My latest column for the Chicago Tribune is on the Big Ten Network preparing for its eighth season.

From the column:

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If you watch ESPN, you have seen the million or so (estimate might be on low side) promos hyping the new SEC Network, which made its debut last week.

It’s been there, done that for the Big Ten Network (BTN). The network has been around for light years in terms of the new media landscape.

Consider that when the BTN launched in 2007, Twitter barely existed and the idea of watching television on your mobile phone still sounded like a crazy idea.

“Back then, one of our big decisions was whether we would spend the extra money to broadcast in HD,” said BTN president Mark Silverman, laughing at the idea of even asking that question now.

The BTN did go HD in Commissioner Jim Delany’s highly risky venture to launch a network centered on just one conference. Now about to begin its eighth year, the BTN has been a major game-changer in college sports.

The BTN is in 60 million homes and supplies a considerable portion of the $27 million payout the Big Ten made to member schools this year (relative newcomer Nebraska got a bit less under its deal). It is difficult to put a dollar value on the exposure generated for the Big Ten by the network in terms of recruiting and marketing, but let’s just it is considerable.

Little wonder why the BTN is the prototype, if not the envy, for other league-focused networks. Seven years later, the SEC finally is joining the party.

“It’s an ESPN-owned network and I’m sure it will be high quality,” Silverman said. “But there’s always going to be new networks launching. We’re focused on our network and growing our brand.”

Growth comes in the form of Rutgers and Maryland beginning Big Ten competition this year. It was initially speculated that the existence of the BTN triggered the decision to expand. Silverman maintains the BTN aspect was “overstated.” He notes that Fox owns 51 percent of the network. It isn’t as if the conference pockets all the profits.

“Having a network was one of the reasons why the conference to expand,” Silverman said. “It wasn’t like the network was urging the Big Ten to expand.”

Nevertheless, the addition of the two schools helped add upwards of 10 million new BTN subscribers, bringing the Big Ten firmly into the nation’s No. 1 market in New York and into the Washington D.C-Baltimore areas. That means increased revenue in subscriber fees and advertising.

My latest entry for Awful Announcing is my Q/A with Paul Finebaum.

Here is an excerpt.

*******

It’s good to be Paul Finebaum these days.

He has a daily ESPN radio show that is simulcast on the new SEC Network. He will be featured prominently on the SEC Network’s pregame coverage on Saturdays and on ESPN’s College GameDay.

And Finebaum has a new best-selling book, “My Conference Can Beat Your Conference: Why The SEC Still Rules College Football.” It is co-written by his old University of Tennessee classmate and current ESPNer, Gene Wojciechowski.

It all comes as a surprise to Finebaum, who reveals in a Q/A that as late as two years ago he was told to forget about working for ESPN. He thought he was just going to be regional personality in Birmingham.

He also discusses his drive to complete some unfinished business after getting turned down by papers like the New York Times early in his career.

Q: These are pretty heady times for you. You’ve got a book, SEC Network, ESPN, GameDay coming up. Do you feel like you’ve kind of won the lottery, so to speak, with all that’s happening?

FINEBAUM: A little bit. Listen, I’ll try to spare you the ‘I am blessed line,’ but it’s pretty amazing. It’s been a good career, but I feel like there’s been more failure than success, and I didn’t see this coming. I walked out of a meeting about two years ago in New York. Someone sent me to see this guy. He basically said, ‘Whatever talents you have, you’re going to be in Birmingham and be a regional guy and ESPN won’t hire you.’ I said, OK. I’ve had a good career and I’ll continue to do whatever I can. Then I was introduced to someone else, and it completely changed my career, my life.

Q: What happened?

FINEBAUM: Joe Tessitore, who’s a friend of mine, said, ‘I want you to meet a guy name Nick Khan, who is an agent at CAA.’ He now represents Kirk Herbstreit and Olbermann, a lot of other people. I met him at DFW airport. He said, ‘I think you could go to ESPN very easily.’ The next thing you know ‑‑ it took a few months, but my contract was up at the end of the year, and he put it together. Everything he said happened.

It just took someone who believed in me and knew the right people and did it the right way. It also, by the way, coincided with the launch of the network.

