Is the Big Ten the only conference where we have to debate balance or mediocrity?

In the SEC, LSU beat Florida on the road. The same LSU team that lost at home to Mississippi State.

In the Big 12, two teams that lost at home to G5 teams beat Oklahoma ... one in Norman!

The only normal things this year ... Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State are still good as always ... unless their starting QB is out with COVID-19.

(12-13-2020 03:18 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  JR—do you think the ESpn is trying to force the best of other 4 into:

1. Independence with a contract with ESPN

2. Forced into an ESPN controlled SEC on onerous terms

Neither, they are sculpting over time the very thing Clifton Ave was angry at you for suggesting. FOX ups the Big 10 to SEC level payout and at a difference of 20 million to 30 million a year the best of the PAC, Big 12 and ACC coalesce into two leagues which are more ideally set up to maximize profits from streaming platforms. Everyone else is relegated to a streaming world's version of pay for play which will be essentially like forcing them into independence. I suppose schools within certain financial parameters could still pool rights, but the real winners in the rights pool would be the two leagues which would become unassailable because of the financial disparity.

Look, we are on the cusp of pay for play which will triage most of the G5 and force them into an pure amateur status while the upper echelon of the G5 will still try to grow into the P status. Some might make it as the lower rung of the P5 drop down because they can't afford the arms race, and don't want to pay players.

Once that natural attrition has taken place due to court rulings and institutional choice then the emerging upper tier leagues can be established. The Networks wind up maximizing profits by cutting the overhead of so many schools on contract, controlling scheduling, and offering weekends packed with brand on brand matchups ranging across the time slots. It's an advertising bonanza for them. Schools will be selected upon their national draw and some for the markets they deliver regardless of the competitiveness. It will be designed to maximize corporate profits, not competitiveness.

(12-13-2020 02:57 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Well said JR. The networks are the enemy here and they are the ones ruining college football. The BCS and the farce that is the playoff committee were all their creations. It’s not like the NCAA was doing any better prior to the 1984 ruling—keeping all the money for themselves.

The networks have been meddling with college football for 3 decades now and the results have not been for the better.

It’s one thing for conferences to be pitted against each other to win bowl games but the networks have created an expansion arms race were conferences are vying to stay financially competitive and in some cases fighting for their very existence.

I often get labeled as an Ohio St fan on here but I’m a UC Bearcats fan too and have a family connection to Xavier and just about every Ohio MAC school. I recognize the merits of the G5 and am a big advocate of a 5-1-2 playoff that guarantees a seat at the table for the schools in conferences that aren’t financial juggernauts.

This new SEC contract is dangerous and is going to have a long term destabilizing impact on the sport.

Interesting take.
This is what I see: This contract has been in the works a long time. We pretty much knew almost everything about it long before any details were ever known. The most widely held speculation was that ESPN would buy out the last years of the contract from CBS and start with the "Game of the Week" broadcasts next year.
The thing that stands out to me is that ESPN is letting the CBS contract run it's entirety, which gives CBS three more seasons. Why?
There is some speculation that the next round of realignment is already factored into the ESPN/SEC contract even though it goes into effect a year before the Big 12's TV contract/GOR's expire.
I would further speculate that ESPN and the SEC know which schools from the Big 12 will be joining the SEC and the ACC even if the agreements are acknowledged only with a wink and a nod.
I see this contract as eliminating speculation and a return some stability into the upper echelon of college football. Instead of a destabilizing impact, I believe this contract will cement the P4 for the foreseeable future, and already has divided the spoils that what once was the Big 12.

(12-13-2020 02:36 PM)TerryD Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 02:21 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 10:00 AM)CliftonAve Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 08:53 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  I’ll say this much, there needs to be more parity within each of the the P5 conferences. I think fans are getting weary of Alabama, Clemson, Ohio St, and Oklahoma always being in the playoffs.

The end of the BCS, the CFP era, and the mega media deals caused all this. It’s only made the rich, richer. All because people wanted to create further divide between the autonomous and non-autonomous schools.

Keep this in mind, as all of you sit around and fantasize about a “break away” of 32-64 schools. Yeah you sure put schools like Boise and Cincinnati and their place—- but unless you are one of 10 schools your favorite team will be destined for mediocrity forever.

