The Atlanta ABC affiliate pivoted by remaking its shows and scrambling to fill them with their own unique programming…
While former Georgia and SEC championship-winning quarterback D.J. Shockley gets exclusive 1-on-1 interviews with coach Kirby Smart and players each week as the face of Fox 5’s coverage, WSB-TV lined up “exclusive player correspondents” for their own original content.
They paid tight end Oscar Delp, edge rusher Jalon Walker and inside linebacker Jamon Dumas-Johnson as part of an NIL arrangement with Georgia’s Classic City Collective. Interviews were filmed at the collective’s headquarters in Athens on Monday mornings.
Klein declined to disclose the cost of that for the station but said “we paid significantly less than what they were doing to be the official TV station of Georgia and we feel we’re getting better exclusive content than the university was providing us because there was nothing really exclusive about it because the same players were being made available to everybody.”
According to Klein, WSB’s “Gameday on 2” continues to be the No. 1 rated pregame show in the market.
In any event, if you’re looking for Bulldog football content year-round, brother, you’re in luck.
WSB’s show runs year-round and Fox 5 is required to air its Saturday show 46 times this year and at least 52 the next four years.
Charlie Baker thinks his new proposal is a pretty simple deal at its heart.
He said the $30,000 figure is: “about giving (athletes) the ability to launch. And if that means going and taking the labs they couldn’t take to sort of round out and complete their degree, or taking an internship that they didn’t have time to take, or taking the four courses that they needed to actually complete their graduation, or a whole bunch of other things.
It’s about “giving them the resources to have the living expenses that they need, so that they can actually make the next move when they either graduate or their eligibility expires. … And, you know, schools can make decisions about how they want to organize this with their student-athletes and all the rest. I’m not going to tell anybody how to do this. But in the end, what we want is all of these folks to complete their college career and then go somewhere with it.”
That’s all! Never mind that it’s an attempt to shut the players out from sharing television revenue permanently and to let the schools clamp down on the NIL market (with a little antitrust help from their good friends in Congress, natch). $30,000 will be the new “free tuition, room and board”, in other words.
It’s also freaking out schools who aren’t going to be sitting at the big kids table anymore.
Late Tuesday night, groups representing athletics directors at schools in the Football Championship Subdivision and schools that do not have football teams issued a statement saying that they have been “working diligently to ensure our voices will be heard as the college athletics environment continues to evolve at an historic pace. The time is now for us to double down on our connection to education and our alignment with our institutional missions. We have an opportunity for clarity within Division I, and Charlie Baker’s letter brings that opportunity to the forefront.”
The groups said they have hired a college-sports consulting firm to assist with those efforts.
Virginia Commonwealth AD Ed McLaughlin’s program does not have a football team but has seen its men’s basketball team reach the Final Four and remain a perennial NCAA men’s tournament participant. He said that even if Baker’s proposal goes forward, “I do think there is a place for VCU at the table. … I’m not panicked. Yet. But that’s only because we’ve been anticipating it.”
He said his department has spent time over the past 18 months doing financial modeling in anticipation of benefits for athletes being allowed to continue grow, and that while it’s unlikely VCU can have “broad-based nationally competitive” teams, there is a way to have some teams at that level and “do it in a way that’s economically reasonable for us.”
“It’s no different in the Big East” or other non-Power Five conferences. “I would hate to see an NCAA (men’s basketball) tournament without Villanova, Gonzaga or VCU. It’s not March Madness without schools like ours … We just need to know what is expected of schools like ours.”
Easy peasy, Charlie. And that’s before you’ve convinced Congress your way is the path.
Hey, I give him credit for trying to be proactive. There’s no way Emmert would have ever dared suggest something like this. The problem is that (1) he’s pitched this without buy in from his members and (2) he’s still trying to claw back what the current market is doing. That’s a tough sell.
Baylor President Linda Livingstone said college sports leaders need to show lawmakers they have a plan to direct more of the billions of dollars that flow into major college athletics, mostly toward major college football and basketball, toward athletes.
“If Congress sees us saying, ‘Hey, we want to benefit them more financially, but we believe keeping them from being employees helps us to support them in different ways and maybe better ways,’ I think we might be able to get some of that protection that probably we won’t get otherwise,” Livingstone said.
Our schedule next year is brutal, especially with away games at Texas, Alabama and Ole Miss, and Clemson in Atlanta to start the year. It would seem another unbeaten regular season is unrealistic, so how many games do you think Georgia can afford to lose and still make the expanded Playoff? — Blake B.
My, how the mighty have fallen.
No doubt next year’s schedule is a step up in terms of degree of difficulty, but rumor has it Georgia will still be pretty formidable next season. Anyway, Seth thinks that the schedule is tough enough that the Dawgs might qualify for a 12-team field with as many as three losses. What do y’all think?
Nothing insidious. The Orange Bowl has a VIP event each year, and part of it is a press conference. The scheduled time, during a hectic time of year on the trail, wasn't conducive to either school's head coach…and my understanding is the OB just…
Tin-foil hats? Insidious? WTF’s going on here? Welp, since you asked…
The Orange Bowl was set to have a news conference this Thursday that would feature Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Florida State’s Mike Norvell. On Wednesday, that event was officially canceled.
Immediately after this news was made public, the college football community started speculating about the status of the Orange Bowl.
It’s no secret that Florida State is furious about being snubbed from the College Football Playoff. To some degree, Georgia feels the same way.
Though there’s currently no indication the Orange Bowl will end up being canceled, there are a lot of fans who think Florida State will boycott the game.
Honestly, I don’t get it. FSU, which has complained about finances for the past couple of years, is gonna walk away from a big check, and for what? The system’s already changing for next year, so it’s not like the revolution is coming.
“We remember the Sugar Bowl, I think it my junior year of high school, we let Alabama beat us twice,” Brinson said of a team that also lost to the Crimson Tide in the SEC Championship game. “We’re not letting Alabama beat us twice. In the Sugar Bowl in 2018, they… thought they should have been in the playoffs and lost to Texas.” -- AB-H, 12/27/23
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