Morgan Wick

We interrupt our ongoing political debate for Hussie’s latest pre-break kisstravaganza.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized party at English’s place.)

I had been holding off on writing a Homestuck post because I was waiting for all the twists and turns to finish building up to the end-of-act flash… so naturally Hussie announces there’s going to be a flash before the end-of-act flash. (I still decided to wait for that first flash – which actually turned out to be two connected flashes – to come out before writing this.)

Another reason I held off on writing anything? Despite Hussie making a habit of ending the different acts in Act 6 with hints that the post-Scratch group of kids are nothing but red herrings (great way to get people invested in the characters you’re devoting most of the act to, Hussie), I adamantly refused to believe that Hussie would kill off Jane and Roxy so cavalierly. I was confident it would prove to be a doomed timeline or something. For one thing, on top of contradicting something in the opening flash I’ll get to later, it also contradicted what Calliope repeatedly said about Roxy blacking out the session, or indeed numerous references suggesting Roxy had to enter the session, even if she died later.

So, if Calliope’s revelation isn’t big enough to end the act, and the deaths of two of the act’s protagonists isn’t big enough to end the act, what could possibly be big enough to end the act? I don’t think it’s a good place for the reveal of Calliope’s brother…

As it turned out, I was half right. Hussie wasn’t willing to kill everyone off permanently. Instead, after waking up in the same dream bubble our normal protagonists have been hanging out with Aranea and Meenah in, Dirk chucks Roxy out of the bubble towards his session (and provokes an absolutely hilarious reaction from Dave), then, after getting a wake-up from Aranea, starts setting things up for his entry into the session. He then plugs in the fenstrated wall GCat left him earlier, pops into Roxy’s house, and kiss-revives her… just in time for her dreamself to witness the knocked-out dream!Dirk and dead Jane. Yeah, that’s totally not contrived or anything.

Oh, and then he sendificates his head to the knocked-out Jake in the past.

After a tense back-and-forth where Dirk’s auto-responder messes with Jake’s head (no pun intended) by referring to himself as “Lil Hal” and twisting the knife on Jake’s uncomfortableness with kissing Dirk’s severed head, Jake eventually pulls it off and Dirk, now as his dreamself, sees Roxy’s own uncomfortableness with kissing Jane, does it himself, then loads Roxy onto his rocketboard and hops inside the temple meteor’s flower, popping out just in time to meet with Jane (who just transportalized from the Prospitian palace to the temple) and help arrange Jake’s kissing of Dirk’s head.

Although Hussie considered these two flashes to be one single flash for the purposes of his workload and the breaks he’s taking in July, from a storyline perspective I’d also join them up with the end-of-act flash (and so I could conceivably have delayed this post even more), because I don’t see what Dirk’s plan is here. Why did he have to kill himself and have Jake revive him? It helped get Jane revived, but how does he have any way of knowing that Roxy won’t be able to kiss her? (Then again, how would he know that Roxy would be in position to kiss her in the first place?) Why is he taking Roxy to the past with him? It actually seems counterproductive; don’t he and Roxy have to go back to the future in order to enter the session properly? Depending on how much he knows and where exactly she can go on the island on her own power, can’t Jane wake up Jake? I can see bits and pieces come together, but I can’t quite see the whole, which is why I don’t think the story these flashes tell will be entirely complete until the end-of-act flash comes out.

But I said I was only half-right about Hussie’s unwillingness to kill off Jane and Roxy. That’s because of the flash that opened Act 6-3, introducing Jane’s land, and the circle of lanterns therein, color-coordinated with the four post-Scratch kids, with the green one burnt out, corresponding to the earlier death of Jake’s dreamself. Near the lanterns are some tablets inscribed with this accompanying flavor text:

One by one the Nobles will arrive, and just as surely, one by one their lights will be snuffed out. In the beginning, the light of our Hope was lost. We must make do without it, and so must they. Then a mighty gust came and took the light of our Life as well, and our people knew despair like never before. But the light renewed its flicker quite spontaneously, and has been shining strong since. All in the land rejoiced.

Our lights of Heart and Void will each follow in time, long after our extinction. One will be extinguished, and then another, leaving only Life as the guiding light. But they should remain long enough to illuminate the Maid’s path, and assist her with the housekeeping we have left behind.

Well, it hasn’t exactly played out that way. Instead, Life and Void have been extinguished with Heart dimming out, then lighting up again, then being extinguished, then lighting up again so bright it exploded – all on-panel, by the way. (What was up with that, and the “Care Bear Stare” effect to start the latter flash? It’s not like Dirk’s situation is really any different from that of Roxy or Jane…) That was why I thought he would relegate this to a doomed timeline: to restore the sequence of events these tablets seemed to be foreshadowing. It wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility: Dirk could have travelled back in time (using some other means than what he did, of course) and not only restored the status quo ante but also mirrored the pre-Scratch Davesprite in the process.