You are directing your hostility at the wrong source, and that is like many people here, and in this nation do regularly, and quite frankly it's doing everyone harm. Face it, none of us can direct our anger where it really belongs because we don't see the CEO's at Disney, CBS, FOX, and NBC. Muskie isn't fantasizing about the destruction of the G5, or FCS or any of it. In fact your anger in this case should be directed at 2 sources only.

1. The NCAA which until 1984 essentially soaked up TV revenue for college football the way they do for college basketball today. The consumer wanted more college football games to be televised. The University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia joined lawsuits against the NCAA's monopoly over college football which did exactly as it does today only in microcosm showed you 1 or if you were lucky occasionally 2 games per week. And who the hell it was on the tube? Alabama, Notre Dame, Ohio State and U.S.C.. with Michigan tossed in with Texas for good measure. The only way anyone else got on the tube is if they were playing one of those in a big game and even then you would readily recognize U.C.L.A., Michigan State, Washington, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Auburn. No there wasn't any Penn State or Florida State regularly per se as they were growing up as programs and Miami was only just emerging as a power in the early 80's.

As with all things success walks hand in hand with doom. Thanks to OU/UGA's lawsuit there was a great demand for games and some networks, like ESPN which was just getting rolling were able to secure rights to broadcast games with schools that had never been seen on the tube. Sports rights money grew the G5 which wouldn't have ever developed as football powers without initial TV money, and more importantly TV to advertise their schools' names, mascots, and games.

The MAC was the best recognized minor conference along with the WAC in those days. And CUSA grew directly as a brain child of marketing as a way to reach advertising demographics in cities. And it was a network executive at Raycom if I remember correctly who first introduced the concept of a super conference (16 schools) to maximize commercial value.

This concept would prove to be revolutionary and the main catalyst for expansion. It is why the Big 10 took an emerged Penn State and why the SEC grew into Arkansas and South Carolina. More market reach meant more money.

Sleepy old college football commissioners who only handled officiating problems and scheduling issues for there respective conferences found themselves confronted by TV executives and they botched the first sets of deals signed because they didn't understand the industry and just how valuable their product was.

Networks soon learned that you could manipulate these conferences by offering their member institutions more and more money. Then as technology changed we moved from brand and national draw to the market footprint model which grew all of the conferences and as the demand for the product rose the Sun Belt started being able to sell its games and pretty soon a pecking order of the newly emerging conferences came about and as some conferences were raided and died and others were reformed all the reshuffling accelerated. And the big brand conferences which had expanded their scope for more money suddenly found themselves in an arms race to keep the most money and the strongest of these regional conferences were the Big 10 and SEC. The ACC raided the Big East more in a survival mode than one of greed. ESPN had all of their rights so they used them to acquire product that old line ACC fans didn't necessarily want but the conference took to get wealthier. ESPN owned part of the SEC rights by then so they used them to do the same with the old SWC product and eventually Missouri from the Big 8 turned Big 12.

Nobody in the SEC sat around dreaming of adding Missouri. Nobody in the ACC sat around dreaming of adding Syracuse, and nobody out of the SWC / Big 12 sat around thinking they should add West Virginia.

The fans got involved the way people do when watching a natural disaster head their way on the horizon. Some realized the danger to their conference and raged against change, some tried to cope with it by understanding it, and some just tuned out while millions in this social phenomenon took to the newly created message boards to talk about it.

But sport nobody here is to blame for it. And now that the market footprint model is being replaced by the streaming model which once again wants highly recognized brands playing to draw national eyeballs to boost advertising rates the change is happening again, only unfortunately because they want this, the games everyone will watch (at least the casual fans nationally) are the ones involving Ohio State, Alabama, Notre Dame, and U.S.C. and those brands that they play in big games.

Only now instead of those being the "Game of the Week" on ABC's Wide World of Sports they are the season finale, the CFP selections. Too many networks now make weekly money from the vast number of games on the tube. So we'll keep the right to broadcast virtually all of the FBS games in form or the other and now that people expect to see them on the tube we yawn over the marvel that they are available where we once couldn't believe our eyes. So now they network that owns the CFP knows it can realize Super Bowl like revenue (not that anything is touching the Super Bowl) if the right teams are in the CFP.

So how do you accomplish that? With a damned committee paid to do your bidding and comprised of big name people whose credibility you don't doubt. And this Clifton Ave is a creation of the networks, not the conferences. The P5 is a designation given the conferences by the Networks, not by the conferences themselves. The conferences don't buck it because to be under that label means the networks are setting them up for more money. If we wanted a fairer system we would have a P4 but we don't. We don't because controlling those selections makes the network millions more.

