quo vadis
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RE: Aresco Talks NCAA tourney & SMU, AAC Respect and Paying Athletes
(03-19-2014 07:23 AM)Bull Wrote: (03-18-2014 03:26 PM)quo vadis Wrote: (03-18-2014 01:19 PM)Bull Wrote: (03-18-2014 09:21 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (03-17-2014 07:10 PM)NBPirate Wrote: I know ppl hate on Aresco, but he's a great ambassador for the conference that understands exposure and talking points.
Problem is, he's all hot air. All hat and no cattle. He talks a big game but in the end, we have a $2.1m media deal, no AQ for major bowls, lousy minor bowls. In other words, he never delivers on the talk.
We've had this argument before, but I'll go ahead and toss it onto this thread too... I'd love, to hear exactly what you or any of the other armchair commissioners would have done differently. Or what you would say differently in any of these interviews.
Every team that left was going to leave anyway... heck, to this day we've still got schools publicly whining about wanting out. No addition at any point prior to our expansion would have prevented a single defection. Also, the C7 were always going to leave as soon as they got their chance (maybe not a bad thing for us). Bowl games? Exactly how is aresco supposed to FORCE the P5 to play us, if they really want to freeze us out? Heck, I'm impressed he got as many solid P5 ties as he did... way better than anyone else outside the P5 got. His job, as I see it, is to rebuild us into the strongest *possible* conference. And yes Virginia, what we are today is the strongest possible option *at this time*.
Does this mean I'm happy with our situation? No. Does it mean I don't want a P5 ticket as well? Of course not. But it is what it is, and most of what happend was well beyond our control. The P5 picked us clean. But, Aresco got us a fairly stable 12 school lineup, pretty clearly the #6 conference, got us HUGE exposure (matters to recruits), and he took a short deal that can be renegotiated in just a few years.
To anyone willing to be intellectually honest, that's about the real story...
So if there was absolutely nothing that Aresco could have done to get us more media money, get us into AQ status, or get us better bowl bids, or keep schools from defecting, exactly why did we sign him for $1.2 million per year?
FWIW, I agree that nobody short of God could have kept any teams from leaving. That's still true - all of us would leave for a P5 in a nanosecond if invited.
But as "ECU" notes, Aresco was hired and given P5-level money because of his alleged negotiating savvy. He was supposed to have skills to get us good TV money and good bowl bids thanks to his alleged "insider" knowledge of the media negotiating process and his connections with bowl and media people. And he crapped out completely.
If you want to focus on the claim that Aresco is being paid too much, that is the only point I will concede... but I'll note you only know this through the prism of HINDSIGHT. (Always a convenient tool for message board protesters...) To answer your question, when Aresco was hired the 'Big East' clearly thought there was some pipe dream they could prevent the meltdown. They were 100% wrong, and underestimated the total control of ESPN and the P5 conferences. Total control.
I however give the old Big East credit for having the stones to at least fight back, hire someone major league (or at least PAY major league $$), to TRY and bid the TV deal and keep themselves relevant. I guess you feel they should have publicly announced our failure (in advance) and only paid SBC/cUSA level money??? (lol)
Seriously though, if it all boils down to 'we paid Aresco too much'... well, I'll just say it must be the off season. Sheesh. But I do appreciate the acknowledgement finally that only God could have prevented the rest. Because that's pretty much true...
You seem to think that by acknowledging that we are overpaying Aresco, you are conceding a trivial thing and that you are otherwise largely correct.
But actually, that's the pretty much the whole ballgame, because any time anyone does a lousy job, what that translates into is that you paid him too much. E.g., if I hire a kid for $30 to shovel snow from my driveway, and he does a bad job - takes forever, leaves lots of ice, etc. - then what happened was I paid him too much for the work he did. And not only that, the implication is that I made an "adverse selection", I should have hired someone else.
That's true of Aresco: We paid (and are paying) too much for him given what he delivered, and we should have hired someone else. You might appreciate the stones of the Big East school Presidents for "going for a home run" when they hired him, but that macho-appeal aside, turns out it was a mistake. We swung and ... missed, like the Lakers being stuck paying broken-down, old Steve Nash $9 million this year for close to zero productivity.
That's not Aresco's fault, of course, it's the fault of those who hired him, but it also doesn't change the fact that hiring him was a mistake.
And as for what else he could have accomplished, you make it seem like it is obvious nobody could have done anything better (I agree, but only with regards to preventing defections). But that implies that Aresco had the perfect set of skills, such that we can assume that "if he couldn't do better, nobody could have". But remember, Aresco was hardly an ideal on-paper commissioner candidate. He was a risky choice. His background was entirely in working for media companies. Had absolutely zero experience working in university athletic departments or conference administration offices. In contrast, successful P5 commissioners like Delany, Slive, and Swofford all served either as ADs at major athletic universities and/or served as commissioners of smaller conferences before getting their P5 gigs. They had experience with the full range of issues that commissioners face, whereas Aresco had skills in one area -media negotiations- and he had those skills on the other side, negotiating for media companies, not conferences. Could a better-qualified all-around candidate produced better results? We'll never know for sure, but there's no reason to think that because a one-trick-pony like Aresco couldn't do better that nobody else could.
As for your "hindsight" complaint, I don't get that, because you can never know in advance of performance whether someone is a good hire, because that is defined by their performance. If the STL Rams draft Bridgewater, can we say on that draft day whether they made a good choice or not? No, we have to wait and see what he does on the field once he starts playing. That's not a "message board protester" tool, it's empirical reality, at least until someone builds a Time Machine.
Truth is, the only contract Aresco has successfully negotiated is .. his own. He used those vaunted bargaining skills to get himself a very sweet deal from the desperate Big East presidents. For the conference? Not nearly so much, not in that negotiation or in subsequent bargaining with the P5, bowls, or media companies.
(This post was last modified: 03-19-2014 08:21 AM by quo vadis.)
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