Posted on 08/12/2023 4:32:03 AM PDT by MtnClimber
You don’t have to dig too deep in any mess these days to find lefties from Hollywood and academia at the heart of things. Or sometimes a principled conservative fighting them.
That’s certainly the case now with the latest round of football conference musical chairs. And with it, the old sport may be losing much of its fun, tradition, rivalry, and sportsmanship,
Sheer stupidity explains a lot of what happened, but there is also something more sinister at the heart of it in my opinion . The Mouse and his evil four-letter network, EPSN.
The big-money era of college sports began in the 1980s after the NCAA lost control over TV rights in a famous court case. With cable TV millions, ESPN and its broadcast sister, ABC, started signing up every big football and basketball conference. They also subsidized the proliferation of holiday season bowl games.
But the Disney Corp. bought ESPN/ABC, getting them in bed with the same people who brought you affirmative action and DEI: the college presidents.
With cable TV money stagnating in the 2000s, even for sports programming, Disney pursued a strategy to weed out all but the highest TV ratings schools from its patronage. (Not unlike how Paul “Bear” Bryant used to overrecruit players, then ruthlessly cut all but the best. Getting rid of the players he no longer needed was the main reason for his infamous summer “two-a-day” practices)
Disney’s ESPN had TV deals with all the “Power 6” conferences 20 years ago, but in my opinion quietly sought to wreck two of them, the Big East and the Big 12, by encouraging other conferences to poach their members. This started in 2003 when the ACC took Miami (led by Donna Shalala), BC, and Virginia Tech....
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Sheer stupidity explains a lot of what happened, but there is also something more sinister at the heart of it in my opinion .It's only about the $$$$.
Every media format, cable TV, over the air TV, streaming etal. need content.
They can do the math and see that college football with big named teams draw the most eyeballs {therefore the most ad bucks}.
Big time college football is the cash cow for every other college sport {with the exception of March madness} so every college President is looking to maximize the guaranteed TV revenue.
Not one of them give a fat rat's ass about fun, tradition, rivalry or sportsmanship, because without the big bucks the college's would have to resort back to student athletes, and who would pay big bucks to see that.
The college I graduated from has less than 2,500 students and a football team.
They have a contract with a local AM radio station that broadcast's their games that pays the President of the College a 'Subway sandwich' once a week.
I go and watch them play @ $15/game a coupla times a year and while the players try, there are probably several western PA super large High School Teams that would destroy them.
Small private colleges provide a great place for an education, they are not pro sports learning centers, and not ready for TV contracts.
The great U. of Chicago cut the cord. I don’t know why Cal and Stanford don’t do the same. Stanford’s endowment is so huge it could easily cover the cost of other sports.
There are so many free streaming services already on the internet,that I can watch any sport or game I wish for free.
It’s been that way for at least fifty years
I pretty much just go to YouTube and watched the condensed highlights, they usually put them up soon after the game completes, so I don’t even know the score. It saves a lot of time. I just cannot sit through an entire 2-3 hour game anymore.
Yep, my entire life.
I know the answer to whether I would rather live in the ascendency of a nation or it’s peak and decline.
I thought it would be the Big 8/12 that would die, but at this point it looks like it will be the Pac 8/10/12 that will die.
That's worked (sort of) for Notre Dame football but not the other sports there. It didn't work for Texas, although they did manage to tear up a couple of conferences before jumping to the SEC.
The biggest problem with streaming services is that their product has an underlying value of zero.
The next generation will use pirate streams to watch anything that can hold their short attention spans.
Amazon at least had the sense to bundle their streaming service with a hedge against high shipping prices and a few other semi useful consumer services.
Everyone other streaming service is just swirling around until they reach the drain hole in the middle, where rising subscription prices can’t offset increased costs and drop in demand. Disney+ is getting pretty close to the point of no return already.
Yeah.
It would appear CBS and Fox are increasing their roster of schools to broadcast games and ESPN is looking to start losing especially when the ACC gets poached.
What’s cute is that when the SEC started doing the latest poaching, Big 10, ACC and Pac 12 formed some sort of alliance..
And now one of those 3 in that alliance is eating part of one of them.
Oops
:)
Mega fail.
Like I said earlier eventually the cable and satellite companies will respond with either lower prices or a bundling option like a Chinese menu where you can choose one from column A, two from column B,etc., they are not going to keep hemorrhaging customers forever
Very rarely do you see such a self own on the internet where someone doesn’t know basic facts, calls out an article for being wrong about those facts when the the poster is actually wrong, which thereby proves the article’s point. SEC moves to ABC/Disney next year with the start of OU and UT playing in jt.
colleges should offer inter=mural Big time sports like baseball, basketball, and football should be minor leagues and funded by the fans and major leagues since they are the feeder system for their teams. Attending college would be a separate thing from playing post-high school sports.
College football destroyed college football.
LOL- so college football is being ruined by what’s going to happen next year?? Not everything that’s gone on the past ten years???
An abundance of ignorance found in one post- such as yours- is a rare event indeed.
The ACC was the original culprit of all the poaching, expanding as they did and destroying the Big East years ago.
It is funny how they are now a second rate conference and, except for Clemson, cannot compete with the SEC or B10
It’s got a lot more to do with the NCAA than ESPN. The demand of the illusion of amateur athletes causes so much idiocy. The big teams get tired of having their wins vacated and being banned from the post season because some players got free tattoos, or a player’s mom got a free house. Or most recently a recruit got a free burger during the tour. The NCAA sees the writing on the wall which is why the punishments got more meaningless (coach suspended for 3 games). But in the end the big teams just don’t have a need to put up with that. But in order to make their own championships and playoffs they really need 4 conferences. And there’s only 1 way to get from 6 to 4.
The author is right in that this started with the involvement of school president’s.
The bigger issue is, with all the billions of $$$ colleges make from sports like football, never mind their billion $$$ endowments, all of it tax free, when will they removed favored tax status from these universities??
And the CFB playoffs haven’t even expanded yet, which will be another huge $$$ windfall for the schools.
“The only reason I watch ESPN is to watch my favorite team play when there is no other option.”
It can be tricky, but there’s an app called DofuSports that will allow you to watch any sporting event, even those blocked in your area. Sometimes you have to switch to a different link, as they sometimes get shut down. Wifey is from PA and wanted to watch Steeler’s games, which generally aren’t shown here. We discovered the app and have been well pleased. Also, it’s free!
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