ESPN Events


ESPN Events is an American multinational sporting event promoter owned by ESPN Inc. It is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and shares its operations with SEC Network and formerly with ESPNU. The corporation organizes sporting events for broadcast across the ESPN family of networks, including, most prominently, a group of college football bowl games and in-season college basketball tournaments.
ESPN Events previously operated primarily as a syndicator of college sports broadcasts; the company was founded as Creative Sports, a sports programming syndicator that merged with Don Ohlmeyer's OCC Sports in 1996. After ESPN purchased the merged company, the division was renamed ESPN Regional Television, which distributed telecasts for syndication on broadcast stations and regional sports networks; these telecasts were also available on the ESPN GamePlan and ESPN Full Court out-of-market sports packages. Most of ERT's broadcasts were presented under the on-air branding ESPN Plus, but this name was later phased out in favor of dedicated on-air brands for each package, such as SEC Network.
Following its acquisition of the Las Vegas Bowl in 2001, ERT began to double as an organizer of sporting events. The subdivision, which later began to operate under the name ESPN Events, would acquire and establish other bowl games to provide additional post-season opportunities for bowl-eligible teams. ESPN Events also organizes several pre-season tournaments in college basketball, as well as the season-opening Camping World Kickoff and Texas Kickoff football games. All ESPN Events are broadcast by ESPN's networks.
ESPN Regional Television began to wind down its syndication operations in the 2010s, as the proliferation of competing outlets took over most of the conference rights and overflow formerly held by the company.

History

The company traces its history to Creative Sports, Inc., a North Carolina-based sports syndicator owned and founded by Bray Cary. ESPN Inc. purchased Creative Sports, Inc. and OCC Sports, Inc. in the mid-1990s.
On July 22, 1994, ESPN Regional Television was incorporated in Delaware. ESPN Regional Television was formed in 1996, through ESPN Inc.'s combination of Creative Sports and OCC Sports, under the direction of Chuck Gerber and Loren Matthews. In January 2000, Loren Matthews left ESPN Regional Television for an executive position at sister division ABC Sports. By February 2000, ERT acquired the production rights to the Arena Football League; this included responsibilities for AFL broadcasts on The Nashville Network, which had ESPN retain duties for the events in lieu of its own unit, World Sports Enterprises.
In 2001, ESPN Regional Television moved beyond broadcasting college football bowl games, when it purchased the Las Vegas Bowl from Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. ESPN Regional did so to help partner conferences that had bowl qualified teams but no bowl available. The company bought four more bowls and started two others.
In August 2008, ESPN reached a 15-year, $2.25 billion broadcast rights agreement with the SEC. As part of the deal, ESPN also assumed the syndicated package of games previously held by Raycom Sports; beginning in 2009, ERT syndicated SEC football and basketball under the SEC Network brand.
The original business of ESPN Regional Television began to grow obsolete with the launch of dedicated networks dedicated to specific conferences, including the Big Ten Network, Pac-12 Network, and the ESPN-operated SEC Network, since they largely assumed rights to the game packages that ESPN had previously syndicated. As such, the division pivoted to focusing solely on organizing events, particularly within college football and basketball.

Broadcast rights

Former rights

ESPN Plus used to hold the rights to Conference USA football and basketball, Mountain West Conference football and basketball, and Big Ten Conference football and basketball, but has lost them as detailed below:

College football

ERT acquired its first bowl game in 2001, with its purchase of the Las Vegas Bowl from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The company moved into the area as it saw that some of their conference partners had teams that were bowl-eligible, but with no bowl available to take them. By 2013, ERT had founded two new bowl games and purchased four additional games. The games primarily serve as a source of live content for ESPN during the early weeks of bowl season, prior to the larger, traditional games in proximity to New Year's Day. This strategy has been successful for ESPN, although it has in recent years contributed to an oversaturation of bowl games that have prevented them from all being populated by bowl-eligible teams. ESPN also runs the Celebration Bowl in Division I FCS, which is played between the champions of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and the Southwestern Athletic Conference — the two prominent conferences of historically black colleges and universities.
ESPN Events operates the following bowls, which ESPN televises:
ESPN Events also organizes several opening weekend games, such as the Camping World Kickoff, Advocare Texas Kickoff, and FCS Kickoff.
ESPN Events is also involved in college basketball, operating early-season events such as the AdvoCare Invitational, the Champions Classic, the Jimmy V Classic, the NIT Season Tip-Off, and the Phil Knight Invitational.

College marketing division

The company's success with college tournament operation and broadcasting led ESPN Regional Television to form a college marketing division, which provides colleges all-in-one services for selling sponsorships, local media rights and other marketing campaigns. The University of South Florida, the University of Kansas and the University of Oregon are some of the clients that the division began representing in 2000.