Posts Tagged ‘San Diego State Aztecs’

Tomorrow Never Knows: The Latest Conference Realignment FAQ

Posted: May 8, 2012 in Big East, Big Ten, College Basketball, College Football, DePaul Blue Demons, Illinois Fighting Illini, Sports
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The past week has featured more conference realignment moves and rumors in quite some time.  Seven schools switched conferences last Friday, all of whom are really pawns in the college sports game of double chess.  Stewart Mandel has pointed out that ever since the Big Ten announced that it was going to expand back in 2009, 25% of all FBS schools (31 in all) have changed leagues.  Inspired by the use of a classic presciently-titled Beatles song* (along with an appearance by Mr. Belding from “Saved by the Bell”) in “Mad Men” this past week, let’s look into the future** by answering some questions that I’ve been seeing from a lot of readers lately:

(* The cost for “Mad Men” to use an actual Beatles master recording as opposed to a cover version: $250,000.  It was well worth every penny.)

(** As the friendly posters at TexAgs seem to enjoy reminding me about once a month, I had this doozy of a wrong prediction last year.  I’m certainly not a soothsayer.  However, what I hope that readers will appreciate that I try to dig a little deeper than the surface level view to get them to think about the issues of the day in a different way.)

1. Does the removal of AQ status and resignation/ousting of Big East commissioner John Marinatto mean anything for Boise State and San Diego State? – Not really.  BCS auto-qualifier status in and of itself would have been nice for Boise State and San Diego State, but they were well aware months ago that such designation was on its way out the door.  What’s more critical for those two schools is the amount of the next TV contract for the Big East, which should be substantially more than what they would have received in the Mountain West Conference even in the worst case scenario.  The main issue for Boise State will be whether the WAC will continue to live on as a non-football league for the Broncos to place its basketball and Olympic programs.  As long as there’s some home for Boise State’s non-football sports, they’ll be in the Big East (meaning that San Diego State will be there, too).

2. Does the removal of AQ status and resignation/ousting of Big East commissioner John Marinatto mean that the Big East will split? – No.  If anything, it’s a sign that the conference is going to be sticking together for the foreseeable future.  This was a move that appears to have been driven by the Catholic members of the conference and the football members ended up agreeing.  As I’ve stated in prior posts, the Big East isn’t going to be getting a bonus from a TV network for its football league just because it’s an all-sports league as opposed to a hybrid league.  The value of the Big East football side is what it is regardless of the conference’s structure.  In contrast, it’s really the value of the basketball side of the conference that’s the variable and it’s clear that keeping Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, et. al will garner a better per school package than a split league.  As USA Today reported today in an otherwise somber assessment of the future of the Big East:

The conference could begin television negotiations as early as September. College football officials inside the league and out, and others well versed in TV negotiations all said the league would be best served if it stayed together, even in its unwieldy current configuration.

Even if no one in their right minds would create the Big East as currently constituted from scratch today, the Catholic and football members of the conference are still more valuable together than they are apart.

3.  Is the Big 12 raiding the ACC? – I don’t believe so (and you can refer back to my post from February on some of the reasons that I think still stand today).  Sometimes, I feel like I’m a crotchety guy constantly throwing a wet blanket on rumors that the Big 12 is going after the likes of Florida State and Clemson, but everything that I’ve heard on this topic has either originated from not-quite-reliable locales and rooted in what sound like football fan-focused concerns as opposed to university president-focused.  For instance, I see a lot of comments that a school like Clemson would want to join the Big 12 because of the “football culture” compared to the Tobacco Road dominated ACC, yet that belies the facts that (1) Nebraska and Texas A&M, two of the most football-focused schools in the country, couldn’t run from the Big 12 fast enough and (2) the ACC didn’t exactly decide to add Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College back in the day due to hoops prowess.  That’s what I mean by a “football-fan focused concern”.

Now, TV revenue disparity is certainly a university president-type concern that could make the Big 12 attractive compared to the ACC on paper.  The Big 12 reportedly has a verbal agreement with ESPN to kick up its total annual TV rights revenue to approximately $20 million per year per school.  (That figure would be the combination of ESPN first tier and Fox second tier TV rights but doesn’t include third tier TV rights controlled by individual schools, such as the Texas deal with ESPN’s Longhorn Network.)  However, it’s still unclear what ACC will end up after its renegotiation with ESPN.  There was a SportsBusiness Journal report in February that each ACC school was looking at around $15 million per year, yet that hasn’t been finalized.

