BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

Another thing about college sports is regional identity. That's huge in a lot of programs. LSU doesn't just represent the school, it carries the flag for the whole state because, unlike the Saints, 70 percent of the key players are Louisiana bred. Another great example of this is Miami in its heyday. We know how much "putting the fence" around the "state of south Florida" was the key for the Miami program.

Pro teams are big local draws, but it's understood that they are, more or less, mercenary. If State U wins, it's a validation of how your state produces athletes and, for some, it's almost like a personal validation.

I notice my sister-in-law has become a huge college football fan AFTER she left her home state and moved half way across the country. She's from Louisiana and she gets picked on for being from Louisiana, so when LSU has success, that validates where she's from and who she is at some level. When she lived in Louisiana, she didn't really care.

 

I think you are wrong.

I think MankyJimy graduated from the New York Yankees.

 

Two other points:

1. Americans like to watch football more than any other sport. Ratings pretty consistently bare this out. And the NFL is limited by law from playing on Saturdays when a lot of people are home.

2. I don't know this for a fact but college football probably has higher income demographics than baseball. College alumni do have higher average incomes than non college attendees. So an advertiser gets a more affluent audience.

 

There were like 20 college games on my TV yesterday, maybe more. I watched a little bit of many of them. But I sure didn't watch any commercials. The sport competes with itself to an extent the pro sports do not. It's the essential business problem. I mean, for FBS games yesterday 4 million or so potential viewers, the most committed and well-to-do of them all, were AT the games. Good for them, but bad for my tire advertisement.
BTW, of all those games on TV here in Boston, know one that wasn't? UMass (state university) at BC (only FBS school in state). Pretty much says it all about college football in this town.

 

The SEC has announced Texas A&M will join as the 13th member, beginning next year. The league says, "Screw it. Sue us. We'll deal with it."

http://www.secdigitalnetwork.com/NEWS/tabid/473/Article/228257/texas-am-to-join-southeastern-conference.aspx

 

A few points:

1. "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."

Really? What do you think the Cleveland Browns draw for an average game? How about the Carolina Panthers (before Cam Newton)? Or the Buffalo Bills? The Arizona Cardinals? The Jacksonville Jaguars?

I'll give you a hint. All drew more more than double that 30,000 benchmark last season on average. Carolina, the worst team in the NFL, was sixth in average home attendance at more than 72,000. The big exception is Oakland, which still averaged 46,000.


2. "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. "

But the situation spelled out in the first paragraph there also was the case in Texas. Before 1960, there were zero pro sports in the state, amd what's more, TCU and SMU were big-time programs for years (Sammy Baugh, Davey O'Brien, Doak Walker, Don Meredith, etc.). So why did they get squeezed out while the schools you mentioned didn't?


3. You're right about the money. Games are really freaking expensive.

 

It's interesting that you include Miami in the list of teams whose history predates pro sports because the rise of the "U" came after the 17-0 Dolphins and that whole era where the town became a Dolphins town.

Miami did it by tapping into local pride. The Hurricanes, mostly kids from South Florida, could represent the city and the region in a way the Dolphins never could.

That's a part of the appeal of college sports that can't be overestimated. Indiana doesn't support IU football much, but there's an understanding that Indiana is a basketball-playing state and perhaps football is an afterthought that is reflected in both IU's results and the blase attitude toward the sport. They support the Colts because they are winners, not because they are an extension of Indiana football culture. In much the same way, New York has long since been left behind as a town with a strong participatory and developmental baseball culture. That's Texas, Florida, California and the rest of the Sun Belt in this country. Yet, New York loves its Yankees.

Two completely different mindsets, college and pro fandom.

 

MU fans should stick around for the last, last line...

 

Interesting take from the CJR, which beats up on a favorite target around here...

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/espn_obscures_its_own_role_in.php

 

One other point that I think fuels a lot of the passion for college football, at least in the South, is the fact that in many states with divided loyalties – Bama-Auburn, Ole Miss-MSU, South Carolina-Clemson, to name a few – the divisions between the schools break along class and heritage lines.

It's a variance on the old Culture vs. Agriculture clash that goes back generations. People in those states have an extra passion for those rivalries that you don't find in, say, the Saints-Falcons (to name one of the more bitter NFL rivalries).

 

I'd be really interested in a breakdown of those class lines for the SEC schools. That's just something I don't know much about.

 

I don't know about the other states, but the Clemson-South Carolina rivalry emerged from tensions surrounding the creation of Clemson. Thomas Green Clemson had set out to bequeath his estate to the state in order to set up an agricultural college, and agrarian/populist politicians seized on this opportunity as a means of gaining a more prominent seat at the table. An "establishment vs. rabble" fight emerged, and agrarian/populist types rode it for all it was worth. There was a lot more going on, but at the root of it the rivalry emerged from these tensions.