2024 college football offseason thread

I come from the pre-ESPN days as well, where ABC carried one game a week and it was A BIG DEAL to be on television. Florida tied Pitt at Florida Field my sophomore year and to see the players, one by one, helmet in hand, run past the lone on-field camera, was a real kick in person. Otherwise, you needed to be in the stadium or listening to the radio to know how your alma mater played.

The cable era was literally Pandora's Box for every major sport. Suddenly there was time to fill and money to burn, and everyone got rich. But they eventually killed what was special about the whole thing in the first place. If everybody's on TV, what makes Michigan-Ohio State, Nebraska-Oklahoma or Florida-Georgia any more iconic to today's generation than MACtion? Who really needs a conference affiliation if Notre Dame can make NBC pay the piper?

Now Gwen can stream UC Davis games from northeast Georgia. Even weirder, if I cared to pay for it, I could watch someone's else kids from the high school I attended in the Bay Area 48 years ago.

 

1987 Big Monday

 

Send it in, Jerome!

 

Kinda like you knew your team was good when you started seeing stuff at the sporting goods store at the local mall. There was no Fanatics so you were either getting your gear at the mall or from a mail in catalog. As a Portland Trailblazers fan living in Pittsburgh, I knew the Blazers had arrived in the early 90s when their hats and Starter jackets were on sale on a rack at Monroeville Mall. Now? I can have anything I want for any team I care about in three clicks and 24 hours.

 

What else it has done is ensure there will never be another TV ban as part of a probation ruling. Of course, I don’t even know how you would get on probation now.

 

This. Senior year our game at Kentucky was televised regionally. Me and the cheer crew spent some quality time at the hotel on Friday night hottubbing with people from CBS.

 

Heh ... some of those trips would require an athletic department to actually fly the band to the games.

I don't care how much cash the athletic departments are swimming in. They'll never claim to have enough to actually take care of the bands.

 

ACC learned that lesson the hard way when it took Maryland men's basketball off the TV schedule following the Bob Wade scandal. Big, big mess.

And don't try to convince Cleveland State that probation is strictly a historical footnote.

 

In the early '70s, John McKay (who was also USC's athletic director) said, off the record: "The NCAA allows me to only take 65 football players to road games, but I have to take 265 members of the damn band."

 

I can’t decide if programs are going to lean into marching bands as a way to keep up the kayfabe that this enterprise is still related to colleges or abolish them altogether in the name of extra nickels for NIL funding.

 

I had thoughts in this regard even back when I was in college. The school recruits the top football players, offering scholarships, etc. Does the music department do the same thing with the top violinist, top trumpet player?