Small schools to get fewer games vs. top programs

[Harry]

NEW YORK (AP) — College football's Davids will get fewer chances to knock off the Goliaths in the coming years.

Part of the fallout of the sweeping changes coming to college sports will be a decrease in so-called guarantee games in football, where a power conference school pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a team from a lesser league play at its stadium.

The result will be far fewer opportunities for embarrassing blowouts (Oklahoma State 84, Savannah State 0) and startling upsets (Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32). Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said it would be good for college football and that he is "not very sympathetic" to the potential loss of revenue to the schools on the receiving end of the checks.

The commissioners of the lower-revenue conferences say losing the pay days won't kill their leagues, and that giving players from smaller schools a chance to compete on the big stage has value.

"Traditionally, we play the Big Ten a lot," Mid-American Conference Commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said in a phone interview Friday. "We're in the neighborhood so that makes a lot of sense."

MAC teams will play 13 games against Big Ten teams this season, plus six against the SEC and two each against the Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference, and many of them fall into the category of guarantee games.

The shift to nine-game conference schedules, along with an increased emphasis on strength of schedule for the coming College Football Playoff, all but guarantee fewer opportunities for the other five conferences (MAC, Sun Belt, Mountain West, American Athletic and Conference USA) in FBS to play the top five.

Add in the need for the power conferences to beef up their schedules to create made-for-TV matchups to justify the millions they are getting in media rights deals, plus a possible reconfiguration of Division I, and it leads to speculation that the big five will be playing exclusively among themselves at some point.

read more: http://www.meangreensports.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/marcus_trice_847388.html

[emmitt01]

The "Big 5" will neve just play with themselves.* UT won't schedule tough teams out of conference...last time they stepped outthere and brought Ohio State to town Mack Brown swore off doing anything like that again. Ditto Oregon. Or Bama. Etc.

*Yes, I saw the pun.

[JesseMartin]

Well really, if it's going to be a 9-game conference schedule then even if they schedule 1 or 2 power matchups they would still probably have 1 or 2 money games. I wouldn't expect that they would require 3 big nonconference matchups, because of what Emmitt said. It's one thing to push for stronger schedules, but if the commissioners tried to completely do away with "tune-up games" then they would probably have a revolt on their hands.

[PlummMeanGreen]

Now that we have multi-millions of dollars paid per year to many Power 5 HFC's how soon will it be before they start running the entire show in the NCAA?

Why they see so many problems with the present NCAA FBS set-up is beyond me. Might they only check the annual TV revenues for all the G5 conferences along with the anemic G5 bowl guarantees as to rest their minds at ease and then realize that they are still getting the majority of the family farm? For crissake, do they just want it all? Some of them have built their100,000 seat capacity stadiums so whats next....250,000 seaters? Does greed ever have a stopping point with this bunch?

This Power 5 group of coaches don't seem to have mathamatics as their strong suit since if (as some of you have posted) they start playing (only) each other that there will be more 6 & 5 or 5 & 6 W/L records but I suppose that they have worked all that out in their greedy little minds, too? Wonder what the alums of all these Power 5 schools will say about 6 & 5 or 5 & 6, though? And how long till the truly Big Boys start putting the squeeze on the Baylors, Iowa States and TCU's to exit their elite little world? On that subject...never say never.

The Power 5 crowd will soon be taking the complete amateurism out of the sport and many of us who can no longer stomach the over-paid NFL professionals any longer will have to go elsewhere to get our amateur college athletic sports fix and I suppose for all of us we will get ours in Denton.

Power Five'ers......a suggestion to you: Don't burn your barns down to kill what you perceive to be a much too expensive mouse inside your respective barns; namely the G5 conferences and its schools who take so very little corn from your silos as it is.

GMG!

Edited July 29, 2013 by PlummMeanGreen

[MeanGreenGlory]

It's pretty disturbing how quickly, swiftly, and seamlessly this is all taking place.

Just days after conference realignment ended the term "Power 5" gained instant traction by the media outlets.

Months after the "Power 5" became a household reference in college athletics the commissioners of those leagues start publicly stating NCAA rules need to change.

Soon after that the NCAA publicly agrees.

And now the schism begins.

Makes you wonder how long they've had this plan in place to follow through with it so effortlessly.

I also wonder if "the other 5" conferences have been working out a plan to help one another the way the "Power 5" have. My guess is that a lot of "the other 5" commissioners have been fairly blind to it up to this point hoping that they could get enough bowl tie-ins and TV markets to convince the "Power 5" they could be one of them. The writing is all on the wall at this point though.

It's going to be tough to compete for air time when Oregon vs. Alabama, Michigan vs. Oklahoma St., and Wisconsin vs. LSU, are the games of the day. It makes Houston vs. NIU or UNT vs. SMU look incredibly boring.

Hopefully the "other 5" commissioners face the facts and start working together to maximize TV deals, publicity, and exposure. Otherwise this could get real ugly real fast.