Case in point, last week Texas A&M was next in if something happened to Clemson. Now that U.S.C. managed to beat a woeful UCLA and suddenly a West Coast ratings darling is available (if the # of games is waived as a criteria) ESPN ran some bogus poll last night saying that USC would be most likely to get the last spot over the Clemson / Notre Dame loser. How did this new data point magically appear to jump a heretofore distant USC all the way to #4? Money from tying in the West Coast viewers instead of having two teams from the Southeast even if both were deserving and Alabama has a stronger national draw than Clemson. Notre Dame pulls a national demographic as does Ohio State.

So we are right back to 1975 where if we are ABC and we have two major bowls we show on New Years we can put Alabama and Notre Dame in one, Ohio State and USC in the other and rake in the dough!

Now I want you to think about all of that when you attack Fighting Muskie and anyone else who is fascinated by the natural disaster on the horizon and they talk across the fence with their neighbor while both speculate on how the disaster will play out. While you shake your fist at the sky and scream at your neighbor to relieve your stress they speculate to relieve theirs, but either way we all face the same damn storm and that storm is Corporate Greed which not only impacts our football, but has been the impetus behind the destruction of family business which erodes the middle class and the main driver behind media bias and the furor over the last election.

But when you get ready to curse Disney and ESPN remember this, Cincinnati and Louisville and the other initial members of the old Metro conference or later members of CUSA and now the AAC would be nothing in athletics without the OU/UGA lawsuit and the Networks. That which you now curse as being the cause of your limitations lifted you out of obscurity and made your school's name a household word. Your world expanded from a region around Cincinnati to the nation because of them.

Yep, Back To The Future.

After a 45 year journey, we are back to what was the natural order of things in college football back when I was 18 years old.

Everyone else has got more games on TV, though. That, and some nice new facilities.

The first charter meeting of the Southwest Conference in 1914 involved Texas, Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma St., Texas A&M and Arkansas. (Rice ended up participating the first season, but wasn't at the first meeting). 82 years later, the lineup was the same but with Texas Tech in place of Arkansas for the Big 12 South.

So will A&M and Arkansas rejoin Texas, Baylor, Oklahoma and Oklahoma St. in another 50 or so years?

(12-13-2020 05:16 PM)XLance Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 02:57 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Well said JR. The networks are the enemy here and they are the ones ruining college football. The BCS and the farce that is the playoff committee were all their creations. It’s not like the NCAA was doing any better prior to the 1984 ruling—keeping all the money for themselves.

The networks have been meddling with college football for 3 decades now and the results have not been for the better.

It’s one thing for conferences to be pitted against each other to win bowl games but the networks have created an expansion arms race were conferences are vying to stay financially competitive and in some cases fighting for their very existence.

I often get labeled as an Ohio St fan on here but I’m a UC Bearcats fan too and have a family connection to Xavier and just about every Ohio MAC school. I recognize the merits of the G5 and am a big advocate of a 5-1-2 playoff that guarantees a seat at the table for the schools in conferences that aren’t financial juggernauts.

This new SEC contract is dangerous and is going to have a long term destabilizing impact on the sport.

Interesting take.
This is what I see: This contract has been in the works a long time. We pretty much knew almost everything about it long before any details were ever known. The most widely held speculation was that ESPN would buy out the last years of the contract from CBS and start with the "Game of the Week" broadcasts next year.
The thing that stands out to me is that ESPN is letting the CBS contract run it's entirety, which gives CBS three more seasons. Why?
There is some speculation that the next round of realignment is already factored into the ESPN/SEC contract even though it goes into effect a year before the Big 12's TV contract/GOR's expire.
I would further speculate that ESPN and the SEC know which schools from the Big 12 will be joining the SEC and the ACC even if the agreements are acknowledged only with a wink and a nod.
I see this contract as eliminating speculation and a return some stability into the upper echelon of college football. Instead of a destabilizing impact, I believe this contract will cement the P4 for the foreseeable future, and already has divided the spoils that what once was the Big 12.

1. If COVID hangs around next Fall why not let CBS hold the bag if you are ESPN? It gives CBS another lackluster year and ESPN time to make a better offer on the remaining two years with what I heard could be second or third pick for the CBS game from the entirety of the ESPN product line up for maybe up to 5 years which would give CBS plenty of time to find a new product for the time slot.

