Columnist Tim Graham: New league may attract TV dollars

TIM GRAHAM is a Las Vegas Sun sportswriter. His media column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached on the Internet at [email protected].

The Western Athletic Conference never was a media darling. But the new kid on the block could turn out to be.

Even with Utah's unlikely run in the NCAA men's basketball tournament and Brigham Young's football allure, the WAC never could score the huge financial windfall that other conferences do with their national television packages.

With 16 teams spread out over four time zones, the WAC wasn't very attractive to TV executives. Teams kicked off at 7 p.m. on the West Coast or in Hawaii, while the Central and Eastern Time Zone denizens got heavy eyelids.

But everything changed Tuesday with the announcement UNLV, Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, New Mexico, San Diego State, Utah and Wyoming are seceding from the WAC to form a new conference in the summer of 1999.

The eight departing institutions strip the WAC of virtually every top football and basketball team. The last time one of the remaining WAC teams won a championship in either sport was the 1993-94 season, when Fresno State football and Hawaii basketball finished on top.

The new, streamlined league will be an attractive addition to the ESPN menu and should fetch a large sum, probably even more than the current WAC makes. Those teams, which generated a bulk of the WAC's income only to see equal portions given to the dregs, now will divide their riches eight ways rather than 16.

"Eight is a number you can get your arms around," UNLV athletic director Charlie Cavagnaro said. "Sixteen teams ... I can't even tell you how unwieldy it was."

With all the WAC's star power gone, ESPN cannot be content with its current agreement. The all-sports cable giant already had been threatening legal action against the WAC. ESPN claimed the conference breached their contract by failing to supply games for its "Full Court" premium college basketball package.

ESPN's current contracts with the WAC run through 2000-2001. But the network can terminate the deals now that the top teams are leaving.

All signs point to ESPN exercising the deal for one more season -- with all 16 teams intact -- before dropping the WAC in 1999.

Playing Fairless

Two weeks ago in this space, KVBC Channel 3 weekend sports anchor Brian Lippai criticized Green Valley High baseball coach Rodger Fairless for not granting an on-camera interview before a zone tournament game, thereby denying his players TV exposure.

Fairless responded Tuesday, three days after his Gators won their sixth consecutive state title.

"I would do anything at most any time to give my team or my players recognition," Fairless said. "But there is preparation before the game. You do have to come up with a lineup, talk to your coaches, tend to the scorebook.

"I'm a pretty intense person. Before a game I need time to get ready, and I like my team to do that, too, rather than talk to a TV camera."

Fairless, who also won six more state titles at Valley High, wondered aloud about Lippai's sports knowledge. Lippai claimed to have played baseball at Seton Hall.

"I would have to question if this guy was much of a competitor ever," Fairless said. "Before you get ready for a game you have to prepare yourself mentally.

"I don't want to neglect my athletes who have worked hard all season."

Sports in short

KVVU Channel 5 has decided not to deliver sports in a traditional manner when it debuts its news programming on Monday. Instead of having a sports anchor like Las Vegas' other three news stations, KVVU has opted for voiced-over highlights, a la CNN Headline News.

Jolin Kellogg will produce the sports segments, while Tom Hall will announce them. Hall, who KVVU news director Gwen Castaldi calls a veteran sportscaster, also is the station's assignment editor.

Slipping in Indy

ABC's Indy 500 coverage is catching some heat for two off-color remarks uttered during Sunday's telecast. One was incidental to a live broadcast; the other was incidental to stupidity.

The network can't be faulted when irate driver Tony Stewart, interviewed shortly after his engine blew while in first place, told a pit reporter he was tired of getting "s--- on."

Chalk that one up to road rage.

But there was no excuse for color commentator Tom Sneva's attempt at toilet humor when the race was seconds old. On the first turn of the first lap, rookie driver J.J. Yeley spun out. In describing the mishap, ABC's lead announcer, Paul Page, alluded to the skid marks on the track. Sneva chimed in by saying there probably were skid marks in Yeley's cockpit, too.

Doesn't Sneva know he's not supposed to air dirty laundry on national TV?

Static

The watered-down Indy 500 scored its lowest all-time overnight rating Sunday with a 5.6. That's down 18 percent from 1996 (the first year of the CART-Indy Racing League split) and 33 percent from 1995, placing the Indy 500 in the same category as an ordinary NASCAR race. Each rating point equals one percent of U.S. households with a TV, or 980,000 homes. ... Sister networks ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 team up to air the 1998 World Cup, covering all 64 matches from June 10-July 12. ESPN2 offers World Cup 2Night, a daily highlight show, at 4:30 p.m.

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