Thursday morning buffet

Some tasty morsels out there, ready to be sampled:

• The Sports Business Journal has an interesting article on the World Wide Leader’s manuvering with regard to boosting the presence of ESPNU (h/t Capstone Report).  Why should we care?  Quite simply, because of this:  “The channel, which launched in the spring of 2005, has been at the center of ESPN’s most recent media deals. ESPNU will pick up a significant part of ESPN’s SEC schedule and is expected to run shoulder programming that supports ESPN’s BCS package.”
• Over at Capstone Report, you’ll find this post laying out the athletic department budgets for every school in the SEC except for Vandy, a private school that doesn’t disclose, and Alabama, a Nick Saban school that doesn’t disclose.  Good stuff, and I hope they’ll go back in a year or two after the new TV revenues have been fed into the system to see what effect those have had on these budgets.
• Chris, over at Smart Football, offers some more thoughts on the whole NFL-scouts-versus-system-quarterbacks debate.  He thinks the concern is a bit overblown and that the scouts need to work harder or get out of the way.  I think that’s valid to some extent, but check out the third comment to his post for some solid points on the other side of the discussion.
• And speaking of Smart Football, I love wading through stuff like this.
• People are noticing that attendance at the first two rounds of this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament was down and wondering if there’s a lesson from that to be applied to the football postseason.

Advertisement

Senator Hatch is hurt! Call the waaaaaaaaaaaaambulance!

When I read stuff like this, I realize that everything they taught me in that ninth-grade civics class was wrong.

Sen. Orrin Hatch says it is not just greed that makes college football’s Bowl Championship Series unfair and maybe a violation of antitrust laws. He says it is also biased “elitism” that he has seen since he grew up in poverty.

“I think it’s elitism almost more than greed,” Hatch told 1280 The Zone on Monday. He said such elitists often say, “the Mountain West schools just can’t compete,” which he said is “bull.”

Hatch added, “I like the word elitism. I was born in poverty. In my family, I had to earn everything. We didn’t even have indoor facilities in my early part of my life. I had to fight for everything I’ve ever had. I was a janitor going through BYU. I’m proud of that.”

So, he said, “Unfortunately as we’ve all grown up, we’ve found there are elite people who think everything should be done their way and not done in a fair way. And in this particular case, it (the BCS bowl system) isn’t done in a fair way.”

This, of course, is being said without irony by a man who serves in a body that has often been referred to as the most exclusive club in the world.  Who is arguing that the college football postseason should be done his way.

Also said without irony:

Hatch also said he believes the last team not part of the “elite” BCS conferences to win a national football championship was Brigham Young University in 1984.

“They were really lucky to be national champions that year. Not because they didn’t deserve it, but because of the way the system works” with elitists saying anyone not part of their conferences do not deserve to win because they face lesser competition, he said.

Pardon me while I finish chuckling… there, that’s better.  Let me take a minute to remind everyone about that ’84 MNC.  As Wikipedia describes it,

The 1984 NCAA Division I-A football season saw an aerial attack (in a college version of the West Coast offense), as the only undefeated team, Brigham Young University, won the national championship in the AP and Coaches Polls. Under the leadership of head coach LaVell Edwards, BYU had a 24-17 win over a 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl. The crowning, by the pollsters, of BYU as the 1984 national champion was disputed by Washington and Oklahoma fans, and to many commentators, a sign that the football crown should be decided by a playoff of some sort, if not a reform of the bowl system.

You’ve gotta love it.

And this, too:

… Hatch added that he feels elitism even hurts the Utah Jazz. “I get very resentful (about) the way the Jazz are treated because we are a small TV market. You don’t see them on national TV very often, yet they are one of the premier teams in the whole doggone game.”

He probably feels the same way about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir not being played on Top 40 radio.  After all, those folks are one of the premier choirs in the whole doggone music world.

There ought to be a law about that.