ESPN.com - Size matters in the Big Ten

ESPN.com: Sports Business

Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Size matters in the Big Ten

By Darren Rovell
ESPN.com

In college football, bigger is better. But it's not only the average weight of offensive lines that are ballooning beyond the burly 300 mark. Team media guides are bulging, too.


	The Boilermakers have nearly doubled the size of their media guides since 1998.

In a growing, mine-is-bigger-than-yours competition, media guides of Big Ten football teams have swelled beyond the 300-page mark as each school hopes the size of its guides will both inform media and impress recruits.

Call it page envy.

"We'd be kidding ourselves if we said that we take pride in having the smallest media guide in the Big Ten," said Tom Schott, Purdue's sports information director, who started the push for more statistics and pages in 1999. "In 1998, we walked into Big Ten Media Day and someone said, 'Well, at least Northwestern's is smaller than yours.' "

Since then, Purdue's media guides have grown from 188 pages to 204, 256, 308 and now 352 pages this season -- all without an increase in font size.

Certainly, thanks to the team's winning ways in recent seasons, Purdue has more to boast about than just the size of its media guide. Together, they become an effective tool to lure recruits to the burgeoning Big Ten power.

"Although a lot of high-profile recruits don't have time to read it all, we think it closes the gap with the Michigans and Notre Dames of the world," Schott said. "It's certainly a bit of an arms race to see who can have the largest and heaviest one."

Aside from weight and size, there's not much schools can do to give them an advantage besides a fancy cover. According to NCAA bylaws, media guides can use color only on the front and back covers, reducing the recruiting advantages for schools that have heftier budgets. So until the NCAA limits the number of pages, which Schott says could come soon as a result of cost containment issues, the books keep getting bigger and bigger.

	Bigger is better
	How Big Ten school media guides measure up:
	School	Pages
	Michigan	408
	Michigan State	360
	Penn State	356
	Purdue	352
	Iowa	348
	Minnesota	336
	Ohio State	336
	Illinois	328
	Indiana	300
	Wisconsin	256
	Northwestern	240
	Average	329

Big Ten media guides average a conference-record 329 pages this season. Even at 352 pages, Purdue still ranks behind three other schools: Penn State (356), Michigan State (360) and Michigan (408). And Michigan reduced its guide by 42 pages this year.

The push for size is one of the reasons why schools have been selling their media guides. Purdue, which has its books printed for about $5 a piece, hopes to sell 500 of them at $15 apiece this year. That's relatively inexpensive considering that many schools, including Georgia (416) and Maryland (248), are charging $20 this season.

Despite the Longhorn's 576-page media guide, not everything is bigger in Texas. Texas' guide sells for $21.65, tax included, a bargain next to Marshall's 348-page guide. Still, the Mid-American Conference power tops the list of most expensive media guides at a whopping $25. "We're just hoping we can sell enough that we can recoup some of the money," said Ricky Hazel, Marshall's sports information director.

In case you haven't heard ...
Despite the University of Miami's run to the national championship this year, the school's average attendance at the Orange Bowl was only 47,132, a 19 percent decrease from the 2000 season. This season, the Hurricanes are armed with an advertising campaign, called "Feel the Fury," that has turned quarterback Ken Dorsey, wide receiver Andre Johnson and head coach Larry Coker into animated action heroes.


	The Hurricanes hope quarterback Ken Dorsey can have another super-hero type season.

"The goal of the campaign was to appeal to a wider fan base," said Chris Prindiville, Miami's assistant athletics director for marketing. Prindiville said the school, in part because of the campaign, is expecting a 30 percent increase in attendance and ticket revenue this season.

The school has printed a caricature of Coker onto T-shirts, but have they have decided not to make a version using Dorsey or Johnson. Last year, the school had a problem when the Nike tag on the inside of the Miami No. 11 jersey said "Dorsey" on it. "They used it to track the sales of the jerseys, but we took care of it pretty quickly," Prindiville said. Although his name was not on the back of the jersey itself, the school didn't want to violate NCAA bylaws, which prohibit the use of an athlete's name for the sale of a commercial product.

The Enron club
Will the Minnesota Wild be the next team to have its arena naming-rights sponsor default on its long-term deal? Xcel Energy Inc., which a year ago agreed to pay $3 million a year through 2024 for the naming rights to the arena for the NHL expansion franchise, is embroiled in accusations of corporate corruption. The company has been subpoenaed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for allegedly offsetting deals to buy and sell energy over the past two and half years. In June, Xcel stock (NYSE: XEL) fell below $20 for the first time in the company's history. It closed Tuesday at $9.84. Company spokesperson Mary Sandok said the company has no intention to sever its naming-rights deal with the arena. Since Friday, there have been at least five class action lawsuits filed against Xcel Energy executives, accusing them of releasing false or misleading statements about at least one of its companies in order to inflate the Xcel's stock price.

Timing is everything


	Tony Stewart has had trouble keeping his cool on the track.