Q: Right, your timing was good here, too.  You had a huge following in Birmingham. Why did you feel the need to expand your reach?

FINEBAUM:   I wanted to at least explore and exhaust the possibilities.  I mean, I did have a really nice career and a nice life, and it wasn’t like I had to do this.  My greatest disappointments came 25 years ago in the newspaper business.  I thought I would be in New York and in Chicago at the Tribune and Sun Times.  That’s where I thought I was going to be.

I didn’t have to have it.  I wanted to at least have a conversation, and Nick made sure that happened, and it did.

Q: So was there a little bit of a feeling of unfinished business?

FINEBAUM:  Yeah, it was a little bit of that.  I wanted just to simply get an evaluation. Could what I do translate (beyond Alabama)?

Q: And then you wrote a book.  How did this book come about?

FINEBAUM:  The book came about very simply.  And by the way, this is another key component here, which I’m about to tell you.  About a little over two years ago, I got a call from a guy who writes a sports blog at the New Yorker magazine, and he wanted to talk to me about an article. OK, I didn’t really give it any thought.  Turns out that he had an idea.  They wanted to do a profile of someone in college football, and he came to me.

He hung around me on and off for six months.  The article came out in December of 2012.  I was in New York for a conference. The next day I got a call from a literary agent, and he said, ‘There’s a book in this.’  I said, ‘Really?’  And he said, yeah, ‘I think there’s really a big book in this.’

I was about to end my contract.  I thought it could be pretty messy. I was not overly excited about diving in, so I ended up hooking up with Gene.  I said, what do you think?  Gene said, ‘I think it’s a great idea.’

Q: What is the point of the book? What did you hope to say?   

FINEBAUM:  Well, it was a couple of books in one.  I mean, the original idea was to make it autobiographical but bring the SEC and the radio show in.  I frankly didn’t think my story was all that interesting. I thought the SEC was a much bigger vehicle, and we started thinking about the launch of the network, timing it, and that’s really the genesis of that.

And then the GameDay thing happened, so we used GameDay as the basic point or the jumping off point of the narrative week by week with GameDay.

Q:  Then you had that great finale of the Alabama‑Auburn game.  You really couldn’t have scripted it any better for a book.

FINEBAUM:  No, it was pretty dramatic.

*****

And there’s more.

As readers of this blog know, Jason Whitlock and I haven’t been the best of friends.

So I wasn’t expecting much when I saw the latest entry in Still No Cheering in the Press Box, the sportswriter interview project by the Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Maryland. The subject was none other than my old pal Jason.

You could be sure there was plenty of Whitlock’s bravado in there. Such as:

I’m sure I’ve said many things I regret, but what you need to keep in mind about me that’s different than most is that I’m 47, I’m not married and I don’t have kids.

I can be more provocative and fearless than many of my peers, who are married with kids. The repercussions that they suffer affect other people. Here, it’s just me.

That’s a somewhat ridiculous statement, considering there are plenty of provocative and fearless journalists who are married with kids. Whitlock’s hero, Mike Royko, was married and had children.

Whitlock also had an interesting perspective on his initial break-up with ESPN and then his reunion.

I worked at ESPN for six years, left for seven years and during the six or seven years that I left, I was a thorn in ESPN’s side. Not because I disliked ESPN but because ESPN has been the world’s most powerful institution in sports and it needed to be questioned by someone with stature and credibility.

Whitlock later says he left because ESPN wasn’t paying him enough. Regardless, there definitely was considerable bitterness that led to him lashing out at his former company. Now all is hunky dory again.

Yet despite all the bluster, Whitlock actually had some insights and advice on journalism that are worth sharing.

Whitlock felt he benefited by starting small:

After a year of writing various stories, The Charlotte Observer interviewed me and gave me a job covering high school sports for them at one of their bureaus in South Carolina.

That was my first full-time job and I think I got paid $403 a week. I was a growing boy; it was hard to eat on $403 dollars a week.

Starting in smaller markets is the route to go. There are a lot of people that study at journalism school and say “Oh, I think it’ll be cool,” and they get out of school and they find out they have to go to a small market and this is particularly true for African-Americans.

