I decided to make this post after reading several posts on the UConn Boneyard message board. Yes, the younger generation does have very different desires than the older generation, but the younger generations, both X & Y tend to give ideas and people more of a chance than the old, we're old and too darn set in our ways Baby Boomers.

How it affects realignment is thusly: what the old power brokers want is what they will get. If the old power brokers @ Texas & Oklahoma want to join the PAC 12, then forget everything else you heard to the contrary, and bank on them going to PAC 12. If they want to join the SEC, same thing. Content driven realignment is no doubt in the future, but as long as the old blue hairs are in control, we will continue to have the market model, IMO.

I think the boomers where the vanguard and ignition for the money that we see today in college sports.

They were the ones who lead the surge in premium ticket pricing and price pressures that led to aggressive redesign of the postseason and conference alignments.

People under 35 don't care. Very few of them on this board when compared to 35+

(06-30-2019 08:09 AM)Kit-Cat Wrote:  I think the boomers where the vanguard and ignition for the money that we see today in college sports.

They were the ones who lead the surge in premium ticket pricing and price pressures that led to aggressive redesign of the postseason and conference alignments.

People under 35 don't care. Very few of them on this board when compared to 35+

Pretty much. Boomers, retire already! :)

Decision makers at universities are usually 50 plus. That included the people making decisions in the last large wave of realignment, Nebraska, Colorado, A&M, Rutgers, Maryland, Pitt, Cuse, WVU, TCU, BYU Indy, C7, ........ACC, Big East, SEC, BIG, ND alliance ACC, etc etc. So I would older people have been very pro realignment, not stuck in older ways.

(06-30-2019 08:04 AM)DawgNBama Wrote:  I decided to make this post after reading several posts on the UConn Boneyard message board. Yes, the younger generation does have very different desires than the older generation, but the younger generations, both X & Y tend to give ideas and people more of a chance than the old, we're old and too darn set in our ways Baby Boomers.

How it affects realignment is thusly: what the old power brokers want is what they will get. If the old power brokers @ Texas & Oklahoma want to join the PAC 12, then forget everything else you heard to the contrary, and bank on them going to PAC 12. If they want to join the SEC, same thing. Content driven realignment is no doubt in the future, but as long as the old blue hairs are in control, we will continue to have the market model, IMO.

What I see from this UConn situation is that there IS a limit to how far you can go with this. What's driving UConn back to the Big East besides finances and travel is the fact that their fans are largely yawning at their schedules. Their fans don't care about playing Houston or SMU or USF. It's not a knock against those schools, either. It just is. What will Texas and Oklahoma fans think when their schedules are now filled with Cal, Washington State and Arizona? Living in Atlanta I can tell you that two of the great things about college sports is seeing fans of a dozen and a half schools at the water cooler and talking sports (or trash) and the ability to drive to a dozen and a half schools within 6 hours. It's the reason that even the NFL fixed their geography.

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Realignments and affiliation swapping is nothing new. It’s just that there have been some significant movers over the last decade, and it makes this span look extremely active.

I, personally, don’t want to assign blame to any particular generation, since, again, these moves are quite common. What I despise, however, was how longtime rivalries got the boot out of it. And that this hive mindset some have taken toward the stressing the greater value to a conference rather than nearby peer and rival institutions.

Baby Boomers (1946 - 1964)
Generation X (1961- 1981)
Generation Y (1976 - 1995)
Generation Z After 1996

Note overlaps.... you’ll have to decide what you are if you fall in overlaps. Look it up....

Baby Boomers screwed everything up.

I believe it was Georges Clemenceau who observed that war is too important a matter to be entrusted to generals. A corollary might be that realignment is too important a matter to be shaped by network executives of any age. Not every bottom line should have a dollar sign in front of it.

(06-30-2019 11:14 AM)colohank Wrote:  I believe it was Georges Clemenceau who observed that war is too important a matter to be entrusted to generals. A corollary might be that realignment is too important a matter to be shaped by network executives of any age. Not every bottom line should have a dollar sign in front of it.

When I look at Penn State and Maryland’s moves to the Big Ten, I don’t see network execs. And it wasn’t ESPN inviting the conference commissioner to sit down with pissed off boosters at Florida State.

Those would be the college presidents.

(06-30-2019 08:29 AM)panama Wrote:  

(06-30-2019 08:04 AM)DawgNBama Wrote:  I decided to make this post after reading several posts on the UConn Boneyard message board. Yes, the younger generation does have very different desires than the older generation, but the younger generations, both X & Y tend to give ideas and people more of a chance than the old, we're old and too darn set in our ways Baby Boomers.

