(07-27-2015 06:48 PM)DavidSt Wrote: (07-27-2015 06:39 PM)domer1978 Wrote: (07-27-2015 06:37 PM)DavidSt Wrote: Would schools like Cincinnati, Memphis, BYU, Boise State and some others get invited into the P4 since they make money in certain sports?
Not likely IMO...
Then, start the anti-lawsuits. I bet the Networks would have the P4 take a school like Boise State.
There's nothing to sue over if its just a conference realignment ... unless it could be shown that there was a conspiracy in restraint of trade, and despite the ease of generating conspiracy theories, proving a conspiracy in a court of law is much, much,
much more difficult.
Consider the conspiracy theory at in the OP of this thread ... each and every link has one or more alternative and quite plausible explanations. So even if there is a conspiracy (which at this point is simply idle speculation), proving it would involve getting one or more parties involved to confess to it, when the parties involved would have every reason to shut up.
Which leads to the one of the most serious obstacles ... that often times what looks like a conspiracy is just different people chasing money in pursuit of their own individual self-interest under a changed media environment, and it only looks like a conspiracy because the changed media environment rewards a particular type of outcome. If this is
not a conspiracy, but just what the new economics of sports are tending to push towards, there is no actual conspiracy to prove.
The second most serious obstacle is, of course, the Big Ten being willing to take Oklahoma, which is not an AAU caliber school. The only non-AAU school that the Big Ten Presidents were able to sneak past the Big Ten faculty was Nebraska, and it was still a member of the AAU when they pulled that stunt off.
Remember, a majority of the cash made by a main research university is research grants and corporate money in support of research, and unlike sports, the Universities cut of those research grants is baked in as a facilities charge, and no the profit that a majority of FBS athletic departments do not make at all, and that all FBS athletic departments work to undermine by increasing their costs of operation to grab the lion's share of their revenues.
If the Big Ten Presidents are trying to get Oklahoma past the Big Ten faculty by presenting Oklahoma as part of a package deal, its not entirely clear that Kansas is a shiny enough bauble to distract from Oklahoma's academic status. IMO, Texas would be a shiny enough bauble to pull that trick off, but its not clear that Kansas is.
(07-27-2015 09:19 PM)miko33 Wrote: Is any of this really making sense? If you REALLY want to extract as much cash out of this as possible, here is how you do it. Invite all current P5 member institutions to a retreat, figure out the top 70 or 80 universities that should split from the NCAA for their own football association - which would include determining which current P5 schools want to get off the merry go round and not double down on big time athletics. Those universities all sign an agreement where all negotiations for television contracts go to one single entity - just like the professional leagues. Then, all current conferences are scrapped and new divisions are created based purely on geography. All scheduling is done by the league headquarters and will look similar to the NFL method. The regular season expands to 14 games - everyone gets equal H and H schedules. There is an 8 team playoff. All bowls are eliminated. This maximizes the revenue possibilities. No fvcking around with this conference's ego vs that conference's ego, etc.
If you really want to do it right and maximize revenue and profits, this is how you do it.
This argument ignores a lot of basic economics. Just a couple:
(1) The biggest pile of cash that is locked away from the conferences under the present system is not in college FB at all, but in college BBall, since the NCAA tourney has such a large share of the total media value of BBall, and the schools only get a minority of that cash. However, for media value, the ideal tourney would be a 64 team tournament, and a 64 team tournament out of 70-80 schools would have a lot of losers in the first round that would not excite a lot of interest.
(2) The difference in media value of FB between five conference negotiating individually and one mass group is not as great as some people imagine ... the outcome in an oligopoly market is not the same as in a competitive market, it is rather somewhere in between a competitive market outcome and a monopolistic outcome. And the average value of all 70-80 negotiating as a monopoly
has to be substantially greater than the average value of
the SEC and Big Ten separately. Because you have to give the highest income incumbents a substantial reason to defect from the current system, because without their defection the breakaway does not happen.
(3) There is substantial brand equity in the SEC, the Big Ten, and the PAC-12 that is being destroyed in this realignment. Conference realignment junkies seems to conveniently forget that every conference realignment destroys some brand equity, which takes time to recover, and the higher the status of the conference, the more substantial the brand equity of the conference is. That is part of why conference realignment at the top level of college FB has been going in waves since well the start of the large university era after WWII ... a period of time passes over which time the landscape of college sports evolves, new schools establish a reputation, new opportunities become available to generate revenue from college sports, and the benefits of conference realignment becomes greater than the cost. Then there is one or two realignments that sparks off further realignments, until most of the value that has been lying on the table has been picked up, and the benefits of further realignment is no longer clearly superior to the costs of realignment.
Conference realignment junkies seem to like to ignore the fact that every realignment
does come at a cost, so they can imagine that any real or imagined gross benefit they can see is the net benefit of realignment, so they can convince themselves that the next realignment rumor has
got to happen because it makes so much economic sense.
/
It is all making sense now
