HOOVER, Ala. -- Recession? What recession?
The SEC just spat on the global economic downturn and went, well, global. Foreclosed on a convent. Lit a cigar with a $100 bill.
There are folks trying to make rent in these trying times. The nation's most powerful football conference is trying to keep from laughing all the way to the bank.
The announcement of the SEC Network on Wednesday at the conference's preseason media days confirmed a new reality. Never mind the SEC becoming a national brand. All things considered, SEC football just became the world's most popular sport behind soccer and the NFL.
• SB Nation: SEC media days | B/R: SEC's best of the last 25 years
That's what a 15-year, $3 billion contract with ESPN, CBS and others will do for a conference's profile. ESPN made a grandiose announcement here at the SEC preseason media days calling their piece a "network" but really all the rightsholders are partners.
There is so much content that ESPN can't fit it all on its family of networks. Through the year 2024, the Worldwide Leader will show an average of one SEC event per day. But Fox is also a partner. So is Comcast. CBS has had the No. 1 choice of the SEC game of the week since 2000.
Even with the over-the-top, overhyping that ESPN can provide, Mike Aresco sees it this way: Consider it all a weeklong lead-in for CBS which gets the choice of the No. 1 SEC game each week.
"People watch what they think is important," said Aresco, CBS Sports executive vice president.
And the SEC is important from Wall Street to Beale Street. That's quite a change from the 1990s when the league was seen as a passion in a nine-state region.
You can invest in gold, if you want. The networks have invested in the gold standard.
"[It is] a period that someday may be called the SEC's Golden Age," commissioner Mike Slive said.
Someday?
Now they all drink of the same bottle of Cristal in the worst economy since the depression. The league hit it just right, finalizing the deal last year right before the economy tanked. The challenge now is for the rightsholders to make their money back through ad sales.
Unless there are bread lines, they seem confident. If the economy does flat line, we're all in trouble and nothing else will matter anyway.
Either way the SEC will party the same way: Grab another beer and getcha some ribs off the grill. The game's about to come on.
The league has taken over college football, TV -- and our minds. All our babies from now on will be named Zeke or Bubba. A fourth meal was just added to the human diet -- tailgate.
If the SEC were a nation, it would have finished fourth at the Beijing Olympics. Fifty-one former or current SEC athletes won medals.
There are close to 1,000 media here this week chronicling a league that drew 450,000 -- for its spring games.
With the announcement, the rest of the sport has been put in a secondary position financially and athletically. The Big Ten has to be kicking itself. Its fledgling network now looks like a mom and pop. Pete Carroll ought to be sweating too. The deal proves that there are enough folks in Southern California that care about, say, LSU to make the Tigers' games more available in USC territory.
That's a snapshot. Starting this season, every SEC football game will be televised on some platform or another. SEC schools are going to average a BCS bowl payout each year from now until 2024, $17 million in rights fees per season. The entire ACC contract with ABC/ESPN is worth $75 million. Vanderbilt will surpass that number in five years with its split of the new deal.
Slive was asked how any other conference can now possibly compete with his league.
"I wish you could print the expression on my face," Slive said looking like a happy drunk.
BCS? The SEC freakin' is the BCS. This is going to do nothing to slow the momentum from three consecutive national championships and four out of the last six.
You know what's scary? Slive says the league didn't even need that recent success to seal the deal. It's the fact that there are a whole lot of people in, say, Seattle who care about Auburn.
There are GM workers looking for transmissions to build. They might want to think about retraining. Someone is going to have to manage all that SEC Digital Network web content. That's another vein of income in the deal waiting to be mined.
In the negotiations, SEC schools wanted to keep the rights to their archives. At a place like Florida that means, in theory, fans can now put on a bib to catch their drool while watching a 24-hour loop of Steve Spurrier highlights from 1966 on their laptops. For the SEC? Pure profit when they go to sell ads.
With money just floating around, Nick Saban is going to look underpaid at $4 million per year. There will be kids in Orange County, Calif., growing up South Carolina fans.
In the end, the league moves the needle. CBS found that out in the late 1990s when it started doing SEC games.
"We were criticized by a lot of people in the industry," Aresco said. "You can't take a regional conference like the SEC and do a national package. Your affiliates will balk, they won't want to do it. People outside the region won't care.
"We said, 'Look, this is really good football.'"
Throw in the BCS and suddenly it has become CSI: Tuscaloosa. A weekly drama with a familiar cast.
"The coaches are the stars," Aresco said. Even Lane Kiffin, the Tennessee titan who hasn't coached a college game but has lit up plenty of rivals with his mouth of the South?
"It's perfect in terms of TV," Aresco said.
You might hear a lot of talk about college football being recession-proof. Not entirely true. Universities are struggling to balance budgets even with sold-out stadiums. But after helping fund football and the money-sucking minor sports with this deal, every SEC football program will now be able to contribute money to the university side.
If that's a bit of the Tide wagging the dog, who cares?
"It's going to be self-perpetuating for a while," Aresco said. "Nothing lasts forever, [but] three national championships in a row. Who knows?"
We've got until 2024, at least, to find out.
