Smoke your cigars and enjoy the band while you can....

[sonofdaxjones]

In the back of my mind I still hold the notion that these guys are going to push it so far, that there's no way politicians aren't going to get involved, and the academic ranks are going to chime in as well.  Asking why universities are homes to professional sports, and why football and basketball coaches (and other sports) make more money than UP's, the Gubs etc. etc.   The her-her-her tell the chemistry prof to teach a class in front of 80K people line is going to start losing some steam.  As regular college kids pay higher and higher tuition while the pro athletes at the end of campus rake it in, and the admins and coaches are by far and away the highest paid people at the school.

I'm all for big time college athletics, but I never thought I'd see a day where athletic departments couldn't make ends meet making $30-$40-$50 million just on media rights alone.  With some now clearly in desperate need of even more money to avoid being bankrupt.

Read the Washington State Athletics financial recovery document, they're a freaking mess.  Cal is a mess, and now it sounds like UCLA is a mess. 

[sonofdaxjones]

https://theathletic.com/3410274/2022/07/08/college-football-realignment-tv-viewers/

measure the schools based on who wants to see them when they aren’t playing a team either in or headed to the Big Ten or SEC. So that’s what I did. I took the ratings spreadsheet I made last year* — which includes data from 2015-19 — and added 2021 data. I left out 2020 because the unevenness of the pandemic year skewed the numbers.

I then examined the games between teams that aren’t in or headed to the Big Ten or SEC (and aren’t Notre Dame) when they played other teams that aren’t in or headed to the Big Ten or SEC (and aren’t Notre Dame). Instead of four million, I set the cutline at one million. We still have the same issue of trying to decipher which school people tuned in to watch, but if a team that cracked a million at least 20 times in six seasons did it against a team that cracked a million twice in six seasons, it’s pretty easy to answer that question. It’s also pretty easy to imagine that if the team that cracked a million at least 20 times played in a league with a bunch of schools that regularly crack three or four million viewers, even more people would watch.

From 2015-19 and in 2021 there were 914 rated regular-season (no conference title games) televised games not involving Notre Dame or anyone who will be in the Big Ten or SEC.

• 284 of those games drew more than a million viewers. (By contrast, 732 of 951 games involving the Big Ten, SEC and/or Notre Dame drew more than one million viewers.)

34
Clemson
31
Florida State
28
Washington
26
Oregon
22
Miami
21
Washington State
19
Oklahoma State, Utah
18
Louisville, Stanford
16
North Carolina
15
Baylor, Colorado, Virginia Tech
14
TCU, West Virginia
13
Arizona State, Boise State
12
BYU, Cal, Pittsburgh
11
Cincinnati, NC State
10
Syracuse
9
Texas Tech, UCF, Virginia
8
Houston, USF, Wake Forest
7
Army, Boston College, Iowa State, Navy
6
Arizona, Georgia Tech, Memphis
5
Duke
4
Kansas State, SMU, Temple
3
Oregon State
2
Air Force, Colorado State, Kansas, Marshall, Tulsa, UConn, Utah State
1
1: Alcorn State, Appalachian State, Coastal Carolina, FAU, Kent State, N.C. Central, Rice, San Diego State, Nevada, Tulane

How does the same source page that he used for this article have K-State avg 1.2 million viewers in all but 1 year this article covers?  That makes no sense, but I've found that sports media website to not be very user friendly, so it's hard to tell.

[Katpappy]

I was right a few years back when I said the ESPN were shitheads, even thou SD didn't believe it.  Flitz thinks they are assholes.                                                                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                 

[chum1]

Two things I could live without in this thread:

1. Lists that make us look really bad
2. Fitz's takes

[wiley]

https://theathletic.com/3410274/2022/07/08/college-football-realignment-tv-viewers/

measure the schools based on who wants to see them when they aren’t playing a team either in or headed to the Big Ten or SEC. So that’s what I did. I took the ratings spreadsheet I made last year* — which includes data from 2015-19 — and added 2021 data. I left out 2020 because the unevenness of the pandemic year skewed the numbers.

I then examined the games between teams that aren’t in or headed to the Big Ten or SEC (and aren’t Notre Dame) when they played other teams that aren’t in or headed to the Big Ten or SEC (and aren’t Notre Dame). Instead of four million, I set the cutline at one million. We still have the same issue of trying to decipher which school people tuned in to watch, but if a team that cracked a million at least 20 times in six seasons did it against a team that cracked a million twice in six seasons, it’s pretty easy to answer that question. It’s also pretty easy to imagine that if the team that cracked a million at least 20 times played in a league with a bunch of schools that regularly crack three or four million viewers, even more people would watch.

