cuseroc
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RE: Blame for the 2010 TV Contract
(03-11-2020 02:57 PM)Lou_C Wrote: (03-11-2020 11:47 AM)cuseroc Wrote: (03-11-2020 10:04 AM)Lou_C Wrote: I'll put in my two cents...Swofford is number one to blame, as head of the organization, but there is blood on everyone's hands, including FSU and Clemson.
Some things were bad timing...ACC football being pathetic, the economy, etc. But it's not like the ACC being pathetic was just bad luck. It was pathetic for decades. I'm not going to do it again, but I went back and tracked by decade, and the ACC was by far the worst every decade in landing top 10 final poll teams. Several decades, behind conferences that don't even exist any more, like the Big East or Southwest. People would always say "it's cyclical", but it wasn't cyclical...the ACC was the flat line worst for DECADES until the 2010s. So basically, they deephasized football for decades UNTIL they signed that deal.
We've seen the ACC have a solid performance in the last ten years (last year notwithstanding), in large part simply by making the commitment. The scales didn't fall of their eyes until the realignment crisis, and the dangling of the ACC Network, and all of a sudden ACC schools start realizing that football matters. Commitment gets results. If they'd done that in 2000 instead of 2010, we'd be in a totally different situation.
And I don't necessarily blame them for not having the insight in 1983 or something, when basketball was the big financial driver...but by the late 1990s is was plainly obvious to everyone but the ACC that football was the financial future. You would think that watching the arguably greatest basketball conference, the Big East, progressively fall apart over the inability to field a coherent football product would have made it perfectly clear that basketball wasn't going to save anybody, but that shouldn't even have been necessary.
All that being said, even if you're as blind to the changing financial landscape as the ACC was, the deal was STILL worse than it had to be. Even if they hadn't seen the football light until late in the game, they could have signed a shorter contract, pieced it out among suitors, and not set aside for Raycom.
All you have to do is look at the fact that the ACC was the ONLY conference that decided that:
1. ALL content should be sold to one network
2. Games MUST continue to be sold to a syndicator
No other conference thought that was a good move, and it actually went opposite the trend of everyone else.
So not only did you let your product deteriorate and stagnate even knowing a contract would be on the horizon, you then sold that product in a disadvantageous way. Swofford has to own that first and foremost, but it's not like one man made it happen against the wishes of the programs. The programs all own that by being complicit, ignorant, or simply deferring without thought. Swofford isn't a king or a mega genius, and the schools should not have acted (not acted) like he was.
You have so eloquently and elaborately stated what I have been saying for years now. Swofford didnt make these decisions all by himself. And Im a guy who really doesnt care for Swofford.
I am hardly exonerating him. His head should have rolled. He's the one responsible.
What I'm trying to say is that all parties we culpable, and it's not as simple as "Bad man messed up."
The schools empowered him. The schools deferred to him. The schools were either too nonchalant or too ignorant to see what was happening.
That's important, or else its too easy to just shrug it off as if it was just one man's mistake, or just a "bad contract". It's a decades-long institutional failure that Swofford was able to exploit.
As Nole said, FSU deserves its share of recrimination. Back in the mid-late 1990s, when FSU was rolling the ACC like toilet paper, THAT'S when they should have been bitching about all the other schools letting football decay and riding their coattails. Not in the 2000s when FSU hit the skids.
The 1990s was when FSU had the leverage. The 1990s was when FSU should have said "Listen...this league has got to pick it up or we're gonezo." But we were plenty happy to smash everyone 55-0, sure that would never end despite our coach pushing 70. It's like nobody at FSU asked any hard questions. And in that same decade, while they created 97% of the ACC's football gravitas, FSU was allowing itself to shuffled to below the kids table in the conference. It's absurd.
It could have been different. Once the specter of realignment happened, and then ESPN said "your football sucks too much for an ACC Network", lo and behold the ACC had probably the best multi-year run in it's history. It's not that freaking complicated...investment and will.
Again, if that had happened in 2000, or 1995, (and MANY of us were shouting it to the rooftops then), we'd be in an incredibly different ballgame.
I agree with everything that you wrote. Im not exonerating Swofford either. But the parts of your statement that are in bold cannot be ignored. This is why I place as much blame on the presidents as I do Swofford. Some folks try to make him out to be the boogeyman, but there were 12 other boogeymen, because they were as you commented "culpable."
(This post was last modified: 03-11-2020 04:14 PM by cuseroc.)
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