Notre Dame: best 4-8 team of 2016…

… or best 4-8 team ever?

By the way, Mr. Connelly projects Notre Dame as an almost four-point favorite when the Dawgs come calling in September.

“In other words, an early signing period has been approved.”

If this marks doom for college football, as Saban and Meyer have argued, why do I have the sneaky suspicion that those two are already prepared for the changes and won’t miss a beat?

When it comes to certainty and the future, there’s death, taxes and…

… the never-ending expectation of conference commissioners that the broadcast revenue gusher will keep flowing.

The easy hot take given these circumstances is that the sports media rights bubble will pop, and the money college leagues make from selling the broadcast rights to football and basketball will peak just before the Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12 deals expire in the middle of the next decade. The revenue that has fueled huge coaching salaries, a facilities arms race and angst over the size of the cut the majority of the labor force receives will slow or fall. Power 5 athletic directors will have to—gasp—manage money responsibly instead of simply relying on the next media rights bump to cover any overspending.

The reality is more complicated and less certain. Like newspapers before them, ESPN and Fox will grapple with disruption to their business model and ultimately may have to remake themselves if they want to continue to thrive in the new media landscape. But reflexively forecasting doom assumes television networks are the only entities that will bid on sports rights in the future*. That is almost certainly not going to be the case. “I really see a time when there are going to be a lot of players in the marketplace and there are going to be a lot of distribution methods,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said. “The unknown is how much is it all worth? I don’t think there’s anyone who legitimately knows what it’s going to be worth.”

*Don’t get hung up on the television-versus-Internet delivery issue. No, streaming isn’t as reliable on May 8, 2017, as cable or satellite service. Buffering remains a problem. But by May 8, 2023, the differences could be negligible.

Bowlsby is correct. No one knows. Not him. Not Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany. Not SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. Not Apple CEO—and Auburn grad—Tim Cook. The only thing we do know is that there is a limited number of major college football and basketball games available for sale and there is a built-in demand for them. How much that demand is worth depends on how many companies wind up bidding. “I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the landscape will look like or what health ESPN or Fox will have in 2023 when we’re negotiating or how significant a player a Twitter or a Facebook will be,” Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said. “My sense is that there will be more competition. There will be more and different types of players. And there will still be very limited and highly valuable sports properties.”

Commissioners and ADs look at tech giants as the white knights that could allow their leagues to keep growing revenues, but the question is whether a Google, an Apple, a Netflix or a Hulu would even want to get into the live sports business. If they did, it would be unwise to assume they would overpay simply because their market capitalizations dwarf those of the players in the marketplace now. The money could stay flat or drop even if the tech companies join the fray, but the leaders of college sports hope the competition for a limited resource might drive up the price. “Long-term, I’m very bullish on the value of premium sports rights,” Scott said. “I see more competitors. And frankly, competitors with bigger market cap than ESPN or Comcast or DirecTV. Some of these companies we’re talking about are huge by comparison. If they decide that sports is a vertical they want to get involved in in a big way, that’s good news for the Pac-12 or the NFL.”

Larry Scott sure knows how to drop words that make him sound like he’s got everything under control.  But notice that the key word in the last sentence of his quote is the first one.  Nothing’s happened yet.

What these guys are banking on, without any concrete evidence that it will come to fruition, is that if more capitalized competition arrives, it’s bound to spend even more money than ESPN and Fox already are, because… well, I’m not exactly sure why.  Maybe Big Jim can explain that to us.

Or these companies might kick the tires on sports rights and decide they don’t need them. Remember, they’re already wildly successful without live sports. This is the gamble Delany took when the Big Ten opted for six-year deals for its Tier 1 and Tier 2 rights. “There’s no doubt we’re in a disruptive environment,” Delany said. “There definitely is money and interest on the sideline. It really hasn’t emerged very much yet, but I’m sure that there is—whether it’s Apple or Google or Hulu or any number of companies.”