2. I believe realignment is baked into the pie as well X, but you may not like the ingredients.

3. Anything that gives one or two conferences this much of a leg up economically is still going to be profoundly destabilizing.

(12-13-2020 06:38 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 05:16 PM)XLance Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 02:57 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Well said JR. The networks are the enemy here and they are the ones ruining college football. The BCS and the farce that is the playoff committee were all their creations. It’s not like the NCAA was doing any better prior to the 1984 ruling—keeping all the money for themselves.

The networks have been meddling with college football for 3 decades now and the results have not been for the better.

It’s one thing for conferences to be pitted against each other to win bowl games but the networks have created an expansion arms race were conferences are vying to stay financially competitive and in some cases fighting for their very existence.

I often get labeled as an Ohio St fan on here but I’m a UC Bearcats fan too and have a family connection to Xavier and just about every Ohio MAC school. I recognize the merits of the G5 and am a big advocate of a 5-1-2 playoff that guarantees a seat at the table for the schools in conferences that aren’t financial juggernauts.

This new SEC contract is dangerous and is going to have a long term destabilizing impact on the sport.

Interesting take.
This is what I see: This contract has been in the works a long time. We pretty much knew almost everything about it long before any details were ever known. The most widely held speculation was that ESPN would buy out the last years of the contract from CBS and start with the "Game of the Week" broadcasts next year.
The thing that stands out to me is that ESPN is letting the CBS contract run it's entirety, which gives CBS three more seasons. Why?
There is some speculation that the next round of realignment is already factored into the ESPN/SEC contract even though it goes into effect a year before the Big 12's TV contract/GOR's expire.
I would further speculate that ESPN and the SEC know which schools from the Big 12 will be joining the SEC and the ACC even if the agreements are acknowledged only with a wink and a nod.
I see this contract as eliminating speculation and a return some stability into the upper echelon of college football. Instead of a destabilizing impact, I believe this contract will cement the P4 for the foreseeable future, and already has divided the spoils that what once was the Big 12.

1. If COVID hangs around next Fall why not let CBS hold the bag if you are ESPN? It gives CBS another lackluster year and ESPN time to make a better offer on the remaining two years with what I heard could be second or third pick for the CBS game from the entirety of the ESPN product line up for maybe up to 5 years which would give CBS plenty of time to find a new product for the time slot.

2. I believe realignment is baked into the pie as well X, but you may not like the ingredients.

3. Anything that gives one or two conferences this much of a leg up economically is still going to be profoundly destabilizing.

I'm not too worried in the short term, the "ingredients" will keep the money close enough for the length of the contract.
When we get to 2035-36 I think you will find that there will be many schools that will voluntarily opt out of big time football, and you will have your league of 24-40 schools.

If there is built in language in the new contract that would kick in escalated payments I wonder what the nature of that language is and if ESPN has already tentatively lined those expansion pieces up?

(12-13-2020 02:21 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 10:00 AM)CliftonAve Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 08:53 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  I’ll say this much, there needs to be more parity within each of the the P5 conferences. I think fans are getting weary of Alabama, Clemson, Ohio St, and Oklahoma always being in the playoffs.

The end of the BCS, the CFP era, and the mega media deals caused all this. It’s only made the rich, richer. All because people wanted to create further divide between the autonomous and non-autonomous schools.

Keep this in mind, as all of you sit around and fantasize about a “break away” of 32-64 schools. Yeah you sure put schools like Boise and Cincinnati and their place—- but unless you are one of 10 schools your favorite team will be destined for mediocrity forever.

You are directing your hostility at the wrong source, and that is like many people here, and in this nation do regularly, and quite frankly it's doing everyone harm. Face it, none of us can direct our anger where it really belongs because we don't see the CEO's at Disney, CBS, FOX, and NBC. Muskie isn't fantasizing about the destruction of the G5, or FCS or any of it. In fact your anger in this case should be directed at 2 sources only.

1. The NCAA which until 1984 essentially soaked up TV revenue for college football the way they do for college basketball today. The consumer wanted more college football games to be televised. The University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia joined lawsuits against the NCAA's monopoly over college football which did exactly as it does today only in microcosm showed you 1 or if you were lucky occasionally 2 games per week. And who the hell it was on the tube? Alabama, Notre Dame, Ohio State and U.S.C.. with Michigan tossed in with Texas for good measure. The only way anyone else got on the tube is if they were playing one of those in a big game and even then you would readily recognize U.C.L.A., Michigan State, Washington, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Auburn. No there wasn't any Penn State or Florida State regularly per se as they were growing up as programs and Miami was only just emerging as a power in the early 80's.

