(02-02-2020 08:25 PM)vandiver49 Wrote: (02-02-2020 11:25 AM)JRsec Wrote: (02-02-2020 05:35 AM)vandiver49 Wrote: (02-01-2020 08:43 PM)JRsec Wrote: My position now is that we need to continue to cut unnecessary conference overhead by consolidating. That also gives the conference (any of them) more leverage moving forward.
The ethical and business decision that is before FOX and ESPN is whether to move Oklahoma and Texas to either the SEC or Big 10 and thereby increase the revenue gap between those 2 and the other 3 making essentially P2 and a Psub2 which will continue to alienate fans and result in non competitive play between the PAC / ACC and the B1G/SEC.
It won't make me popular but I'm going to continue to push moving the strongest available product to the PAC to create a 20 team conference that has the 7 closest state schools to the PAC and T.C.U. and to divide the ACC which really only has 1 decent team right now between the SEC and Big 10.
It's the only way to shrink the revenue gap and create a competitive situation.
So you move 6 from the ACC to the Big 10 and 6 from the ACC to the SEC and 8 from the Big 12 to the PAC. That's enough from the Big 12 and ACC to dissolve both conferences and void their GOR's. You reduce duplicated overhead by 2 conference commissioners, all their staff, and you can sell the buildings of both and divide the assets between their former members.
Then your CFP can be the 3 conference champs and 1 at large which will keep all 3 conferences' contending fans energized late into the season. Schedule all P3 games and move the Spring game to mid August and play your local FCS school or a G5 for a pre season game that can be sold as the 7th home game for each P3 school.
It cleans up a lot of mess. If 60 total schools is deemed too few make it 72 and go to 4 divisions of 6 instead of 4 divisions of 5.
But at least you would have some competitive balance. The way we are headed it will be the SEC and Big 10 and nobody else will survive.
Outside of the PAC12, I don't think the other conferences overhead is that significant. Distributing the conference share to the teams would be a nice bump though for members.
But the bolded is the real issue. And if a bunch of keyboard warriors can understand that moving UTX and OU to the SEC and B1G would severely cripple CFB competitive balance, the folks in Bristol have to know this too. Instead they conspired to derail the P16 that would have addressed this issue.
That is why I lean more towards CFP expansion to 6 or 8 as the solution to this problem. I believe the intractability of the remaining P5 conferences along with the dubious business sense of ESPN would preclude appropriate contraction to P3. To say nothing of the legal ramifications.
Expanding the CFP is a complete and utter waste, that only extends the risk factors of unpaid players. The players are already bailing on the bowl games which is one reason the bowls are suffering. This may be an easy solution but its not going to change the results. If anything I would say the fans were actually happier arguing about who the champions might have been when AP and UPI used the bowls to only obliquely address the issue of champion and everyone knew the one picked was fictitious! I'd think the game peaked early in the BCS and that the CFP has only awakened an unhappy public to the fact that college football is now regional, but it always was regional it's just that regions shifted.
In the years following the Great Depression the population shifted to the Industrial Northern Midwest and started shifting even faster to the West Coast. The PAC / Big 10 and Rose Bowl flourished and kept flourishing in part to a Jim Crow South which truncated the SEC and ACC's prominence even when the population started shifting South following WWII. When Jim Crow finally died it took about a decade before the real talent shift started being felt in ways that matched the population shift, which occurred because foreign trade killed off American Automobile production, especially when coupled with the first fuel shortages in the 70's. That shift has the SEC and a couple of ACC schools in the spotlight now.
The playoffs have proven this in a more dominant fashion than ever before with the Deep South holding 14 of the last 15 national titles in football. and quite frankly there's no end in site. Ohio State's tittle was won by Urban Meyer who had recently left Florida and was still drawing a lot of talent from the Sunshine state to the Buckeyes. This year's Ohio State team featured more than a handful of Southern recruits. And that's the problem. Southern High Schools are now culturally the final bastion of this generations love of football. Football is still culturally significant and its players local heroes in the South and Southwest because small towns love it and support it and the kids want to play it.
The trajectory for the sport nationally is dire and getting worse. Therefore expanding the CFP will only produce a much higher rate of blowout embarrassments that leave little doubt as to what the regular season proves. The Norther 3/4ths of the ACC, the Big 10 outside of Pennsylvania and Ohio (really the last 2 decent football recruit areas in the North) and all of the West Coast just plain don't have the horses to run in this race.
As to the keyboard warriors remark it is what built and supplies the fuel for this board, its forums, and numerous sites like it. It has been a sports junkies pass time for nearly 2 decades now.. Do you suggest we shut down the boards? You are an educated man and should know that in slow times it is all these sights have. Look at the number of views for the realignment threads vs the others. Only the pinned thread on the main forum about cable TV is doing as well.
The stopping of the move of Texas and Oklahoma to the P16 was a property rights matter. ESPN doesn't own rights to any of the PAC, they lease them, effectually the same in terms of broadcast, wholly different in terms of control, but I bet you didn't know that. Texas is a property coveted by all TV networks because they are the flagship with the best brand recognition nationally and they control a state of 28 million. It is why A&M is in the SEC and why ESPN facilitated it.