Here’s one thing that’s clear to me, though: ESPN has zero incentive to see the ACC get raided.  None.  Nada.  Unlike its contracts with every other power conference, ESPN has complete top-to-bottom control of all ACC TV rights.  This means that ESPN has more of a vested interest in the survival of the ACC specifically over every other conference – it’s the one league that the people in Bristol aren’t sharing with Fox, CBS or the Big Ten Network.  In fact, think of it in these terms:

The ACC is the single largest content provider to all of the ESPN networks, whether college or pro.

Let that sink in for a moment.  The ACC provides more live content to ESPN than the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBA, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12.  So, do you really think ESPN wants the ACC to lose anyone, much less actually enable another league (the Big 12) to poach Jim Swofford’s gang?  Is ESPN going to want to trade an entire slate of Florida State games that’s guaranteed annually in order to receive only a handful of tier 1 Seminole games that’s variable from year-to-year?  Well, for all of the talk about how sexy of a matchup Florida State vs. Texas would be, check out the number of times that FSU vs. Miami appears on the list of highest rated games in the history of ESPN.  Since many sports fans tend to forget the existence of anything that happened beyond one year ago, they have forgotten how strong the ACC has been as a TV property over the long haul.

No one knows how much ESPN can single-handedly shape conference realignment more than the Big 12.  There’s one reason why Texas and Oklahoma aren’t in the Pac-16 today: the Longhorn Network.  ESPN was willing to pay Texas $15 million per year alone for bottom-of-the-barrel TV rights just so that its limited tier 1 Big 12 package would be kept alive.  So, my educated guess is that ESPN is going to be more than willing to throw at least an extra $30 million per year toward its single largest content provider of the ACC to make it at least revenue neutral on the TV front (where it’s close enough to the value of the Big 12’s TV deal that any difference would be offset by higher travel expenses) or even more to remove any doubt that the ACC is on equal standing with the other power conferences.

As I’ve stated in prior blog posts, I’m not saying this out of any love for the ACC.  Personally, there’s nothing that I’d love more than to witness those douchebags from Duke get relegated to the Southern Conference.  However, I try my best to separate what I want to see happen from what I believe will actually happen.  In this case, I believe that ESPN is going to end up paying the ACC enough to remove TV revenue as a reason for any school to leave that league for the Big 12.

4. Is the Big 12 going to expand with non-ACC schools such as Louisville? – I find this scenario to be much more likely than any type of Big 12 raid on the ACC, but the issue that the options for the Big 12 besides Louisville are limited.  BYU has been brought up on several occasions as a possibility, but the Cougars have such stringent requests regarding its own TV packages that even Texas says, “Damn!  You’re giving us nothing!”  Cincinnati is a geographic bridge between Louisville and West Virginia, yet their fan base size and football stadium situations aren’t making the heads of anyone in the Big 12 turn.  Rutgers and/or UConn are intriguing options for the Big 12 in my personal opinion, but that hasn’t been validated by anyone that’s actually associated with the conference.

Unfortunately for Louisville, they need a twelfth school to join them, as the Big 12 isn’t going to add them alone as number 11, and there isn’t anything close to a consensus on who that twelfth school should be.

5.  How are the non-power conferences going to end up? – The non-power conferences are in a worse position than they were 4 years ago.  While they will have more access to the new college football playoff on paper, they have few (if any) programs that have the resources to legitimately challenge for one of those 4 playoff sports on a consistent basis.  At the same time, those depleted leagues will likely be giving up any access to the other lucrative BCS bowls, which are going to be even more geared toward contractual tie-ins and a free market system of choosing the most popular schools that draw TV ratings and sell tickets.  To the extent that the Big East might get raided again by the Big 12, the Big East can then turn around and poach from the Mountain West and Conference USA even further (so fans from those conferences should not get any joy in any manner from all of the Big East doomsday stories).

If there’s one rule in conference realignment, it’s this: Shit ALWAYS rolls downhill.  When you’re at the bottom of that hill, you’re the WAC.

(Follow Frank the Tank’s Slant on Twitter @frankthetank111 and Facebook)

(Image from Gothamist)

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Big East Expansion: The Big Country Conference Lives!

