Technological Advancements In Sports Analysis

Today’s sport fans have more ways to consume televised broadcasts of their favorite team or event than any other time in history. In addition to live television, which has been around since 1939, when the first college football game was broadcasted, they now have the ability to view them on their computers, tablets, or smart phones (Galily, 2014, Voort, 2014). The technological advancements in television viewership has helped to drive the increase in broadcast rights fees paid by networks to televise college sports, to the staggering levels we see today. In 1985 the NCAA and CBS inked a three year deal worth $94.7 million, which included the rights to broadcast all intercollegiate athletic events (Jensen, Wakefield, Cobbs, & Turner 2015).
Beginning in 1953 the NCAA began to regulate the number of college football games that could be televised. It was their belief that if there were too many games televised it would lead to a decrease in fan attendance (Greenhouse, 1984). However, on June 27th, 1984 the U.S. Supreme Court issued their ruling in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia Athletic Association, which was a direct challenge to the NCAA’s broadcast regulations of football telecasts (NCAA v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma, 1984). The decision that day, stating the 1983-1985 NCAA Television plan violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, returned the property rights of football telecasts to individual schools, who could now sell or assign their own broadcast as opposed to the NCAA selling them for the entire association (Bennett and Fizel, 1995). With the regulations lifted, schools began to look for new ways to monetize their broadcast and multimedia rights. This led to what we see today, as universities enter into agreements with third party rights holders who sell the universities' multimedia rights on their behalf. The relationship between the university and rights holder is mutually beneficial, with both parties seeking financial gain from the partnership, and has created a massive market for sponsors
Cornwell, Pruitt and Clark stated that “this dearth is due in large part to the proprietary nature of costs incurred by sponsoring firms” (2005). Thus, this study delineates the factors that influence cost incurred by the third party company as it pertains to collegiate multimedia sponsorships costs. In order to do this, I utilize a hierarchical regression model to highlight the latent influence of several factors on cost. Then, I employ a multiple regression analysis to develop a predictive empirical model, which creates predicted values to determine whether universities have been underpaid or overpaid for their multimedia rights (Jensen et al 2015). The process is homogeneous to the methods used in a previous study analyzing the athletic apparel industry (Jensen et al