Delany is betting that demand for Big Ten football will be so valuable that the revenue from the next deals will outpace these deals. But he also has a hedge; the Big Ten Network’s deal with Fox runs until 2032. On the other end of the spectrum is the ACC, which allowed ESPN to lock up its rights until 2036 in return for getting a conference network that is scheduled to launch in 2019. “If you go shorter, you take out a little more risk,” Delany said. “But you also have a little more upside.”

In other words, these guys don’t have a fucking clue.

ESPN’s recent move to clear out a lot of talented journalists/reporters is more than just serving notice to shareholders that it has a plan to deal with its current numbers crunch.  It’s also a realization that the real value is in live content.  We tune in to watch games; for the most part, we’re indifferent to “The Sports Reporters”.  That’s where Mickey’s expense has to focus, then.

But here’s the thing.  If the WWL continues to pare down its operational expenses by whacking out everything other than sports broadcasts and still finds itself bleeding profit margin, there’s only one conclusion left to draw, and it’s that the overall business model isn’t what it used to be.  If that’s the new normal, to think that a shrewdly operated company like Apple, which makes massive bank as easily as we breath, is going to come in on a white horse and throw stupid money around to pull Larry Scott’s nuts out of the proverbial fire is a pipe dream.

… Every league is feeling it as the cable networks hemorrhage subscribers. An industry that has become accustomed to economic growth now has to grapple with the very real possibility of flat revenue or less revenue in the near future. Of course, the possibility is just as real that some deep-pocketed newcomers could swoop in from Silicon Valley and keep the money flowing. “We could be right, or we could be wrong,” Delany said. “History will tell us.”

Hey, if it blows up in their faces, at least Delany’s already written the epitaph.

Advertisement

When it comes to recruiting numbers, resistance is futile.

When you put it like this…

“If you look at a map of where the Big 12 is, there’s not a lot of high school football in some of these states,” Casazza said. “In fact, I just did some research… Texas, for example, had about 1,100 schools that played (11 on 11) high school football. The Big 12’s other four states — Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and West Virginia — had fewer than 900 combined. There’s four Big 12 schools in Texas. You really can’t change the fact that 40 percent of your league plays in the bottom 20 in the country of high school football teams.”

On where the talent is spread and why the SEC has an advantage:

“The top four states in the past five years for four and five-star recruits are Georgia, Florida, California and Texas. Georgia, Florida and Texas… the SEC has nine schools in those states.”

… that paints a pretty bleak demographic picture.  There ain’t enough spread offense imaginable to bridge that gap.

Bottom line:  if the recruiting glass is big enough, it doesn’t matter if it’s half empty.  But it’s hard to quench your thirst drinking out of a thimble.

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.

This is pretty amazing.

Almost a year ago Georgia running back Sony Michel was in an accident involving an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) and in the process broke both bones (radius and ulna) in his forearm. The break was so bad that the bone penetrated the skin, requiring surgery.

Coming back from such a serious injury wasn’t a walk in the park but it was made easier by the Bulldogs biomedical engineering program.

In Georgia’s latest “Beneath the Helmet” video, head athletic trainer Ron Courson and members of the UGA biomedical engineering program take the time to explain exactly how they worked together to get the star running back on the field.

It’s easy to assume that if a player only misses one game due to an injury, it must not have been too serious.  Maybe in the hands of lesser mortals than Ron Courson that might be the case, but we shouldn’t forget whom we’re talking about here.

No hard feelings

A.J. Green is the recipient of the university’s 2017 Young Alumni Award, a honor given annually to Bulldogs who show a continued commitment to UGA.  That’s a nice recognition for a great player who was kicked to the curb for four games in his last season in Athens through the athletic department’s ineptness to protect him in the face of an overreaching NCAA investigation.

What was the key to this fond turnaround?  Do you really need to ask?

Green, who played at UGA from 2008-2010 has continued to visit and contribute financially to UGA and the football program since choosing to forego his senior season and entering the 2011 NFL Draft.  [Emphasis added.]

I swear, if Jim Harrick and his son ever make financial contributions to UGA, they’d be welcomed back with open arms.  ‘Cause that’s how the Georgia Way rolls, peeps.