We want to be in a big city where there are a lot of African-Americans and a good social life and we say, “No, I am not going to do that.”

I wanted it so badly that I didn’t care where I had to go to get a job. I wrote nearly every newspaper in the country looking for a job.

You go to a small market like that, and particularly for someone like me who wasn’t very good, it was a great place to learn and hone my craft.

When I did get to a major market, I would be better than someone that came out of college and goes to a major market and has to do all the learning that I did in the minor leagues.

Whitlock talked about developing a niche:

When something happens in the NFL, people think “Oh, let me see what Peter King says.” Everybody has to have something like that, and for me, I knew it was going to be the intersection of sports and culture and sports and race.

When something that goes on in the sports world goes along racial lines, I wanted people to think “Oh, I want to see what Whitlock has to say.”

On stirring the pot:

I think most people are sheep, and again, one of the things that I like to tell young journalists is if you’re going to be a journalist and not just a writer, you have to be comfortable when other people are uncomfortable around you.

Too many people enter this profession hoping that they’ll walk into a press box or walk into a locker room hoping that everyone is happy to see them. I don’t really care. … I want my family to be happy to see me; I want my friends to be happy to see me; I relatively want my coworkers to be happy to see me, but the people that I cover, it’s not that I want them to hate me, but I don’t care what they’re feeling.

On his new website at ESPN:

I’m going to be launching this website that will be directed at African American sports fans, and I think that that will

1: foster an environment where we as African Americans can do some self-analysis, and

2: I think it will help some people in the African-American community understand where I’m coming from.

I feel like sometimes people think “You’re too tough on us; you’re too tough on black people.”

And I think, by doing this website, they’re going to see that it’s tough love, it’s not disrespect. It’s belief and self-confidence in us that we can handle self-examination and some of the things that we are doing in our culture. That’s healthy for us. I think that if things go well, my voice on black cultural issues will get stronger and more respected.

On learning the landscape:

My advice [to young journalists] would be to really understand and study journalism. So many people are focused on how they can capitalize on all of these new opportunities in journalism, but they have virtually no understanding of what journalism is.

And on the power of the written word:

You have to remember that broadcasting is, to me, mostly for entertainment. It’s for marketing your written content; for marking the other stuff that you do.

I’m a journalist at the end of the day, so I believe in the written word, I believe in newspapers and I believe that the most important conversations and analysis happens in writing.

But, I do think that the things you do on TV can elevate your reach as a writer and it’s important.

I think that we’re reading more than ever, we’re just reading it on the Internet and in different forms.

We’re reading with more immediacy than previously intended, and so, while some of it isn’t as thoughtful, we will eventually figure it out: How to be thoughtful on the Internet, the same way we were thoughtful in the newspapers.

I never thought I would say this, but I am going share Whitlock’s story with my sports journalism class at DePaul this fall. There are some good lessons in there.

There are many challenges facing new MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. One, though, stands out above the others.

Tyler Kepner in the New York Times zeroes in on the main issue plaguing baseball in his lede:

The fundamental problem facing Major League Baseball and its next commissioner, Rob Manfred, is that attention spans are getting shorter while games are getting longer. Confronting these clashing realities may be Manfred’s top priority when he takes office in January. It will be the first transition at the top of baseball’s hierarchy since Bud Selig replaced Fay Vincent in 1992.

“The job is much more complicated,” said Larry Baer, the chief executive of the San Francisco Giants. “You’re dealing with a 20- or 25-channel world, maybe, in 1992. Now you’re in a 500-channel universe and the Internet. You’re communicating with people that are walking down the street consuming baseball. And that’s a good thing; that’s positive. But we have to figure out ways to make it relevant to that 12-year-old.”

Sunday was a case in point. Here is what I found from reviewing the boxscores of the 16 games (the Reds and Rockies played a doubleheader):

Of the 16 games, 7 lasted in excess of three hours.

Another 5 fell between 2:55 and three hours.

The fastest game was 2:49 for Atlanta’s 4-3 victory over Oakland. The slowest was 3:59 for Colorado’s 10-9 win over Cincinnati.

Oh, you say the Rockies win took so long because of all the runs scored. Well, how do you explain the fact that Kansas City’s 12-6 victory over Minnesota took only 2:51, tying for the second quickest game Sunday? Indeed, it’s not just about the volume of runs.

