Arkstfan

No. People do not like underdogs. They may like the idea of them but they don't really like them. The ratings for the BCS games with the unheralded teams have been among the very worst for the BCS. Ticket sales have been the weakest with virtually no "secondary" market for tickets. The TV ratings for Cinderella teams in the NCAA tournament have been bad as well. People hate the idea of schools moving to Division I or I-A because they need to stay "where they belong." Underdogs being successful upsets the order people are comfortable with. Look at politics (sorry) but people love candidates who say they are for change but have positions that really aren't very different from what has been around for years. The true change candidates are usually out of the presidential races shortly after the New Hampshire primary.

Lonnie cut you a deal. I'll take Rick's job at UNT when he leaves you take Dean's job at ASU. We'll have ironclad pact to swap jobs while collecting checks from the other schools.

Simple rule. Most lawyers hate lawyering Many of them devote every free minute to something not lawyering and develop expertise in something else. A lucky few get to change careers. If I'd been paying attention and seen that the Notre Dame job was open I might have applied.

I know, I know. But those of us on the fringes are usually talking about the hot rising schools before the media ever notices they are any good.

It takes years to become an overnight success. As some or most of you may know a good friend of mine is on the Independence Bowl committee. The Independence Bowl was last pick of the SEC last year (thanks to Birmingham they pick next to last this year). The SEC teams are obligated to buy nearly 15,000 tickets for the game and its pretty common for them to sell their full allotment without having to run any bulk deals. When you have enough fans that you can sell 15,000 tickets a few hundred miles from campus with ease... you are a force. You have value to the bowls and to television that the rest of us dream of and make more off the sale of home football tickets than most non-BCS schools spend on their entire athletic department. No one other than BYU is consistently in that range in fan support and yet they are roundly hated by bowl communities because their fans don't get drunk and open their wallets. It is about dollars when dealing with the media. They can attract the attention of more readers/viewers with a piece on Penn State or UCLA than by covering every MAC school or WAC school in the same time or space. But what if you are a Penn State or UCLA fan? I-AA Coastal Carolina is an annoyance tune-up game. Oregon State is relevant to BCS hopes as is Syracuse. If Temple weren't in-state, just another annoyance tune-up game. There aren't many knowledge football fans out in the world. Most sort of know about what concerns them, which is their favorite team. I've got a friend who is supposedly a big Razorback fan but he literally will not attend a non-conference game that isn't televised because... "it must not be an important game". That's what we are up against. There are people who simply are not and will not be interested in our schools because so few others are. If there aren't 50,000+ in the stands and multiple television broadcasts they conclude it is small-time and unimportant. The funny thing is the very people who scorn a Randy Moss when he is in college embrace him (or at least his talent) when it is verified by the NFL. A former AD at Central Arkansas says that if half the people who claimed to have watched Scottie Pippen play basketball there had actually come to games they would have needed a much bigger gym.

Trying reading ALL of the "experts" not just the one who suits you.

And MAC And WAC And CUSA And MWC

Southern Miss had a 6 point win over ASU at Hattiesburg and with any luck ASU is healthy this go-round. Hopefully their dream ends in Jonesboro. Hawaii wouldn't have been "the Hawaii" of last year if BYU had pulled the upset at UCLA or had fended off Tulsa. At 11-1 they would have gone ahead of Hawaii. You rarely get second chances. With three key road games and a home rematch against UCLA, I think they miss. You have to like Utah. Only one key game on the road and its early season against a new coach. Tulsa... Arkansas has a lot to replace and this is a high pressure game for Arkansas. It will be interesting to see how they react.

I use FeedDemon on Win, NetNewsWire on Mac, and NewsGator on Blackberry. They are all by Newsgator so one registration and you are synced across all devices.

It's off-season. Texas has scrapped last year's "arrest a week" promotion. Arkansas has fired their "Text messages are for female friends not recruits" coach. TAMU's new coach is quietly boring so far. Gotta find some pompous blow hard to mock and Dooley has served himself up on a platter.

Heck the guy is a walking quote machine. Last week he was grousing about the WAC money not being enough.

Hey Bat look on the bright side. Friend of mine in high school did that at a class party at the end of the school year (long steep hills and skateboards aren't a good combination) but he had a reaction to the anesthesia so he got to heal his the old fashioned way, cast and traction. He got out of the cast the week before the first day of school. Worst summer vacation ever.