From 2015-19 and in 2021 there were 914 rated regular-season (no conference title games) televised games not involving Notre Dame or anyone who will be in the Big Ten or SEC.

• 284 of those games drew more than a million viewers. (By contrast, 732 of 951 games involving the Big Ten, SEC and/or Notre Dame drew more than one million viewers.)

34
Clemson
31
Florida State
28
Washington
26
Oregon
22
Miami
21
Washington State
19
Oklahoma State, Utah
18
Louisville, Stanford
16
North Carolina
15
Baylor, Colorado, Virginia Tech
14
TCU, West Virginia
13
Arizona State, Boise State
12
BYU, Cal, Pittsburgh
11
Cincinnati, NC State
10
Syracuse
9
Texas Tech, UCF, Virginia
8
Houston, USF, Wake Forest
7
Army, Boston College, Iowa State, Navy
6
Arizona, Georgia Tech, Memphis
5
Duke
4
Kansas State, SMU, Temple
3
Oregon State
2
Air Force, Colorado State, Kansas, Marshall, Tulsa, UConn, Utah State
1
1: Alcorn State, Appalachian State, Coastal Carolina, FAU, Kent State, N.C. Central, Rice, San Diego State, Nevada, Tulane

How does the same source page that he used for this article have K-State avg 1.2 million viewers in all but 1 year this article covers?  That makes no sense, but I've found that sports media website to not be very user friendly, so it's hard to tell.

The article is essentially removing all OU, Texas, LSU, and Mississippi State football games.  Because SEC.  What also sucks is there are teams that obviously kill viewerships and those stats seem to be overlooked as well (when looking at the top teams viewing numbers and how much they drop playing certain teams).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[catastrophe]

I don’t know how you can put any stock in data that ends up getting so skewed by that kind of process. Seems like you’re better off just looking at how effectively each school was able to monetize its Tier 3 rights, right? People that are paying to watch their school on something like ESPN+ are obviously going to watch the other games.

[nicname]

How valuable would an OG Big XII be these days?

[Shooter Jones]

How valuable would an OG Big XII be these days?

I often think about this, and it would be so gd good. It makes me kind of feel bad so I try to ignore it for the most part.

BUT, WHAT IF we would've somehow been the first to move to a 16 team conference? Mostly just based on regional rivalries and ignoring everything that's ever happened in realignment.

If we could've got a few more from the southwest conference mashup in Arkansas (I know they went SEC a few years before the OG B12 was founded), and TCU/Houston (never would've been considered at the time, but here we are)...... Not sure who the 16th would be.

Either way, what an incredible conference with ridiculously good rivalries and cheap travel.

[MakeItRain]

How valuable would an OG Big XII be these days?

I often think about this, and it would be so gd good. It makes me kind of feel bad so I try to ignore it for the most part.

BUT, WHAT IF we would've somehow been the first to move to a 16 team conference? Mostly just based on regional rivalries and ignoring everything that's ever happened in realignment.

If we could've got a few more from the southwest conference mashup in Arkansas (I know they went SEC a few years before the OG B12 was founded), and TCU/Houston (never would've been considered at the time, but here we are)...... Not sure who the 16th would be.

Either way, what an incredible conference with ridiculously good rivalries and cheap travel.

Arkansas left the SWC in 1990. If the Big 12 expanded to 16 first and added Texas schools, it would have faced the same fate that the WAC did when it went to 16. The conference would have been better off picking off the best Big East programs before they were decimated. They could have plucked WVU, Pitt, Louisville, and whoever else. There was no way to know then what we know now, and like I said there was already a failed super conference. That being said, I don't know if anything stops ESPN from partnering with the SEC, Fox was already booed up with the Big 10.

[Shooter Jones]

I said to ignore all that, MIR!

[Houstoncat93]

How valuable would an OG Big XII be these days?

From a value standpoint I think Missouri and Colorado were equal to the schools who replaced them.

At the time Nubb was a big $ loss but I am wondering how much their value has dropped since then give ln small state and not much success. I am not sure they would make the cut today to get into the BIGSEC based on TV $ alone.

Aggies have lots of value do to their cult like behavior of their fans.