Imagine the lack of nothing happening in the Yankees’ 4-2 victory over Tampa Bay, which dragged on for 3:13.

Indeed, the slow pace issue has to be Manfred’s main priority. Thankfully, momentum is building for something to be done.

From Kepner’s story:

That includes improving the pace of play. Thirty years ago, the average time of a game was 2 hours 35 minutes. This season, through last Sunday’s games, it was 3 hours 2 minutes 47 seconds, which would be the longest on record. Players sense the problem.

The Yankees’ Mark Teixeira, when asked what the new commissioner’s top priority should be, said: “From a fan’s perspective, getting kids interested in the game again, watching the game. I just know that kids don’t watch the game like I did, and pace of play doesn’t help that.”

I’ll keep working the stopwatch at Sherman Report.

My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center is on local and national TV ratings for baseball. Something doesn’t add up.

From the column:

********

You’ve heard the familiar storyline: Sports fans are losing interest in baseball. The game moves too slowly, young viewers are tuning out, even old viewers are drifting elsewhere.

Well, as Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend.”

Last week, Maury Brown did a piece for Forbes.com on local TV ratings for baseball. It suggests that reports of the game’s demise have been grossly exaggerated.

Brown wrote:

Major League Baseball is king during prime time at the regional level thus far this season for regional sports networks (RSNs) winning the key prime time slot in the US markets that Nielsen Media Company tracks.

The data bolsters the position that baseball continues to be a solid programming choice for networks in the summer when the major networks are in reruns.

According to the information from Nielsen, of the 29 U.S.-based clubs in the league, 12 of them are the #1-rated programming in prime time since the start of the season in their home markets, beating both broadcast and cable competition. These teams include the Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, Milwaukee Brewers, Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals, Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants, and Arizona Diamondbacks.

Mr. Corso, can I have a little help here? I could use another, “Not so fast, my friend.” There are a couple of things to consider in Brown’s post.

Judging baseball’s success in terms of where it rates among prime-time programming doesn’t say as much as you’d think. With so many choices out there for viewers, the ratings for all prime-time shows have been extremely splintered, resulting in a much lower threshold to be No. 1 in a time slot. In many evenings in our house, the most viewed shows are on Netflix.

Also, I would offer that local baseball telecasts, especially for successful teams, have generated strong ratings among other prime-time programming in recent years, given the current TV landscape. I don’t think this is a recent trend.
Brown’s story also doesn’t get into any historical context. Are local baseball ratings higher, lower, flat in 2014? Yes, the game does well in primetime, but are the overall numbers improving at the local level? It still is tied to winning and losing. Last week, in a Chicago Tribune column , I detailed sharp local TV ratings declines for the struggling Cubs and White Sox.

Later in the story, Brown asks a key question:

The numbers bode do bode well for network partners, such as Fox Sports. The question is, why do national ratings seem to lag, while regionally ratings are mostly flourishing?

The issue about lagging national numbers is easy to answer. Again it deals with splintered ratings due to so many national games being available on so many different platforms. We’re a long way from the days of Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek on NBC Game of the Week on Saturday afternoons as the only national game on the menu. Does anyone even know where to find the Fox Saturday game anymore?

The more relevant ratings are for the All-Star Game and the post-season. If baseball is generating so much interest on the local level, it logically would follow that there should be more viewers tuning in to the games on the sport’s biggest stage, right?

Nope.

******

And there’s more about the national ratings for baseball. The link to the rest of the column.

My latest Chicago Tribune column is on the local TV ratings for the Cubs and White Sox for 2014 compared to 2008, when both teams made the playoffs and baseball was king in Chicago.

You also can access a link to the full column via my Twitter feed at @Sherman_Report.

From the column:

*******

On May 28, 2008, Alfonso Soriano’s game-winning single in the 10th inning gave the Cubs a 2-1 victory over the Dodgers. While a crowd of 39,945 jammed Wrigley Field, many more fans throughout the Chicago area were sitting in front of their televisions to watch WGN-9’s telecast.

