When I was growing up I was just a little bit different as a sports obsessed teenager. (Ok, I was probably a little bit to a lot different in other areas of life too, but I digress.)
My favorite sports channel wasn’t ESPN – it was Fox Sports World.
Sure, I loved football and basketball and all the other sports that most of us grew up with. But there was something special about being exposed to all the great sports from around the world. Fox Sports World was that outlet where you could watch everything from gaelic football to Australian Rules Football and from darts to cricket.
Sadly, Fox Sports World fell by the wayside as the network transitioned to Fox Soccer Channel, which later folded into the new Fox Sports lineup we have today. Many of those great sports were lost forever or moved to a pay service like Fox Soccer Plus. We do get the occasional Aussie Rules match on Fox Sports 2… but that’s not even in HD for too many of us.
There’s few experiences quite like diving into a completely foreign sport and developing into a new fan. It’s exhilirating, challenging, fun, and confusing all at the same time. You begin to learn some of the teams, then start to understand a few of the rules and learn what some of the strategies might be, then you begin to develop affinities with teams and players, and finally get to the point where you’re all in. I’m that way with Australian football now, but I don’t think my local sports talk station is going to take any calls on Paddy Dangerfield’s move to Geelong.
One of the first sports that drew me in was rugby. You can’t encounter an athlete like Jonah Lomu or a magician like Carlos Spencer and not be hooked in some way. Probably not too many teens would rather stay home on a Friday night and watch a Ranfurly Shield defense, but again, there’s that whole not being normal thing again.
This is a really long way of saying when I first heard that NBC would be offering live coverage of the Rugby World Cup Final, I was beyond excited. This Saturday is the day, when the All Blacks of New Zealand face the Wallabies of Australia at Twickenham in London. For years we’ve only been offered delayed coverage or expensive PPV telecasts of one of the most prestigious sporting events in the entire world. Now the biggest game in one of the biggest sports in the world will finally be accessible to the entire country and promoted in a huge way.
It’s hard to understate what a huge deal this is for American rugby fans. The 2011 tournament claimed to reach 750 million households around the world and this year’s edition is projected to break every record on the books. Imagine finally being able to watch the biggest events of the Olympics live for the first time in 2015… ok, maybe that’s a bad example.
I won’t drill down too deep into the matchup (you can do that here), but there couldn’t be a better one for the World Cup’s first big bow on network television stateside. These are the two best teams in world rugby, arguably its best rivalry, and its best stage. You couldn’t ask for more.
There is a growing market for rugby and NBC has been investing a lot in the sport ever since it was named as a future Olympic sport. Of course, the Olympic version of 7’s is vastly different than what you’ll see on Saturday with a full game of 15’s – but hopefully one can help the other grow as new fans continue to come on board. NBC offered limited coverage of the Rugby World Cup this year, showing some USA Eagles games (they were easily eliminated in the group phase) and a semifinal last week. Universal will also broadcast the third place game between South Africa and Argentina.
You don’t have to be a rugby fan or a hardcore sports wonk to appreciate the athletic artistry that will be on display this weekend. The precision kicking of the flyhalfs, the bruising scrummaging and mauling of the forward packs, the power and the speed of the backs – these are athletic traits that we all enjoy regardless of the sport.
Hopefully NBC can use this year’s tournament as a springboard to showing more RWC action and more rugby overall. This is a great opportunity for the network this weekend. Realistically, it’s not going to get very high rating and a majority of viewers are going to have no idea what the difference is between a ruck and a maul.
Nevertheless, it’s a win for fans who get one more live sports option and also get exposure to one of the world’s great sporting events. It’s also smart for NBC from a business sense as well.
Live sports rights are exploding across the industry and all of the sports networks (not just ESPN) are trying to figure out on the fly how to best move forward more efficiently. Taking a flyer on a hugely popular world sport like rugby and seeing if it can grow stateside is a low-risk and high-reward proposition. After seeing the growth of the EPL on NBC the last couple years, the network should be encouraged that there’s an audience for world class sports no matter the code or the origin.
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About Matt Yoder