This Wall Street Journal ($) article describes the financial disaster that is the CBS contract with the NCAA for the right to telecast the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. CBS is entering the second year of an 11-year, $6 billion deal with the NCAA for the rights to carry the tournament games. That high price, coupled with declining viewership for the games, almost ensures that CBS will lose tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on the event over the life of the contract. Even optimists think the best CBS can hope for is to break even on the contract. The article goes on to point out:

The NCAA contract is particularly onerous for CBS, though. Not only is it more than double what the network had been paying, but also the rights fees will rise dramatically over the 11 years. This year, CBS will pay the NCAA $389 million for essentially three weeks of college basketball, not much less than what it pays the NFL for five months of regular-season and postseason football. For the 2013 tournament, the last under the current agreement, CBS will pay $764 million, according to the NCAA.

. . . Making the high costs even more worrisome is viewership. The audience for the NCAA tournament has been on a steady decline since hitting 34.3 million viewers for the final game in 1992 (Duke vs. Michigan) The 2002 final between Indiana and Maryland drew 23.7 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. Last year’s audience for the Syracuse-Kansas championship game was 18.6 million. To be sure, the Iraq war hurt last year’s tournament numbers, but even so, viewership has clearly been on a downward trend.

And the clincher:

The NCAA also gets final say on who can and can’t advertise in the tournament . . . It also bans commercials for Viagra and other erectile-dysfunction drugs, bad news for CBS since pharmaceutical companies like to spend money on sports to reach older men.

Which leads to CBS’ mantra upon the inevitable renegotiation of this albatross: “No Viagra, no way!”