(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.