Posted: December 7, 2011 in Big East, College Basketball, College Football, Sports
Tags: , , , , , ,
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After what seemed like a dozen false alarms over the past few weeks, the Big East is poised to finally add Houston, SMU and UCF as all-sports members and Boise State and San Diego State as football-only members with the schools joining for the 2013 season.  Navy won’t be able to join until after 2014, which likely means that Air Force won’t come until that time, as well.  (Colorado Spring Gazette Air Force beat writer Frank Schwab has been fairly consistent over the past month that the decision for the academy is actually extremely tough.  It’s interesting to recall back in September that Air Force appeared much more enthusiastic about joining the Big East than Navy, but now the roles have switched.)

A year ago, I wrote this post proposing that the Big East ought to form a conference by adding football-only members from the West (which I called the “Big Country Conference”) while keeping the hybrid intact for non-football sports.  While the actual schools have changed a bit as a result of defections to the ACC and Big 12 and my proposal was for a 16-school football league, it delights me to no end that the Big East is effectively going to employ this format conceptually.

Would anyone choose to build what the Big East is going to look like from scratch?  Heck no!  It’s a Frankenstein-looking conference spanning from the northeast corner to its southwestern border with football-only members and non-football members.  (I keep imagining that John Marinatto’s press conference to announce the new alignment will look like this.)  However, there are really only three conferences that are in 100% control their own destinies (Big Ten, SEC and Pac-12) and another that is reasonably assured of not suffering of any defections (ACC).  We’ve already seen everyone that had the ability to leave the Big 12 do so, which indicates that conference stability is virtually impossible outside of those top 4 AQ conferences.  As a result, in terms of a triage procedure to keep a viable football league alive, I actually believe the new Big East/Big Country looks pretty good.  All of the current Big East members might still always look for greener pastures (see my last post about possible Big 12 expansion scenarios), but that doesn’t mean much if other conferences aren’t reciprocating.  Therefore, they needed to make their current home as strong as possible and the best way to do that was adding the top non-AQ schools from the west (particularly Boise State).  Limiting themselves to only more geographically friendly schools from Conference USA or the MAC would’ve been a major mistake.  As ugly as the new conference might look on a map, it really doesn’t matter much as a football-only entity.  The real travel concerns come from having non-revenue sports traveling across the country, which won’t be happening here with the western outposts being football-only members.

Regardless of whether AQ status for BCS bowls exists in a few years, the schools that are about to join the Big East are going to be better off, as well.  Houston, SMU and UCF would be in a moving to a stronger top-to-bottom all-sports conference even without the football consideration.  At the same time, those that follow conference realignment closely know that TV money is really the largest financial driver for moves.  San Diego State has apparently been told by outside media consultants that the projected low end for the new Big East TV contract would be $6.4 million per year per school for just football compared to $1.5 million per year for all sports in the Mountain West.  The increased TV money alone would be enough to justify Boise State and San Diego State to sign on as football-only members.  Finally, it’s a classic “bird in the hand” situation regarding the AQ status of the Big East.  Many people speculate that the Big East would lose such status, but that’s simply all it is at this point: speculation.  All we know is that if Boise State was a member of the Big East this season, they’d probably be heading to the Orange Bowl as opposed to a pre-Christmas bowl in Las Vegas for the second consecutive year.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with Vegas.)  To the extent there’s an overhaul of the BCS system, it’s likely going to look more like the Jim Delany Proposal of a more exclusive club consisting of those on the inside, so this is effectively the only way that schools like Boise State will even have a chance of being part of college football’s power structure.  If they get kicked out of that power structure in a few years, then they’ll still be no worse off than if they didn’t take the chance and just stayed in the Mount USA (the Mountain West/C-USA Alliance).

While the Big East has made a lot of mistakes over the years, the fact of the matter is that the conference doomed to be perpetually unstable the day that Penn State joined the Big Ten.  Couple that with the fact that Miami was always going to take an ACC invite if it ever came their way and it would never have mattered if the Big East would’ve split up its hybrid structure or added more football members earlier.  Every Big East member would have still left for one of the other AQ conferences if they had the choice, so the league would have been in the same position today from a big picture standpoint.  Of course, as we’ve now seen, every Mountain West and C-USA school would leave for the Big East in a heartbeat, as well.  They know that being in an unstable conference that might only have AQ status for a couple of more years is still a more valuable home than any of the non-AQ conferences.  The Big East did the best that they could do with the pieces they could reasonably work with and from a pure competitive football standpoint, the new setup looks like it’s going to be an entertaining league.  In a Big Country Conference, dreams stay with you.

(Follow Frank the Tank’s Slant on Twitter @frankthetank111 and Facebook)

(Image from blog.mcall.com)