I've pointed out numerous times the number of teams for which ESPN owns 100 % of the rights. It's a solid swath from Virginia to Missouri and South. They want total control in Texas too. That's 75% of the viable brands nationally in the markets that still care deeply about college football and where the viewer saturation numbers are the highest. Nothing has changed there. It is a network driven matter and has little to do with the boys in Bristol who don't give a rats ass about anything but profit. It is a business. They know already that the region that college football will survive in and are merely trying to make sure that it gets tied in with the Northern Midwest because those are the two best markets.
The "transfer portal" is an NCAA invention to address the same problem of dominance resting in 1 region. Spread the bench talent around and it helps to a degree. I'll believe they give a hoot about the players when I see them get some form of remuneration.
Until you or anyone else can show me how any of this is actually happening for other motives, I stand my ground. And the last thing College Football needs is an expanded playoff that cements further the reality of dominance in a single region. We'd be better off going back to mythical championships decided by the disproportionate number of sports writers in the packed Northeastern region. They at least had to acknowledge stellar years by some schools other than those that they sold their damned newspapers to.
You mistook my keyboard comment as derision when it was actually meant as a compliment. If folks like us on forums understand that strengthening the SEC and B1G with UTX and OU ultimately harms CFB then shouldn't execs paid millions know this as well? Yet, here we sit waiting on ESPN/FOX to turn off the lights on the B12. The actions simply don't match the words IMO.
I am aware of the P12's broadcast situation. They attempted to mimic Delaney's BTN but failed to get carriage with DirecTV. While I'm skeptical that anything can help the P12, moving the B12's best brands west is better than shifting them eastward.
Unlike most on this board, I have maintained that a playoff is just as arbitrary a way to determine a champion as the polls. Back when MLB played 154 games, there were no divisional rounds; the winners of the respective leagues went to the World Series. The 'playoffs' were a profit scheme to maintain fan interest. I wasn't a proponent of the CFP for much the same reasons as you; that 'proving it on the field' revealed that truth of college football's competitive imbalance.
While I long for the days of the MNC, the playoff genie is out of the bottle. We are both spitballing ideas on how to turn chickin$#!+ into chicken salad.
That I can appreciate. The only thing I see that can help is to consolidate. You said they wouldn't save that much. In a 14 member conference it is a whole conference share per year, plus corporate property. So lets say that the ACC and Big 12 go away. In just conference shares that's 65 million a year or an extra million for every school in the current P5. And for what? More suits, more buildings, more overhead.
As I see it we can head one of two ways and make it better. We can move to 4 conferences of 20 and give each conference's champion an automatic qualifier and include the 3 service academies and the strongest of the G5, or we can cull the bottom 5 of the P5 and move to a 3 x 20 structure. Either way you can redistribute some power and come up with a better playoff structure than what we have now. Put Texas and Oklahoma in the PAC and Oklahoma will still emerge most years. Put Clemson and Florida State in the SEC and the SEC champion will still be the odds on favorite to win it most years but you won't have two deep South schools within 2 states of one another meeting in the finals every year and it will keep more of the nation involved.
But the obstacles to having a truly well defined playoff occurred at the network rights level of product placement.
For example if ESPN hadn't been so concerned in breaking up large states the SEC might have added Florida State and Clemson to get to 12 instead of South Carolina and Arkansas. If this had happened then adding Virginia, North Carolina and Duke along with N.C. State would have finished the SEC out as "the" Southeastern Conference. We would have had football, basketball, and baseball would have been just as sharp as it is now.
The Big 8 and SWC would have eventually formed a much better and healthier conference.
Arkansas, Baylor, Brigham Young, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech
The PAC would have turned out similarly but without Colorado and perhaps with a Nevada school or Hawaii if Scott had followed his first inclination.
The Big 10 would still have added Penn State only without a market footprint issue they would have picked up Pitt, and Syracuse (still AAU at the time)and with them would likely have added Notre Dame, Maryland and quite possibly would have considered Virginia Tech (a school with better academic profile than Oklahoma who they are presently considering).
Now you have regional conferences that would produce champions to drive the CFP's national interest level.
Big 10:
Maryland, Pittsburgh, Penn State, Virginia Tech
Indiana, Notre Dame, Purdue, Syracuse
Illinois, Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern
Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio State, Wisconsin
SEC:
Auburn, Clemson, Florida, Georgia
Duke, North Carolina, N.C. State, Virginia
Alabama, Florida State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt
Louisiana State, Kentucky, Mississippi, Mississippi State
Big 12:
Brigham Young, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska
Arkansas, Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech
PAC 12:
California, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, Washington, Washington State
Arizona, Arizona State, California Los Angeles, Hawaii, Southern Cal, Utah
There would be no AAC and the Metro would still be with us only with remnants of the Big East:
Cincinnati, Connecticut, Boston College, Louisville, West Virginia
Georgia Tech, Houston, Miami, South Carolina, Texas Christian
That's 68 schools in 5 conferences and much better quality in each.
So a P4 and a tweener conference which would be eligible for any bowl game not involved in the CFP. Or you could have the PAC champ in a play in game with the Metro champ. There are lots of angles to use to make it work. True the SEC would not have been in Texas, but we would have added 20 million in North Carolina and Virginia and still had South Carolina (the state of). Travel distances would have been trimmed and we would have had advertising leverage in Florida and North Carolina.
