BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

I haven't been to a Virginia Tech game as a fan since 2007 (the Matt Ryan Thursday night rain game, ugh). I don't really have the desire to go any time soon, either. It's a full-day commitment to get there (3 1/2 hours each way without traffic), or a hotel room with the prices jacked up out of control. The only way it's really fun is if you've got a good tailgating group. I just don't have the energy to do it. I'd rather just go to the bar, watch the game, drink shit beer, and go on my merry way.

 

Reaction Out West: Realignment May Pose Challenges to CFP Expansion


"The Realignment War of 2021 has begun, and this time, there is a particularly precious battleground: the expanded playoff model.

Conferences are scrambling and schools are jockeying, all of them tossed into a tizzy of action by the SEC’s bold play—stockpiling more of the nation’s richest college football programs.

It’s clear who the bad guys are this go-around: commissioner Greg Sankey and the Southeastern Conference, brandished by some here as the person and the entity that helped destroy a conference, pushed college football into a mess of disruption and compromised the expansion model.

Sankey was on the four-person working group that created the 12-team proposal, leading some around college athletics to question his motives as one of the few who knew that his league could soon expand.

“It’s fishy,” says one.

“It’s insider trading,” says another."

 

That's me with LSU. I have about that same three-hour drive to get there, and ticket prices have gone through the roof. Even if you run it down and back the same day you're looking at spending $300 plus to go to a game including tickets, food and gas. And that's after working late on Friday night and possibly having to get up super early to make an afternoon kickoff.
No thanks. I'd rather stay home, watch it on TV, track my bets and sleep in.
For the same reason, I'm glad I don't have to cover a ton of college football games in person anymore. I don't have to spend any money, but the long drives to our nearest in-state campus stadiums (they're all 2-3 hours away) basically means working back-to-back 12-hour days on Friday and Saturday and no true days off that week.

 

This is the benefit of small time college football. I can roll out of my driveway and be at UAB's new stadium in ten minutes with normal traffic. If it is backed up, there are a dozen alternate routes. We bought a pair of fifty yard line tickets in the lower bowl and a parking pass in a nearby deck for less than $500, and my tailgate group's spot is on top of that deck. Pull the cooler of beer and whatever food we're adding out of the car, take the elevator to the top, and I'm there. It's a block from the stadium, and we can see the field from there. When it's game time, dump the cooler back in the car and walk a block.

From my house to Tuscaloosa is perhaps a 45 minute drive. On 'Bama game days add something between an hour and a half and three hours in traffic each way, depending on the time of day and where you need to go once you are off of the interstate. Season tickets have a waiting list and require big money and your back teeth to get, and everything surrounding the game is more crowded and more expensive. My team won't be playing for a national championship, and that's a fair observation to make - but I'm not going to decide not to go to a home game because it's just too much of a pain to do it.

 

From my apartment it is 90 minutes at most on game day to downtown Tuscaloosa, where I park for free and catch the $2 shuttle bus to the stadium. I have a friend who hooks me up for a couple of free games each year, and I might make one or two more if I can find a reasonable ticket ($50 or less). I eat out all the time anyway (terrible habit I know) so that’s not what I consider an extra expense. Gas costs whatever it costs. It’s worth it to me.

 

I am sure that if a C-USA school could get into the AAC or the ACC they would move. One reason would be the more lucrative media contracts. But how would the existing members of the ACC or AAC make more money if they added UAB, for example? The existing schools would lose money because they would have to divide up existing revenues into more pieces. College football is an oligopoly and the oligarchs keep trying to make the cartel smaller, not larger.

 

Ha, not that one. But it was the coming out party for Johnny Hekker, who earned one of the MVP honors for his unbelievable punting.

CFB Saturday's in Microville are great. I drive 10 minutes at about 7 a.m., reserve spots in our tailgating place (being polite Oregonians, the spots remain saved), then we gather about four hours before kickoff. Five-minute walk to the stadium, and then afterwards hang out for about an hour while the traffic clears, or even longer if it's an early game and the weather cooperates, and then a 10-minute drive home. Same with baseball.

 

College sports has been on a road to ruin for decades; this is just another lane added to that superhighway. If I never see or watch another college game, my life will be just fine.

 

That's the wild card in all of the talk about conferences adding more teams, across the board. If the team being added will not bring in as many TV eyeballs and as much contract money as the existing members then everyone gets a smaller slice of the pie. ESPN, Fox, and CBS as well as any other network who wants to get into these contracts will be the arbiters of this. If the broadcaster thinks that the league with additional members is worth more money this isn't a big issue. If not, why add Team X?

The SEC and Big 10 have some leverage here, but the rest? I think that's going to be an issue of negotiating with the network they have a contract with.

As a fan of a C-USA team, I'd like to see UAB move to the AAC, for the money, for TV coverage that isn't on shit broadcast networks (watching away games on Facebook sucks), for the long time rivalries with teams who used to be in the older versions of C-USA, and far from least of all to get away from the leadership vacuum at the top of C-USA. It's abysmal. About the only positive is that C-USA has some decent bowl tie-ins for a G5 but even those are not all that good.

 

You can get a decent ticket to a Pitt home game for around the same price as a decent steak at Outback and I still have no interest in going anymore, meaning I’ve gone from having season tickets and driving three hours to attend most games, to attending one game a year to not caring. From damn near four hour games, to a dwindling number of tailgating buddies sick of mediocre results to a school and city that is actively trying to kill tailgating, I have no desire in putting in the effort any longer.

We went to the BC game in 2019 for no other reason than we were in town and felt obliged. They fumbled the ball four times by the midway part of the third quarter and I said to soon-to-be Ms. Matador2, “they commit one more fuckin turnover and we’re outta here.” Sure enough, running back coughs up the ball in the very next possession and we were hitting the exit with 14 minutes to go in the fourth quarter.

 

As to this, any AD in the conference would make that jump in an instant, even if they only got a half share for the first three years or something like that.

 

That's exactly what Tulane did, and immedately reaped a windfall from UConn's MBB title.