This might seem kind of nitpicky, and a lot of people may have forgotten about those tablets (though people reading the comic all at once later won’t have), or never were that diligent about exploring every nook and cranny of the exploration flashes for flavor text. But as much as I’ve complained about Hussie pulling shocking twists on us seemingly for the sake of having a twist, this to me hints at a far deeper problem: the possibility that Hussie is setting up foreshadowing, but then making things up as he goes along anyway. Of course, it’s not exactly new that pretty much all of MSPA was made up as it went along, but Homestuck and later Problem Sleuth, by his own admission, have been increasingly preplanned with more intent to tell an actual story, and if he can ignore past foreshadowing at will just because it doesn’t fit what he wants to do now, or worse just to make his twists that much more twisty, it robs all that foreshadowing of credibility. A big part of the comic’s fandom is looking for all those little clues in every nook and cranny to make sense of Hussie’s infinitely-complex yet cohesive world, and Hussie has just raised the possibility that that may all be for naught.

Perhaps Hussie just forgot about those tablets, or perhaps he still has some plans to make them true, at least from a certain point of view. But it’s not just the tablets; remember Act 6 Intermission 2, where the scenes on-board the meteor and Jade’s battleship were preceded by “YEAR 1” graphics? That to me implied there would be another graphic for at least “YEAR 2”, which meant we would presumably get another intermission with the kids and trolls before their arrival in the session, and maybe most of Act 6-4 would pass before they’d actually arrive… then the meteor appeared inside the dream bubble with Aranea and Meenah, and the subsequent appearances of Jake, Roxy, and Dirk inside the bubble, and especially how quickly Roxy flew to the bubble and back to Derse under her own power, suggested that in fact this dream bubble is so close to the session (both temporally and spatially) that if the meteor’s arrival isn’t imminent, then Rose and Dave especially could easily cut the trip short under their own power (which could also help explain the apparent absence of the trolls in all the foreshadowing about the session), making that journey’s continuation something of an idiot plot. Time is already substantially twister in this new session than it normally is in Homestuck, but this is ridiculous.

Of course, Act 6-3 is just about over and no one has shown up yet, so it’s entirely possible if not likely we’re going to get at least that “YEAR 2” graphic during the third intermission to appear shortly… but it also feels like it’s entirely possible that the arrival of the kids and trolls is what Hussie is going to end Act 6-3 with, and it certainly feels like Hussie would have to find a way to kill a lot of time in Act 6-4 before the kids and trolls show up, which seems to be something you end an act within Act 6 with, not start one, or end an intermission that started with events a year beforehand. Perhaps he could delay the entry of Roxy and Dirk somehow or focus Act 6-4 far more on the cherubs, but it still seems difficult.

More importantly, I used to think that everything in Homestuck was building up to one grand climax, that all the pieces would fit together into a coherent whole, a premise that I suspect is at the heart of Homestuck’s popularity. But, and this is a feeling that has been increasingly building throughout Act 6, now I feel like I’m flying blind, and I can’t help but wonder whether or not Hussie is too. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of path connecting current events to the conclusion of the comic, especially with at least three whole acts within Act 6 devoted entirely to completely new characters (characters, I should point out, nowhere near as interesting as the trolls or even the pre-Scratch kids, except the cherubs, maybe Roxy, and a teensy bit of Dirk but only because he’s starting to take on some Mary Sue-ish qualities), and now I’m not sure Hussie feels the need to follow one. If Hussie can just drop anything he wants on us, it’s not going to be long before I no longer feel any reason to read the comic.

Act 6 has long been a shadow of the epicness that was Act 5-2, but Hussie now needs to pull a heck of a saving throw for the end of Act 6-3, intermission, and start of the next act to make me feel like maybe Act 6 isn’t one huge (potentially unnecessary) anticlimax, and hopefully, make me feel like I’m reading Homestuck again, as opposed to some sort of lame fanfic thereof.

The Occupy Tea Party Platform, Part II: Obamacare

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Health care reform and universal health insurance is one of those issues that has popped up time and again in American politics for decades, dating back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, if not further. Both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton tried and failed to enact their own reforms. In that context, love him or hate him (or his plan), the fact that Barack Obama was able to pass anything, in the most polarized political climate since at least the Civil War, is nothing short of astounding.

The spiraling costs of health care pose such a threat to the long-term viability of the federal government, especially as the baby boomers retire, that this should be an issue that both sides of the aisle can agree on. In practice, a lot of people, especially on the right, seem to be unclear as to what the issue actually is, seeing the health care debate as being less about health care and more about the role of government in our lives, and there’s a lot of disagreement over where to fix the problem. (It doesn’t help that “Obamacare” has become a bogeyman that has arguably overshadowed the actual contents of the bill.) A lot of Democrats made insurance companies into the scapegoat, calling for the government to institute a public option to force insurance companies to keep premiums down and stop discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions (the people who most need it) in the name of profit, if not take over the health insurance system entirely and adopt a single-payer system.