How it affects realignment is thusly: what the old power brokers want is what they will get. If the old power brokers @ Texas & Oklahoma want to join the PAC 12, then forget everything else you heard to the contrary, and bank on them going to PAC 12. If they want to join the SEC, same thing. Content driven realignment is no doubt in the future, but as long as the old blue hairs are in control, we will continue to have the market model, IMO.

What I see from this UConn situation is that there IS a limit to how far you can go with this. What's driving UConn back to the Big East besides finances and travel is the fact that their fans are largely yawning at their schedules. Their fans don't care about playing Houston or SMU or USF. It's not a knock against those schools, either. It just is. What will Texas and Oklahoma fans think when their schedules are now filled with Cal, Washington State and Arizona? Living in Atlanta I can tell you that two of the great things about college sports is seeing fans of a dozen and a half schools at the water cooler and talking sports (or trash) and the ability to drive to a dozen and a half schools within 6 hours. It's the reason that even the NFL fixed their geography.

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There is truth in that. Unfortunately—the AAC will never be the conference that offers big opposing fan bases in close proximity. We are closer to a best of the rest Frankenstein that’s really a made for tv league. Spread out over hells half acre, we offer excellent quality—but not a lot of regional passion. The plan for replacements has always been to take the best quality replacement available—with location being largely irrelevant to the decision.

(06-30-2019 08:04 AM)DawgNBama Wrote:  What Generation is driving realignment- is it Y or are the Baby Boomers to blame??

Neither. As the mass media tells us, millennials are to blame for everything.

(06-30-2019 12:59 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-30-2019 08:04 AM)DawgNBama Wrote:  What Generation is driving realignment- is it Y or are the Baby Boomers to blame??

Neither. As the mass media tells us, millennials are to blame for everything.

Yup millennials. Who else could it be?

(06-30-2019 01:02 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  

(06-30-2019 12:59 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-30-2019 08:04 AM)DawgNBama Wrote:  What Generation is driving realignment- is it Y or are the Baby Boomers to blame??

Neither. As the mass media tells us, millennials are to blame for everything.

Yup millennials. Who else could it be?

I assume millennials are what was meant by Y, since they were called Gen Y before millennial became the preferred identifier.

(06-30-2019 01:09 PM)Cyniclone Wrote:  

(06-30-2019 01:02 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  

(06-30-2019 12:59 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-30-2019 08:04 AM)DawgNBama Wrote:  What Generation is driving realignment- is it Y or are the Baby Boomers to blame??

Neither. As the mass media tells us, millennials are to blame for everything.

Yup millennials. Who else could it be?

I assume millennials are what was meant by Y, since they were called Gen Y before millennial became the preferred identifier.

I'm afraid the answer is none of the above. It's not a generational issue. It is a corporate issue. Once OU / UGA won their court case to win the right to sell their own product on the open market the networks, who thrive on live sports for ad revenue, saw an opportunity to jump in without having to deal with the NCAA.

It took them about a decade to realize that marketing tools could apply to the new situation. If you were going to buy rights through the conferences now then organizing the structure of those conferences to augment your marketing and advertising strategy made sense. And since the conferences wanted more and more money then dangling the carrot of what they needed to do to get it was all too easy to utilize.

Enter the cable subscription driven footprint pay model that spurred the Big 10 to take Maryland and Rutgers and the SEC to add Missouri and to tell the SEC that Clemson and Florida State, would earn them nothing.

Splitting large population states then became an aim of the Network. It kept a single conference from exercising leverage over the large schools of a large state, and guaranteed they would always have another way into that market if they didn't win the favor of a particular conference.

It is why N.D. got favorable setups to keep them from considering the Big 10 since Notre Dame carried a backdoor into the largest cities of the Big 10 for ESPN. It is why the SEC was doubly encouraged to go after A&M, and it was why Clay Travis spent so much time hawking N.C. State and Virginia Tech to the SEC before FOX hired him.

It's true that the norm of college football has been realignment since its inception. But those were internally driven motivations for realignment. Now the motivation is external and it has nothing to do with generations and everything to do with enhancing revenue and that is done at the bidding of the networks who are looking for arrangements that maximize their revenue from advertisers.

It is IMO why we are going to have some consolidation down the road but not in terms of smaller conferences, but in terms of fewer conferences. Fewer conferences are easier to deal with an to organize and for the schools would entail less overhead and easier scheduling. The money spent on college sports is nowhere near that of professional sports so the landscaping of college athletics is only about halfway done. They'll be more.