[JesseMartin]

Something that Plumm mentioned about stadium size got me wondering...of the "fans" that have no official ties to the big boy schools, how big do those stadiums have to get before people realize they are more just part of a mob than enjoying a real game that they can actually see? And with the extra money they might hoard, they probably aren't too worried about bowls and such since most people think there are too many already. They basically want to see a bowl level game, every game. And then the lower Power schools get to be Cinderellas/Davids again, but with the same money they were getting with an extra lump of cash from a bowl game.

But I do think there's plenty of TV to go around with as many channels that are available now, so no matter how "boring" mid-major games may seem, people will still watch. Not in the numbers that watch the top conferences, but that was usually the case anyway. And lots of people flip channels, use picture-in-picture, sports bars have a ton of extra TVs, etc. So I don't think we'll really see the TV cash go down as much as maybe the bowl money. But maybe there will be new mid-major bowls, or some bowls will align with power conferences and the others with the rest of us.

Basically, though it sounds like a big, greedy pain in the ass, I don't think much will actually change for us other than 1 or 2 less TV appearances (thank God for CUSA) and less money for guaranteed games, which many people prefer to have less of anyway. Then we have more winnable games on a regular basis and people will follow our winning team more often. This may also play into why "big names" haven't been as willing to come to Fouts...and maybe Rick and co. knew this and had the current set of plans moving with Army, SMU, etc. just in order to be ready for the change.

[Christopher Walker]

Are the potential for anti-trust lawsuits and legislative retribution from Congress (haha) suddenly off the table? I heard a lot about that when the split first started coming up a few years ago...

[PlummMeanGreen]

Are the potential for anti-trust lawsuits and legislative retribution from Congress (haha) suddenly off the table? I heard a lot about that when the split first started coming up a few years ago...

I think the Power 5 people have every angle of all this covered with their lawyers, quite frankly.

[TheWestie]

Why pay $500,000 for the UNTs of the world to come play you for a home opener and risk getting beat at home to start the season when you can schedule a non-conference against someone just like you in a stadium halfway between both schools and negotiate some exclusive TV rights to it, separate from any deal your conference might have? Have 100,000 generic sports fans/T-shirt fans trying to one-up their bros by spending way too much to go to said game and brag about it. Yup, sounds about right.

I'm looking at you LSU Vs Oregon and Notre Dame Vs Arizona State on October 5.

[emmitt01]

Why pay $500,000 for the UNTs of the world to come play you for a home opener and risk getting beat at home to start the season when you can schedule a non-conference against someone just like you in a stadium halfway between both schools and negotiate some exclusive TV rights to it, separate from any deal your conference might have? Have 100,000 generic sports fans/T-shirt fans trying to one-up their bros by spending way too much to go to said game and brag about it. Yup, sounds about right.

I'm looking at you LSU Vs Oregon and Notre Dame Vs Arizona State on October 5.

Why? Because the truth of the matter is that these "Power 5" teams find themselves ranked to start the season, before ANY games have been played, then feast on the WKU's and Buffalo's of the world to "validate" those rankings before getting into conference play. They truly don't want to risk the smoke and mirrors system that is in place. They need us as much as we need them, don't believe the hype. If UT started the season #5 and then had to prove it week 1 or 2 against Georgia, Oregon or Florida State you'd see that system last all of about two years.

All of this bluster about not playing the little guys is just posturing to bring CUSA/Sun Belt/MAC etc to the table to renegotiate the revenue sharing with the specter of being locked out looming overhead.

Edited July 29, 2013 by emmitt01

[UNT90]

Good. Hopefully this allows us to get out of some games and get some scheduling flexibility.

[ragpicker]

I have no interest in semi-pro farm teams. Let them do what they will.

[meangreener]

I'm done with big time college football. It's a joke. It's semi pro, not entertaining and ruled by arrogant assholes. Real life college football is CUSA/MWC/AAC/SBC, etc.

[untjim1995]

I've posted a lot on this subject over the last few years. It wasn't hard to see what was about to come to fruition. The Power 5 conferences and Notre Dame control a lot--add BYU in there, too, if you want. They have the networks under control, they have huge stadiums to fill, and they have the control of the legislatures in their states and in DC. Add in additional media control and then throw in there this "stipend", and you get the "Division 4" now in play, since these schools also control a little entity known as the NCAA. There is literally nothing you can do about it as an outsider, unless you can somehow convince a conference to invite you in (see TCU).

I used to think that I wouldn't want to be the Chancellor or BOR member who supported Apogee gettting built only to see us get dropped out of the top level of college football again. I figured that the Denia residents, old nestors, and other non-athletic types that hang out in Denton would just make their lives miserable for putting so many $$$ into that new stadium. But I now think that won't be too much of an issue. The reality is that Fouts was so decrepit that we had to play somewhere else to even have a football program anymore. Apogee, in my opinioin, saved the university from dropping the program. Even if you drop down to the new FCS level, the stadium still had to get built. The capcaity of Apogee is lower than I wanted, but it makes me think that the university knew that expanding it would be easy if it was necessary, but 30k would be just fine for our needs.

The next 3-5 years will tell us a whole lot. Who we get to play in OOC games, who will still play football at a lower level, and who we will have as future conference mates, those are all questions that will get answered within that timeframe. Who knows, maybe those SMU games will actually be conference games!! Never say never...

Edited July 30, 2013 by untjim1995