If all those teams had stayed I really don't think our overall TV value changes enough to be competitive with BIGSEC payouts. Maybe increase our distribution 10 - 20%. Basically put us in a solid 3rd significantly behind the big 2 but significantly ahead of little.

Which may be the same place we end up when whatever happens to the PAC and ACC is done.

[Stupid Fitz]

Two things I could live without in this thread:

1. Lists that make us look really bad
2. Fitz's takes

 

[Houstoncat93]

https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/sec-football/sds-sources-sec-wants-to-end-expansion-race-stay-at-16-teams/

Translation. There is no one left we want until the ACC GOR is up in ten years, see you then.

[catastrophe]

It’s really sad to hear school leadership talk in terms of “product” as the exclusive basis for how they approach alignment.

[Fedor]

Apologies if luke’d:

College football was betrayed by the adults who were supposed to protect it

Perspective by Sally Jenkins
Columnist
Updated July 8, 2022 at 2:14 p.m. EDT|Published July 8, 2022 at 9:29 a.m. EDT

The current state of college football is this: Across the nation, paunchy over-exalted ticket managers who title themselves athletic directors are racing in ungainly circles trying to find a padded, covering seat for their butts in a game of musical chairs. For years they cried that name, image and likeness payments to players would be a threat to the game’s tradition and uniqueness. It’s nothing compared to the destruction wrought by these administrative gluttons with their combination of treachery and ineptitude, who would give away a century to grab a television minute.

The 101-year-old Rose Bowl is in danger of collapsing into one of those tumbled-down structures you see on the slopes of old Rome, while the supposed business geniuses turn college football into something sickish that looks like three different tumors stuck together. They have arrived at a situation where Stanford, Texas Christian, Cincinnati and Central Florida could all wind up clapped into the same distended conference, in which players must take red eye flights home from games, just so said administrators can claim to be media honchos while covering their years of overdrafts.

All the people saying college football would lose the character that made it distinct if players were ever allowed NIL payments? They didn’t recognize that the real people leeching it of originality and distinctiveness were the ones sitting in the corner offices.

These functionaries would do any kind of business, no matter how unseemly, rather than do the most fundamental thing: balance sensible budgets in the name of academia. College athletics is supposed to be a break-even proposition, a nonprofit endeavor with education as its aim. Amateurism was never required for that. Simple integrity was. The right intention.

Instead, they have ruled college football with market panic and predatory practices. These continental leaps by schools toward creating bloated “superconferences” are not the result of the “rapidly changing sports media and college athletic landscapes,” as Southern Cal President Carol Folt tried to sell it disingenuously to her constituency. They are the result of the slow gathering of lousy practices over decades, which were the furthest thing from well-intentioned.

UCLA is frantically clutching at the end of a rope and swinging across the country to the Big Ten because it has apparently run up a $102.8 million deficit, which the Big Ten’s media rake-off will help alleviate. A good deal of the deficit is the inheritance left by former athletic director Dan Guerrero when he retired rich in 2020. As The Washington Post’s Will Hobson revealed in a devastating expose of college sports fiscal practices in 2015, Guerrero increased his salary from $299,00 to $920,000 between 2004 and 2014, though his duties remained the same.

Another of Guerrero’s bequests to the world of college athletics was to grow UCLA’s administrative staff from 91 to 141 employees and its non-coaching payroll from $9.1 million to $16 million in that span, after adjusting for inflation. On his watch, former football coach Chip Kelly was allowed to increase the “nutrition” budget for his team from $1 million to $5.4 million. Such excesses put these schools on a path toward catastrophe, even before a real one arrived with the coronavirus pandemic.

But the frenzied economic climate goes back much further than this kind of disastrous bloating of athletic departments in the past 20 years, the $50 million gross misallocations to indoor waterfalls and locker rooms like first-class yacht cabins.

It dates to the powers schools’ subversion of Supreme Court’s 1984 antitrust ruling in the case of NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which stripped the NCAA of its ability to regulate college football’s TV contracts and team appearances on the air. The ruling was intended to be a corrective to the NCAA’s overbearing exercise of its powers, but it didn’t recognize there is a legitimate state regulatory interest in curbing the excess profiteering of athletic department scoundrels who are simply using the kids for skim.