As with all things success walks hand in hand with doom. Thanks to OU/UGA's lawsuit there was a great demand for games and some networks, like ESPN which was just getting rolling were able to secure rights to broadcast games with schools that had never been seen on the tube. Sports rights money grew the G5 which wouldn't have ever developed as football powers without initial TV money, and more importantly TV to advertise their schools' names, mascots, and games.

The MAC was the best recognized minor conference along with the WAC in those days. And CUSA grew directly as a brain child of marketing as a way to reach advertising demographics in cities. And it was a network executive at Raycom if I remember correctly who first introduced the concept of a super conference (16 schools) to maximize commercial value.

This concept would prove to be revolutionary and the main catalyst for expansion. It is why the Big 10 took an emerged Penn State and why the SEC grew into Arkansas and South Carolina. More market reach meant more money.

Sleepy old college football commissioners who only handled officiating problems and scheduling issues for there respective conferences found themselves confronted by TV executives and they botched the first sets of deals signed because they didn't understand the industry and just how valuable their product was.

Networks soon learned that you could manipulate these conferences by offering their member institutions more and more money. Then as technology changed we moved from brand and national draw to the market footprint model which grew all of the conferences and as the demand for the product rose the Sun Belt started being able to sell its games and pretty soon a pecking order of the newly emerging conferences came about and as some conferences were raided and died and others were reformed all the reshuffling accelerated. And the big brand conferences which had expanded their scope for more money suddenly found themselves in an arms race to keep the most money and the strongest of these regional conferences were the Big 10 and SEC. The ACC raided the Big East more in a survival mode than one of greed. ESPN had all of their rights so they used them to acquire product that old line ACC fans didn't necessarily want but the conference took to get wealthier. ESPN owned part of the SEC rights by then so they used them to do the same with the old SWC product and eventually Missouri from the Big 8 turned Big 12.

Nobody in the SEC sat around dreaming of adding Missouri. Nobody in the ACC sat around dreaming of adding Syracuse, and nobody out of the SWC / Big 12 sat around thinking they should add West Virginia.

The fans got involved the way people do when watching a natural disaster head their way on the horizon. Some realized the danger to their conference and raged against change, some tried to cope with it by understanding it, and some just tuned out while millions in this social phenomenon took to the newly created message boards to talk about it.

But sport nobody here is to blame for it. And now that the market footprint model is being replaced by the streaming model which once again wants highly recognized brands playing to draw national eyeballs to boost advertising rates the change is happening again, only unfortunately because they want this, the games everyone will watch (at least the casual fans nationally) are the ones involving Ohio State, Alabama, Notre Dame, and U.S.C. and those brands that they play in big games.

Only now instead of those being the "Game of the Week" on ABC's Wide World of Sports they are the season finale, the CFP selections. Too many networks now make weekly money from the vast number of games on the tube. So we'll keep the right to broadcast virtually all of the FBS games in form or the other and now that people expect to see them on the tube we yawn over the marvel that they are available where we once couldn't believe our eyes. So now they network that owns the CFP knows it can realize Super Bowl like revenue (not that anything is touching the Super Bowl) if the right teams are in the CFP.

So how do you accomplish that? With a damned committee paid to do your bidding and comprised of big name people whose credibility you don't doubt. And this Clifton Ave is a creation of the networks, not the conferences. The P5 is a designation given the conferences by the Networks, not by the conferences themselves. The conferences don't buck it because to be under that label means the networks are setting them up for more money. If we wanted a fairer system we would have a P4 but we don't. We don't because controlling those selections makes the network millions more.

Case in point, last week Texas A&M was next in if something happened to Clemson. Now that U.S.C. managed to beat a woeful UCLA and suddenly a West Coast ratings darling is available (if the # of games is waived as a criteria) ESPN ran some bogus poll last night saying that USC would be most likely to get the last spot over the Clemson / Notre Dame loser. How did this new data point magically appear to jump a heretofore distant USC all the way to #4? Money from tying in the West Coast viewers instead of having two teams from the Southeast even if both were deserving and Alabama has a stronger national draw than Clemson. Notre Dame pulls a national demographic as does Ohio State.

