(03-04-2013 08:37 AM)Big 12 Wrote: This is what I have been saying all along. While everyone has been singing Jim Delany's praises for being an evil puppet master and a genius, most have missed the fact that he and the B1G have made several, uh, curious (or at the very least, inconsistent) decisions along the way.
If choosing Maryland and Rutgers for their television potential was sheer genius because of the value they are going to add to the BTN, then choosing Nebraska over Missouri a few years earlier was very likely a mistake for those very same reasons.
Getting valuable TV markets will always be huge to the B1G but there is a very small collections of elite football programs from small TV footprints that will draw viewers in any geography (Nebraska, Oklahoma to name 2).
Mizzou has, in its footprint, some valuable TV markets but most college football fans, even in that footprint, are more likely to watch Nebraska or OU than Missouri.
Oh, I'm sure that was the B1G's logic. I'm just now sure that it is indicative of a sound overall strategy. It just seems like some good old fashioned needle threading to me.
My point is that Atlanta is also a Top 10 television market (No. 8) and Florida State would have (theoretically at least) given the B1G access to Jacksonville (No. 47), Orlando (No. 19), Tampa-St. Pete (No. 13), West Palm Beach (No. 38) and Miami (No. 16).
Those areas are MUCH more passionate about college football than either Washington, DC or New York City will ever be and Florida State would appear to fit that same profile of "traditional powers" under which you listed Oklahoma and Nebraska.
Passing on FSU and GT for RU and UMD was a mistake, IMHO and if the ACC survives as a major conference, I believe that historians will point to that bone-headed decision as the one that allowed that to happen.
Rutgers and Maryland would have still been there in the next go round whereas Georgia Tech and Florida State may not be. For the past several decades the former two properties have been considerably less valuable than the latter two under any financial model one chooses cite and I can't envision very many scenarios in which that is likely to dramatically change going forward. Conversely, if the current cable paradigm changes, where companies can no longer bundle programming, as so many experts are predicting it will, then that gap will almost certainly widen and likely considerably so.
To me the whole thing was dumb and poorly planed... That is unless, as I suspect, the RU and UMD acquisitions were really about trying to lure Notre Dame - the biggest fish in the sea and Delany's white whale. The thinking being that ND needs to play in front of its Subway Alums in the Northeast and games in East Rutherford, NJ and Landover, MD would help them do just that. If that was the case then it does begin to make some sense. However, even if that is the case, I still think that Delany and company are going to end up with a pocket full of straw.