you know, they want to look their best.
Remillard: What other kind of numbers can you get from university athletic departments?
Maynard: At a lot of big schools, the football program floats the rest of the sports programs. So you want to find out what kind of revenue the football program generates, and you also want to find out whether the university is subsidizing the athletic department in any way, because a lot of universities will say, “We make all our money on football” and maybe basketball at a place like UNC but there are a lot of sports, lacrosse, field, hockey, baseball, softball, just regular hockey that have to be paid for because they can’t possibly sell the kind of tickets that you can to a football game.
Remillard: There are some new sources of revenues for schools now, though, tell us about that.
Maynard: Well, this is one of my favorite developments in college athletics. It’s the spring football game. So, pretty much all my life, spring football games were really casual events. You just showed up on some Saturday during the spring, and you watched half the team play the other half of the team, and a lot of times it was free, and you go down and get autographs, and that’s the thing. Well, now the schools are charging admission, you know, it’s still just $5 or $10 a game, but with the kind of numbers that they’re getting, that’s an opportunity to make some real money, and these games are being televised. So Ohio State University had the biggest attendance in history for its spring game. This spring, they drew almost 100,000 people in Columbus. And there were some other big spring games too that drew tens of thousands of people after Ohio State, you had Nebraska, Penn State, Alabama and Auburn. So here you have yet another revenue producing opportunity for these college athletic departments.
Remillard: This is just to watch one half of the team play the other half?
Maynard: Right, and it doesn’t mean anything. Except now you’re starting to see stories on espn.com and on other college football sites where I saw that one that was “Five things we learned from the Ohio State spring game.” I’m like, what could you possibly have learned from watching guys play other guys? And yet, the sports writers are taking this as seriously as you know, pre-season game.
Remillard: Wow. A lot of these universities are public. You can get information on these things. What are some good ways to get information?
Maynard: Well, it’s really basic stuff. You know, follow them on social media and sign up for their email list. Because the way that I did some numbers on Michigan football and what the tickets were costing was that they sent me an offer to buy individual tickets, not season tickets, but individual tickets. And I was able to calculate, you know, you give away X number of tickets for this game, how much lost revenue was that? You want to follow the players themselves, and especially on Instagram, because finding people are tweeting less, but they’re posting more photos, and Instagram is just like heaven if you want to follow particular athletes. And if they’re very photo centric, you’re going to find out all kinds of information about them. Another thing is something that people don’t really think about, but you want to find out if your city has an official liaison with the university, because universities and the towns where they’re located sometimes have these tense relationships, and the university tries to tell the town what to do, and the town tries to tell the university what to do. So you want to know the people in your city that are dealing with the university.
Remillard: Obviously, too, I would mention as well that since these are some of these are public universities, they’re under the same scrutiny as any other public government. And you can submit FOIA requests for some of these things, if you were looking to see if the school was subsidizing the athletic departments or things like that. That’s information that you could request through FOIA.
Maynard: And another thing, you don’t even have to FOIA it or do a Freedom of Information Act request, you can just look at the budget, because especially if they’re publicly funded, there’s going to be a budget that’s submitted to the state legislature, and you’ll get to see that, and then the budget will be approved for your university, and then you can get that too.
Remillard: We’ve talked about sports and money throughout this podcast, and how it’s important to follow all the permits involved with new stadiums and anything to do with your local sports teams. What are some other things that reporters should be doing?
Maynard: Well, I would actually get to know the sports reporters in other cities or the business reporters that cover the teams that your team plays. I would say, get to know sports reporters in other cities, follow them on Twitter or meet them at, you know, sporting events. Or the business reporters who cover the teams that your team plays. People are actually pretty generous, and you might come across a tip that you can use, and I’ve had really good luck with people who cover Minor League Baseball teams. And one of the reasons why Minor League Baseball has become so important is that seating towns are building new stadiums for Minor League Baseball, and we think a lot about Major League Baseball, but all across the country, there are new teams, new stadiums, new owners, and I’m finding that minor league baseball is just as rich and rewarding an environment as Major League Baseball. You know, one thing to remember in all of this is that there’s a game story that the sports writers cover, but there’s also money story that business journalists cover. And we’ve never seen a bigger story lately than what’s going on with the Soccer Federation in Europe, and what a huge scandal that’s become.
Remillard: Yeah, billions of dollars and briberies as to where they get where they decide to place the World Cup. These stadiums being built in like in Brazil, I know the stadium was built in a town that is almost not even accessible by car, but they built, you know, a stadium for like, four matches or something like that. Like these things have serious issues in terms of money and what that the effect on the rest of the people who might not even watch the sport.
Maynard: So you might not be covering the World Cup or what’s going on in Qatar, but you can sure cover what’s going on in your backyard.
Remillard: That’s it for this episode of How to Cover Money next time, we’ll wrap up Series 2 by talking about some of our favorite tips that people gave us during the season.
Maynard: Support for How to Cover Money comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. If you’re interested in more tips and story ideas, sign up for our daily newsletter. Each morning, we’ll send you a rundown of our Must Read Money Stories. You can use those to inspire your own pieces and to get a jump on the day. Visit our website, businessjournalism.org, you’ll find a list of all our upcoming workshops. You can download our eBooks and you can also find out how to enter the Barlett and Steele Awards, they’re given out every fall for investigative business journalism, and it’s free to apply. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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