clt says this nominal compared to our sec deal
Confirmed 9 mill per year by WKU AD.
Virginian Pilot says it’s 2.8 million per year.
lol, apparently no one has a clue how much $$ the conference members will receive.
[quote=“VA49er, post:44, topic:30341”]lol, apparently no one has a clue how much $$ the conference members will receive.[/quote]It’s $2.8 million. The WKU beat writer got clarification that there will be $6.2 million in production cost assistance to help schools “save” money, but it won’t be additional revenue.
Nice spin, that guy should run for office.
The NNN reaction has been extremely tame compared to other programs in the conference. Whipped dog syndrome.
Common positions from CUSA fanbases:
-
Just about all of the schools could do better than $200k if they retained their broadcast rights and sold them individually. Conversations about ODU already getting $70k for the pittance of 2nd & 3rd tier digital rights they retained last year. WKU has a deal to get a portion of their games on Fox sports. IIRC we get close to $100k/season from IMG just for our radio rights.
-
Several fanbases ready to leave CUSA for… anywhere. Even independence. Of course, Marshall is going to the Big 12 or AAC or whatever (just ask them), but there is also a lot of humble pie. Life lines requested from the MWC and MAC. Rice wants to go it alone - and one of their points is a genuine question - can they do better just scheduling themselves against local/regional competition and one or two marquee games per year? Their fanbase would much rather play other Texas schools than CUSA east, and would draw better at home. Maybe? Probably? Then again, some Rice fans want to fold the program entirely.
-
Near universal anger at league administration, especially Banowsky and Judy McLeod. But also a great deal of frustration with ADs in the league. Everyone should be fired. Apparently, CUSA hired a firm to negotiate our TV deals - [insert Stamats joke].
-
near universal revulsion of Charlotte as a league addition - “but but markets!!!11!!”
-
Jealousy of the MAC for smartly negotiating a long term deal before the sports bubble popped. They are viable for 10 years and that $500k they each get looks a whole lot better.
-
a few weak pleas to make up the slack via NCAA tournament units (wishful thinking IMHO)
My take is that everything is going as planned. P5 was tired of FBS additions. They are now moving to relegate the G5 to FCS via economics. Anticipate at least 10% of current FBS programs downgrading to FCS (now effectively DII) or dropping the sport in the not too distant future if this trend continues. Could snowball fast & worse with the additional burden of cost of attendance which is a double whammy with the TV rights cuts (those that say its a fraction of the budget…)
The remaining FBS will limp along taking charity body bag games just to try to replace the lost revenue - can see P5 schools going to 8 home games per season just due to economics, and the G5, desperate for a lifeline, all too willing to give up another home game to acquiesce. The B1G move to cut FCS programs from their schedules wasn’t altruism, nor was it SOS related; it was phase 2 of “the plan”. With the addition of shoe company sponsorships in the hundreds of millions, there is no capacity for the sisters of the poor to possibly compete. The weakest of the P5 schools is distributing over $23M/yr to each school plus whatever sponsorship $$.
The truth of the model as currently constructed is that FBS will be reduced to the superconference future through economic attrition within a decade or two. It’s inevitable without reform. The only question is just how fast it will happen.
We are such whipped dogs that we will ridicule the critics of this news while simultaneously letting our administration off the hook.
Honestly, I’d love to see the rise of football independence again.
Look at the schedule UMass put together. It looks pretty good IMO. There are always teams looking to fill out random open weeks and when you are independent, you have a lot more scheduling flexibility.
The downside is there is no CFP money and no conference championships to pitch to recruits to play for. Realistically, no G5, indepdenent or not, is going to compete for the national championship, so if you’re not competing for a conference championship, what are you really playing for? A bowl game? I’m sure some recruits are fine with that, but others probably want to feel like they’re playing for something meaningful.
Didn’t we make more than $200k our first year with our games only on WCCB and Greensboro/Raleigh stations?
What is the point of a conference?
Scheduling?
I’m with Rice here. Are we seriously saying we couldn’t make a better schedule on our own? The new TV rights deal gets us $200k a year, it will cost that for the team and equipment to go to UTSA this year.
Why should our revenue sports have the same travel partners as non-revenue sports? Why should a Saturday only (typically) sport have the same travel partners as the volleyball team that plays on a Wednesday? How does sending our M/W basketball team to Houston/Hattiesberg/LaTech for 3 days during a school week really benefit the student athlete? Really need to think like Baseball with midweek games and schedule local.
We are in the city of Charlotte. This is a place other schools can visit and want to visit. Home and homes should not be an issue.
Collective TV Agreements?
Goes without saying, we are getting squat now. Compared to larger conferences we are getting basically nothing. The 200,000 could be made up with FM radio, WCCB, or a $7 increase in the student fee.
NCAA Credits?
We are in a One Bid conference. Those credits get split 14 ways. Could we not get an at large every 14 years and keep all the credits?
Bowl tie-ins at our level do not make the schools a lot of money, and again, get split 14 ways. Wit the scheduling on our side, we can stack the deck easier to get 6 wins. With so many bowls now, we could generate access to the mid level CUSA bowl on our own.
With being one of the lowest paid conferences w/ TV revenue and visibility, our chances at an access bid from this conference are considerably lower than a MWC or AAC school.
