Sacrilege! Heresy!

Glenn Guilbeau, you are not welcome at my G-Day tailgate this Saturday.

“If no one had spring football, everyone would be even, and it would not be missed.”?  It’s a damned long stretch from April to September, brother.  You think nobody will notice if you make it even longer?

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• Georgia Southern is moving to the Sun Belt Conference.  That’s good news for Georgia, as it means there will be one less FCS opponent on future schedules.
• Evidently, we think college players shouldn’t be paid, but college coaches should be paid more.  Weird.
• Speaking of paying college players, this is some well-played snark from the AJ-C, of all places.
• The media’s strange fixation with what it thinks Jadeveon Clowney ought to be doing with his football career goes in a new direction.
• John Infante thinks a little sunshine would work wonders on SEC oversigning.  Methinks Nick Saban could care less about that.
• March Madness usually inspires some really stupid thoughts about what college football can take from the basketball tourney, and CFN delivers, in spades.
• If you’re a Vol fan living in a certain place, Charlie Pierce describes how the Georgia-Tennessee water war could lead to your worst nightmare.

“It’s such a disruptive model.”

A couple of eagle-eyed readers pointed me to a story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about Verizon FIOS’ attempt to come up with a new pricing strategy for content that would involve customers paying for channels based on the number of subscribers who actually watch them, and not a set rate.

The story itself is behind a pay wall, so no direct quotes, but the gist of things is that Verizon is looking at a business model that would involve putting a box on a subscriber’s TV that would measure viewing time.  The customer would only be charged based on usage that crossed a certain time threshold.

This is coming from Verizon, mind you, so I’m not convinced this would benefit the consumer in terms of saving money.  But it clearly indicates that providers are increasingly worried about the impact on-line video outlets are having on the market.  And that’s not all.  According to the article, ESPN draws less viewers than the USA Network, yet distributors paid ESPN an average of $5.04 a month per household last year, compared to the 68 cents a month USA received.  If you’re somebody stuck in the middle like Verizon, you can see where moving to a model based on actual usage has the potential to be an attractive way to avoid price fights with certain content distributors.

The catch is that you can also see how that might not be so great for sports network providers who are pushing product in markets where there isn’t that much interest in the product, say, like the Big Ten Network in the greater New York area.  The problem won’t be unavailability.  Rather, it’ll be that the price will go up if the customer base interested in the product is small.  And that’s got the potential to create a negative feedback loop, as prices go up and fewer people are willing to pay to watch.  (Although maybe Jim Delany can figure a way to threaten a few viewers in Brooklyn to keep them in line.)

Right now, it’s hard to say whether this is a canary in the coal mine story.  But it bears repeating that the content delivery world is under pressure and it’s more likely that things will change than that they won’t.  And that’s something network-owning football conferences should be mindful of.

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UPDATE:  More from the Washington Post on this.

“This is the beginning,” said Gene Kimmelman, a former senior antitrust official at the Justice Department. “If the conflict between cable distributors and content owners persists and prices keep rising, there will be enormous market pressure to begin unbundling offerings, give consumers more choices and, from my perspective, ultimately let consumers control what they buy and how much they pay.”

Target this.

The NCAA has officially approved the new ejection for targeting rule.  Therein lies the rub.

One area of concern, though, is how exactly to define the targeting of a defenseless player and how different officiating crews may interpret the NCAA’s own definition.  In an attempt to alleviate some concern on that front, the oversight panel accepted the rules committee proposal that any targeting penalty be subject to immediate video review.  The release states that “[t]he replay official must have conclusive evidence that a player should not be ejected to overturn the call on the field,” which of course brings additional subjectivity into the mix.

A bug for some, a feature for Penn Wagers.

‘Who wants to defend this?’

Revealing nugget from Jon Solomon’s piece on former NCAA infractions committee chair Jo Potuto, who, by the way, as one of the few people associated with the NCAA who doesn’t appear to have her head stuck up her ass, ought to be in consideration should the day ever come when Mark Emmert is deposed:

Top NCAA leaders have privately debated for years how to defend its model as the games became more commercialized. Their answer for keeping it: Losing the amateurism component loses operating as a nonprofit with tax benefits and control over policies.

