Former CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus recounts getting the NFL back on CBS

Now more than ever, owning NFL rights is key for a broadcast network’s survival.

And after losing rights to the league in 1994, CBS knew they had to get back in the game. Just a few short years later in 1998, the network was able to secure rights to the NFL’s AFC package, taking over for NBC. It was barely a year after CBS Sports had named Sean McManus its new president, but the man who would go on to lead CBS for the next 27 years knew how important it was to get the NFL back on his network.

Speaking at a fireside chat hosted by the UMass Amherst Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management on Tuesday, McManus recounted how the network got back in business with the most important professional sports league in America.

“Nobody thought we were going to get the NFL back, because they saw what happened to CBS when we lost the NFL. They were the number one network with the NFL. They went to being the number three network, actually the number four network in one year. The sports division, even though we had really good events like the Final Four, The Masters, and SEC football, the sports department wasn’t being taken seriously because we didn’t have the NFL.

“We lost a lot of our broadcasters. Pat Summerall and John Madden. A lot of producers who went to Fox, who stole the package away. And everybody thought, ‘Who is going to give up the NFL and let CBS back in?’ It’s all I thought about when I got the job was what can we do to get the NFL back.

“So we convinced the NFL to negotiate the AFC package, which was in some ways the least valuable package, AFC not having the markets that the NFC has. We convinced them to do that deal first. And we knew that NBC was targeting Monday Night Football. That’s what they wanted as their package. And we did our deal first, we gave them a huge number, $500 million dollars. They accepted our offer on a Friday afternoon…NBC had the right to match until nine o’clock on Monday morning. I could almost taste the fact that we were getting the NFL, keeping in mind that NBC, again thought they were getting Monday night. Every time my phone rang during the weekend I would jump 100 feet and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s Paul Tagliabue, the commissioner calling to tell me that NBC had matched,’ which would have dashed our dreams. And it would’ve been personally and professionally just devastating.

“So we get to nine o’clock on Monday morning, Paul Tagliabue calls me and says, ‘NBC didn’t match…once you sign [the contract] you have the NFL back on CBS.'”

As much as that phone call was a relief for McManus, it proved to be a nightmare for NBC.

“At the last minute, ABC, who had Monday Night Football, decided they were going to re-up it. And all of the sudden NBC said, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on here?’ And they said, ‘We’re sorry, ABC is picking it up.’ And [NBC] said, ‘We want to bid on the AFC package.’ And the NFL told them that that deal had already been done.”

What a whirlwind of emotion for McManus, who was still brand new to leading a network sports division. It’s safe to say that his efforts to secure the NFL for CBS completely altered the network’s trajectory throughout the next several decades. Now, it’s hard to imagine what CBS would look like without the NFL (if it would even exist at all).

Hearing about how matching rights were adjudicated back then is reminiscent of the NBA’s recent fiasco with Warner Bros. Discovery. NBC seems to have been iced out of the NFL back then in a similar way to how WBD was left out of the new set of NBA deals.

It goes to show how much the leagues value being wanted. Aside from the pure dollars and cents of it all, having a broadcast partner that wants you is quite important. NBC wanted to downsize from a conference package to a single-game package, while CBS wanted to jump back into the NFL business headfirst (and pay the league handsomely to do so).

In the end, CBS and McManus’ desire won out, and the network is much better off for it.

[UMass Amherst]