While I’m sympathetic to the Democrats’ stance, I’m still not convinced that repealing the health insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption wouldn’t have done a lot to solve those problems even on its own, without further government intervention in the marketplace. Ultimately, Obama wasn’t able to pass any form of public option, and the bill’s ultimate solution to the problem of the insurance industry could be seen as an adoption of my viewpoint. Perhaps the centerpiece of the bill is the establishment of an “exchange” with which individuals and businesses could compare and contrast various health plans. But this was coupled with numerous requirements for qualifying health plans and a universal coverage mandate. During the debate on the bill, while watching C-SPAN I saw Republican lawmakers denounce the “exchange” as sufficient to constitute a “government takeover” of health care, raising the specter of the government deciding which insurance plans you’ll have a “choice” from. The “exchange” comes across to me as more of a shadow free market than an actual one, one the Democrats didn’t have enough confidence in not to include instructions to insurance companies on what to do and what not to do on top of it.

I can see why the individual mandate, probably the most controversial specific provision, was included. Most young, healthy people consider themselves invulnerable and don’t think they’ll need health insurance for anything. Requiring them to get health insurance means they’re covered if they turn out to be wrong, while their healthiness makes them the insurance companies’ ideal customer and makes it easier for them to cover more marginal customers for less, possibly having the result of lowering insurance costs overall. Republicans have been most vocal in decrying the mandate, but even Keith Olbermann, then still with MSNBC, called for the mandate to be stripped after the public option died, claiming that with the mandate but no public option the bill amounted to a massive gift to the insurance companies. I suspect that betrays his lack of faith in capitalism and the free market more than anything else, but in any case I can definitely see a scenario where requiring everyone to get health insurance causes high and inelastic demand, theoretically allowing insurance companies to drive prices to the moon.

At any rate, all the emphasis on insurance may be at least slightly misguided anyway. A larger problem may involve the quality of care itself and how it’s delivered to patients. There’s little research on what treatments offer the best bang for the buck; doctors are presently paid based on how often they’re used, not with a constant salary, encouraging overtreatment; and there needs to be effort to encourage healthier lifestyles so people aren’t so reliant on the health care system in the first place. (This last may come up in later entries in this series.) Republicans would rather focus on tort reform, claiming that fear of malpractice suits is what drives up costs; I’m not convinced by Wikipedia’s analysis which focuses on the effect of the actual rather than perceived risk of malpractice. And we’re running the risk of shortages in doctors and nurses in the future. The health care legislation does confront many of these problems, though they’re clearly in the background compared to insurance reform.

This is too complex an issue for me to figure out what the best approach is, so I may revisit it later. My impression is that the health care bill is superior to the status quo ante, and any better reform would need to build off at least some of its provisions, and if the Republicans repeal it without providing some sort of replacement there may be some people who feel a bit betrayed. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if we had instituted a true free market, rather than one imposed by the government. As it stands, it may well turn out that the health care legislation will give more power to both government and business, and while I’d like to see how it plays out before making any rash decisions, if it does end up repealed we should insist that it be replaced with a bill that empowers patients first and foremost by encouraging, rather than stifling, innovation in all areas of health care. Perhaps it includes an individual mandate, perhaps not, but if it includes it it does so only if it’s been established that, combined with other reforms, it will improve health care costs and quality of health for all Americans, rather than serving as a giveaway to insurance companies.

Want to know how my day went?

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First, I had to go to an out-of-the-way town to get my state ID card renewed, missed the place to do so, kept looking for too long (really past the point where I should have by all rights stopped), had to walk 15 minutes to get back there, which left me too pissed off to focus on anything else while I waited, and STILL saw the bus I needed to take to get back pass me by just as I was done, leaving me stuck for almost an hour.

Then, I found out that there was a live band playing outside the library for some reason, AND I was locked out of the house, not that I would have wanted to stay there anyway because I could hear music even there (not to mention baseball across the street).

Then, after I passed the time elsewhere for a while, I waste way too much potentially productive time doing something else instead of the next part of the new series.

That next part will go up sometime Saturday morning or afternoon, and I’ll try to get the part after that up later in the day Monday, and work on as many parts as I can over the weekend. I may also introduce an #OccupyTea category for the new series. That’s right, I’m resorting to Twitter hashtags as categories. Clearly, we have reached a new low.

The Occupy Tea Party Platform, Part I: Reforming the Financial System

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Yesterday I suggested that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street arose from a common impetus of the people fighting back against The Man holding them down, be The Man government or big business. I proposed that this common impetus could be seized to become the birth of a new political movement looking out for the best interests of the people rather than government or business.

Of course, if it were that simple, our political system wouldn’t be so gridlocked in the first place. So let’s start with OWS’ concern about the depredations of Wall Street, because it most clearly illustrates both the problem and the opportunity. Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have at least some of their roots in outrage over the huge bailouts given to big banks, but at the same time, who’s going to rein in Wall Street if not the government?

