2013 College Football Coaching Carousel thread...

Going to the Big Ten Network website and putting in a DC zip code it tells me that in Washington DC the Big Ten Network is available on Comcast, Verizon and RCN, as well as the two big satellite providers.

 

Do they play at Foxboro? I would think a 25,000-seat stadium on or close to campus would be a good fit for them.

 

Regular basic? Or a premium tier? Just curious.

 

I'm not sure, but if it's not on basic I'm sure they are negotiating to change that before Maryland begins competing in the league.

 

UMass does indeed play at Foxboro, where they draw no one. The school's move to FBS was one of the stupidest decisions in its history.
PS: I get Big Ten Network on Verizon here, hundreds of miles away even from Rutgers, as part of the sports premium package. I almost never watch it unless its their reruns of Big 10 Football Highlights of the 1950s -- all in black and white and some narrated by a very young Chick Hearn.

 

Funny this gets mentioned today. Story in the Boston Globe about how UMass' subsidy for the program is much more than expected.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/12/13/umass-football-subsidy-exceeds-projections/LdMZCquclCgNI7YFMYWeNP/story.html

I was surprised when they said UMass drew 15,000 a game. I would've bet it was about one-third of that.

UMass is in a pickle here. It says it doesn't have the coin to expand McGuirk (16K seats, IIRC), but also felt squeezed at FCS. The Krafts offered a Gillette rental for small dollars, so UMass could afford to move up and meet the facility requirements.

Also, Big Ten Network indeed is on all the DC-area cable providers already. What B1G/Fox are hoping is that Maryland's arrival will get it bumped down to basic, for much more total take in subscriber fees. Also consider that DC gets a lot of Midwest natives living there, as it does for other parts of the country.

 

Comcast and BTN had a small-scale war that was similar to, and at the same time as, the Comcast-NFL Network war. They got it all solved and now every Big Ten school makes more money from TV than Notre Dame does.

The idea that there would be no financial reason to add Maryland, or that BTN's distribution is suffering, is ... well, it's a Mark2010-like idea.

 

Only reason I also knew UMass played at Foxboro was that, on NCAA FB 13, that's where my road game at UMass was.

Even on the Xbox, there was no one in the stands.

 

Well, you know, if they don't have it where Mark lives, they must not have it anywhere.

 

I've lived quite a few different places in the past 10 years.

I know there are some providers who offer a separate premium tier with some extra channels. In my current locale, I haven't found a reason to purchase it. Long time ago, I got one of the out of market packages in order to follow a certain team game-in, game-out. That made sense for a while. When I grew disinterested in that team and just wanted a random assortment of games from around the league, it no longer made sense. I suspect that's the case here. If you polled every subscriber, I wonder what percentage would say "I'm a fan of (insert team name here) and want to see every single game they play."

Hey, I live 1,800 miles from the closest Pac-12 school and I can get 2-3 Pac-12 football and/or men's basketball games per week without purchasing a premium tier.

 

I wish you would write this article for my local paper. Every time conference realignment comes up, so many people around here say things like, "The SEC should plant its flag in VA by getting Virginia Tech" or "The SEC should add Florida State". I try to explain that the way the Big Ten makes money (getting on cable packages) is a lot different then how the SEC makes money (having games that people even outside of SEC country want to watch).

 

There will come a day when schools will rue these large conferences with 12, 14, 16 teams.