WGN averaged an 11.3 local rating for the game, peaking at 16.6. That means nearly 600,000 homes were tuned in. Those are astounding numbers for a regular-season game in May.

In 2014, the Cubs don’t even average 50,000 homes for many of their games.

The landscape was much different six years ago. Everyone was on the Cubs bandwagon. They were en route to a National League-best 97 victories and second straight Central title. The White Sox also had a great season, winning the American League Central in a one-game playoff.

Meanwhile, the Blackhawks barely registered on the radar (0.6 average rating on CSN for the 2007-08 season) in the days before Stanley Cup titles, and Derrick Rose had yet to begin his rookie season with the Bulls.

Indeed, 2008 was the last time baseball was king in Chicago among pro teams not named the Bears; the NFL operates in an entirely different stratosphere.

Looking back not only reveals the huge decline in local ratings for the Cubs and Sox, but also shows the potential if (when?) the teams become good again.

Here are the not-so-happy totals on the cable side:

• The Cubs, headed for a fourth straight season with 90 or more defeats, are averaging a 1.5 rating for their games on CSN this year, down 72 percent from their 5.0 average rating in 2008; 1 local ratings point currently equates to 36,000 homes. CSN pulled an 8.3 rating for the Cubs’ 6-4 victory over Milwaukee on July 28, 2008. It still is a record for a Cubs game on CSN.

• The Sox are averaging a 1.4 rating for their games on CSN in 2014, down 27 percent from their 2.3 average rating in 2008. The good news for the Sox is that their ratings are up 23 percent from 2013, when they lost 99 games.

WGN declined to disclose its 2014 ratings for the Cubs and White Sox. The station has been very quick to boast of strong ratings from the Blackhawks and Bulls in recent years — and even for that Cubs-Dodgers game in 2008 — but remains silent when there’s bad news.

It is safe to say the ratings declines for baseball on WGN are similar to what CSN has experienced.

My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center is on the PGA Tour’s veil of secrecy in the wake of the Dustin Johnson situation.

From the column:

*********

We live in a society where transparency rules. Sports leagues have been far more open about their activities and the way they interact with players and coaches.

It really can’t be any other way with the modern media landscape. The spotlight always is turned on high with so many different platforms peering in these days. It seems silly to try to hide.

Then there’s the PGA Tour.

Last week, the Tour went behind its usual veil of secrecy when the news about Dustin Johnson broke. After the golfer initially announced he was taking time off for “personal reasons,” Golf.com broke the story that he had been suspended for six months after testing positive for the third time for using marijuana and cocaine.

The Tour quickly issued a statement, saying Johnson wasn’t under suspension and that his leave of absence is voluntary. However, nobody is buying that. There’s a prevailing feeling that it is a matter of semantics here. Johnson jumped before he was pushed.

PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem continues to go with a policy of not disclosing penalties to its players when they stray off of life’s fairway. In a column about Johnson last week, Bob Harig of ESPN.com ran a 2009 quote from Finchem addressing his don’t-tell stance.

“Why don’t we talk about it or give out the details? One, we don’t feel like people really care that much,” Finchem said. “We don’t get emails from fans saying, ‘Why don’t you tell us.’ So we don’t think there’s this hunger for that information. Two, candidly, we don’t have that much of it, and we don’t want to remind people about it.”

Perhaps somebody is filtering his emails, because Finchem is deluding himself if he thinks people aren’t interested in the PGA Tour handing out penalties to its players. Fans definitely want to know why a player suddenly disappears from action. Before the Golf.com story came out, speculation was rampant about the exact nature of Johnson’s problems. That definitely wasn’t in his best interests.

After going out to dinner, I tuned into the Yankees-Red Sox game last night at 9:45 p.m. Central (10:45 in the East for those who can’t figure it out).

And the game only was in the sixth inning!

Yep, ESPN aired another version of the Boston Marathon on its Sunday night showcase. I bailed quickly, not wanting to get sucked in to another slog at Fenway. Looked at the box score this morning and saw the Yankees won 8-7 in a brisk 3 hours, 42 minutes.

I’m sure the game did a strong rating, because Yankees-Red Sox always performs for the networks. But as a baseball fan, I’ve had enough. The Red Sox are dead and the Yankees are barely treading water. So let’s suspend the mandate that requires one of the national TV partners to air every pitch of this vault rivalry.