And now that content is driving the national eyeballs, rivalries are driving the large regional draws, and quantity of inventory will drive streaming revenue, I would be surprised to see 4 conferences of 16 to 18 each, or 3 conferences of 20 to 24 each, or even 2 conferences of just the best 24 draws each.

It won't be evil commissioners, Boomers, X'ers, generation Y, or even Millennials driving this trend. It will be the maximization of profit that drives it, and it will be the networks dangling larger sums of cash that make it happen.

When does it end? When nobody gives a hoot about watching it anymore. No audience = no market = not much change.

What gets us there quicker? Pay for play because that will winnow out the programs that really can't afford to compete at the higher prices and it will help the networks to reduce the number of those wanting to play at that level much quicker than consolidation will.

Look, schools like Boston College, Duke, Wake Forest, Kansas, and Pittsburgh and at times Rutgers do not get the fan support in football. We have schools in the G5 who should be in a P5 conference while some P5 are G5. I think realignment should be taken out of the hands of school Presidents and BoTs on who should be invited to play in the conference since they do not know sports and what could draw people to the games. You do have failures like Colorado, Rutgers, Nebraska, Maryland, Pittsburgh and Missouri. We are now seeing more G5 and FCS schools kicking the butts of P5 schools. You need to add schools who the fans want to see, and not add crappy teams that fans will not see.

Since Louisville has been in Four different conferences in a decade, we probably know as much as anyone about assimilating into a new conference. And that’s really what we are talking about isn’t it.

UConn, as much as they tried, last year to a 40 million dollar deficit, they never could accept playing strictly teams from the Midwest and Southeast vs Northeast. When UConn played Cincinnati and USF while in The Big East, they still had Georgetown, Villanova and St Johns in basketball. When UConn joined The AAC, those basketball games disappeared. They were replaced by Memphis, Houston and most recently Wichita State. All great ball clubs with tremendous history but not a lot of history playing in the Northeast.

The question was how long was the UConn administration going to let this go on. Every year in The AAC they dug themselves a deeper financial hole and their basketball history was another year further in the past.

As I watch the events unfold with UConn I can’t help but think how lucky Louisville was to be selected for The ACC. I don’t however believe we would have left The AAC being put in the same situation. I believe UofL would have stuck it out with Cincinnati and Memphis. For the same reasons UConn left.

(06-30-2019 02:27 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  Look, schools like Boston College, Duke, Wake Forest, Kansas, and Pittsburgh and at times Rutgers do not get the fan support in football. We have schools in the G5 who should be in a P5 conference while some P5 are G5. I think realignment should be taken out of the hands of school Presidents and BoTs on who should be invited to play in the conference since they do not know sports and what could draw people to the games. You do have failures like Colorado, Rutgers, Nebraska, Maryland, Pittsburgh and Missouri. We are now seeing more G5 and FCS schools kicking the butts of P5 schools. You need to add schools who the fans want to see, and not add crappy teams that fans will not see.

(06-30-2019 08:09 AM)Kit-Cat Wrote:  People under 35 don't care. Very few of them on this board when compared to 35+

How would you know?

(06-30-2019 02:27 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  Look, schools like Boston College, Duke, Wake Forest, Kansas, and Pittsburgh and at times Rutgers do not get the fan support in football. We have schools in the G5 who should be in a P5 conference while some P5 are G5. I think realignment should be taken out of the hands of school Presidents and BoTs on who should be invited to play in the conference since they do not know sports and what could draw people to the games. You do have failures like Colorado, Rutgers, Nebraska, Maryland, Pittsburgh and Missouri. We are now seeing more G5 and FCS schools kicking the butts of P5 schools. You need to add schools who the fans want to see, and not add crappy teams that fans will not see.

No

(06-30-2019 02:27 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  Look, schools like Boston College, Duke, Wake Forest, Kansas, and Pittsburgh and at times Rutgers do not get the fan support in football. We have schools in the G5 who should be in a P5 conference while some P5 are G5. I think realignment should be taken out of the hands of school Presidents and BoTs on who should be invited to play in the conference since they do not know sports and what could draw people to the games. You do have failures like Colorado, Rutgers, Nebraska, Maryland, Pittsburgh and Missouri. We are now seeing more G5 and FCS schools kicking the butts of P5 schools. You need to add schools who the fans want to see, and not add crappy teams that fans will not see.

Nebraska and Missouri are failures?

David, if any of your fantasy schools drew flies, they might have an argument.

You truly are special but I want to know with proof from TV execs that we want to see more G5 schools when their own fans don't care?? Can you do that for the board? It might help your awesome credibility