The University of Georgia’s president at the time, Fred Davison, made clear why the big football schools were suing to strip the NCAA of regulatory control over TV rights. He wanted an end to “a tyranny of the majority to impose itself on the commercial enterprise.” Why should Georgia have to split airtime and media profits with a mass of smaller colleges? Even then, the ministers at the power schools were talking about forming a single “superconference,” in which the peons would be brushed aside so the giants could compete solely against giants — and not have to profit share with Rutgers or Hofstra or Vanderbilt. They’ve been trying to get to this consolidated-wealth point for decades and decades.


In a dissent, Justices Byron “Whizzer” White and William Rehnquist recognized this ulterior motive and where it led. White wrote that the court was “subjugating the NCAA’s educational goals” to “purely competitive commercialism.” And the end game would be total cannibalism. They were exactly right.

So now Virginia, North Carolina, Clemson and Florida State may be flirting with the Southeastern Conference, and the Big 12 may try to swallow half a dozen Pac-12 schools, not because it’s good for the players or the student body or will lead to interesting and uplifting competition, but because of the mega-broadcasting rights deals. And for those who are left out, it could mean the gutting of entire athletic departments.

If college football is anything more than pageantry and fevered boosterism, it’s because there is something worth teaching in it. It doesn’t make you naive to say college athletics can and should have a genuine moral-educational component. In the right hands, the game is a discipline that has absolutely nothing to do with money or amateurism. It teaches a certain brand of, for lack of a better word, citizenship. It’s all about restraint of selfish desires for a larger goal, in the name of a collective prideful endeavor. When you strip the final vestiges of that away, now the game truly does become unrecognizable.

This “new landscape” of college football is not new at all but rather the black decay of a half century of totally unrestrained commercialization by the administrators. And the game they’re blighting is likely to be a lot less captivating and worthwhile as a result. That’s what will ultimately kill interest in the sport, not the cash in the pockets of the kids.

Thanks for posting Nic.  This article pretty much sums up my feelings, although it is a little more fun being the hunter rather than the hunted.  But overall the whole thing is BS and is ruining my #1 sports love.
 

[MadCat]

If WVU is going to stay in the Big XII, and if big 10 and SEC are going to pick apart the ACC, the Big XII should look at maybe adding VaTech and Pitt and Virginia.  I don't know who else to add to reconnect rivals. 

I'm guessing UCF and Cincy don't have Power 5 rivals

[DQ12]

If WVU is going to stay in the Big XII, and if big 10 and SEC are going to pick apart the ACC, the Big XII should look at maybe adding VaTech and Pitt and Virginia.  I don't know who else to add to reconnect rivals. 

I'm guessing UCF and Cincy don't have Power 5 rivals

It's pretty hard to guess what SEC/Big 10 "picking apart the ACC" would look like, and depends upon how many programs each want in their conference.  My hunch is that if the Big 10 has any appetite for ACC teams (beyond ND), UVA would be high on their list. 

My guess is that at least two of [NCST/Pitt/VT] will be available, along with Louisville.  I don't think anyone (including Big 12) will want BC/Syracuse/Wake.  Duke/GT are kind of wildcards imo, but I don't see Big 12 having much interest in either of them. 

Anyway, for Big 12's purposes, I think NC St/Pitt/VT/Louisville are all realistic options that may be available sometime in the next 15 years.  I think the impending availability of those schools is the only real pressure the relevant pac schools have, in terms of timing.  There's not really any huge rush for ASU/Utah/etc. to make a jump right now (they can backfill or stand pat), but if Clemson decides to flip the bird to the ACC GOR and things get wild over there, then those PAC schools have some potential competition for their Big 12 spots.

[MadCat]

I was wrong about Cincy...they used to play Louisville for something called the "Keg of Nails"

[Rage Against the McKee]

I think we have a halfway decent chance of Miami being available if the SEC raids the ACC before the Big 10 does.

[MakeItRain]

I said to ignore all that, MIR!

Sorry, friend

[MakeItRain]

I think we have a halfway decent chance of Miami being available if the SEC raids the ACC before the Big 10 does.

Sure, why would we want them though?

[Phil Titola]

Because they invited swag.

[Rage Against the McKee]

I think we have a halfway decent chance of Miami being available if the SEC raids the ACC before the Big 10 does.

Sure, why would we want them though?

Because I was a kid in the 90s.

[MakeItRain]

fair enough

[joda]

I was wrong about Cincy...they used to play Louisville for something called the "Keg of Nails"

Yea, Louisville and Cincy have been rivals for a long time through multiple conferences. Even if they weren’t the close proximity would probably make it a rivalry quick if they joined up.