(08-03-2022 03:38 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  This is where you're totally wrong... and why the Big Ten was already on pace to get over $1 billion per year in rights fees even before the USC/UCLA expansion.

The market share of college football compared to the rest of television has absolutely increased. If you want to try to throw in all of the streaming services and other platforms, that's all well and good, but the market share of college football (and several other sports) for televised programming where people actually watch commercials (AKA the programs that are the most valuable) has ABSOLUTELY increased.

95 of the 100 most watched TV shows in 2021 were sporting events. 3 of the other shows were news programs related to the presidential inauguration, 1 was the Oprah interview of Harry and Meghan, and the ONLY actual scripted TV show on that list was an episode of The Equalizer... which was only there because it was what CBS chose to put on after the Super Bowl. That figure is completely astounding compared to when we were growing up (I'm a child of the 1980s and 1990s) - there might have been the Super Bowl, the AFC/NFC Championship Games and a couple of World Series games on that top 100 list in terms of sporting events, but not too much past that. Instead, it would be filled with tons of prime time TV network shows - Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, ER, etc. We certainly wouldn't be seeing *every* NFL game plus multiple college football games per week beating EVERY prime time network TV show in the ratings.

Look - if you're just going to look at absolute numbers, then there's no point in arguing with you since we're not going to get anywhere. To me, the absolute numbers are generally worthless (or at a minimum highly misleading when look at alone) because everything needs to be put into context with other forms of entertainment that would be competing with sports... and those other forms of entertainment are getting COMPLETELY pummeled.

There will never be a TV show like Friends or Seinfeld again that's ubiquitous throughout the broader culture. Music is similarly fragmented with streaming - what constitutes a hit song has a totally different meaning today. This is what you're missing: the ONLY thing that comes close to having any type of "monoculture" that we used to see is sports. It's literally the only type of program that has any type of audience aggregation anymore, which is why all of these networks are falling all over themselves to pay billions of dollars to the NFL, NBA, MLB, Big Ten, SEC and even entities like the NHL and PGA.

It's a supply and demand issue: 30 years ago, pretty much every network TV show gave you an audience larger than a college football game, so there was tons of supply of shows that advertisers could utilize. That world is gone: sports is IT in terms of supply.

We don't even need the data. Once again, you can follow the checkbooks of every major media company. They're certainly not sending the Big Ten and SEC billions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts. If there were better options to spend their money than sports, then they would be doing so... but the point is that there is NOT a better option in today's world.

Now, will this continue forever? Maybe not. However, sports will always have the advantage of the live viewing element, which inherently makes them valuable because nothing else on TV or especially streaming has such element.

You killed your own argument. TV is virtually irrelevant for non-live events. You are still living in this 90s 00s model because you happen to pay up the whazoo for that type of programing. ESPN+ is failing... the streaming is not making up for loss of sports viewers, which has declined in CFB over the last 7-8 years on a percentage basis any way you slice and dice it. The sport is becoming regionalized to the upper midwest and the southeast. Those are literally the only hotbeds for college football, aside from PAC 12 teams actually being good once in a blue moon (that day may be already extinct from a national relevance viewpoint).

So again, why are we discussing television and programming that is becoming close to extinct with nothing to fill its void on the same viewing platform? You realize household TVs will no longer exist in a decade or two when VR headsets become more mainstream, right? There will not be a cable wire or optical fiber plugged into it billing you by the month. The trends are here to stay. CFB goes away completely for 7 months and the decline in TV viewership still prevails in the Spring and Summer months. And maybe you've heard of... Big Techs like Google monopolizing ad revenue on the internet? That's where all the advertisers have gone to because the young people (I'll throw myself into that category despite the greying hair) are consuming publicly available streaming content by the droves. It's not just premium subscription fees.

I don't know where this whole thing is going, but nothing that's taken place in that last 8 plus years is remotely healthy for the growth of CFB. OUT further cements the sports regionality. Maybe the B1G can revolutionize viewer habits with Warren's vision, but nobody would have guessed his next move was to cannibalize the B1Gs closest partner, network driven or otherwise. There is clearly something terribly amiss right now in CFB.