camel at sea

Historically, the SEC has always been willing to take less contract money in exchange for an easier schedule / more wins / better national perception. The extra wins helps the have-nots in the league to feel good about themselves and keep their stadiums relatively full.

I think the biggest obstacles to settling down are 1) ND having enough money via the status quo to continue competing, and 2) Phil Knight (net worth $40B) accepting Oregon's fate. (I don't get the sense that Stanford or Washington care as much about finding a PAC exit ramp.) If ND could get someone to offer them $10-12M per home game after their NBC deal expires, then they're probably set. Oregon though, cannot really solve its situation short of leaving the PAC. One of the most powerful men in the world (let alone sports) is flexing financial muscle on their behalf.

Oregon/Stanford vs. Clemson/FSU/etc. is probably better Tier 1 inventory than the ACC has now. The real value would be in cable carriage on the west coast. But that's a short-term play both because cable is a dying revenue model and because everyone involved will be trying to get into the B1G/SEC as soon as possible.

Jon Wilner is probably the most plugged in sports journalist in PAC territory and his twitter account reads like someone going through the five stages of grief. The remaining PAC brands are going to turn their nose up at inviting Big 12 schools, joining up with them, and especially expanding with MWC schools. But it's going to be a big hole in the boat if they stick together and don't have a flag planted in the southern part of California. Assuming they get over the idea of adding SDSU, there's still the problem of SDSU likely being non-additive financially. They will need to be willing to sign a GOR to improve their money, at least marginally, and it is unlikely they'll be able to get anyone to agree to that. The PAC Presidents probably wouldn't mind associating with ACC schools. Maybe that's where the loose partnership stuff is coming from. But how does that work financially? Or logistically? Maybe you can sell Disney on a pod of PAC schools, ACCN carriage on the west coast, etc., but that probably doesn't work financially unless you limit the schools making the move to as few as possible. That still leaves the Four Corners schools in the Big 12 at some point. If I'm at Washington State, I'm hoping that Disney charges in at the last minute and throws a lot of money at a new deal to hold the PAC together. But I'm not sure why they would do that. FOX appears to be pushing for a PAC break-up based on the stuff their media talking heads are saying publicly.

I wonder how much you should credit a program for willingness to play on Thursday/Friday night, or at nearly midnight on Saturday, such that they have a TV window to themselves. It probably should count for something. Would Tech have more 1M+ viewer games if they played a bunch on Thursday/Friday? It's likely. Would they do it? Who knows. I would also like to see how these schools rank at is relates to number of horribly rated games. That would present a picture about what the floor of these programs are.

There's all of this. I think part of it, too, is that Disney does not want to be shut out of the west coast. I think the Mouse is trying to figure out how to hang onto the PACN schools without having to do any business with the Big 12 (where there is some pretty potent mutual enmity.) FOX on the other hand is encouraging PAC schools to join the Big 12. I actually think FOX (for once) has the upper hand here but we'll see how hard they press for it.

Is college football king in America? 60,000+ people gather together on Saturdays in the fall, in Ames, Iowa, to watch the Iowa State Cyclones - who as has been mentioned repeatedly have never won a conference title or national title in the lifetimes of any of their fans. ISU's stadium would be somewhere in the top 30 stadium capacities in all of Europe. Top college stadiums are larger than the top end of the NFL. The disconnect in this conversation is happening between the people who can and cannot tell the difference between the likes of Iowa State, Oklahoma State, BYU... and Bowling Green. There is a big difference.

Yeah. A lot of this makes sense if you assume that some shadowy figures at both FOX and Disney are working together and then staging the CR theater so that it matches up with the backroom deal.

This is the sort of report that comes out if someone is hoping to make someone nervous about starting an alliance with the ACC.

How'd the European Super League work out? You've got to know just how far you can push the fans but it's a bad idea to push them too far. Cutting out a third of the schools who are currently in the P5 (an argument I've seen on this thread) would be too far. Cutting out CUSA, the MAC, and the Sun Belt is probably not too far. Fewer of those games means more good match-ups and more often. As for the legal side, yeah, the more schools that get cut out, the more congressmen, lawyers, etc., you're dealing with. But as for streaming... there are not many things that can potentially draw 1-2M live streams. It's dumb to throw Oklahoma State out of the top tier when history suggests that they can deliver live viewers in the millions (just not the same number of millions as Texas or OU.)

I think the Big 12 gets the four corners schools (and eventually signs a deal with FOX) and the ACC gets some PAC North schools. The ACC adding 4 boosts their network numbers and the bang-for-the-buck is better for the ACC if they only take 4 schools. Dividing by 18 is better than dividing by 24 for their purposes. I also think that the eventual breakaway will be in the 70 school range. People are enamored with the 64 school breakaway idea (or often even a smaller breakaway)... but you can construct a mathematically pleasing system from 72, also. I don't think the media partners want to invest a ton of money into a product and simultaneously generate massive backlash for rendering the sport unrecognizable by cutting out 3/4 of the traditional participants. There's still a ton of TV viewer value in schools like Oklahoma State, Iowa State, etc. You don't just casually throw away inventory that can draw a couple million live viewers, just because it can't draw (as often) more than 5 million live viewers.