The question is really one of saving Wall Street from itself. It’s as much in Wall Street’s best interest as anyone for the economy to be humming along smoothly. Ask Lehman Brothers or the hordes of other banks that went down as a result of the financial crisis whether they enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else. Individuals who made money from the constructions that precipitated the financial crisis may have gotten off relatively scot-free, but that’s a different problem from “Occupy Wall Street”.

Wall Street’s problem is that, in their zeal to make money, they sometimes throw common sense to the wind and bamboozle themselves into the equivalent of a pyramid scheme. They delude themselves with a bunch of fuzzy math that says that, in aggregate, these investments are an awesome, can’t-miss proposition, even if there are enough not-so-can’t-miss investments hidden in there that the fuzzy math obscures that can still send the entire construct crashing into a heap. Wall Street may have swindled each other and the public, but first and foremost, they swindled themselves. The biggest problem with untangling the financial crisis is that Wall Street failed to do what one would think it would do regardless of what anyone tells it to.

Painting “Wall Street” as the monolithic villain of the story is probably unfair unless you’re arguing against capitalism itself. At least in theory, big investment banks are the engine that drives the system of capitalism, lending the money that allows people to do everything from starting a business to buying a home. If you’ve ever taken student loan money or saved for retirement, your money has probably been tied up in what Wall Street does, and you’re counting on them to make sure you get it back in one piece. Ideally, Wall Street does this precisely by working for its own benefit, because that benefit should be passed down to the people whose money has passed through there, through lower or higher interest rates. It could be said, if you wanted to oversimplify, that a bank’s role is to temporarily redistribute money from those who have it to those who need it, in the hopes that the same money will eventually flow back in the other direction.

Of course, part of the reason why that’s an oversimplification is that banks have what might be considered a weird definition of “need”. Banks are obviously not in the business of simply handing out money to the poor; arguably, getting into that business is what precipitated the housing crisis. Rather, banks lend out their money to people who will (hopefully) use that money to make more money, both powering the economy and allowing them to pay back that money with interest.

The problem is not that Wall Street is too powerful in and of itself. The reason why Wall Street was able to bamboozle itself was because certain specific banks became so big they could effectively act with impunity. Even that isn’t really a bad thing in and of itself, because lost in all the talk of all the risky loans banks handed out is that without risk, there’s no reward. The problem comes when banks become completely isolated from any negative consequences of their actions at the peak of their power, with nothing stopping them from bringing down the entire economy once they’re big enough to potentially do so, because the government will bail them out if they do. The alliance between government and business isn’t even all that great for business.

The answer isn’t to burn down Wall Street entirely, or even for the government to put up barriers to confine it, reducing the incentive for success. What’s needed is some way to keep Wall Street from bringing down the economy without restricting their ability to grow it. That means transparency, not control; rather than tell Wall Street what to do, let’s make sure we know what it is doing. We need independent watchdogs who can keep an eye on what Wall Street is up to and determine whether or not it’s working, watchdogs who can be trusted not to be in Wall Street’s pocket, but can speak up whenever it starts undermining itself – and who will be listened to when they do. And rather than bailing out banks that are “too big to fail”, the government should instead mitigate the damage by protecting such banks’ assets, getting everyone off the bus before it crashes, possibly by liquidating those assets on other banks or even taking them on itself. If the government does need to resort to bailouts, we need to make sure our taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely.

Wall Street needs a check on its power the American people can trust, not one that can’t keep up with it, only seeks to build its own power at Wall Street’s expense, or worst of all, actually makes it easier for Wall Street to abuse its power.

The Tea Party Occupies Wall Street

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The funny thing about the “people’s movements” that have energized both sides of the aisle and challenged their respective parties over the course of the past three years is that they’re not inherently incompatible.

In fact, they largely stem from the same source. The Tea Party was a reaction to the perceived encroaching dominance and enriching of government; Occupy Wall Street was a reaction to the perceived encroaching dominance and enriching of big corporations. Both at least portrayed themselves as movements of the people against those with a lust for power and money, and even to the extent they were single-issue movements – the Tea Party excessive taxation, OWS Wall Street’s role in the economic crisis – it was still possible for someone to sympathize theoretically with both positions. Indeed, part of OWS’ message is precisely that big business has taken over the government.

Although both movements are largely associated with a particular political persuasion, the Tea Party positioned itself as a libertarian movement independent of the two major parties, while even some conservatives felt Occupy Wall Street had a point, even if they disagreed with their methods. It was possible to be a Democratic Tea Partier and a Republican occupier of Wall Street. To be sure, the diehards of each political persuasion could probably never be convinced of that, claiming the former to be fakes or the latter to not be “real conservatives”.

Still, I see in the compatibility of the two movements hope for moving beyond our tense ideological divide. A lot of people across the country saw outrage in their particular economic situation, and a lot of people across the country saw outrage in the general economic situation, enough so that they felt the need to demonstrate their outrage. It’s a shame that OWS seems to have lost a lot of its momentum, unable to seize the momentum of the initial protests into a long-term political movement like the Tea Party, and it’s also a shame that the Tea Party itself may be sputtering out as the Republican Party has settled on its most moderate plausible candidate for President, but in that may be opportunity. Had both movements remained strong they might have become irreconcilably opposed. Now, though, if we can take these two different currents of populist outrage and find a way to articulate a coherent, populist message and platform from the both of them, we can effectively give voice to the broader position of the people, and in so doing, create a better chance to “take back the country” than either movement could have done alone or in opposition.

