Month: September 2011

I know much was made of how the President “backed down” regarding the scheduling of his address to Congress, but after the media attention last night to the GOP debate – and to Rick Perry’s assertion that he intends to run as both Jed Bartlett’ opponent from The West Wing and as the scourge of Social Security – I’m starting to wonder again if there’s not some “pleeeeeeease don’t throw me in that briar patch” going on at 1600 Penn.

The chaos is well and truly underway.  The Big XII is finally imploding, with the imminent departure of Texas A&M to the SEC leaving only nine teams behind.  Now the rumors are starting about Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the Pac-16 (!) and Kansas to the Big East (where their football-to-basketball ratio will be an asset rather than a liability).  Missouri keeps getting pitched as a possible 14th for the SEC.  And this leaves Baylor, Iowa State, and Kansas State…standing without a chair when the music stops.

In 1984, the Supreme Court rules that the NCAA was in violation of antitrust law by collectively selling the rights to college football broadcasts.  As a result, 64 schools broke away and formed the College Football Association to sell their game rights to the highest bidder, while the Big Ten and Pac-10 in turn made a separate deal with ABC.  Famously, Notre Dame then went to NBC for their home schedule exclusively, and before long every conference was trying to make the best arrangement for itself…which is how we got here.  The SEC got the world from CBS and ESPN, only for the Pac-12 to get the universe from Fox, and now the arms race has hit critical mass yet again.

The situation we find ourselves in is this:

1) Conferences will be increasing their membership in an attempt to reopen their broadcast deals and negotiate better arrangements for themselves.

2) Most conferences are at 12 members already.

3) Conferences larger than 12 are inherently untenable owing to the limited number of games available in a season.

4) Conferences as large as 16 will invariably function as a joint alignment of two 8-team conferences, and will in almost all cases result in splitting up intraconference rivalries.

5) Superconference realignment for football purposes stands to have a deleterious impact on non-football sports.

6) At some point, schools will be unable to keep up with the arms race associated with major college football, either from a financial standpoint or from an unwillingness to prioritize the sport.

 

We are reaching a point where another CFA-type situation is in the offing.  The biggest-ticket programs – think the SEC exclusive of Vanderbilt, the Big-XII as of last season, USC, Notre Dame, Florida State, Miami, probably BYU and possibly Ohio State and/or Michigan, and possibly a few others – could conceivably assemble themselves as a new CFA, withdraw their football programs from NCAA sanction and set themselves up as their own thing.  Call it the College Football Premier League.  All the big-time programs – Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, USC, Ohio State, basically anyone who’s played in a national title game or more than one BCS bowl in the last decade – will go off on their own, along with the Auburns and the South Carolinas and the Oklahoma States and the Texas Techs and the other schools intent on being a football factory first.

Say, the top 64 teams, organized into four 16-team conferences for the sake of a name and a title game, but effectively playing in 8-team pods en route to an 8-team playoff for their own championship of college football.  And the rest of what’s currently NCAA Division I-A possibly reorganizing as a sort of I-AA-plus, possibly with its own championship tournament, possibly not. Either way, you can forget about the bowls, save perhaps as a sort of framework for the Premier League playoffs or a series of consolation matches among the teams knocked out.

Except for the Rose Bowl, of course, and the Big 14 and Pac-14, which probably won’t go for that Premier League nonsense.  Or maybe they will, who knows – but then, if there’s a bowl and a conference that have always held themselves to be above the rabble of mortal football, it’s the Rose Bowl and the Big Ten.  So who knows.

Either way, I doubt Vanderbilt makes the cut.  The eternal argument – serve in heaven and cash fat checks, or reign in hell and be the best of the dregs? – might be settled forcibly.  I doubt the new-look CFA is going to be all that concerned with AAU membership or endowment and research credentials; the key metric will be the ability to deliver eyeballs on Saturday afternoons…

They’ve got it down to a science in Boise.  Get a season-opening game against a big-name program of suspect quality, win big on national television, and glide to an undefeated season, constantly moaning about disrespect and being ignored and not getting a fair shake – while getting a half-dozen ESPN games and opening the year ranked #5.

Nobody is saying that Boise State wouldn’t do just fine in another conference – even in the SEC or Pac-12, they’d probably be good for at least 9 wins a season – but the notion that they could roll undefeated through any conference but the WAC, year after year, is risible.  But they are the darlings of ESPN, so now we get to hear all about them for another four months.

You know, sports is really taking more from me than I take from it lately…

The mall is an easy place to see what’s doing with the tablet business. It seems like every other shop has some Honeycomb-based Android gadget on offer. Telling, though, is the fact that they’re all 10-inch models. So much for the notion that cheap 7-inch tablets would eat the iPad’s lunch. Ironically, the rumblings about the new Amazon Kindle based on an Android fork are making me interested in the 7 again. A 7 might fit in a jacket pocket. An iPad or its imitators? No chance.

Sony has some new tablet that’s thick and round at one edge, a bit like a folded magazine or a regular tablet with it’s cover open. My immediate reaction, unfortunately, was to blurt “You’re not serious.” I don’t think a wedge-shaped tablet is the key to consumer electronic resurrection for Sony, alas.

All these tablets – whether at T-Mobile, AT&T, the Sony store, the Verizon kiosk or the Samsung display – are a widescreen 10.1″ that strongly suggests they are meant to work horizontally first. The vertical orientation was not comfortable for the DSC-in-law and I suspect the round side of the Sony was an attempt to cope with that.

Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich is the answer. Having a unified Android release for all devices might help clean up some of the fragmentation issues – and hopefully put an end to the custom UI blight. But the fact that Amazon is choosing to fork – and the Great Mentioner is higher on the putative Kindle tablet than any iPad competitor yet – suggests that once again, the key to a mobile device is cutting out the carrier and designing the whole widget yourself.

Are you Superman disguised as Clark Kent, or are you Clark Kent disguised as Superman?

“It is still the single most breathtaking play I have ever seen not because of the raw athleticism, but because it was never over for George Teague. To hell with the flags, or the angles, or the score: if Lamar Thomas were streaking toward an endzone a thousand miles away, guided toward it only by the sun, the stars, and a compass in his soul pointing towards the goal line, George Teague would have found him and stolen the ball and run the other way until he died exhausted and alone.

“It happened on a down that appears in no stat line, no sheet of formal records. The turf is Astroturf, the game a glorified exhibition put on by a corporation hiding under the guise of a non-profit, involving players likely violating the rules of amateurism, beaming through satellites to flicker on the television of a fake house in a fake neighborhood in a fake state to a family in the last stages of living under the same roof. And yet it still stops my heart when I watch it. George Teague doesn’t give a shit what down it is. He gets the ball, or he dies.”

-Spencer Hall, “God’s Away On Business”