(11-20-2016 11:32 PM)AllTideUp Wrote: (11-20-2016 12:18 AM)JRsec Wrote: (11-19-2016 11:06 PM)AllTideUp Wrote: (11-19-2016 09:28 PM)JRsec Wrote: (11-19-2016 05:40 PM)AllTideUp Wrote: If the GOR ends first then, yeah, all bets are off, but I was predicating our scenario on some sort of agreement beforehand. Otherwise, I don't see schools like Baylor getting in.
I also look at it like this. The only members of the old Big East that aren't in a Power league right now are UConn and Cincinnati. UConn may have a decent chance at the B1G at that. Point being, even though the arrangement has changed, pretty much all the same schools have gotten in on the party. Even Rutgers, a mostly insignificant athletic brand, has gained access to one of the wealthier leagues.
Especially if local politics play a role then just parking all or at least most of the Big 12 in other leagues is the path of least resistance. The networks can get the thing over with, get fans used to a new order, and start focusing on growing the brand rather than altering the brands every few years.
If the networks are going to get it over with it will happen at the end of this season. If not it will be at least 6 years before anything happens because of the GOR and its penalties and prohibitions. So we'll see. I have no problem with 15, 16, or 18. I just think if it was going to be 16 or 18 we'd already be there.
You're probably right.
My only hesitance in completely accepting that would be the idea that OU and UT might have been legitimately interested in preserving the Big 12 until recently. Don't know how likely that is, but I think it's possible.
Being that they've abandoned trying to preserve the league for the long term, maybe now we can get something done.
If Texas and Oklahoma had really wanted to keep the Big 12 together they would have added Louisville with West Virginia and B.Y.U. with T.C.U. in 2012.
What Texas and Oklahoma wanted to do was stay together until the fate of the ACC was decided or until they could extort the best possible offer. They didn't want to lose control of the vote to those who were afraid of being left behind. So their plan was to stick at 10 understanding that Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma would vote against expansion and that just one of Texas Tech or Oklahoma State would be all it would take to control any future expansion vote. Actually since it requires 3/4's of the members to vote to accept just the three of them could have controlled the vote, but Texas and Oklahoma had insurance with their two fellow state schools.
So I never believed they wanted to expand and said so back in 2012. I had a rep bet with a couple of Big 12'ers over that very issue. Neither of them are here much anymore so I doubt I ever collect.
Let me rephrase that.
It's not that I think UT and OU were terribly interested in saving the Big 12 as an entity, but that they were interested in maintaining their control over a Power conference. I think they would have taken Florida State and Clemson had the opportunity ultimately presented itself. When the ACC finally became stable though, there was no need to worry about pie in the sky scenarios so they gave up the ghost.
I disagree though that the additions of BYU and Louisville would have saved the league. It would have been a better and stronger league, yes, but the temptation for the likes of UT and OU to make more money elsewhere would have remained. And I don't think the networks were ever truly interested in preserving the Big 12 either. I think that's why they paid for so many prime members to leave. I think OU and UT knew that and any desire to save the Big 12 was purely a desire for the preservation of power.
I was fooled for a while into thinking the Big 12 would expand, but my belief was predicated on UT and OU's interests being in concert with the networks' interest. Perhaps I should have known better.
Anyway, I say all that to say that the networks would stand to lose a lot of content and a lot of fans by excluding more schools than they have to. If it's true that UT and OU were never really in concert with the networks then it would make sense that something's changed more recently with the very public bluff on expanding. It would seem to indicate a willingness to look past any future for a Big 12 and more towards a future crafted by networks.
It could then indicate that the primary reason we haven't seen a brokering yet was because OU and UT weren't willing to give up the ghost yet. In other words, they fought the networks as long as they could, but failed anyway. For their part, they don't really lose anything by putting up a fight so, hey...why not?
Eight years is a long time to wait, from the networks' perspective, to create the final product. Just get it done now by not losing very many schools and they can start to focus on branding and how to better monetize the streaming model rather than risking more lawsuits, more bad publicity, and greater disorganization. I think that's especially true if we move to 11 or 12 quality games. Larger conferences that also include their fair share of weak opponents will allow the networks to create the stories the fans are used to...undefeated teams, similar enough winning percentages as to keep fans of big programs happy, and more postseason games all at the same time.
I agree with your long stated premise that content rules and the best quality schools will drive the money soon enough if not already. I maintain though that one of the tenants of streaming is niche content as well. The more eyeballs buying subscriptions, the better. The more product you have at your fingertips, the more likely the average sports fan is to buy in. There are a lot of niche fans out there that don't necessarily watch the most popular schools and aren't necessarily more likely to do so.
Two points on the first bolded part. 1. 8 years is nothing in the life of a corporation or in the planning of a business model. 2. Their market is dying. That changes the dynamics of marketing as well. The last vested generation to love college football are the Boomers. Those born in '46 turn 70 this year. The model 8 years out will exceed the average life expectancy of boomers born 78 years ago and the die off will continue every year afterward.
As to the second bolded part. What we are seeing with the NFL and now with college sports is a negative synergy. College football games for the P schools are almost all on television somewhere. Couple that with the high cost of attendance, and what we are seeing is a declining attendance rate, and product burnout from over supply. People are only watching the games they want to see, and are no longer going in as great of numbers to the venues. The experience was unique twenty to thirty years ago. Now it is commonplace. It's commonplace to watch from home as well. In the venues IMG sees to it that the same music soundtrack & artificial noise is blaring in all of them. The same corporate logos decorate the walls, and the same money first mentality predominates the athletic departments of money hungry schools.
