Who is Eddie Einhorn? Many American sports fans over age 65 will know. Younger sports fans — women’s basketball fans in particular — can learn something from Einhorn, a man who died in 2016 but who permanently changed basketball on television in 1968.
Women’s basketball is on the brink of becoming a much bigger television entity than it ever has been. We noted that the Caitlin Clark-fueled TV ratings bonanza for ESPN at the 2023 Women’s Final Four is reminiscent of the 1979 Magic Johnson-Larry Bird national championship game, when Michigan State beat Indiana State. That 1979 game was a major catalyst for the growth of men’s basketball on television. In that sense, men’s basketball went through a process in which the packaging and presentation came first. Then the personalities (Magic and Bird) took everything to another level.
The women’s game already has the personalities. Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese are TV ratings gold. Lots of other elite women’s basketball players are coming back for the 2023-2024 season instead of going to the WNBA. The material is already there to support bigger ratings and bigger market values for the sport and the events attached to it.
What remains unachieved is a new level of packaging and presentation. That’s where Eddie Einhorn comes in.
As this story from Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune documents in great detail, Einhorn revolutionized how college basketball was presented on American television. The sport was obscure and regional for the first 29 years of the NCAA Tournament era, dating back to 1939. However, in January of 1968, everything changed.
Einhorn ran a company — TVS (Television Sports) — which syndicated sports television broadcasts through numerous local and independent television stations across the country. Einhorn negotiated a deal for TVS to cover a special UCLA-Houston basketball game in the Astrodome, the first time that a basketball game would be played in a multi-purpose domed stadium. Einhorn worked out an arrangement with the Houston and UCLA athletic directors and Roy Hofheinz, a former Harris County (Houston) judge and Houston mayor who owned the newly-built Astrodome, which had opened in 1965.
The UCLA-Houston game was completely unprecedented as a television event, as a spectacle, and as a marketing opportunity for college basketball. Einhorn was taking calls from advertisers during that UCLA-Houston game. He wrote down 10-second spots and passed the text of those 10-second ads to the game’s television play-by-play man, Dick Enberg, who read the ads on the air.
Over 52,000 fans attended the game. Houston upset UCLA in a dramatic game everyone in America talked about for months.
“The launching pad for the incredible popularity of college basketball on television, I believe, started right there in Houston, close to NASA,” Enberg told the Los Angeles Daily News. “That really shot the rocket into the sky.”
Three years after that Astrodome game, the Astrodome would host the 1971 Final Four, with UCLA returning to Houston and winning a fifth consecutive national championship. Fourteen years after the 1968 UCLA-Houston game, the Final Four began to be played in domed stadiums on a regular basis. The 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1995 Final Fours were played in domes. After 1996, every subsequent Final Four has been played in a dome. Clearly, UCLA-Houston 1968 began a revolution in college basketball on television.
Obviously, no one will field calls from advertisers during a game today, but the parallel with women’s college basketball is pretty obvious: After the ratings breakthrough created by Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese (and South Carolina) at the 2023 Women’s Final Four, women’s college basketball should create made-for-TV games in domes.
The nuance: Women’s hoops probably shouldn’t try to play games in front of 60,000 or 70,000 people — not right away, at least. Domed stadium configurations can put the court in one corner of the stadium to facilitate a crowd of 35 to 40 thousand people. A 65,000-seat configuration puts the court in the middle of the stadium. It would make sense to start with 35,000 and work up to 70,000. This can be done in installments.
This much is clear, though: It’s time for women’s basketball to create more UCLA-Houston-style dome games and grow the product, now that its popularity is in a position to take off.
Women’s college basketball doesn’t need Eddie Einhorn, but it needs the marketing and packaging savvy Einhorn used 55 years ago to transform college basketball on television.
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