quo vadis
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RE: Indiana VP thinks AAC is a major conference!
(05-08-2014 09:45 AM)NestaKnight1 Wrote: (05-08-2014 08:20 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (05-08-2014 07:57 AM)NestaKnight1 Wrote: (05-08-2014 07:20 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (05-08-2014 06:19 AM)NestaKnight1 Wrote: As do the aac's on field results in year one. Name any p-5 conference that has both a Bcs bowl champ and the national champ in basketball. Don't bother there's only one, the AAC. As to the tv contract and bowl lineup, that is more a product of the perceived instability of the AAC at contract formation.
While our basketball results on the court surely put us in the quasi-Power category (and the same could be said for the A10 and Big East), our football results were the opposite. We were terrible on the football field OOC, nowhere near Power quality.
And 'instability' doesn't mean anything, it's the nature of the instability that matters, because 'instability' just means 'change', which can be for the worse - or better.
E.g., if at the time of our contract negotiations, we were losing Rutgers, USF, Memphis, and Tulsa, but were adding Notre Dame, Alabama, USC, and Ohio State, that would make us very 'unstable', in that our membership was in serious flux, but since the change also is obviously for the better (in terms of market values), it would mean we would get a better contract, not worse.
Also, instability doesn't mean much because it is easy for a network to protect itself should further change of a negative nature occur, e.g., the clause in our current contract that says what happens if "class A" schools like Cincy or Houston leave.
The AAC got a terrible media deal because the networks looked at our post-realignment lineup and saw very little value. We'll see what happens in 6 years.
Hogwash. Instability as in the tv networks at the time of contract negotiations did not know if any current members of the AAC would be poached by a P-5 conference, that is precisely why espn put a renegotiation clause into the contract should certain members leave the AAC. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any reasonably objective person ever suggested that Notre Dame, Alabama, USC, or Ohio State would be joining the AAC, therefore your reference to same is not relevant to the "instability" to which I referred in my original post.
It's highly relevant, because it highlights your inaccurate use of the word "instability". Your point would have been accurate had you said that our lousy contract was a "product of the perceived lack of market value in the current membership caused by the recent changes in membership".
So it wasn't the threat of future losses that caused the deal to be terrible. That "threat" could easily be handled by the clause that states that ESPN can renegotiate or abrogate should the top 4 schools leave.
Rather, it was clearly the result of the devastating effect of recent losses and the addition of back-fill members, that caused us to get such a lousy deal. By the time the contract was negotiated, we had already lost the great bulk of the schools with non-trivial market value. Cincy and UConn were about all that was left, and that's why the contract was so bad.
Look Genius, using the running definition of instability as 1. Lack of stability or steadiness, or 2. Tendency to variable or unpredictable behavior, my statement was entirely accurate. How can a new conference have "stability" when it has no history by which to judge it's stability? I respectfully suggest you look up the word "context" to avoid these needless dissertations and pointless diatribes which are based upon nothing more than semantics.
Why can't you seem to grasp that this is not an issue of semantics? You invoked the term "instability" to explain why our media deal sucked. I've explained to you why your use of the term was wrong, in a substantive sense.
The networks paid us peanuts not because they feared future instability. As I've noted, that fear is easily handled contractually, such as the clause that gives ESPN outs if "class A" schools leave.
We got peanuts because past instability had resulted in the loss of higher-value schools and their back-fill with lower-value schools. That was the "context" that mattered to them.
It's not instability per se that matters, it's the nature of that instability, whether the "lack of stability" results in the conference becoming more or less valuable. In our case, we became a lot less valuable because of the specific schools lost and added.
(This post was last modified: 05-08-2014 10:22 AM by quo vadis.)
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