This unified, populist platform, with the potential to strike fear in the heart of both parties, might have among its guiding principles:

  • The liberty of the people shall not be infringed.
  • The people will fight for their freedom and their livelihood against all who would take it.
  • Government should not take our hard-earned money so they can intrude into every aspect of our lives.
  • Wall Street should not be able to make themselves rich at the expense of everyone else.

If I had to distill the message sent by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street into a single sentence, it might be: We won’t let anyone else screw with us. Whether the enemy is government or Big Business, the people are willing to fight back against the both of them. And considering how huge the people are compared to government or business, that’s a force that will prove impossible to ignore.

Over the next several days and weeks I’m going to look at how this position might play itself out in practice. I’m going to look at various issues and consider what a policy based on the best interests of the people would decide. At no point will I give more power or money to government or big business unless there is no way for that to come at the expense of the people and there is no alternative. As such, I won’t always advocate things either political party is backing right now. In so doing, I hope to give structure to this new populist movement, to recommend concrete strategies for people to advocate and follow and guiding principles for voting and activism.

It’s time to move beyond pointless division and allow all of us to move forward as Americans, truly and passionately, as more than a buzzword for politicians who are about to realize just how much they didn’t actually want it to happen, and if nothing else, set an example for a Congress seemingly unable to do so.

Can boxing re-colonize broadcast television?

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I didn’t pay much attention when NBC announced an expansion of its relationship with promoter Main Events for its Fight Night series on NBC Sports Network – it wasn’t even enough to budge my Sports TV Wars count. But there is one aspect of the deal that is intriguing: up to two fights (presumably per year) airing on the main NBC network.

Before you go heralding the return of boxing to broadcast television a year after Fox’s relationship with the UFC began, keep in mind that these probably aren’t even fights of the caliber you’d see on Showtime, let alone HBO or pay-per-view. Don’t expect many if any world title matches; most fight cards on ESPN2, NBCSN or FSN tend to be focused on building up-and-coming fighters in hopes that, one day, they’ll fight for a title and justify the investment in the original broadcasts. To me, that makes it somewhat mystifying that NBC would put boxing on its broadcast network when it’ll pale in comparison to the matches even hardcore fans of the sport would be interested in. I doubt any of the other broadcast networks are going to put boxing on anytime soon, though CBS could certainly take a card off Showtime if they wanted. Granted, calling the NBC shows “Fight Night” is a bit of a misnomer, as the first broadcast show will run 4-6 PM ET, but that raises its own questions regarding whether it’s a good idea to hold US-based cards so early. (And it’s emblematic of the decline of the sport that boxing, once a broadcast mainstay, isn’t a solution for a network looking to follow Fox’s lead in giving Saturday night to sports, even with Saturday’s own decline. To be fair, though, that timeslot does better facilitate a European audience.)

NBC and Main Events seem to be big on the notion of inviting fighters from any promotion to participate on their cards, thus presumably pinning their hopes on being the premier source of boxing on broadly-available television. I’m not a big enough fan of the sport to know how well it’s worked so far beyond press-release spin, but color me skeptical. Boxing, rather infamously, has become a rather territorial sport, and just because Main Events is willing to play with others doesn’t mean the others, especially the big boys Golden Boy and Top Rank, will want to play with them.

NBC and boxing can help each other greatly, but I’m skeptical whether the relationship will be enough to overcome the larger problems with the sport. Considering how high most people seem to be on the partnership, though, I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised, but don’t expect it to be a panacea, especially for the ongoing loss of interest to mixed martial arts.

Update on the forums

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On the eve of my long-in-the-works political series, I’ve all but started over on the forums.

For one thing, I’ve put up a proper registration page.

More importantly, I have instituted a new rule: any account that remains inactive for 14 days after creation will be automatically deleted. As the plugin I’m using for this isn’t very common and hasn’t been tested with even my somewhat-outdated version of WordPress (and thus I don’t know how bbPress-compatible it is either), please let me know if it causes any problems it shouldn’t as well.

Apologies if you have created a legitimate account; you can re-create it when needed, but I’m not fishing through the nearly 800 squatter accounts that were deleted as a result of this. CAPTCHA on individual posts wasn’t going to cut it for me; I would have preferred to institute CAPTCHA on the registration page, but without a plugin to do that, this is the next best thing.

Expect a post on the rules thread laying out some of the rules that are inactive because of the lack of bbPress plugins to institute them in the near future. My hunch is that I will need to install the BuddyPress plugin to institute many of them. More on that when we get there.

