Disney Wrecks College Football

American Thinker ^ | 12 Aug, 2023 | Frank Friday

[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....

[Captain Peter Blood]

I understand that ESPn has contracts worth $57 Billion they have paid for sports rights for the next several years.

[delchiante]

Requiem for the Big East was a pretty good documentary about their rise and fall. But they’ve still got a good basketball brand with National Championships even recently...

And any basketball focus colleges that left the Big East probably look at Villanova and Connecticut and see those guys winning National Championships in the Big East as bitter pills

But hey, get beat up by Michigan and/or Ohio State or a Clemson in foosball is a better payday..

[srmanuel]

Besides my favorite team, I like to watch football, the last couple of years I picked up on NFL again, I began playing DraftKings fantasy football on NFL games.

I am in my 3 year and still have a $180 of my original bankroll of $250 left, I am not playing to win large sums of money, I use it expand my Microsoft Excel expertise by collecting and analyzing statistics to see if any correlations exists.

[God luvs America]

I went to St John’s from 1982 to 1986 and lived it.

[Jeff Chandler]

He’s writing about sportsball, right?

[delchiante]

You bet you did..
You probably don’t like Villanova or UConn winning those championships either, but every one is a feather in the Big East’s cap..

Pitino is at your old stomping grounds now, right?

[Repeat Offender]

It's corrupting, with ghetto fools who can't read getting scholarships.

Congrats - here's your Bachelors in Science for "Fetch."

[God luvs America]

I went through SJU on a track scholarship and really wasn’t a basketball fan. The greatest value of the BB program for me was scalping tickets- i’d purchase as many tickets as i could at the student price of $3 to $4 a ticket and sell them for $30/$40/$50 a piece. It was all the money in the world to me back then.

If you watched the 30 for 30 you could see Georgetown was the big nemesis back then- everybody hated Georgetown except the people who went there and “da hood.” I was actually very glad when Villanova beat them in 1985. I also like seeing a Catholic school like Nova win the titles, especially considering how bad SJU has been recently.