Professional college sports.

Ever more product placement will be forthcoming, and the line between college sports and television money became even narrower recently when a New York Times story discussed how Nike and College Sports Television, or CSTV, struck a deal to snuggle even more closely in a bed whose mattress is stuffed with greenbacks and whose sheets are embossed with dollar signs.

CSTV is a cable channel, only seven months old; it shows college sports, 24 hours a day, to about 15 million homes and hopes to double its size within two years. Its leaders, Brian Bedol and Stephen Greenberg, formed the Classic Sports Network in 1995 and later sold it to ESPN.

"Nike Training Camp" joins the network soon. It will be a half-hour show, programmed regularly and featuring college coaches who--one would guess--will be wearing Nike clothes, hats and shoes and using Nike equipment while instructing on how to improve, or excel, at one or another sport. Tips on training will be passed out, too. At least six episodes are already scheduled, and the focus is on schools and colleges which have endorsement deals with Nike.

As the boundaries between commercials and programming continue to be blurred, especially with college sports as the subject matter, discussion continues. Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a Portland, Ore.-based organization that opposes continuing over-commercialization, accused embedded advertising of "taking over television," and college sports and accused it of being deceptive.

Chris Bevilacqua, executive vice-president of CSTV, responded, "There's always criticism. But by and large, what Nike and other corporate sponsors do has high value to college student athletes because it helps them promote their universities."

Murray Sperber, professor of English and American Studies at Indiana University, said that as college sports became more and more commercialized, so did the colleges themselves, and Ruskin commented on the same topic, saying, "This is one small part of the commercialization of the university, and its drift from the education mission, obviously at high cost to the integrity of the universities."

Myles Brand, former president of Indiana University and now the president of the NCAA, responded by defending CSTV and pointing out that it had helped the sports and the universities it covered.

"We like the content because it lets us spotlight some of the sports and schools that don't normally get heard of," he said and continued, "It always brings challenges when you have new partners. I would hope, and do believe, that the CSTV leadership knows we're interested in keeping a balance between the commercialization and the integrity of sports."

Interesting to see that even Brand apparently noted, or told, The Times that commercialization and integrity seem to be on opposite sides.