KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- CBS Sports agreed Tuesday to pay $1 billion for a 7-year extension of its coverage of the NCAA Men's Division I basketball tournament and 16 other NCAA events.
The contract gives CBS exclusive rights to televise the tournament from 1991-97. The fee, which was $550,000 in 1970, escalates from $55.3 million for the 1990 tournament, which the network will share with ESPN, to about $110 million in 1994. There will be further increases in the other three years of the deal.
'CBS was in a highly competitive position and was pushed very hard by the other two networks,' said NCAA Executive Director Dick Schultz. 'Of course from an NCAA standpoint, we're very pleased with that. But in addition to the highly competitive nature of this bid, which created this number, there's also a tremendous expansion of not only Division I championship basketball, but other championships and this is the thing that really creates the excitment for us.
'We feel that this takes the Division I men's championship to an entirely new level.'
CBS Sports President Neal Pilson said, 'This deal reflects, a) the love affair that America has with sports and, b) more specifically the level of interest that the viewers, and adverisers and affilates have expressed in the NCAA tournament.
'It reflects that enthusiasm. It reflects that degree of excitement that this tournament genarates.'
The deal continues CBS Sports' recent binge for broadcast rights to big-time sporting events. The network will pay more than $1 billion for four years of major-league baseball and a total of $534 million for the 1992 and '94 Winter Olympics in addition to its continuing NFL coverage. CBS, however, lost in the bidding to renew its rights deal with the NBA. It seemed, however, to truly want to hold onto the NCAA Tournament.
'The tournament is a concentrated 27-exposure burst of excitement,' Pilson said. 'For us (it) is eminently saleable, and has been. The advertisers' enthusiasm for this event and the affilates' enthusiasm for this event is extrordinary.'
CBS agreed to expand it tournament coverage to first-round games, which it has previously left to ESPN. The network also contracted to broadcast other NCAA events including women's regular-season and tournament basketball, Division II football, lacrosse, wrestling, swimming and diving, volleyball, soccer and track and field.
Schultz said one contingency of the contract was that the number of beer commercials be cut by 'about 33 percent.' The remaining ads reportedly will be matched second for second by public service announcements about alcohol abuse.
The NCAA already generates about 80 percent of its budget through the basketball tournament. Most of the money is funneled back to the competing teams, making an intitial bid worth more than $250,000. For the past several years, the Final Four qualifiers each were given more than $1 million.
Schultz said the NCAA would work to develop new ways to distribute the funds in order to benefit all college athletes, not just the teams in the tournament.
'We want to take the pressure off coaches and off athletes,' said Schultz. 'We want to see that these dollars go back to serve higher education and intercollegiate athletics in the very purest form.'
