Captain Bearcat
All-American in Everything
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I Root For: UC
Location: IL & Cincinnati, USA
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RE: Dodd: Tipping Point Now for P5 Breakaway
(05-27-2020 05:19 PM)JRsec Wrote: (05-27-2020 04:47 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: (05-27-2020 03:48 PM)JRsec Wrote: (05-27-2020 03:09 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: One problem with a "breakaway" is leadership. Who will lead it?
The leading college presidents? Please. They have much bigger fish to fry at the moment.
The leading college ADs? Any meeting of the ADs will be crashed by the NCAA leadership.
The P5 commissioners? Maybe. That's a small enough group that they could lead this. But it's really tricky. Any decisions they agree on effectively will have to be ratified by the presidents of the leading schools - because you know darn well that the Presidents of Texas, Ohio State, USC, UNC, etc all view their commissioners as their employee, not their boss.
That makes it a mess. Any objections will have to be settled by 5 powerless commissioners acting as intermediaries for the decision makers. If you've ever negotiated to buy a house, imagine that instead of two parties having two intermediaries, you have 20-30 important parties with 5 intermediaries about topics that might violate labor laws or anti-monopoly laws. Again, the Presidents don't have the time to do this by themselves... they're busy plugging budget gaps of hundreds of millions of dollars and don't want to risk the bad publicity that could come from leading this crusade.
Come on you can do better than that. Who stands to make the most out of this other than the schools? Who drove the OU/UGa suit in the early 80's? It sure as hell wasn't the presidents and ADs. It was strongly encouraged behind the scenes by networks.
Have you guys stopped to consider who Mike Slive, Jim Delany, Warren, Sankey and other such guys really are? Contract lawyers for media rights companies. That's right the foxes were put in charge of the hen houses and the hens paid them!
Was realignment started by presidents and commissioners? No It was started when networks told Kramer and Delany how much more they could make by expanding.
Who is it that would like a better organized and contained football product to be a cheaper alternative to the NFL but one that had great advertising rewards because of the days on which it is played and the diverse audience it reaches? The Networks
And what was it that Howard Beal said when talking to his network executive when the executive explained to him who it was that drove the news and how it was that they made money? The fictional character from the movie Network exclaimed to Ned Beatty's character, "I have heard the voice of God." To which Ned Beatty said, "You probably have!" "It's TV dummy!" The brain trust for organization of a breakaway will be corporate in nature and will involve the commissioners who will show the AD's and College Presidents the sums they will make and the latter will drool and it will be a done deal.
IMO the biggest thing to be worked out would be subcontracted a unified officiating service, paid much better than the NCAA is, which will have its own enforcement wing and each conference will front their share of overhead to make it happen.
Once that is taken care of there isn't much else that need be done except for each athletic department to hire a legal team for the drawing up of contracts instead of grant and aids.
Those who can't wrap their heads around how far down the road this is are typical in their hysterical claims that it can't happen. It's already happening. Quit overthinking things and reacting like the sky if falling. The only thing happening, hopefully, is the death of an outdated, bloated, greedy organization that has 2 endowments of over a billion dollars total, that has no justification for ratholing that money save crisis and when one hit the first thing they did was to back away from using the endowed money to cover the schools that they exist to serve. In the South we say Piss on 'em! It's easier than people think when you have those who are dying to help you monetize and organize it waiting in the wings for an opportunity to do so.
I shake my head a lot at what I read here and categorize as ambient hysteria. It reminds me of an old saying that once adorned the walls of Auburn's School of Agriculture, but was removed when PC set in, "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think!" The word play of course was on horticulture, but the point was uncultured and uneducated leaves us all to be whores of the world. Well substitute slave for whore and you have what the NCAA has done to the athletes and to the schools, but when you think about it whore is still appropriate as well. We've been all working for a Pimp called the NCAA!.
If profit & revenue were the dominant concern (like it was with realignment), you'd be right. The network execs could lead the charge.
But the bolded part is the toughest part to accomplish.
If something's going to change, it has to change in a direction that the Presidents want. Notre Dame & Stanford & Wisconsin & many others won't sign up for a new organization that decreases the players' connection with the academic side of the university (because they think the connection is already too tenuous). It'll be very tough to find a solution that the Presidents, the schools' legal counsel, and the schools' accountants are happy with. So most schools (particularly in the North & West) will stick with the NCAA until a solution presents itself.
And who is most likely to come up with such a solution? Not the media executives, the conference commissioners, or the Presidents. Rather, the solution is likely to come from the organization that has the most to lose from a new system: from the NCAA itself.
The NCAA has too much money to collapse on its own weight. The only thing that will doom the NCAA is if they are so incompetent that the conference commissioners take it upon themselves to find a better solution to the NIL crisis.
What they say today and do tomorrow are two different things. Financial need and need for exposure in a time of nadir for enrollees will change their tunes. Being painted as a plantation owner benefiting from a modern vestige of slavery won't help their PC feelings either.
We've known that this was a possibility but it won't stop the Big 12/ SEC / and ACC from making the move, nor will it stop some key independents.
If folks up North choose their path it will be seen for what it is, a lesser form of the game and they can thump their chests over ethics but it won't help their exposure, their sagging population, or their futures.
Nathan Bedford Forrest once said , "The battle is generally won by the side that gets there firstest with the mostest." Not much has changed in 160 years on that front.
We agree on most of the bolded part. It will definitely be seen as inferior football.
But bad for their future? I doubt it.
Plenty of schools do just fine without big-time athletics. Only 3 of the top-11 universities offer football scholarships. Even among public schools, 11 of the top-40 don't play FBS football: William & Mary, SUNY-Binghamton, SUNY-Stony Brook, CO School of Mines, Delaware, and 6 University of California campuses.
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