It is is and I don't dispute that. But if the rumors are true, the per team to Sun Belt schools for TV will be going up nearly $100,000 per team after this upcoming season. Throw in five years of a guaranteed increase in NCAA money (WKU eats most of the increase the first year) and it works out to about an extra $50,000 per team per year. In other words, if the WAC doesn't field a BCS entrant the gap in revenue distribution drops $100,000 from the WAC decrease and drops another $150,000 from the Sun Belt increase. Let's put it in perspective. Tech's receipts from the WAC right now are equal to basically one money game in football. Sun Belt per team roughly 4 money games in basketball. The typical Sun Belt receipt was 25% of what Tech made. At the end of the 09-10 academic year if the WAC doesn't have a BCS entrant and doesn't gain any extra NCAA units and the Sun Belt doesn't have a BCS entrant or gain any extra NCAA units the Sun Belt per team receipts will be 50% of the WAC distribution to Tech. Worse, for the WAC members the narrowing of the gap is because of a fall in spendable cash at a time when energy costs have basically doubled over two years, while the Sun Belt increase should help cover some of that increase. The simple truth is that if ULM weren't in the Sun Belt, we wouldn't be having this conversation because Tech would have joined the Sun Belt shortly after UTEP joined CUSA.

Quick quiz. Take $13 million (current WAC distribution among all teams). Add $3 million (net increase under WAC TV deal). Subtract $4 million (amount WAC gets by placing a team in BCS) If the WAC doesn't place a team in the BCS how does that go up? As noted in the Honolulu and Shreveport articles if most of the TV money is going out based on TV appearances it would seem that most of the ESPN increase is headed to Honolulu, Boise, Fresno and Reno.

From the article Both Utah State and Idaho received $800,247 from the WAC, while New Mexico State brought up the cellar with $432,197. The latter amount was due to the Aggies athletic department being required to pay each WAC school $40,000 as a guarantee for hosting the WAC postseason basketball tournament. That explains $240,000.

Looks like a smart decision. NJIT is closer to South Dakota, North Dakota, and Houston Baptist, than La.Tech is to any WAC school other than NMSU.

And it could be the others got some TV.

La.Tech leapt at the chance but they had three regional opponents and the shake-up didn't work so well. When you are grousing about an $800,000 payment not helping your program much, you've got trouble.

My understanding was that the WAC was going to withhold something like $250,000 year for three years or $200,000 for four years from those three.

In about six years we get a second play-in game for the NCAA Tournament.

It's a nice bump and if their BCS streak comes to an end, it will temper the lost revenue from that and the dropping NCAA money. Very well timed for the WAC.

Follow the money. The BCS share paid the six wealthy leagues works out to about $1.9 million per team but that is before deducting the expenses related with playing in those games. A playoff is estimated to double or triple that revenue so we are talking gross revenue of $2 million to $4 million which is a lot of money on my budget or even the budget of a Sun Belt team but it ain't jack. Those schools are grossing between $13 million to $30 million per year on football ticket sales and that is assuming all tickets sold are the cheap ones and donation is required. The SEC's TV income JUST FOR FOOTBALL was 2.3 times the SEC's BCS revenue. Post-season money isn't a big deal. The real money is in keeping the fans happy enough to buy tickets and donate to get those tickets, followed by television money. If you went to most message boards you would think that the SEC or Big 12 are rich because of the BCS, followed by TV money, then tickets, but that is exactly reverse order. The wealthy six leagues want to walk a fine line. I-A becomes too large and you dilute the brand value. Allow it to become too small and you are faced with having to increase the number of lower tier opponents, you increase the number of games against quality opponents making won/loss records worse, you flatten the bell curve of quality because instead of approximately 3,000 student athletes signing I-A letters each year that number drops to around 2,000 each year in an 80 member I-A. That means 1,000 quality players distributed across 40 schools are now out there for the remaining 80 to recruit with less competition. The NCAA has done a series of massive realignments over the years. The first was breaking up the old University/College I/College II structure and criteria into the new Division I, II, III structure, then breaking I-A into I-AA. The odd thing that has emerged from looking back through those realignments has been that when the top level of football has fewer than 120 members the greater the gap between the number of members and the "magic number" of 120 the faster teams have moved upward. As it nudges close to 120 the pace slows down. As it begins moving past 120 the more pressure there is to trim down the top level. In the mid-70's the NCAA revenue sharing structure got severely stressed because the NCAA TV contract money bumped up rapidly and triggered a gold rush pushing Division I rapidly past 120. So first the I-A/I-AA split was created to grab a couple really low tier Division I leagues and to grab a bundle of schools moving in like the Yankee and MEAC. That was followed by stricter rules cutting I-A back further that caught folks like UNT and the Southland. Whether or not there is an intent to pick 120 as the "magic number" (I don't think there is intent but has to do with psychology and the economics of needing a certain percentage of the Division to be lower tier so that existing conference members can schedule enough non-conference games to create an impression of competitiveness) it seems to be a real barrier. Western Kentucky filed its intent to reclassify I-A which will make them member #120 in FBS football and shortly thereafter the NCAA adopted a moratorium to study the FBS admission criteria. There may be a group get a wild hair to pare back to 65, 70, 80 but the last major drop in numbers resulted in a disruptive era where programs like Miami and BYU emerged as national contenders and the SEC and SWC were racked by cheating scandals, if there is a paring, it will be followed by programs trudging back up joined by some rising programs finally stepping forward.

