JRsec
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RE: Is All Well in PAC Land? Just How Disgruntled Are the Trojans? Stay Tuned......
(12-12-2017 09:42 PM)Stugray2 Wrote: The big money at USC is research and the associations with the UC schools and UW. USC is not moving anywhere, as Sports are a pimple compared to that. USC like Stanford has so many big donors the can (and sometimes do) tell Billionaires to take a piss in the ocean.
California the institutional money is so much larger it would blow the minds of Southerners and Midwesterners. These are multi $Billion research machines. The athletic money is peanuts by comparison.
UCLA, Notre Dame, and Stanford are USC's most important football games, their biggest money draws. The Arizona schools are part "meh" USC fans don't like. To be honest they would rather be with Cal, Stanford and Washington than those teams to the East of them. The break away concept moves them farther from that base. Texas and Oklahoma are fine. But schools like Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, and TCU are as bad for fan support in SoCal as Utah, Oregon State, and Washington State. Realistically an Independent route is hopeless, and their late season schedule would look similar to BYU. The Pac-12 wont do them any favors for scheduling, so they will be bringing in UMass, BYU, and New Mexico State to close the season after the Notre Dame game. Playing UCLA in September is not the same (ask BYU about that with Utah).
As for scheduling issues in the league, this is a common theme from Washington, Stanford, USC and others. It is a big topic for Larry Scott to deal with. The Boosters will also have to get their own President to change his attitude on the P12N being primarily for Olympic sports to a model more like the B1G where MBB and FB are featured, and where an equity sale is made to a larger media partner. (Part of the reason they have so far refused to sell is because they want to have women's water polo, and men's tennis on TV before tens if not dozens of enthralled fans in the greater Los Angeles metro). They have much company in that thought.
But I expect, and so do many others out here, the P12 to start addressing scheduling issues (road game followed by a road Friday night game; byes for some schools before big games but not others ... USC benefited in the CCG this year), and to work on the P12N issues to switch emphasis away somewhat from water polo, soccer and golf. So far USC's President is just one of those in favor of the Olympic approach over maximizing dollars.
While I don't disagree about the research dollars dwarfing the sports revenue, the two are not in the same sets of revenue. A move of athletic affiliation doesn't alter the research money. The Cali schools and Washington will stick together anyway.
If things worked out ideally we would have something like this:
Big 12 / PAC
California, Oregon, Stanford, Utah, Washington
Arizona, Arizona State, Cal Los Angeles, Colorado, Southern Cal
Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska
Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas Tech, T.C.U.
Big 10 / ACC
Duke, Maryland, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Virginia
Boston College, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse
Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Purdue
Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Northwestern, Wisconsin
SEC / ACC
Kentucky, N.C. State, Tennessee, Virginia Tech, West Virginia
Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Georgia Tech, South Carolina
Alabama, Clemson, Florida State, Miami, Mississippi State
Arkansas, Louisiana State, Mississippi, Texas A&M, Vanderbilt
Out: Baylor, Louisville, Oregon State, Wake Forest, Washington State
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