When our athletic department called one of our friends on the day of her mother's funeral to ask for a larger personal contribution to maintain the seating priority her mother had it kind of stepped way the hell over the line of decorum, human decency, and for the family of a former faculty member showed a lack of internal institutional awareness and humanity that was staggering.
We've peaked in attendance, we've now peaked in interest. There are far more kids today that will never play the game than there are those who will. That is the coup de grace for a game we've loved for almost all of our entire lives.
The cost and greed of going to a college game has shrunk the student section from the 40 yard line through the end zone on the home side to the 10 through the end zone in many of our venues, or the 20 yard line through the end zone if the school is more generous. Donations for season tickets, the need for more high dollar luxury boxes (which rob regular seating) have rendered the sport accessible to mostly Boomers and X'ers past child raising years, and those with the monetary wherewithal to form exclusionary social activities surrounding the events. It's a turn off to the young. Many students know the players are not real students by their negative experiences with them, and have put up with they petty crime they commit and suffer their burglary, assault, and intimidation. Local store owners will tell you the same. They simply don't care to support them whether at the stadium or in the basketball arena. I've heard more than a few students express these views. If they watch the game they'll do it at the Frat or Sorority House where they have a party and use the game as a backdrop for their social activities. They see the game as an icon of their school, but have little real interest in it. They like staying away from the game day crowd and from the older people who do not have the same values that they do (whether better or worse). In that regard football is already anachronistic to this generation.
All the money and publicity that ESPN and FOX can throw into it won't change that culture shift. Football will exist moving forward, but I don't think it will be the national sport forever. In fact it may be niche sport in about 20 to 30 years for a wide variety of reasons the least of which is not brain trauma.
The reason so many schools seem to be middling now is because there simply isn't enough top talent to keep even 64 competitive, let alone the 128 or so at the FBS level. Pay for play is designed to improve the quality of play by limiting the number of schools by virtue of TV contract size. Those with the big TV paydays can funnel talent to a pool of schools that will be for the networks their leverage against the NFL which has been a tough monopoly for them to deal with.
The problem with the NFL is that they have lost their blue collar crowd numbers because those folks can't afford to attend any more than the recent graduates with small children can afford season tickets to their beloved alma maters. Every NFL team looks like the next except for the uniforms and their players are not passionate about the games, just their paychecks, endorsements, and staying injury free to keep the gravy train going. Shoot, it's practically 2 hand touch with regard to QB's now. I long ago abandoned the NFL because of game fixing and point shaving and boring predictable play. There is now so much money in College Ball we are having a stronger emergence of the same issues. Star athletes are reticent to play if they think a minor injury will get worse because they don't want to miss their professional signing bonus.
West coasters, East coasters, and the country club set everywhere care only about the NFL now when it is playoff time. Other than that it is simply background noise to the every day pleasures and struggles of their lives. It's no longer the mill workers escape on Sundays that it was when the sport was growing in popularity everywhere.
The talent pool for colleges is shrinking no matter what many younger fans think. I remember when strength was combined with overall athleticism. We never had linemen whose bellies hung over their belts. Yeah the game has changed, but it has changed because of the talent available. Then the rules changed to make playing that talent more workable. The offense is now favored as a ploy to attract more viewers. They think more action means dollars. Instead the disinterest of the young who haven't played the game remains and those of us who did play and loved it don't like what it has become. I think therefore the changes have led to more decline.
Teaching fundamentals to the players was once what all coaches did. Now the great coaches are those who can teach in a couple of years the skills that the kids should have learned in high school, but didn't. They can feed the kids and train them to become better physical specimens than they were when they signed. So if a coach is good at identifying and grading potential talent, instead of reading scouting reports of hacks, and if he is disciplined enough to keep his assistants training the kids in fundamentals and particular skill sets year round, and if he is a great recruiter to keep 4 classes worth of talent, then he can beat the hell out of the competition the way Saban does.
Right now in all of college ball we are fortunate to have half a dozen head coaches with that ability.
We are in a talent crunch from both the player and coaching perspectives. Add that to a turned off generation matriculating from our schools, and couple it with very high attendance costs when the average family's disposable income is declining, and then make the games available every week on TV and voila we have a product cheapened by availability, too costly to attend, and packaged to a dying audience.
What else do you need to know? That's why the networks attempts will be to shrink the pool of competitive schools to easily identified brands from major markets, and to try to hang on to the live advertising dollars as long as they can. They aren't growing a product, they are milking an old cash cow as much as they can before she dies. That utter will produce from the last vested generation until about until about 2040 and then it will be done, dried up, dead & gone.
People might be watching aging adults playing competitive X Box by then and talking about the video feats of their youth, because most of them will never have played in a backyard or vacant lot, let alone on real football field, basketball court, or baseball diamond. And if you think soccer or lacrosse will fill the void then think again. Lacrosse is too exclusionary (like Polo was 70 years ago), and soccer will never make it professionally in the U.S.. With no payout inevitably there will be fewer desiring to play it with the intensity that professional sports requires. The audience will be smaller, but made up of those who played and loved it.
So whittling down the product to 56 to 64 schools and paying them well will milk the last dollars of interest out of a sport passing its prime and will do so far more efficiently than pumping more money into the bloated NFL. The top brands will hold onto their fan bases for the sport longer, and the public might watch a few of them out of a sense of nostalgia. But long term nothing is going to change the trend away from it. We'll have it around for the duration of our lives so enjoy. But the game simply doesn't mean to our grandchildren what it meant to us.