BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

Here's another question for the college powers that be, or rather, for the networks that are subsidizing their madness. How are these enormous sums of money justified? College football TV ratings aren't even as good as baseball's. It's understandable, as people like to do stuff on Saturday afternoons and evenings rather than watch TV, but what makes the money machine tick? People who run TV sports departments aren't stupid, there must be a way it all adds up, but I don't see it. Three of the 10 biggest markets in the country, New York, here in Boston and D.C, don't give a damn about the sport.

 

Got to think there's some demand for the supply among advertisers, in spite of the malaise in some of the major markets.

And I'm not so sure D.C. is a wasteland for college basketball. Seems to me Georgetown and Maryland historically draw, and even the second-tier schools (GW, George Mason, American) not doing too badly either.

 

D.C. is a MUCH bigger college hoops market than it is a college football market.

 

That's because Maryland is a top 10 program.

 

The Nate Silver piece linked here earlier explains the draw of college football on TV.

Based on his numbers, which Silver admits are a little shaky, NYC is the top market in college football because of area's very large population, even though by percentage of people watching, it is was in the teens.

But 17 percent of 20 million is still a shitload.

Atlanta is No. 2 in TV markets.

Market postioning is not as critical in sports as it might seem. L.A. is the No. 2 market by size but doesn't have NFL. That doesn't seem to have hurt ratings much for pro football.

I'd say that in most of the country's top 20 markets, college football is at best the third or fourth most popular viewing choice (if that) but because of the populations, that is still a significant chunk of people.

Then you have states like Alabama or Nebraska that don't have a major metro market, but when you combine all the TV sets and with the knowledge that something like 90 percent of those states' households will be watching college football, that moves the needle more than what Boston happens to watching on a Saturday afternoon.

Factor in that live sporting events are cheaper to produce than scripted TV and that most people watch sports live and not on DVR, you get people watching the commercials makes sports in general a driver in television world.

 

I think college sports hit a nerve among sports fans that pro sports just don't anymore. And with fantasy sports....I think most people accept that free agency has kind of taken the "us" and "we" out of pro sports. You'll cheer a guy you will boo next year. A college guy? He's "ours" for life. The teams don't move, the stadiums are in the same place they were when most senior citizen fans were going to the school - I think they engender in fans a deeper more personal connection and a sense of ownership that pro sports have long since forfeited. I don't know how or if that translates to advertisers but maybe it does.

 

College football is like the GOP. It struggles some in the northeast and the west coast (to a lesser extent in the west coast), but it kills in the "fly-over" states. Odd thing is the GOP makes me nauseous but I love me some college football. ;D

 

I think you seriously underestimate the popularity of college football on the West Coast.

 

Here's how I look at it:

California has just under 37 million people and 11 Division I football programs, unless I'm missing one: Cal, UCLA, Stanford, USC, Fresno State, San Jose State and San Diego State in the FBS and Cal Poly, San Diego, Sacramento State and UC Davis in the FCS. I don't think San Diego offers scholarships.

Louisiana has about 4.5 million people and also has 11 Division I football programs: LSU, Tulane, Louisiana Tech, UL-Monroe and UL-Lafayette in the FBS and Grambling, Northwestern State, McNeese, Southern, Southeastern Louisiana and Nicholls State in the FCS. Granted, Louisiana is an extreme example and its market is greatly oversaturated (which explains why LSU, its only BCS program is highly competitive, while the rest sort of struggle, aside from McNeese which is usually a pretty good FCS), but still, Louisiana has about one-tenth the population of California, so it shouldn't be close.

California has purged programs over the years it could not support (Pacific, San Francisco St. Mary's, Cal State Fullerton, others). The market out there just isn't that great on a per capita basis compared to the middle of the country. I think it has a lot to do with the other entertainment options available out there compared to the fly-over states.

Doesn't mean there isn't great football out there or programs with support, but the market just isn't what it is in the south or midwest where you can't wander around any medium-sized town without running into a Division I football program.

 

That is a good point, Brian. However, the West Coast has gotten immeasurably more interested in college football since the advent of the BCS. Before this decade, Cal, Stanford, Oregon and Oregon State had spent various parts of the last 30 years in some state of decrepit irrelevance; not only were they bad, they were forgotten. They have all become competitive programs that care a lot about football. UCLA would never have a coach under pressure like they do now because UCLA would never have given a shit what its football team did 20-30 years ago. The TV package that we get out here and the amount of interest in the national scene has also grown.

Used to be if it wasn't Pac-10 or Big Ten (hence Rose Bowl) related, you couldn't get anyone out here to care. Now there are discussions about the entire national scene.

 

A couple of other things that makes college sports a big draw:

Nobody ever graduated from the New York Yankees. But every college has alumni, who have a connection to the school, come back, support it, watch its games on TV. Even my alma mater, where half of the alumni spend their Saturdays passionately rooting for some private school 200 miles away that would likely have thrown their application in the garbage, draws 30,000 every Saturday to see it invent another new way to get beat. No pro team with such a record would ever draw like that.

The other thing is, the appeal of college sports is largely regional. In the South, they're huge. In the Northeast, not quite so much. But look at the areas where pro sports -- specifically, MLB and the 1950s-60s NFL -- had their heyday. College football isn't a big deal in those markets -- especially east of the Appalachians. Even in Chicago, Northwestern struggles to draw fans despite having a decent team playing a Big Ten schedule. It's a decidedly Cubs/Bears/Sox town.

However, in the South, pro sports barely existed until the late 1960s. Meanwhile, college teams had years and years to build up a fan base, media coverage, develop a stranglehold on the culture. In a lot of college towns, the local Div. I team *is* the pro team there. It's that area's entry into big-time sports. There aren't any major-league teams in Alabama. There are in Georgia, but they're notoriously poorly-supported (meanwhile, UGa sells out every game). The support for Miami-Florida-FSU in Florida predates the Dolphins & Bucs (and don't even get us started on the attendance for the state's two baseball teams, which is awful). Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa ... never had professional teams until the Thunder moved into OKC. The Sooners, Jayhawks, Huskers and Hawkeyes are the "pro" teams in those states and get supported as such.

Meanwhile, in oversaturated markets like Texas, where there are a ton of pro options and major colleges in TT/UT/aTm, it's difficult for a program like SMU or even TCU to get a toehold when the Cowboys also suck a lot of air out of the room.

One other issue is money. It's really freaking expensive to go to a big-time college game now -- and really freaking expensive to go to an NFL game. A family might have been able to do an SMU game on Saturday and a Cowboys game on Sunday, but not anymore. In Indiana, the Colts' arrival in town and then the surge in popularity post-Peyton Manning has had a dramatic effect on IU and Purdue's attendance. Meanwhile, the only thing keeping Ball State above the attendance threshold to stay in FBS is playing IU in a "home" game in Indianapolis.

 

The only thing keeping IU out of FCS is ... hmmm.

Quality wins? No. Tradition? Drawing a blank. Protecting rep against a winless Sun Belt team on the road? Didn't do that either.

Maybe Indiana should join the MVFC.