Sizing up the MLB contract situation

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Here’s the way I see things heading into MLB’s rights renegotiations:

  • Fox’s decision to hand over Saturday nights to sports, of which MLB plays a key role, may have MLB thinking of moving its main broadcast package to primetime full-time. As the only entity of sufficient stature that can fill the time all summer, MLB would have to be something close to the lynchpin of any effort to turn a network’s entire Saturday primetime schedule to sports. One problem: Fox and ABC would have to postpone the start of their primetime college football schedule to October, and NBC is lacking in sports it can plug in the rest of the year. The state of MLB’s infamous blackout restrictions that prevent out-of-market Fox games from appearing on Extra Innings may affect this as well.
  • With the NFL likely not selling a Thursday Night package in the near term if ever, MLB is in the role of kingmaker, potentially singlehandedly deciding Fox and NBC’s chances of running down ESPN. MLB is NBCSN’s best hope for increasing its reach and popularity, and along with NASCAR, is the other sport that will play a key role in Fox’s eventual decision whether to start a network.
  • Despite all this, the fact is that MLB’s status overall isn’t that great. For a variety of reasons, MLB isn’t succeeding at all at connecting with younger audiences. In particular, I think Fox kinda wants to get out of the sport that was always an odd fit for their brand and interrupts their highly successful primetime schedule considerably during the fall.
  • TBS’ postseason coverage seems to be working out fine, but it’s hamstrung by the utter failure of their Sunday afternoon package, which last year wasn’t even attracting as many viewers as a freaking Formula 1 race. Of course, we’re comparing cable with broadcast, and part of the problem is that TBS is blacked out in home markets and gets second choice after ESPN’s Sunday night package, but it also has to do with a glut of sports on broadcast and cable weekend afternoons, and the fact remains that for most people, baseball means Fox and ESPN all year long, and then abruptly and inexplicably moves to TBS when the postseason hits. My feeling is that MLB won’t try to include that Sunday afternoon package in this round of negotiations, instead giving it to MLB Network and splitting up ESPN’s games. Most analysts seem to think MLB will create a Sunday/Wednesday package and sell the Monday package solo, but selling the Sunday package solo and packaging Monday and Wednesday together makes more sense to me, because Sunday seems to be the marquee package with exclusivity and no other games in the time slot, similar to the relationship between TNT’s Thursday NBA games vis-a-vis ESPN’s Wednesday and Friday games.
  • Complicating matters even more for TBS, ESPN desperately wants back in the postseason. That will probably force MLB to find a way to juggle the postseason between two cable partners and MLB Network. Analysts are predicting that the LCS currently airing on Fox will join its sister on cable; perhaps the arrangement will be similar to how the NBA shuffles its conference finals between TNT and ESPN.
  • The All-Star Game has been an especially odd fit on Fox, and last year actually lost in the ratings to NBC’s America’s Got Talent. My hunch is that it will move to cable, probably ESPN.

Putting all this together, I see only three potential outcomes:

NBCSN and ESPN split the cable contracts, NBC gets the World Series. There’s so much that fits about this, even beyond NBC’s desire to improve the status of NBC Sports Network: NBC’s primetime has been mired in last place for ages, so it has less to lose during October than the other broadcast networks do, plus NBC generally has a weaker sports profile overall. Also, it would mark the return of Bob Costas to baseball coverage people would actually watch.

I would expect NBC, more than any of the other contenders, not to settle for “second-class” cable status in any way. I would expect NBCSN to get a share of the postseason, including LCS games, and possibly even the Home Run Derby. There’s no way to really avoid conflicting with hockey on NBCSN in April and into May, but the Sunday package would work out better for that purpose. Meanwhile, golf and horse racing could pretty much force the broadcast package into primetime.

The biggest problem is probably that even there, NBC would run into conflicts with the Stanley Cup Final on one Saturday night a year, plus occasional West Coast US Open golf tournaments NBC would rather allow to leak into primetime. A bigger problem could be that this would involve MLB jettisoning two partners at once, which could be a bridge too far for them. That could be enough for them to back away in favor of…

ESPN and TBS split the cable contracts, ABC gets the World Series. This might be the most comfortable option for MLB, shacking up with the two most established sports broadcasters on cable in a mirror of the NBA’s relationship, but it would be disastrous for anyone who wants a competitor for ESPN. It would certainly produce some happy faces in the offices of the Walt Disney Company, not only by shutting out any potential competitors and winning World Series rights but mitigating the loss of one or two nights to TBS with the addition of the broadcast package. I wouldn’t be surprised if ESPN were trying to form an alliance with Turner to make this happen.

The only people this would make happy outside Bristol and Atlanta might be people who want to stem the death of sports on ABC. Because of the restrictions of MLB’s anti-trust exemption and MLB’s own desires, neither ESPN nor TBS would be able to move the World Series to cable, and I don’t think either CBS or MLB want a relationship between those two to fill the broadcast contract, despite its popularity with MLB’s own audience – CBS has US Open tennis in September, SEC football in the rest of the month, golf the rest of the year, and “America’s Most Watched Network” in primetime to avoid disrupting in October. ESPN would be fine with putting the World Series on broadcast and giving ABC a regular-season broadcast package because ABC’s primetime in recent years has become increasingly weak, coming dangerously close to falling to NBC’s level, and like NBC, ABC has an infamously weak sports portfolio. I could see ESPN airing a regional ABC game on its cable network, similar to what it does for college football, though only in primetime.

