NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and University of Georgia Athletic Association　

This past weekend marked the opening of the college football season. If you enjoy watching the games on television you could have started Thursday night with South Carolina at NC State, then tuned in to see Oregon at Boise State (we won’t get into the punch here). On Friday Tulsa at Tulane. On Saturday the flood gates really opened up and you could have been glued to the set for over twelve hours with dozens of games. On Sunday Memphis and Ole Miss, and on Monday Miami and Florida State. A couple of days off, and get ready to do it all over again. All these games being televised are the legacy of the Supreme Court’s ruling of June 27, 1984 in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. Essentially, the Supreme Court said that at the time the NCAA’s television plan violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. With the NCAA’s control out of the way, individual schools and conferences were free to negotiate their own television contracts. Coupling this with the arrival of cable television, the boom in college football on the airwaves was ready to begin. Lets take a look at how the Supreme Court arrived at its ruling.

Going back to 1966 ABC had the right to televise college football on Saturdays. If you had a chance to watch two games on a Saturday you had to consider yourself lucky. Most weekends a viewer would get one game whether he liked it or not. By 1977 several conferences plus Notre Dame formed what was essentially a cartel (the conferences were the Big Eight, the ACC, the Southeastern Conference and the Southwest Conference). The College Football Association, or CFA, had a goal to separate itself from the smaller programs in college football. Essentially this is how the NCAA arrived at Division I and Division IAA football. Two conferences refused to join the CFA, the Big Ten and The Pac Ten. The CFA next looked at television rights and realized that many dollars were being left on the table. High profile programs such as Notre Dame, Georgia, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, Alabama and many others were limited to just a few television appearance a season, even though these games were usually in the greatest demand.

In 1980 the CFA negotiated their own television deal with NBC. With that deal set, the NCAA was ready to kick all CFA member schools out of the NCAA not just for football, but for all NCAA sanctioned sports.

The CFA schools decided against going forward with the NBC contract, but did go so far as to file an antitrust suit against the NCAA.

Stay tuned for parts two and three later on this week.