Jesus, this is shameless.
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UPDATE: So, just how shameless is Emmert? Well, just ask his own organization.
Yeah, it’s a real shame there’s all that antitrust litigation against a group that’s violating antitrust laws. I can see why Emmert laments limiting the NCAA’s ability to price fix.
Filed under It's All Just Made Up And Flagellant, The NCAA
Okay, no surprise: your average P5 AD is… well, average. He/She operates in a world where it’s expected that all the money rolling in will be spent on something. And since that something isn’t labor-related expense, outsized amounts are going to flow to people like Bobby Petrino and Charlie Weis. It’s the nature of the beast.
The funny part is how these folks expect to be perceived as shrewd business people.
That’s not the funniest part, though. Now they want you to believe that the coronavirus has taught them a lesson and that, going forward, it’s not going to be business as usual. Cross their hearts and hope to die ($$).
“For now, the days of buying out coaches’ contracts like drunken sailors are gone,” one Division I athletic director said on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely.
Something that won’t happen this fall that did last fall: a school paying a $20 million buyout to get rid of a head coach before the end of his second full season, as Florida State did with Willie Taggart, then hiring a new staff. There’s no way to justify something like that in this financial climate.
“No,” Castiglione said. “There’s not.”
One senior administrator referred to it as “course-correction.” Another used the term “recalibration.” Either way, it could be one area of college athletics that faces something of a reckoning in the coming months and years. And after years of skyrocketing salaries for head football and head men’s basketball coaches with leverage largely in their agents’ hands, it comes as welcome news to those in athletic departments.
I’m sure Jimmy Sexton went to bed last night with the cold sweats thinking about how much harder it’s going to be negotiating with an athletic director who would only talk tough anonymously.
Here’s what “recalibration” actually looks like.
But on the other side of the pandemic — once we reach the middle of the decade — two expanded revenue streams suggest a bright outlook for budgets:
1) As Navigate explained in December, the (seemingly inevitable) expansion of the College Football Playoff would be highly lucrative:
“Based on the average payout by ESPN on a per-TV-viewer basis, we estimate that an expansion to eight teams would bring in at least another $420 million per year, and expansion to 16 teams would add another $560 million annually.
“That’s tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue for the conferences — and millions for the individual schools.
“Combine that with the current payout for the four-team event, $467 million per year from ESPN, and the total for eight teams would be $887 million per year. A 16-team event would generate up to $1.45 billion per year.”
2) The next round of media rights deals will bring massive cash to the Power Five, as well.
Navigate’s latest projections call for an increase in value of 50-to-100 percent.
“The next set of TV deals, we believe, will be enriched, not harmed, by what’s happening right now — that shift toward home (viewing),’’ Maestas said.
“We’re about to release projections, and it’s roughly a 50-to-100 percent jump in TV money for all the conferences other than the ACC; they’re just stuck in a very long deal.
“This return to a new normal (after Covid-19) — these universities won’t be down for long. All those deals come up in the next four or five years. That means every major Power Five will take another significant step forward in their budgets.”
Yeah, that’s some day of reckoning coming. Be afraid, Jimmy. Be very, very afraid.
So, the NCAA recognizes there’s a problem with players faking injuries to stop play. The NCAA recognizes that there’s no way for officials to make a determination about the validity of player injuries. The NCAA knows this looks bad. The NCAA knows that ultimately this one’s on the coaches.
And the NCAA knows something needs to be done.
The answer, it turns out, is simple: tie it to playing time, since it’s the most valuable commodity to both players and coaches.
Somehow, they manage to get that far, but no farther.
So what would be appropriate to deter bad actors? Two plays? Four? Ten? “Some people said a possession,” Steve Shaw said. “Some went as far as a quarter.”
Ultimately, the rules committee decided there was no magic bullet and tabled legislation. But instead of doing nothing, it opted for a direct warning to coaches: Either you deal with this now or we’ll have to do something.