The purpose of the moratorium was to study whether the criteria for switching from I-A to I-AA should be changed. Don't assume the saber-rattling about moving up will be accomplished until we know if there will be a criteria change and if there is one, what the change is.

Perception of quality rises more slowly than an improvement in quality because perception is based on bias. Central Michigan defeated Michigan State in consecutive years but the change in perception was too slow to allow CMU to build a program that could sustain its position relative to MSU. If you weren't born or were fairly young on January 1, 1984 you do not perceive Miami football as anything other than a major national program. The next day Miami won its first national title while playing in only their second bowl game since 1967 and posted its fourth consecutive winning season for the first time since 1964-67. They had been a dog and if they hadn't won again would have been relegated to the trash heap with BYU as a fluke. Last season was nice with football and basketball in the Sun Belt but it will take a couple more years of doing that to change perception. Most people folk to buy a hot stock after it becomes hot. Most people adopt the new fashion fads after others have adopted it. If Wal-Mart and Target are selling it, the fad is just about to end. Conferences are sort of like stocks, you've got to look at their fundamentals. Right now in football the WAC is hotter than the MWC, but the MWC's worst team was UNLV and they were better than the bottom three WAC teams and arguably about equal to the next two WAC teams. If you compare WAC 1-3 to Sun Belt 1-3 clearly the WAC is ahead in any power rating you look at but when you look at WAC 4-9 compared to Sun Belt 4-8 the difference just doesn't exist. The demise of the MAC on the other hand is overstated. MAC 1-13 fit snugly just below Sun Belt 1 and ahead of Sun Belt 7-8. Right now if you look at the future near term prospects of the five non-AQ leagues you should be able to say pretty clearly that the MWC is THE conference between the Rich 6 and everyone else. The margins of difference between 2-5 are pretty slim. If I were picking how the leagues rank three seasons from now I'd predict MWC #1 and feel comfortable filling 2-5 by drawing names from a hat. College football cycles. Early 80's BYU pops up and Miami pops up and there is a reason for that, periods of parity. When BYU became national champion in 1984 they were the first undefeated national champion since Clemson popped up in 1981 (what an ACC team playing for a national title? Shocking when it happened). After BYU's undefeated team it didn't happen again until 1986. What the heck happened? Simple I-A was restructured from about 140 teams to 101. Thanks to the BCS, bowl proliferation, more I-AA games and the vast increase in TV exposure across the board, we are hitting a new era of parity. The BCS means only two teams have any shot at being champion at the end of the year and the margin for error to be in the hunt is fragile. Schools in the top leagues that aren't going to one of the BCS bowls fairly regularly are going to bowls no better perceived than the New Orleans (remember Shreveport and Boise tend to get more jokes than the New Orleans) and match teams far down the pecking order. Today you can reach as many recruits by posting the top five to ten highlights of each game on YouTube as you can with one or two ESPN appearances.

No they were dumb enough to get too good and get noticed... see UNLV basketball for details.