Fox Sports 1 also made Yankees-Red Sox its main game Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, Milwaukee was playing a big series with the Cardinals in St. Louis.

There are plenty of other good teams that deserve to showcased. Hey, have you heard of the Oakland A’s, owners of the best record in baseball?

Fortunately, the A’s will get some national love in August. However, as Steve Lepore at Awful Announcing writes, it has been a long time coming:

Oakland will make two consecutive appearances on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball this month, a rarity for even some of the bigger market teams. The A’s visit the Atlanta Braves on August 17th, making their first appearance on Sunday night since May 28, 2006. That’s right, they haven’t been on MLB’s biggest TV showcase since the Bush administration. The very next week, they host the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at O.co Coliseum, their first home game on Sunday night since September 4, 2005.

The very next week, the Angels and A’s (the teams with the two best records in the sport) will meet up again, and this time the big telecast belongs to MLB Network. Bob Costas, Jim Kaat and Tom Verducci will have the call. While he hasn’t been calling games with much regularity the past two decades, this factoid may shock you: the August 28th game will be the first time Costas has called an Athletics since the 1989 American League Championship Series. That was when he was working for NBC and broadcasting games with Tony Kubek in that network’s final season of play.

I look forward to seeing the A’s and some of the other contenders such as Washington, Milwaukee (in first place all year), Toronto, Detroit.

According to the schedule, the Yankees-Red Sox play two more series in September. Only one of those games should be on national TV: The season finale in Boston, which will be Derek Jeter’s final regular-season game and perhaps final game, period.

Otherwise, enough.

My latest Chicago Tribune column is on Dan McNeil and his uncertain future at WSCR.

You also can access the column via my Twitter feed at @Sherman_Report.

From the column:

*******

Dan McNeil has been on the radio host sidelines since the end of June and might remain there for a long time.

That’s OK with him.

He says the time off would allow him to work on his short game in golf, and more importantly, pursue writing a book about his son Patrick’s struggle with autism.

“I’ve been thinking about this for five years,” McNeil said Thursday. “I want to write about how autism has affected the journey through life for a family in Northwest Indiana. I’d like to leave a greater footprint in my career than just talking about point spreads and pucks.”

McNeil should get a definitive answer on whether he can start writing in the next couple of weeks. He has been off the air as co-host of WSCR-AM 670’s midday show with Matt Spiegel since the end of June when his contract expired. Negotiations are at impasse with McNeil seeking a substantial raise over a reported salary in the $275,000 range.

McNeil said he wants to remain with the station. But this could be the end of that road for him.

“Everything has been amicable,” McNeil said. “It just has taken a bit longer than either side would want it to.”

WSCR officials declined to comment on the situation.

McNeil said it was his desire to be out for most of July for family trips while he was in between contracts. However, he regrets he didn’t inform listeners of his plans.

“In retrospect, it could have been handled better,” McNeil said. “I apologize to my many loyal fans who were left in the dark.”

Well, Dan Le Batard accomplished one thing: He got the Hall of Fame and Baseball Writers Association of America to enact a new rule because of the stunt he pulled last year after handing over his ballot to Deadspin.

From Barry Bloom at MLB.com:

The Hall will now require an Internet registration of the approximately 625 eligible members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and those voters will be notified about a specific code of conduct regarding the handling of that ballot. Voters will be asked to formally agree to a stipulation that their ballot is non-transferable with a penalty of permanently losing that vote.

Not sure that rule would have stopped Le Batard last year. He knew he was going to lose his vote by breaking the unwritten code. But at least now it is in writing.

The BBWA and the Hall also announced that it will release the list of all 600-plus voters. Hall president Jeff Idelson said this is being done because of “transparency.”

However, the Hall and BBWAA stopped short of opting to publish all votes. It still will be up to the writers whether they want to disclose their choices.

The extra step needed to be taken. Journalists fight for transparency on a daily basis in their coverage. It seems a bit hypocritical not to do the same with Hall of Fame voting.

Fans deserve to know if someone votes for Jacques Jones or doesn’t vote for Greg Maddux, as was the case last year.