“If it becomes a version of the professional model, why would you go see an athlete in college who looks like a pro when the pros play better?” Potuto asked. “If they’re college students, that has to mean something.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the gap between what the suits want and what the fans want described better.  And in a mere two paragraphs!

Potuto – gasp! – is even willing to entertain the heretical notion that college players should be able to profit off their names.  She’s unconvinced it will be the end of the republic.

“I don’t know that it would be such a terrible, dramatic, awful thing,” she said. “We should look at what it looks like and talk about what maybe the consequences might be. If boosters involves themselves in ways that tilt things, maybe you say the players can’t get the money until they leave school. I think it’s worth looking at seriously instead of worrying the house will fall down.”

On the other hand, Potuto believes economists should create a model that accurately shows the monetary value of college players.

“”What I think we would find, to the chagrin of a lot of college athletes, is their value in name likeness is not a whole lot, and a lot of it comes from wearing the name of their school on their shirt,” Potuto said.

Clearly this woman is too reasonable to be entrusted with a position of responsibility governing college athletics.

Amateurism, with a twist

It sounds like Johnny Manziel will be spending more of his offseason time with a quarterback coach in San Diego than he will on campus with his fellow Texas A&M students.

But he feels like a “normal” student.  So there’s that.

Spring football is just around the corner.

Or here, if you happen to play for Army, believe it or not, where practice started last Tuesday.

Here’s the comprehensive list of start dates for practices and spring games. (Georgia’s are March 2 and April 16 6, respectively, if you’re too lazy to click.)

Thirteen

Honestly, I’m surprised in this age of conference expansion and networks that this question isn’t being asked more often.

I bet it will be, though.

Vegas is for losers.

Matt Melton takes a look at how every D-1 game in 2012 performed against the point spread.  The results won’t surprise too many of you.

Out of the 697 regular season games involving IA opponents, 261 of them (or 37.45%) finished within one touchdown of the betting line. In other words, more than a third of the time, you’re hard-earned money was one play away from either nearly doubling or floating away. Think about that the next time your buddy has a ‘sure thing’. Overall, over two thirds (67.00%) of the games finished within two touchdowns of the betting line and fewer than one of every five games differed by more than 20 points.

That translates into the average game being roughly twelve points off from the spread.  Not exactly a lock.

“We don’t have the resources you need to compete at this level.”

There are plenty of reasons I prefer college football to the NFL variety, but if I could only choose one, I’d point to this great story about Chris Ault.

The birthplace of the Pistol Offense is a carpeted, 10-foot-by-30-foot stretch in the front of the Nevada football locker room that has probably been walked over a million times in the past eight years. One morning in the spring of 2005, Wolf Pack head coach Chris Ault — coming off a 5-7 season — led his running backs coach Jim Mastro and three other Nevada assistants with him from their coaching offices down a flight of stairs at 6:30 a.m. to the ground floor of the Wolf Pack football building.

Ault had an idea, an idea that less than a decade later has had a profound influence not just on college football, but the NFL as well. What grew from a six-hour session that began that morning in Reno a few weeks before the start of spring ball has had an impact that has even helped spark the San Francisco 49ers and their young standout quarterback Colin Kaepernick on a Super Bowl run.

“I was disgusted with our run game,” Ault recalled to CBS on Wednesday morning. “I felt our football program needed an identity. Honestly, it was gonna be a feast or famine with this thing.”

Engineering an entirely new offensive formation/strategy out of necessity due to limited resources was just the first step.  The second was finding gold in a raw kid – and adapting the strategy to his talents.

“He was a Wing-T QB in high school, and he threw it side arm,” Ault said. “He had that pitching throw. You could see he had decent speed. We had him in camp. I probably wouldn’t have offered him off film. We didn’t offer him out of camp. But we knew he probably could be a good free safety or wide receiver if he couldn’t play quarterback. He was such a great kid, very attentive. We didn’t know he was getting ready to put his cape on, and it’s now with a big K right in the middle of it.”

Can you imagine a coach in the NFL going out on a limb like that?  Nah.  Going out on a limb there means taking a chance that what Ault came up with in that six-hour session might work at the next level.

College ball doesn’t have the NFL’s parity.  But it more than makes up for that with its diversity.  Paul Johnson may be an ass of the first order, but I love that there’s a place in the world for the triple option.  Long may all of it run.