Originally posted by WoadBlue:
In addition to assuming that what has been in recent years and seems right now to be what every sports exec assumes is the only way to go will last forever. It won't last forever. There will be a league that makes the case that what makes its football more valuable is variety in scheduling, which means no divisions. And there will be an executive who agrees. Abnd things will change.
The problem is, you are assuming it will change just for the sake of change. That's not the reason. The networks are only going to change if it brings them more money. Just because some league wants to try out a new idea doesn't mean the new idea will be profitable. Money is and always has been the driving factor. Right now, the money is in divisions.
You also fail to understand that divisons are largelt arbitrary. The NCAA rule, which was created as an excuse to have a large small time conference, was always about having a CCG. The SEC went to 12 nd created divisions in order to play a CCG.
No I completely understand that. I explained that earlier. By the way, you are wrong about the SEC. They didn't go to divisions only to play a CCG. They did it because having divisions made them more money on their TV contract. The CCG itself is simply not the money maker you claim it to be. Let's take the SEC. They play the CCG in the Georgia Dome, which holds around 70,000 people. Let's say the tickets cost $100 each. That's $7 million dollars. Let's round that up to account for concessions, parking, and everything else, to $10 million. Now, divide that 15 ways. It comes out to about $67,000 for each team. Now compare that to the roughly $20 million each team receives from the TV contract. How is the championship game pulling in the kind of money to justify its existence? It's not from the TV contract either. The SEC title game drew a 7.8 last year. That's nowhere near the 15.2 the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl pulled, nor is it anywhere what the other BCS games typically draw. The point being, just the CCG by itself isn't going to generate these large TV contracts, because the networks won't make enough money off just that one game. Keep in mind that the SEC game is on CBS, so ESPN, which pays the SEC about $150 million a year, isn't even getting the CCG. CBS, with the CCG and the Tier 1 games, pays about $55 million a year. That shows a couple of things. 1) The CCG isn't as valuable as most people thing. 2) The "big name" matchups aren't the be-all, end-all that you make them out to be. ESPN's contract is nearly triple CBS's, yet CBS gets the biggest name games.
Division races in and of themselves mean absolutely zilch to the vast majority of fans. That goes at least double for the ACC because our divsions do not, and can never, reflect a natural geographic split. Outside ACC football fans, very few people know for certain who is in which division. Sports writers and broadcasters routinely joke about not knowing who is in which division.
The problem is, you are making a straw man argument. I have never said that an ACC division race is going to be a big ratings game outside of ACC territory. (Heck, even inside it.) You keep throwing up that argument, and I've never made it. I have never said that a game like Pitt/Virginia will ever come close to matching an Auburn/Alabama game. Never even tried to say that.
This is the point you keep ignoring. You have to play these games EITHER WAY. For example, let's take the game of Pitt vs Virginia. Both are mediocre programs, and nobody outside of the ACC (or really their fan bases) cares about those teams. They aren't going to get great ratings either way. However, as I said, you HAVE to play that game. Pitt can't play Florida St or Clemson every week. Most weeks, Pitt has to play somebody like Virginia. The point being, which game will make more money, Pitt/Virginia in a division race, or Pitt/Virginia playing for nothing? The answer is obviously the former.
The argument is not about making an ACC division race some big national draw. It never will be. The point is, ESPN has to do SOMETHING to make a Pitt/Virginia game as attractive as it can. The reason is, ESPN has invested in those games. As I told you, it's not like the old days, where the networks only bid on the marquee games. The networks have now bid on everything, and thus they have to make money on everything.
Are most ESPN execus stupid enough from the day to day reality to know that? Perhaps. TV exuxcs are often way behind, and often so driven by ideology that they fail to see what is in front of their noses (Such as the CBS Saturday Night Massacre, killing all its rural based shows, all of which were 'hits', which failed miserably in terms of viewers, which led to The Waltons getting on the air as a series, which was the biggest CBS drama of the decade).
At some point, there is going to be the first major conference to play with no divisions. It is going to happen. The matter is when and which league. The ACC is the perfect guinea pig because we are the one without naturally geographic divisions. ACC fotballl, becuase we cannot have divisons that make obvious sense to fans and broadcasters, needs to stand out and do it differently, becaus erthat is how we set ourselves apart and thus maximize our value.
That's already happened. That's how college football used to be. It was in fact, almost exactly like that, just without the CCG. As I demonstrated earlier, the CCGs in and of themselves are not big moneymakers. You said that I'm not looking to the future, but what you are doing is actually looking to the past. As I have told you, the TV market does not work the way you describe it. The days when the goal was to simply get marquee matchups (Alabama/Auburn, Ohio St/Michigan) have already come and gone. The ratings and the contracts are proof of that. The networks simply cannot rely on the marquee games, because they have paid for all the games. They have to get money out of all the games, not just the big ones, or they won't make a return on their investment.
ACC football can NEVER [/I]have division races that excite general fans. Never. The best we get from doing it is even more direct comparison to the SEC, which means general CFB fans see us as a weak imitation of the SEC.
Again, you are arguing against something I never said. Even the SEC doesn't command national interest in its title races. They do when it's a big name team like Alabama or LSU, but even the ACC can do that with Florida St or Miami. When the division race comes down to Missouri/Tennessee/South Carolina or something like that, even the SEC won't command national interest. That's not the point, and that's not even what ESPN tries to do. ESPN simply tries to maximize something like a Missouri/Tennessee matchup best it can. For example, let's say the Missouri/Tennessee game draws a 0.8 without a division race, but draws a 1.5 with a division race. Which is ESPN going to choose? That's the point. ESPN can't let these other games just be dead weight.
Someday an ESPN executive will be encouraging the ACC to be original. In fact, my guess is that it has already happened. ESPN execs knopw that variety is the spice of life. And ESPN has SEC football too. So ESPN wins by having the SEC play divisions and the ACC not play with divisions. ESPN would then talk up the differences. ESPN would get both, until such time as the SEC scraps its divisions, which would be within 5 years of the ACC doing it.
And the year after no P5 has divisions, it will be nearly unanomous that the no divisions route is better for all concerned.
"Variety is the spice of life" is just a platitude. As I pointed out, Pitt vs NC State is not going to do any better for the league, or the TV ratings, than Pitt vs Virginia. That's you can't just make a blanket statement like, "Variety is the spice of life." You have to look at what the actual "variety" is going to be. Pitt vs Virginia in a division race will outdraw Pitt vs NC State playing for nothing. You can't compare Pitt/Virginia to Auburn/Alabama. You have to make an apples to apples comparison. The underlying problem is that you are arguing from theory, and I'm arguing based on what's actually happening in the market.