“We’re going to work with all coaches — and maybe players — to where they see this video and recognize that we’re looking at this very closely,” Steve Shaw said, “and our expectation is that in the 2020 season feigning injuries as an issue in our game will go away, with clear expectations that if players and coaches don’t take care of it, the rules committee then will have to address it and deal with it in some kind of playing time respect. That’s really the only way we think we can get after it.”
Faking injuries will go away because Steve Shaw issued a stern warning? Uh hunh. What do you think of that, Mike Gundy?
YOU’LL HAVE to forgive Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy if he rolls his eyes a little bit at this…
“Warning coaches isn’t going to do anything,” he said. “Until they say that if he’s hurt then he’s out for the remainder of the drive, then coaches are going to go into meetings and say, ‘We have to slow their offenses down. I know the rules committee says we need to try this, but the rules committee is not paying my paycheck.'”
When he’s right, he’s right.
Filed under It's All Just Made Up And Flagellant, The NCAA
Ze boolsheet, she is thick here:
All stakeholders recognize the most important aspect: the well-being of athletes. In addition to the continued risk of contracting the coronavirus, there remains a mental impact the pandemic is having on society as a whole considering the uncertainty surrounding the virus.
What is the allowable risk of spread when football reconvenes? Theoretically, one infected player would have to be quarantined along with everyone they contact.
“Unfortunately, it will be a bit of trial and error,” Waldman said. “Somebody will open up [a sport] … and see what happens. Then maybe one will go well and two will go well and 10 will go well. And then on the 15th try, somebody will get sick. Somebody will say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have opened. Maybe we should close again.'”
Yeah, that’s exactly how people concerned about the well-being of athletes sound.
Somebody’s already getting antsy about that sweet revenue flow.
At least he didn’t say Easter.
Just a reminder that ticket sellouts don’t necessarily equal actual attendance.
The sunny Saturday afternoon of Nov. 9 was something out of a movie. Empty seats in Bryant-Denny Stadium rivaled clouds in the sky with top-ranked LSU in town for the sequel to 2011’s “Game of the Century.”
Tickets were selling for multiples of face value for a seat in Alabama’s 101,821-seat monument to football grandeur.
It was a sellout by any measure — except one of the several factors that detail the numbers behind Alabama football attendance over the past six seasons.
A total of 91,557 tickets were scanned for the Nov. 9 game that LSU won, according to the spreadsheet supplied by the university as part of an AL.com public records request. It spells out the number of tickets scanned at Bryant-Denny Stadium gates and how they differ from the official attendance announced for each home game since 2014.
In those six seasons, ticket scans represented 78 percent of the attendance numbers listed for the 56 home games.
Not to worry, sez Alabama’s AD.
Byrne and associate AD for ticketing, Chris Besanceney, estimated there is a 10 percent miss rate in the ticket-scanning process before Alabama home games.
“Because when you get backed up, the gate workers are doing the best they can,” Byrne said in a recent interview with AL.com, “but you have 20 people in the line and they’re trying to get them through.”
Makes you wonder why they even bother with the scan count, especially when we know in the end that it’s the ticket revenue that matters most.
By the way, it turns out that the discrepancy between the two for that LSU game came out to exactly 10 percent. What a coincidence, eh?
Rush Propst is asked about the Scott Cochran move and, in the end, it comes out about like you’d expect.
Propst: “Does it hurt Alabama? I don’t know yet. I’m torn on that and I’m going to tell you why. As good as Scott is and as good as what he has done for 13 seasons sometimes strength coaches play out. It is the same old message. The same song and dance. Sometimes it gets stale and old. Stale and old. Even in my program. It seems like I changed up my strength coach at my program and it paid off. He was the best I’ve ever been around. I think the best I’ve ever seen, including Scott Cochran. This guy is really good. He was with me at Hoover and came with me to Georgia. But he left after the 13th season and I changed it up and gave it then to another guy that had trained under him. He did change it up some and we won our first state championship in Georgia.”
“I think the best I’ve ever seen, including Scott Cochran.” LOL. Makes you wonder why Saban’s settling for the pair from Indiana.
Filed under Alabama, It's All Just Made Up And Flagellant