All things considered, though, I don’t see this happening; the most recent contract, to me, ultimately amounts in the grand scheme of things to a way for TBS to transition out of its old Braves games. MLB might be more comfortable if…

FX (or the proposed Fox Sports network) and ESPN split the cable contracts, Fox gets the World Series. Given Fox’s desire to increase the presence of sports on FX, this is the only way I see Fox staying in the sport – from both Fox’s end and MLB’s. When the Sports Business Journal wrote an article on the Fox Sports network speculations, they cited as one key factor MLB telling Fox they needed to “establish a better cable sports presence” to compete with NBC and ESPN. I don’t know whether that says more about NBC’s chances, Fox, MLB, or FX. (Or Turner, for which it might be even worse news than it is for Fox, both in the fact they weren’t even mentioned and in what it implies MLB is looking for.) In any case, while Frank the Tank suggests that big-time sports leagues like MLB would rather be on a network with other draws, whether other big-time leagues or general-entertainment programming, and cites that as a big obstacle to both NBC and Fox’s all-sports networks vis-a-vis ESPN and Turner, this little piece of information suggests otherwise.

This is the closest outcome to the status quo, and it’s hard for me to find convincing points against it – if Fox ends up launching an all-sports network. It was harder for me to see this happening when it involved FX getting games, because of FX’s inability to raise the fees it charges to cable providers. To my knowledge, however, a Fox Sports network wouldn’t have that problem, so the only real issues left are the ones laid out in the opening of this post.

The most likely scenarios are the ones involving NBC and Fox, with TBS being an outcome of last resort if Fox decides not to launch an all-sports network and Turner’s desire to stick with baseball combined with ESPN’s desire to keep NBC from approaching their level are enough to keep NBC out of the sport. Before Fox’s network dreams came to light I would have considered the TBS/ABC scenario the second favorite, and normally I’d say ESPN could completely box NBC out of the market – besides Turner, an alliance with Fox makes sense even with their network ideas because of their established relationships with MLB – but I think NBC is willing to overpay considerably on possibly their last, best hope to establish NBCSN’s bona fides, and I think NBC can provide a high-quality enough broadcast to overcome any qualms MLB might have over NBCSN.

I keep going back and forth on which scenario is more likely; it’s hard because the MLB contract will influence whether Fox starts a network, but the existence of a network will determine whether Fox gets the contract. That may be one reason why they’re trying to renew the NASCAR contract early, which could be a bellweather for the outcome of the MLB talks if it’s announced first. If Fox doesn’t launch a network, I think it’s probable that NBC ends up with the baseball contract, dependent on the outcome of an ESPN-Turner alliance. But if they do, or even if they haven’t decided yet? Then the race is on as Fox and NBC wage a fierce (and expensive) battle to determine which will move on to take on ESPN, with Fox being the slight favorite if they have decided and NBC a slight favorite if they haven’t.

ESPN and the Rose Bowl stay in business

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No sooner did college football approve a revolutionary playoff structure than ESPN made sure at least one aspect of the past remained in place: the Rose Bowl breaking off from the rest of the BCS and signing its own television contract.

ESPN has signed an agreement with the Rose Bowl over the entire 12-year course of the new format.

I don’t know what this would mean for the other bowls’ TV rights, especially as regards to the semifinal rounds of the new playoff structure, although the release seems to imply ESPN would carry the Rose Bowl in years it’s a semifinal. If that’s true, it would seem to dilute the proposed $5 billion agreement the BCS is looking for for its proposed playoff system, especially since the SEC and Big 12’s “Champions Bowl” would likely also have a separate agreement. A big part of that desired number is the addition of semifinals, but four out of twenty-four of those games might end up going to someone else.

On the other hand, the BCS may decide to sell the semifinals separate from the championship game… but from what I read, if that was the case both semifinals would likely be sold together (which doesn’t make much sense to me – maybe what was meant was one semifinal and the title game?). I don’t know how the whole thing will end up working, but I guess we’ll find out in the fall.

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The State of NASCAR on Television

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NASCAR is in a bit of a state of flux at the moment. If you were describing the “four major sports” and you were looking at matters objectively, the fourth sport would be NASCAR, not the NHL, a status the sport has triumphantly risen to over the course of the last two decades. Once a southern curiosity, NASCAR has taken advantage of the war that rent open-wheel racing apart over a decade and a half to establish its fanbase in the north as well, becoming a force not to be trifled with in the world of sports. Yet over the course of the last contract, TV ratings and most measures of popularity have stagnated, even declined some. Where, then, does NASCAR stand as it prepares to renegotiate its contracts?

