Arkstfan

NOLA wanted Happy Appy. We knew going in we were headed to Montgomery no matter what. We had two picks in the end zone (one was a pick six), we missed two short FGs (hey coach maybe now you will offer a scholie instead of relying on walkons) and got stopped on a fourth and short when we didn't want to try a FG. Zero points on five trips inside the 30 plus gave up a kickoff return for a TD.

Sure thing pal. You are making SBC money with a cobbled up TV deal. That's why the Sun Belt has gotten more performance money than CUSA the past two years though I expect that changes unless Sun Belt has a great bowl run.

No they get Akron because Temple said we aren't playing FAU on FAU's home field. We will play them in St Pete but not in Boca. If FAU had been willing to travel to St. Pete, they could have played Temple, now they get a MAC divisional champ who got smoked in their title game.

You do understand that what you WANT is irrelevant. Independence Bowl values you like gum on their shoe. Their selection is SEC vs. ACC and if they can't get that, their next choice BY CONTRACT is an AAC. If they can't get that they then can turn to CUSA again BY CONTRACT. When you don't give a damn about CUSA it would be awful foolish to run up to the I-Bowl wagging your tail like a little rat dog and give them plum pickings to choose ahead of all the bowls that who put their money where their mouth is. Your last commissioner nearly lost NOLA to AAC because CUSA came to NOLA and said please release UTEP so they can play in New Mexico. NOLA agreed and bit the bullet and took a MAC. A year later CUSA had one more bowl berth than they had bowl eligible teams and NOLA said "Hey we took care of you last year, you should give us a team this year" He laughed and shorted New Orleans. The only reason CUSA isn't out of NOLA today is because AAC opted to join Sun Belt in committing to the Cure Bowl in Orlando. But for that decision, CUSA is out. Their is no joking around over the idea that these guys are your "bowl partners". Sticking it to NOLA would have been a stupid decision for CUSA.

The bowl match-ups reflect the marketplace. The bowls are pure capitalism at work and the pairing reflect market forces. UNT ought to be happy they get to play a conference champ instead of some also-ran and get an opponent that holds arguably the best win of a G5 over a P5 this year. I think a UNT fan might look at the box score of AState - Troy and see what a Fedora inspired offense can do against Troy. A-State crapped out five times inside the Troy 30 with 2 picks (including a 100 yard pick six), two missed FG's and a turnover on downs all relating back to the fact the Red Wolves are in lousy shape at RB.

For those unhappy about the opponent. Sorry you think a Sun Belt champion who beat LSU is beneath you. Check Big Lots they usually have a good deal on mirrors, buy one and put it to use. For those who don't want to travel to New Orleans. Yeah it's got it's faults but it is loaded with history, great food and if debauchery is your thing, they can assist with that as well. The measure of the value of a program is not its capacity to drive across town. It is the capacity to get fans on the road. This is an opportunity to bolster UNT's reputation. It is not an insult nor a put-down. It's a compliment but such is the state of America in 2017 that a compliment causes people to feel insulted.

I think it is unlikely you see the P5 rights fees cut. ESPN is profitable as is. A lot of the subscriber loss isn't real. If you switch from Comcast to Sling, you are still paying a subscription fee to ESPN. Bear that in mind when you see X number of people cord cut. ESPN has a phenomenal online infrastructure and can easily pivot to selling direct to consumer. Want 100% of all ESPN content for a week or a month or a year? There will be a package for that. Want 100% of all ESPN college football? There will be a package. Just want Big XII content? There will be a package. ESPN is going to slice dice and repackage and sell direct to consumer in the future and remember, live sports is about the only thing left that the bulk of the audience does not record and then skip commercials.

