The Reverand E. William Beauchamp, a Notre Dame executive vice president, sat on the CFA's board and, Neinas said, "blessed the ABC deal as a member of the TV committee," giving every indication that Notre Dame, with its valuable appeal to a national constituency, was in the fold. "An attorney friend told me, `You can't sit there, negotiate a deal and two weeks later he and Dick Rosenthal were doing something else,"' Neinas said from Boulder, Colo. "That I will never forget."
At the time, Rosenthal said that Notre Dame had never given its assent to the CFA deal, which he said would have diminished the university's national status.
Feelings have long since softened and college football's landscape is vastly different. The conferences, not the CFA, make network deals.
In 1991 ESPN televised 44 games; this year it will carry 446. CSTV is part of the new world, as is ESPNU. All that product has reduced the intrinsic value of all games, including Notre Dame's on NBC, but it has given more fans what they want.
"The number of games is obscene," Schanzer said.
And not having to pay obscenely high fees is important, too. Even as Notre Dame's fortunes have gyrated, NBC's payments have remained quite affordable.
The US$7.6-million-a-year average fee NBC paid from 1991 to 1995 has risen modestly to about US$9 million through 2010, or US$1.5 million a game.
"Whatever it is we're paying," Schanzer said, "we're delighted to be in this relationship. We want to keep going forever."
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