So we are right back to 1975 where if we are ABC and we have two major bowls we show on New Years we can put Alabama and Notre Dame in one, Ohio State and USC in the other and rake in the dough!

Now I want you to think about all of that when you attack Fighting Muskie and anyone else who is fascinated by the natural disaster on the horizon and they talk across the fence with their neighbor while both speculate on how the disaster will play out. While you shake your fist at the sky and scream at your neighbor to relieve your stress they speculate to relieve theirs, but either way we all face the same damn storm and that storm is Corporate Greed which not only impacts our football, but has been the impetus behind the destruction of family business which erodes the middle class and the main driver behind media bias and the furor over the last election.

But when you get ready to curse Disney and ESPN remember this, Cincinnati and Louisville and the other initial members of the old Metro conference or later members of CUSA and now the AAC would be nothing in athletics without the OU/UGA lawsuit and the Networks. That which you now curse as being the cause of your limitations lifted you out of obscurity and made your school's name a household word. Your world expanded from a region around Cincinnati to the nation because of them.

What was source #2? #1 was NCAA, was #2 networks?

(12-13-2020 03:29 PM)schmolik Wrote:  Is the Big Ten the only conference where we have to debate balance or mediocrity?

In the SEC, LSU beat Florida on the road. The same LSU team that lost at home to Mississippi State.

In the Big 12, two teams that lost at home to G5 teams beat Oklahoma ... one in Norman!

The only normal things this year ... Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State are still good as always ... unless their starting QB is out with COVID-19.

Duh. Read the OP. Two wins for the season (a few moved to 3 this weekend).

(12-13-2020 02:21 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 10:00 AM)CliftonAve Wrote:  

(12-13-2020 08:53 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  I’ll say this much, there needs to be more parity within each of the the P5 conferences. I think fans are getting weary of Alabama, Clemson, Ohio St, and Oklahoma always being in the playoffs.

The end of the BCS, the CFP era, and the mega media deals caused all this. It’s only made the rich, richer. All because people wanted to create further divide between the autonomous and non-autonomous schools.

Keep this in mind, as all of you sit around and fantasize about a “break away” of 32-64 schools. Yeah you sure put schools like Boise and Cincinnati and their place—- but unless you are one of 10 schools your favorite team will be destined for mediocrity forever.

You are directing your hostility at the wrong source, and that is like many people here, and in this nation do regularly, and quite frankly it's doing everyone harm. Face it, none of us can direct our anger where it really belongs because we don't see the CEO's at Disney, CBS, FOX, and NBC. Muskie isn't fantasizing about the destruction of the G5, or FCS or any of it. In fact your anger in this case should be directed at 2 sources only.

1. The NCAA which until 1984 essentially soaked up TV revenue for college football the way they do for college basketball today. The consumer wanted more college football games to be televised. The University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia joined lawsuits against the NCAA's monopoly over college football which did exactly as it does today only in microcosm showed you 1 or if you were lucky occasionally 2 games per week. And who the hell it was on the tube? Alabama, Notre Dame, Ohio State and U.S.C.. with Michigan tossed in with Texas for good measure. The only way anyone else got on the tube is if they were playing one of those in a big game and even then you would readily recognize U.C.L.A., Michigan State, Washington, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Auburn. No there wasn't any Penn State or Florida State regularly per se as they were growing up as programs and Miami was only just emerging as a power in the early 80's.

As with all things success walks hand in hand with doom. Thanks to OU/UGA's lawsuit there was a great demand for games and some networks, like ESPN which was just getting rolling were able to secure rights to broadcast games with schools that had never been seen on the tube. Sports rights money grew the G5 which wouldn't have ever developed as football powers without initial TV money, and more importantly TV to advertise their schools' names, mascots, and games.

The MAC was the best recognized minor conference along with the WAC in those days. And CUSA grew directly as a brain child of marketing as a way to reach advertising demographics in cities. And it was a network executive at Raycom if I remember correctly who first introduced the concept of a super conference (16 schools) to maximize commercial value.

This concept would prove to be revolutionary and the main catalyst for expansion. It is why the Big 10 took an emerged Penn State and why the SEC grew into Arkansas and South Carolina. More market reach meant more money.

