(12-19-2012 09:50 AM)johnbragg Wrote: (12-19-2012 09:41 AM)Halfcourt Wrote: I think it will be a good basketball conference as well. They will now experience the challenges that come with being a 1 revenue sport conference. How do you market yourself in the dormant period form April to Oct. It will be interesting to watch and observe.
You say this like Syracuse and Pitt and West Virginia football ever did anything to market Georgetown and Villanova and UConn basketball. The C-7 schools are already accustomed to being one-revenue-sport schools. If anything, we won't have to dispel the lingering cloud of negativity from people trashing the conference for sucking in football. (Perception, not reality, save it.)
Yes, there's two sides to that coin. It was one thing to have Syracuse, Pitt, WVU, etc. to be out there to keep the Big East brand out there during the fall, but even then it didn't exactly have a great media perception. If anything, the C-7 wants to get *away* from the media perception of the New New Big East football league - they don't want to be associated with what they see as a tarnished brand (whether you believe that's fair or not).
Look at the national media articles over the past week. They have generally been very positive in favor of the C-7 split, whereas we know that the media hasn't been kind to how the Big East football league looks at all (as evidenced by the preponderance of threads on this board that trash articles from ESPN, CBS, and whoever else might be complaining that day). The media people that live disproportionately in NYC, DC, Chicago and Philly *like* the thought of the C-7 splitting off and creating their own branding and that's being reflected. This league is going to have a really strong media perception right off the bat and that's honestly half the battle. Having the media people in your corner from the get go is way easier than trying to have a commissioner or PR person out there trying to recite stats that those media people don't really care about.
The comparisons to the A-10 are complete hogwash and simply denial by those that are objecting to the C-7 actions. It's as if we're in a bizarro world. When looking at the media metrics, the C-7 is likely going to end up with a better TV contract than what the people on this board generally think, while the remnants of the Big East are likely going to end up with a worse TV contract than what the people on this board generally think. That's not because people here are irrational, but they're inherently going to be biased in overstating the prospects of what's good for their school and understating the prospects of what they believe would be bad for their school.
The C-7 group isn't just splitting up on blind faith (pardon the expression for a group of Catholic schools). If this was going to be disastrous for them financially, they wouldn't have split. People are so quick to blame things on ESPN conspiracies around here in some wacky John Nash-esque ways, yet have so much animosity toward the C-7 schools that they can't even recognize the one time where there actually is an incentive for ESPN to have some machinations behind the scenes that allows for ESPN to (a) pay a relatively low amount for the basketball product that they want while not having to buy football product that they don't want, (b) hurt their NBC competitor directly by taking top brand names away from the A-10 now and, if NBC ends up with the new contract, the Big East later, and © still pay enough to the C-7 that it would be more than what they would have received by staying in the hybrid. It's simple, direct, and doesn't involve 10 different things happening at one time. The writing is on the wall here. Trust me on this - the C-7 has been researching how much they'd be worth on their own for a loooooong time. It was simply a matter that they weren't going to leave until there truly was no return.