If a FOX conference has 36-40 schools, and a Disney conference has 36-40 schools... then we're still talking about 72-80 universities playing major college football. I don't think the loss of CUSA, the MAC, etc., will be enough to make the sport feel like NFL Lite. There are still a lot of haves and have-nots present. The people who are making the case that the top tier is too large are right. Dozens of schools have moved up from FCS in the last few decades. But the people trying to make a case for a "big brands only" top tier are wrong, too. That's too small and isn't recognizable as college football. There is middle ground on all of this, though.

If you make the field too small, you change the product too much. Then it really is Triple A baseball. That's a massive financial risk for the people holding the purse strings. But if the top tier still has 70+ schools, it still feels like the same sport to the casual fans. That's a much safer risk to pay for and you don't invoke fan/media backlash.

Not taking UO and UW right away has the stink of the Big Ten not wanting to be perceived as the one who killed the PAC. First... "we're waiting on Notre Dame." Now we've got their mouthpiece over at ESPN suggesting that those two might come onto the Big Ten's radar *for the first time* if the alternative is that those two join the Big 12.

I think "the Big 2" will eventually be 30+ schools each and it will break away from the NCAA. If there were 36 under the (primarily) FOX umbrella and 36 under the primarily Disney umbrella, that covers the entire P5. You could make it 40 and 40 if necessary and it still works. You could set that up so that CFB media deals were all under one umbrella, you could put teams into NFL style divisions of traditional rivals/geographic peers, a pre-set schedule rotation, a playoff system that makes sense, etc.

I also think he believes that everyone currently in the P5 will be included in whatever CFB turns into.

Being in the B1G doesn't somehow turn on a federal research spigot for its members. Nebraska's place in the R&D pecking order, nationally, is still pretty much in exactly the same place it was 15 years ago. If Northwestern and Purdue left the Big 10, even if they were kicked out, those two universities would continue doing research with Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. Football is not the tie that binds that whole thing together.

Logically, if FOX is driving this thing, and if they ultimately want more PAC schools in the Big Ten, FOX will probably also encourage the four corners schools to join the Big 12.

I'll be interested to see if people in Arizona and Utah become more engaged in college athletics, due to sharing a league with BYU. There's a ton of fan overlap between all of those schools and fan overlap generally breeds hatred and encourages fan interest. It goes without saying that BYU fans and alums will be far more engaged.

The "new" Big 12 was being projected to make similar money to the PAC before SC and UCLA left. That should say a lot about where the rest of the PAC is actually valued.

Killing the Rose Bowl as a political power player is a big part of current events. The expanded playoff needs early round games at home stadiums, to really work, and the Rose Bowl was in the way of that.

You can't compare UH to UT, or Cincinnati to Ohio State, to get a sense for how little Washington State is worth.

TCU and Baylor both usually outdraw Washington State and Oregon State at the gate. K-State, ISU, and WVU usually beat them by 10K+ at the gate. WSU is lucky to break 30K for a home game. Every school in the new Big 12 has a better local recruiting footprint than the Beavers and Cougars. TV is the thing that matters, though, and it's hard to compare for a lot of reasons. A lot of the PAC inventory has been unrated on the PACN for the last decade. Almost every bad Big 12 game has been aired somewhere (FS1, ESPNU, etc.) The new AAC adds have been playing games on ESPNU, at weird times, on weird days, against private schools. The weakness of the AAC makes it easier for UH, Cincy, and UCF to string together really good seasons occasionally (and the AP ranking boots the TV numbers when that happens.) But that league has been an albatross around the necks of those schools, too. The longer term upside leans *heavily* in favor of the Big 12's AAC adds against WSU/OrSt. Another thumb on the scale for the Big 12 is basketball. WSU and Oregon State have essentially zero value in the other revenue sport. UH and UC both have legitimate value there. UCF is capable of it, too, given the local basketball recruiting turf in Orlando.

If we assume FOX is the puppet master behind current events, then they probably go to the Big 12 and promise to make it worth their while to kill the PAC so that the B1G doesn't have to be the one to do it (the B1G won't want to technically deliver the killing blow.) It makes more sense to kill the PAC than the Big 12 at this point because there's a lot more dead weight in the PAC. We end up with four "power conferences." FOX has the B1G + the lesser Big 12. Disney has the SEC plus the lesser ACC.

Maybe the Big Ten really is willing to be done at 16 unless the Irish come knocking. If so, the B1G would avoid killing the PAC 12 in the way that the SEC technically avoided killing the Big 12. "The Rose Bowl" as a power player in college football politics, and an obstacle in the CFP expansion talks, would be dead, though. Considering the likely hurt feelings in all of this, then maybe the Big 12 ends up with a (primarily) FOX media rights deal and the PAC remnants end up with Disney. That divides up the U.S. map fairly well between the two media companies.