I don’t know of a single benefit of being in this conference honestly.
The problem with independence is losing your share of the CFP money, which is nothing more than bare minimum welfare from the P5. Completely intentional. Just enough to keep you addicted, but not enough for you to ever climb out of the gutter. Our share of that money is just over $1M/yr, IIRC.
After the hit we just took, we are even more desperate for that money.
Nevermind trying to sell more tickets and build the fanbase.
I don’t think we could pull off independence, as a conference though we have to ask ourselves is it worth noon kick-offs for 200k when most of our schools may be able to get that amount cutting deals for themselves? That’s not even counting lost attendance, concessions, etc from days and times that are not optimal.
Unfortunately for Marshall, Rice, and UTEP, the CFP football money rewards 10 team conferences in the G5, after that there is a diminishing return. It doesn’t make financial sense for the MWC or MAC to accept them now whereas maybe it did previously. Maybe Fox will come back into play in two years since they should need some southern content, but if not there may need to be some out of the box thinking for the next deal.
Everything is going to plan. The for profit broadcast rights and corporate sponsorship business model of college sports is doing what it does to every other industry - it will produce a small, aristocratic oligarchy and drive everyone else completely out of business via economics. That is the desired result of everyone currently pulling the strings.Stupid fans and fanbases will applaud this reduction of choice and competition as what is “best for the game” like frogs on slow boil. At the end, when there are as few as 5-8 winners in the realignment wars, and all the other survivors are stuck playing the role of the Washington Generals in their respective conferences, all the $$ will feel very very empty and bitter as the 1-10 seasons and constant state of desperate churn erodes their fandom and fanbases.
No one stopped to ask why the NFL is so popular. It isn’t because of the effects of Darwinism or unfettered capitalism on the economic side. It’s all the factors that produce more economic and talent parity in the league and keep the competition levels even (the Darwinism is contained to gameday, where it belongs, and kept out of the economic side of the league). For some reason, that model is met with revulsion as a concept for college football - decades of evidence from the NFL are completely ignored.
I am baffled as to how our Conference Commissioner (I know it is her first year and she was dealt some of these cards but she is not new to CUSA) and the Athletic Directors of CUSA’s universities still have a job. The ADs signed off on this deal. I don’t know if independence is the answer. That seems very extreme. What is amazing to me is how we are one year into our new football conference and wanting to find any escape not named the Sun Belt. I am at a loss for words really. I am a huge supporter of our school and will remain that way. I have to question where we are right now.
oh man, if Chuck Landon wrote for the observer he’d be banned from writing more than a press release like David Scott:
You can trace this all back to the late 90s and early 2000s when the push for football was shut down and ignore. We start a program anytime before 2005 and we would be in the AAC.
We are part of the problem. They brought us into this league because of our large TV market. Look how much our market helped out in the new TV deal.
We are part of the problem. They brought us into this league because of our large TV market. Look how much our market helped out in the new TV deal.[/quote]
[size=2]
[font=verdana]This is what we were offered, all of us, together. Not sure what else we wanted them to do other than take the president of Disney hostage and demand more money that way. What I love is all the Masha and USM fans who don’t seem to realize that THEIR SCHOOLS were factored into this equation beside the “useless market” schools too.[/font][/size]
We are part of the problem. They brought us into this league because of our large TV market. Look how much our market helped out in the new TV deal.[/quote]
Perhaps we did help - a lot. Hard to know. I think it is just an example of the TV well starting to go dry. The networks are already over paying for the big conferences and that is bleeding down to us. With many of the networks in tough financial situations there just isnt the cash available.
Good points. This all raises the question, “how do you define what’s best for the school?” Maximizing income and turning a profit? Maximizing opportunity and ability to win? Maximizing media exposure and coverage for our school for marketing purposes? Positioning ourselves to be in the best position to be taken by a bigger conference to increase our ability to do those points previously mentioned?
Obviously, we would like all of the above. If other Texas schools are interested in playing Rice, I don’t see why they would want to play ODU, FIU, etc. The biggest hurdle for going independent would be scheduling BYU and Notre Dame are name brands with long history, and people want to play them. I’m not sure how easy it would be for us to put together an independent schedule. I wouldn’t want to go independent right now, stick with CUSA for the time being and try to elevate the conference.
Seems to me that that best thing to do is to make the best of the situation. Build the programs and see what the future might hold. Yes, the deal sucks, but it’s only for two years. I suppose the deal was agreed, short-term, to continue exploring ALL options to deliver content. The G5 are living in a world constructed by TV and the cartel, nothing Charlotte or CUSA can really do but keep building, which seems to be happening with football and men’s basketball. Right now there are two conferences in the G5 that seem a bit better off (AAC and MWC), but CUSA and the SBC have to get better to compete for limited dollars (the MAc is the MAC and still locked in for a while). I personally think CUSA has a chance to improve it’s package in two years, I don’t think the SBC does (despite the protests of its fans that the SBC has surpassed CUSA). I don’t see the AAC doing better when its contracts get negotiated and won’t be surprised at all to see a significant drop there too.
Make the best of it, support the programs…it’s what I’m going to do.
clt says tv money is going to dry up for all sports other than the nfl. the nba deal is a noose.