A lot First in regards to ESPN and layoffs. Remember ESPN before the layoffs was profitable. ESPN does not have a revenue/expense problem, they have a Wall Street problem. When a company is in growth mode, investors want to ride the growth. When a company reaches the inevitable plateau the price generally will decline a big because it has reached a stable income/expense place. Right now ESPN is shedding expense to boost the ROI because they already hit the growth ceiling in the prevailing economic model. ESPN is now more like a boring utility than a hot growth property. The economic model of intercollegiate athletics is becoming a two-tier model. Any G5 not investing in production capacity is foolish. A-State has gone all in and has been hired to by ESPN to handle the Sun Belt volleyball and soccer tournament productions for ESPN3, which are a must carry for ESPN even if it is on ESPN3. A-State also provides some of the production for the Liberty Bowl. You cannot get a huge ROI carrying G5 games in general. You know all that talk about how Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Apple are going to be the new sports outlets. Guess what boys and girls. Each of them already has a model in place for content like ours. A huge amount of what you buy on Amazon is not sold by Amazon. Someone else owns the inventory and puts the listing on Amazon and many have their inventory shipped direct to Amazon warehouses from the manufacturer. Amazon just lists it and takes a piece of the sale. Apples uses the same model for apps, movies, and TV as well as subscriptions for each. Apple has zip in the inventory cost, they just provide a place to sell and take a piece of the action. Netflix and Hulu do the same thing with a lot of their content. Random documentary or movie you've never heard of? Odds are Netflix and Hulu have invested $0 in that program. Instead they pay the owner a small amount per view. The Duplass brothers have done so well on that model that Netflix now gives them an advance for exclusive rights. This is where the bulk of the G5 programming is going to go. We will pay production costs. We will insert our own commercials (maybe all, maybe a percentage) and we will get paid per view by someone whether it is Disney/ESPN, Fox, Amazon, Apple, Roku, Netflix, whomever. If you want to make money on TV in the future, you are going to need to host teams that fans. Nobody is going to give a damn if eleventy billion people live in Miami or Houston or San Diego. The number of fans willing to pull up the WatchESPN app or the Amazon app is going to determine your media value. Troy in a tiny little town in Alabama can have greater TV value than a team in an NFL market because actual viewers will determine the TV value. Actual viewers is going to be simple to determine, just look at the number of connected subscribers. Self-distributed is probably a loser. You can make more per view but it is going to be harder to convince a viewer to shell out another $5-$15 a month. You want to reach audience you have to be where the subscribers already are and that's WatchESPN and Amazon and Netflix right now. So you self-produce and let someone else distribute. Attendance wise, I think you see schools starting to move to the MLS model. A small section of very affordable seating. A large area of moderate priced seating. Increasing the number of "premium" seats that include other amenities such as included food and you pay nothing out of pocket at the stadium for anything but alcohol and includes premium parking in the price. If you cannot fill your seats, then maybe you are more interested in cheaper travel that might sell some seats on the return trip. Go to any fan space of an MLS team. The supporters group generally has an organized road trip to every opponent. Some clubs go so far as to provide a certain number of seats out of their own pocket (Kansas City provides 200 or 300 tickets per regular season road game to the supporters group) because they know people who will blow up their weekend to travel several hundred miles to watch the team are going to buy tickets at home and they are going to spend plenty on licensed merchandise. The traveling fan is your community evangelist making sure family and friends hear the gospel of being a fan. As to CTE. Sure it's an issue but that's not what's wrong. It makes a nice neat explanation that fits an agenda, the agenda being football is a brutal exploitive sport. Here's what's really wrong. #1. More schools aren't permitting the use of the school day to practice. Kid rides the bus and the only adult at home either lacks a car or work schedule interferes, how does the kid get home from practice? #2 Money. More and more schools are charging more and more fees for kids to play high school football yet the public schools are serving a more and more impoverished population as the middle classes have followed the wealthy into private schools. Poor kids are getting priced out of football. #3. Social status. What sport has liberal arts colleges scrambling to add? Lacrosse. Is it a safe sport for little Trey Moneybags to play? Hell no. Get hit in the noggin with that ball at full speed or whacked in the old thinker with a stick? It'll mess you up. Plenty of knee injuries as well.. The other growth? Soccer. Another high injury sport. CTE studies put it similar to football and again another high injury sport for knees. But right now it in many social circles its just seen as better to tell people that junior plays lacrosse or soccer than football or basketball. So recruiting football is going to become more challenging because the pool is shrinking and presidents and AD's are going to have to rethink what is an appropriate group of schools to align with.

Interesting. Really no excuse to not use ESPN3 broadcast standards. It does cost more but if you are asking people to pay they should get some value for their money. I remember trying to watch a game from ULM on the crapfest feed the Sun Belt used to do. One press box camera and every change of possession and timeout they swung the camera toward to scoreboard to give you the scoreboard view if you weren't bent over puking from motion sickness or writhing on the floor in a seizure. Really should be a 5 camera operation with graphics and announcers coached to not say "We" or "us". AState does some in-house men's and women's hoops, volleyball and baseball for ESPN3. We pay the production costs and just send the stream to ESPN3. For the men's hoops use a local radio guy (who is annoying because he's a ref whiner) and a former AState hoops coach who has real broadcast experience. Opponent fans hate the play by play guy and generally like the former coach doing color because he can turn off the fandom for 2 hours. I don't think online self-produced is ever going to be a revenue center but just a cost of doing business like paying for scholarships, full cost of attendance stipends, and hiring academic counselors.

Last year it was South Alabama beating Mississippi State and San Diego State and face planting in conference play.

I'll pass on that. That's what FCS is for.

Huh? As I said, what works at one school doesn't translate to other schools. However, given the number of cities with direct flight to Dallas, it might be an improvement

Someone at Boise State had a smart recruiting idea many years ago. Idaho turns out 1 to 4 FBS recruits a year and not exactly loaded with recruits within an easy drive. So they focused on players who were close to an airport that offered direct flights to Boise. I've not checked since Harsin took over, but if you mapped their recruits several years ago, they came from places close to those airports with very few exceptions. That's one of the things fans and AD's don't always get. The formula that works for Coach X at School Y may not translate for your school.