NASCAR’s relationship with Fox is very tight. The two entities have been very good to one another; Fox has been with NASCAR since the beginning of NASCAR’s control over the TV contract, and NASCAR has become one of the linchpins of Fox’s sports brand. For many, Fox practically defines television coverage of the sport, carrying the Daytona 500 over the entire lifetime of the most recent contract. NASCAR also isn’t likely to break its relationship with ESPN, if only because it’s scared of the horror stories of what happens to sports like the NHL or UFC (or, arguably, itself before the most recent contract) when they don’t shack up with ESPN. ESPN has certainly given NASCAR plenty of love; while the sport doesn’t get much more coverage on shows like PTI, ESPN does show plenty of NASCAR highlights on SportsCenter, and heavily advertises its coverage of Sprint Cup and even Nationwide series races, not to mention the daily magazine show NASCAR Now on ESPN2. NASCAR and ESPN tied themselves too tight at the hip to break up now. Say what you will about how they cover the sport, I guarantee you that NASCAR is quite happy with the coverage of Fox and ESPN, especially that they cover the sport.

TNT is substantially iffier. They are the forgotten broadcast partner. They have the fewest races, the fewest important ones (they have the second Daytona race, but they stop one race short of the Brickyard 400 on ESPN, and they have neither the Daytona 500 like Fox nor the Chase for the Cup like ESPN) and the least amount of coverage outside their Sprint Cup races. Their presence seems to be a vestige from their far greater role in the previous contract when they were joined at the hip with NBC. Turner itself doesn’t seem to have much respect for the sport; while its MLB, NBA, and NCAA Tournament graphics have all been made to look more like one another in recent years, its NASCAR graphics have remained unchanged for several years now. My hunch is that they will be jettisoned, either giving more races to Fox and ESPN, or making way for a third partner.

To me, there are only two candidates for that third partner: NBC, or a CBS/Turner marriage similar to their NCAA Tournament marriage. But as much as the latter might appear to keep up the status quo, and Turner will probably try to sell it hard (especially considering the windows it could open to add more sports to truTV, as discussed below), there’s no sign CBS is even interested. NBC may want to get back into the sport, if mostly to shore up its NBC Sports Network, but I suspect they will insist on a more equitable share of races, including something more important than what TNT has now. That would have to come out of Fox and ESPN’s races; Fox currently shows close to half the pre-Chase schedule, ESPN close to half the whole schedule, plus it would likely have to give up either the Brickyard or the Chase. I don’t think either of them want that, so I think both of them will persuade NASCAR (possibly with lots of little green slips of paper) to go back to two broadcast partners, thus giving each more races divvied up from the TNT package’s corpse.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be drama; in fact, NASCAR is one of two sports that will play a key role in determining whether Fox launches its rumored all-sports network. There are several facets of this. First, when the last contract was negotiated, Fox was willing to abandon sports on FX, so it allowed ESPN to take the entire Nationwide Series schedule. Fox has since shown remorse for that decision and is interested in putting sports on FX again. But Fox also wants to shore up its NASCAR programming on Speed, to include more than practices, qualifying, the Truck Series, and the All-Star Race; they have voiced their desire to have Cup Series races on Speed. And perhaps most intriguingly, NASCAR quite clearly and obviously wants to launch its own network much like the other major leagues have, but such a network would conflict with the existence of Speed.

Regardless of anything else, I think NASCAR splits the Nationwide Series schedule across however many partners it ends up with, and allows Fox to move some of its Sprint Cup races to cable, whether FX, Speed, or a Fox Sports network. But the question of how to create a NASCAR network is the critical point. Fox could simply hand Speed over to NASCAR and continue to run it, but that’s not the only solution. I could see it going like this: Fox flips Speed to a Fox Sports network and hands its struggling Fuel network over to NASCAR, who flips it to a NASCAR network and allows Fox to keep running it. Fuel-turned-NASCAR-Network gets practice, qualifying, and most of the Truck Series; Speed keeps the All-Star Race (as well as some Truck Series races and the Gatorade Duels) into its new identity as a Fox Sports network, but also gets Fox’s new Nationwide Series and cable Cup Series races (and probably all of Fuel’s and most of FX’s UFC programming). (NASCAR may also hand some Truck Series races to ESPN and, if applicable, NBCSN as well. If Turner convinced CBS to jump on board, I imagine any Truck races and at least some Nationwide races they ended up with would end up on truTV.)

The rights agreements don’t actually expire until after 2014, and the last agreement was announced in December, but Fox is already in negotiations with NASCAR to get their deal renewed before the closed negotiation window ends next spring and the rights hit the open market. I have to imagine all of the above points are being heavily debated in the room (with Fox also not wanting to lose anything even if NASCAR takes on a third partner), meaning even with at least nine months before most of the deal gets done, the most important, game-changing part may be settled by the end of the year. Ultimately, though, all parties may well be in a bit of a holding pattern. The fate of a NASCAR network, a Fox Sports network, and the level of NBC’s interest in NASCAR may ultimately be determined by what happens with the ultimate stick-and-ball sport.