BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

That's interesting. Care to elaborate?

I once covered an FCS that did something like this with a guarantee game. They had an allotment of about 5k for a game at a nearby FBS school that had once been a big rival before they became separated by divisions. They decided to offer the allotted tickets to the away game to season ticket holders first (it was an option when you bought your season ticket). So they accelerated their season ticket sales and actually got more tickets in their allotment because of it. They ended up setting a school season ticket record because of interest in an away game.

 

But the argument that keeps coming up regarding TCU is that they'll get better crowds by virtue of getting better opponents. Anyone can draw against Texas and Oklahoma or Florida and LSU, even if the visiting teams are bringing most of the fans. And TCU will likely have by far the smallest stadium in either of the leagues you bring up, even after the renovation.

I think people get caught up in TCU being good in football and thus making them a natural fit for a good football conference, when the reality is a lot more complicated. That's why Boise State won't do better than the Mountain West for a long, long time. Less than 50,000 for a national title contender playing a ranked team at a big stadium is troubling.

Perhaps the bottom of the BCS, your Baylors and Iowa States and Indianas. But no more than *maybe* a quarter of the BCS qualifiers. And as you mention, if TCU drops back to being a fringe top-25 team -- or turns into a .500 club or worse -- their numbers could drop hard too.

Other than their recent success in football, I don't see the appeal of TCU to a conference that already has at least one of the major Texas schools.
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Yes, but unlike the other schools, TCU now has a fan base. I'd bet it's as big as many schools already in the BCS, but it simply does not get tapped into as much as those schools. They don't get an opportunity to host Texas and Texas A&M every other year. Would Texas Tech's crowd be as motivated if its home schedule were Wyoming, UNLV and Air Force?

That speaks to the stadium as well. The stadium capacity is about meeting current demand. As Kansas State can attest to, if you need to upgrade a facility to meet conference standards, you can be asked to do.

Look, there are two kinds of programs that will currently meet the metrics to "look" like a BCS program: 1. Teams already in the BCS that can use their existing status and the leverage that provides to build revenue and improve attendance and facilities and 2. Growth states that once did not have state schools that were BCS caliber, but may now have those. Utah comes to mind. I read somewhere that it's enrollment jumps significantly every year and it's up over 30k students now. It's one of the nation's fastest-growing states. So Utah is a big public university that has grown to the point where, yeah, it probably does need to be in a BCS league.

But even Utah only drew 46k for the TCU game last year and that was a 3 vs. 5 game. Of course, Rice-Eccles only seats 45k, but that speaks to where ticket demand was for a major state university playing in the Mountain West Conference. Think they might need to expand it in the Pac-12?

 

It does? I live out here and I haven't seen it.

 

I wonder, (I don't know the answer) if TCU would get a better fan base if they were playing against the bigger Texas schools, rather than MWC/Big East schools. I think if they were playing Texas, OU, OSU, Texas Tech on a regular basis, maybe that would change.

Maybe it wouldn't.

 

Brian my point is that this is evidence that the conferences operate as de facto cartels restraining trade for the advantage of members. If Congress thinks this is too ripe, or the Justice Department goes to court claiming college sports are not a nonprofit enterprise and wins, the whole structure becomes immediately illegal, and the losers would be able to sue the winners for damages.

 

I don't think there's any doubt it would. There's a fundamental shift that happens when you go from being a program that sweats the "walk-up" crowd to a program that has a certain number of games it will sell out and uses those games as leverage to sell more tickets to other games.

That, to me, is why a second-tier (I mean by resources as opposed to on-field success, not always the same thing) BCS program will usually compare favorably to most non-BCS programs when it comes to attendance numbers.

Let's face it, even the big schools use attractive games to leverage sales to their cupcakes games. Nobody wants to see Ohio State beat Ohio Teachers Commuter College. But if you have to buy a ticket to the OTCC game to also get a ticket to the Michigan game, well now...

 

Well sure, but I can't think of a single school whose attendance wouldn't benefit greatly from a better schedule. Put Western Kentucky in the Big Ten or SEC and their average attendance will be a smidge higher than 13,000 per game, I'd bet.

 

Probably not, but would they have a better attendance than TCU does with the same schedule? Probably. And if TCU has a great fan base, they should be selling out a relatively small stadium to see a team that's been in the national polls for a few years in a row and on the fringes of the national title discussion a couple of times.

Stadium size was probably one of the reasons Utah wasn't a first-ballot pick for the Pac-12. Had the original Big 12 raid gone off as planned, no way does Utah get in. Once it was obvious that only Colorado was coming, they needed a 12th team. I'm not sure Utah was even the best choice IN Utah, but allegedly Cal and Stanford were not happy about adding a Mormon school, so BYU was out. I'm sure they're happy with Utah, but it's not why they were expanding.

TCU doesn't appear to be thinking in terms of major college football-level support with their stadium expansion, since it'll still be one of the smaller BCS stadiums when all is said and done. And they'll sell out against Texas and Oklahoma, but after that? Iowa State and Kansas might get them the same crowds they're getting for UNLV and New Mexico.

 

There was a time when Jeff was the hot insiders' name to come up to Penn State and raise the program. Those thoughts died down about midway through his SEC stay.

 

As I understand it the Big East television contract is coming up for renewal. Will the schools in the Big East do better or worse than the old Big 12 North schools after Texas and Oklahoma take their cuts on the current televising contract? Why wouldn't these schools be better off going en mass to the Big East. Then the Big East could add ECU, go to 12 and have a season ending playoff that could conceivably draw pretty well if they played it in Kansas City. That would put 20 schools in the conference but then the non-football schools, UConn and Rutgers could play in one division home and the other ten in a second division. Play home and home within the division for basketball and bring the top eight from each division in for a tournament.

 

The Big East recently turned down a $1.17 billion deal over nine years by ESPN for its Tier 1 rights.

The Big 12 last year signed a $1.1 billion deal over 13 years with FOX for its Tier 2 rights, with its Tier 1 contract (ABC/ESPN) expiring in 2016.

That's why schools like Kansas, Kansas State and Mizzou worked behind the scenes to keep the Big 12 alive as opposed to heading to the Big East. So long as Texas and Oklahoma are still in the conference, the Big 12 provides those schools with their best paycheck.

KU, especially, likes the Big 12 setup. The Jayhawks made somewhere more than $7 million last year in Tier 3 rights, largely from basketball games with some other revenue mixed in -- that's a big reason KU annually ranks right up there with Texas and Oklahoma as the Big 12's top earners. Go to another conference like the Big East where KU has to split that Tier 3 money equally and chances are it makes less there, not to mention the first two tiers, as well.