Sleepy old college football commissioners who only handled officiating problems and scheduling issues for there respective conferences found themselves confronted by TV executives and they botched the first sets of deals signed because they didn't understand the industry and just how valuable their product was.

Networks soon learned that you could manipulate these conferences by offering their member institutions more and more money. Then as technology changed we moved from brand and national draw to the market footprint model which grew all of the conferences and as the demand for the product rose the Sun Belt started being able to sell its games and pretty soon a pecking order of the newly emerging conferences came about and as some conferences were raided and died and others were reformed all the reshuffling accelerated. And the big brand conferences which had expanded their scope for more money suddenly found themselves in an arms race to keep the most money and the strongest of these regional conferences were the Big 10 and SEC. The ACC raided the Big East more in a survival mode than one of greed. ESPN had all of their rights so they used them to acquire product that old line ACC fans didn't necessarily want but the conference took to get wealthier. ESPN owned part of the SEC rights by then so they used them to do the same with the old SWC product and eventually Missouri from the Big 8 turned Big 12.

Nobody in the SEC sat around dreaming of adding Missouri. Nobody in the ACC sat around dreaming of adding Syracuse, and nobody out of the SWC / Big 12 sat around thinking they should add West Virginia.

The fans got involved the way people do when watching a natural disaster head their way on the horizon. Some realized the danger to their conference and raged against change, some tried to cope with it by understanding it, and some just tuned out while millions in this social phenomenon took to the newly created message boards to talk about it.

But sport nobody here is to blame for it. And now that the market footprint model is being replaced by the streaming model which once again wants highly recognized brands playing to draw national eyeballs to boost advertising rates the change is happening again, only unfortunately because they want this, the games everyone will watch (at least the casual fans nationally) are the ones involving Ohio State, Alabama, Notre Dame, and U.S.C. and those brands that they play in big games.

Only now instead of those being the "Game of the Week" on ABC's Wide World of Sports they are the season finale, the CFP selections. Too many networks now make weekly money from the vast number of games on the tube. So we'll keep the right to broadcast virtually all of the FBS games in form or the other and now that people expect to see them on the tube we yawn over the marvel that they are available where we once couldn't believe our eyes. So now they network that owns the CFP knows it can realize Super Bowl like revenue (not that anything is touching the Super Bowl) if the right teams are in the CFP.

So how do you accomplish that? With a damned committee paid to do your bidding and comprised of big name people whose credibility you don't doubt. And this Clifton Ave is a creation of the networks, not the conferences. The P5 is a designation given the conferences by the Networks, not by the conferences themselves. The conferences don't buck it because to be under that label means the networks are setting them up for more money. If we wanted a fairer system we would have a P4 but we don't. We don't because controlling those selections makes the network millions more.

Case in point, last week Texas A&M was next in if something happened to Clemson. Now that U.S.C. managed to beat a woeful UCLA and suddenly a West Coast ratings darling is available (if the # of games is waived as a criteria) ESPN ran some bogus poll last night saying that USC would be most likely to get the last spot over the Clemson / Notre Dame loser. How did this new data point magically appear to jump a heretofore distant USC all the way to #4? Money from tying in the West Coast viewers instead of having two teams from the Southeast even if both were deserving and Alabama has a stronger national draw than Clemson. Notre Dame pulls a national demographic as does Ohio State.

So we are right back to 1975 where if we are ABC and we have two major bowls we show on New Years we can put Alabama and Notre Dame in one, Ohio State and USC in the other and rake in the dough!

Now I want you to think about all of that when you attack Fighting Muskie and anyone else who is fascinated by the natural disaster on the horizon and they talk across the fence with their neighbor while both speculate on how the disaster will play out. While you shake your fist at the sky and scream at your neighbor to relieve your stress they speculate to relieve theirs, but either way we all face the same damn storm and that storm is Corporate Greed which not only impacts our football, but has been the impetus behind the destruction of family business which erodes the middle class and the main driver behind media bias and the furor over the last election.

But when you get ready to curse Disney and ESPN remember this, Cincinnati and Louisville and the other initial members of the old Metro conference or later members of CUSA and now the AAC would be nothing in athletics without the OU/UGA lawsuit and the Networks. That which you now curse as being the cause of your limitations lifted you out of obscurity and made your school's name a household word. Your world expanded from a region around Cincinnati to the nation because of them.

What was source #2? #1 was NCAA, was #2 networks?

#2 is the networks