On Aug. 4, race-car driver Tony Stewart was fined $10,000 and put on probation by NASCAR for punching a freelance photographer who was taking pictures of him after his 12th-place finish at the Brickyard 400. Four days later, Stewart was fined another $50,000 by his main sponsor, Home Depot. Quietly, another sponsor, Old Spice, has tried to keep a low profile since Stewart's flare of temper.

Old Spice, a Proctor and Gamble brand, is currently running a print-ad campaign for Old Spice Cool Contact Wipes that appeared on the inside cover of last week's Sporting News. "This year, Tony Stewart will finally keep his cool," the ad boasts.

Last year, Stewart was fined $10,000 and put on probation by NASCAR after he argued with a Winston Cup official and kicked a reporter's tape recorder under a truck.

An Old Spice spokesman did not return calls seeking comment.

Stewart won his third Winston Cup race of the season, Sunday at Watkins Glen.

"It doesn't lift anything off my shoulders," Stewart said after the race. "It doesn't change anything I did last week. I'm still ashamed of what I did.

"It's been a tough week for all of us. It's that way when you hurt your team and your sponsor."

Babe's bat to hit the market
Dave Kohler says he has perhaps the most significant piece of baseball memorabilia and plans to sell it to the highest bidder in an auction at the end of the year.


	Inscription on Babe Ruth's bat he gave to Vic Orsatti.

Kohler, owner of SportsCards Plus, a sports auction house based in Laguna Niguel, Calif., claims he already has turned down seven-figure offers for the bat Babe Ruth used to hit his first home run at Yankee Stadium. Ruth gave the bat to Vic Orsatti as part of a newspaper promotion to honor the home run champion of Los Angeles' City High School Baseball League in 1923. On it, he inscribed, "To the boy home run king of Los Angeles."

Kohler bought the bat three weeks ago from an Orsatti family intermediary. It came complete with documentation, including articles in the Los Angeles Evening Herald and a telegram from Ruth.

"If authenticators are looking for some weakness in the story, there is none," Kohler said. "This is the bat that built 'The house that Ruth built.'

"At the very least, it's a beautiful piece of 1922 furniture and the signature on it is like it was put on a couple hours ago," said Dave Bushing, a collectibles expert who sold another Ruth bat that was given away in a 1924 Evening Herald contest for $250,000 last year. "If the Honus Wagner card went for more than $1 million, this should go for more than $1 million."

A bat believed to be Shoeless Joe Jackson's prized "Black Betsy" sold for $577,610 in August 2001.

They leave home without it
With AOL/Time Warner's stock price on the steady decline, there is some cause for concern about the state of affairs with the company's sports teams, including the Atlanta Braves, Thrashers and Hawks. But forget about tying the Washington Capitals, owned by AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis, into that bunch. "I paid all cash for my team, so I have no debt," Leonsis told ESPN.com.


	Mark Cuban


	Ted Leonsis

Leonsis, Jonathan Ledecky and Dick Patrick bought the Capitals for $85 million in May 1999. Leonsis then bought Ledecky's share for a reported $68 million and has since added four more investors to Lincoln Holdings, which also owns 44 percent of the Washington Wizards.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he paid "all cash" when he bought the team for a reported $280 million in January 2000. Cuban sold his company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo! in April 1999 and sold all the stock six months later. "I never borrow money," Cuban said.

Slam dunk deals


	Chick Hearn

When high-profile celebrities suddenly die, prices of merchandise and memorabilia bearing their name or image tend to increase. Therefore, it wasn't surprising when Hearn, the Los Angeles Lakers broadcaster who called 3,338 consecutive games during his 42-year career, died on Aug. 5, fans started hoarding anything associated with the man who brought phrases like "slam dunk" and "air ball" into basketball's lexicon.

Though memorabilia of broadcasters is usually hard to come by, more than 200 Hearn items have been posted on eBay on a daily basis over the past week. The most frequent item sold were Chick Hearn bobblehead dolls, 5,000 of which were distributed as part of a radio promotion after Hearn returned from his heart and hip surgery in April. While the bobbleheads have sold in the $75 to $125 range, items with Hearn's autograph, such as basketballs, jerseys and books, have been garnering bids of $500 or more.

Pay for play-by-play
Five years ago, as a student in Washington University's MBA program, John Hart drew up a business plan to develop a personalized play-by-play business. Like the modern-day version of personalized children's books, Hart envisioned selling compact discs of eight-minute-long sports broadcasts with the person's name inserted in the dialogue 13 times. Today, Hart says his company, That's Me Sports, is on its way to bringing in $1 million in annual revenue. When Hart started the company, he used generic teams for broadcasts, but now offers calls for fans of 25 collegiate schools, including Notre Dame, which sold more than 2,000 CDs last year. Sales have tripled every year and are expected to reach 25,000 play-by-play CDs sold by the end of this year. Hart did the play-by-play himself until nine months ago, when he met a former play-by-play announcer, Adam Hammarquist, on an airplane flight. Now Hammarquist calls all the play-by-play from his California home. Each CD costs $24.90, including shipping and handling.

Darren Rovell, who covers sports business for ESPN.com, can be reached at Darren.rovell@espnpub.com