Linemen are the hardest signing you make. RB's WR's LB's DB's you can see a player in high school and project where he will be in a year and you only worry about work ethic, staying eligible and adjusting to the speed of the game. Linemen generally you need to project what a year of red shirt plus another year or two of sub work will get you. Freeze, Malzahn, and Harsin flat missed nearly all of their line signings. When Anderson arrived we had to hit juco hard to survive but thing is there are some OL guys out there who are redshirting a year of juco or hustling to get their associates fast and starting to see more OL guys ready to come out of juco with 3 to play 3 and even occasionally 4 to play 3. Tend to be much safer signings.

P5 v P5 games tend to do better in drawing TV audience and sponsor dollars. Games involving G5 are driven much more by ticket sales. Maximizing revenue means it will always be hard to hold on to a bowl that a P5 is committed to and hard to hold on to the P5 opponent whenever a P5 league isn't wild about the bowl they are working with. Long past time for the G5 to enter into an agreement that each conference will have X ties to a bowl alliance and contract as a group with a group of bowls and then get the matchups that make the better financial sense. If that means one year NOLA is AAC vs. MWC and St Pete is CUSA vs. MAC so be it, just flush out the bowl tie system as it exists because it creates weird inefficiencies for the G5 that hurt ticket sales and TV interest.

SMU has a helluva coach. AState tried to hire him twice and thought we had him after Harsin left. Sutton is an All-American who is going to make more money his first year out of college than I've made since college. Researching them pre-season I figured they would be the second best offense AState would see, just wasn't sure what their defense would be like. 23 months ago UNT gave up 66 to an FCS, giving up 54 to a team that will likely be top 20 in scoring offense isn't pleasant but ball protection didn't help. After Iowa things get much more manageable and a bowl ought to be expected.

Wish I hadn't been flipping in and out to get a better feel for the game. Early on your defense looked good. 21 points off turnovers is a death warrant.

The thing about Notre Dame is they could have made more money in the Big 10 but opted to remain independent. They obviously have principles. They are pretty picky about who they will admit for athletics, not Army, Navy, Air Force picky, arguably not Stanford picky, but still selective. They won't take jucos. Take a look at their roster, there are no RFr, RSo, RJr, RSr listed it is Fr, So, Jr, Sr, GS. The GS is Grad Student, they don't redshirt players. Now you maybe don't play as a freshman but if you don't you can't take it for granted that Notre Dame will let you hang around for 5 years. Only five players were permitted to stay a fifth year for this season.

Liberty's leadership is tone deaf. Conferences are indefinite co-equal partnerships. Entry fees are an estimation of the value of the equity the new partner is buying. Let's say you are a partner at a CPA firm. You met with Bill Smith didn't think Bill had what it took to be a partner at the firm. Behavior didn't fit in, resume just a notch under everyone else. Now Bill comes to you says he will pay 10X the usual equity buy in, downside is that payment is going to become public when it happens. Maybe the partner about to retire would support that so he can cash out more easily but the partners who intend to make it their lifetime work? They don't want to damage the brand, once the customer knows partnerships are no longer based on achievement and fit and can just be purchased, why should they trust the quality of the work? It also means being stuck with Bill for the rest of your time at the firm, if you had wanted to work with Bill you would have voted to extend him a partnership. Seriously you don't want a school buying their votes in and you don't want the conference to rely on a television network that a member school earns. Ohhh we really wanted that new basketball schedule format, darn it, none of UNT's games fit in on the TV schedule. It would be like being in the Big XII without an OU to push back.

Someone in the UT system had to be fired after the Maryland game.

Since Hansen started 10 games last year I'd be really surprised if they didn't look at film over the summer, most coaches are easily able to get game film of opponents in advance through the buddy network.

We actually don't. The Saturday we are open we have a Wednesday night game. Would have to play Thursday or could get by with Friday but that Saturday really isn't feasible even though I think we offered it. UTSA wasn't interested.

Richt asked the AD to buy the game out after he was hired. At a coaches golf event asked Freeze and Malzahn what it was like playing at AState and they told him it can be one of the louder places in G5 and Richt complained about his AD. Hurricane gave them cover, they took it. Good luck Saturday, just dropped in to see what the talk was on SMU since they are our next serious opponent.

Football players wear jerseys. ;)

EMCC has by reputation been a true Last Chance U. I think North Alabama under Bowden was THE Last Chance U even though they are Division II. He had at least one 25 player class that was 100% FBS and FCS transfers. Their specialty is FBS transfers in who go there to either let bad press die down or to go play a year before transferring to an FBS to avoid a year of not playing. Most jucos are stocked with a mix of FBS caliber guys who didn't have the academics squared away (and EMCC has them too) and guys who wanted to play FBS ball but only had partial ride offers from FCS or Division II and want to beef up their game to have another crack at playing FBS. Even with the limited aid, the cost of juco tends to be so low that it ends up being a better financial deal than a partial in FCS and Division II.