Morgan Wick

Could the BCS Save the Bowl System – by Destroying It?

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USA Today recently revealed a document that basically lays out what the conference commissioners are looking at with regards to changes to the BCS. I’ll take a look at the playoff proposals contained therein at a later date, but for the moment I want to take a look at the other thing the document reveals: proposed changes to the bowls that wouldn’t be part of a playoff.

Although much has been made of the possibility of the BCS managing only the national championship game, if, as seems likely, the BCS commissioners go to some form of plus-one, the current five-bowl BCS would ultimately go in the opposite direction and be expanded to, in addition to the national championship game, five, six or even ten games, including the semi-finals. Rather than having bowls draft teams as happens now under the BCS, or having convoluted tie-in structures determine nearly random matchups as happens now for the non-BCS bowls, a committee would determine which teams would go to these bowls, with an aim of creating “evenly matched and attractive” games in geographically appropriate locations.

This gets to the heart of why the BCS, for so long adamant that they would never institute a playoff of any sort, is now almost certain to institute the plus-one. It’s not declining ratings for the BCS itself – that’s a predictable result of the BCS’ move to cable. It’s the increasing triviality of the bowls, where more than half the teams in FBS are going to a bunch of meaningless games no one cares about. This option where the BCS would create eight non-semifinal bowls smacks of the BCS taking over the entire bowl system by monopolizing most of the Top 25, unifying it under a single banner and creating more interest, while having the BCS committee take over the setting of bowl matchups could result in the best slate of games we’ve ever had, largely helping to justify the bowls’ continued existence and in part restoring what the lesser bowls looked like before the maze of conference tie-ins took hold. It could conceivably even be seen as setting the stage for a later expansion of the playoff to eight or sixteen teams.

It also occurs to me that by trying to make these bowls “evenly matched”, the most likely result is going to be similar to what the bowl system would look like if there were only two conferences on the top level of a promotion-relegation system. Maybe, in the long run, that dream isn’t so crazy after all.

They changed it, now it sucks.

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized Mary Poppins act.)

I continue not to read xkcd, but when it changed the look of its front page this past weekend, I was willing to accept it as part of the April Fool’s joke of the early version of the “Umwelt” comic that day.

When the actual comic (which I’m sure Scott McCloud would have a lot to say about) came out the following Monday, I was willing to accept it as a continuation of the joke and as a way to get the coding needed for the comic to work to work… even if the look had now spread to the archive pages.

Now another comic has been posted. And the new look is still there.

The same cramming of the upper-left links into the corner (making it look less rationalized and formal), the same spacing out of the news space below the title (and cramming of the title itself), the same airy look on the navigation buttons, and worst of all, the same large type on the buttons and permalinks and simplifcation of the formatting on the latter. In short, the same ugly new look that seems to be designed more for your grandparents than anyone else.

Look, my philosophy is, saying “it’s not that big a deal” is a double-edged sword: if it’s not that big a deal, why are you being so stubborn about it? It’s times like these I really don’t like Randall’s propensity never to say much about his comic…

The Sad Decline of Comixtalk

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O Comixtalk, how art thou fallen, light of the morning.

Comixtalk started life as Comixpedia, an online magazine dedicated to “comics in the digital age”. As such, it strove for the same level of in-depth interviews and analysis of comics as a medium that you would expect of a print magazine, with some names you’ve probably heard of contributing columns. Before there was Websnark, Comixpedia strove to be the site of record for the webcomics community, taking the medium as seriously as it deserved to be taken and serving as the backbone of the growing community.

Or, so I’ve gotten the impression from its entry on the current Comixpedia, old Websnark posts, and its own flashbacks. By the time I encountered Comixtalk in 2009, it had largely abandoned the more “magazine”-like aspects of its format, instead serving as a news blog, rehosting and rebroadcasting blog posts from all over the webcomics community with Xaviar Xerexes’ own posts as the backbone. Supposedly, only the best, most important posts found their way onto the front page, but while I found the “webcomic blog aggregator” format useful enough to add to my RSS reader – it often exposed me to interesting things or topics I’m not sure I would have ever encountered otherwise – there sometimes seemed to be so little rhyme or reason to what posts made the front page, and the workload implied for Xerexes seemed to be so great, that I reached the conclusion that certain blogs were simply given a rubber stamp to have all their posts put on the front page automatically. As such, I planned to wait until I had reached the point that my own posts had achieved the same status, and then write a post detailing my issues with Comixtalk, that would then be reposted to the Comixtalk front page. You see, the plan was totally brilliant.

As it turned out, I only had one post posted to the Comixtalk front page before Xerexes ended the blog aggregator format late in the year, citing high server bills. And now? Now it’s basically a poor man’s Fleen. And while it lacks some of the cutesy names Fleen sometimes indulges in, it doesn’t update nearly as often.

Oh, for a while Xerexes tried to put up an update every day, but right now you tend to get lucky if you get two full-fledged updates a month. And when you do get them, or other posts, they’re basically Xerexes putting up some big piece of webcomics news or something he found somewhere on the Internet relating to webcomics and often giving some sort of personal opinion on them. It’s really become just another personal blog talking about webcomics, at best a bulletin board for various happenings Xerexes comes across somehow. Even if I was interested in any of the news he posts about, it updates too rarely and is too mixed with more frivolous matters for any of it to draw me in. It barely even makes enough of a sustained impression on me for me to get invested in it, and that’s not a good thing. It’s moderately interesting if you’re interested in Xerexes’ rarely-posted opinions, but if you’re looking for a reliable, comprehensive source of news (or even opinion on it) from around the webcomics community? You’re best off looking elsewhere.

That’s a bit of a shame. Comixtalk used to be the one must-go place for webcomics aficianados like myself for smart opinion about webcomics, and to see it reduced to the state it’s in is quite disappointing. My impression is Fleen now has a bit of a monopoly on reliably reporting and pontificating on webcomics news, but I’m not sure it’s as reliable about that as it could be. Admittedly I’m probably a bit hesitant about wholeheartedly embracing Fleen as a result of my documented fondness of the old Floating Lightbulb blog, but the fact that Comixtalk doesn’t provide anything you can’t get at Fleen (with a few occasional exceptions)? Or that the closest I can think of that any other blog does to what Fleen does is occasional news posts at review blogs like the Webcomic Overlook?

Clearly, I’m not the only part of the webcomics community that has slipped tremendously since 2009.

Reading between the lines: Keith Olbermann’s departure from Current

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While Keith Olbermann was at MSNBC, I was, as a liberal myself, rather fond of his show, especially his willingness to put up an actual fight against the right with little guilt, but I felt that it was entertainment more than anything else and not exactly the most reliable place to get “news” despite Olbermann’s tendency to refer to it as a “news hour”. It was basically a place for Olbermann to bring on his liberal friends to talk about how much those conservatives stink; the real reason I watched the show when I did was for Olbermann’s segments where he could bring his own brand of snark and sarcasm to the stories he talked about, segments like the infamous “Worst Person in the World”. I always felt Olbermann’s real counterpart was more the blustering Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh than the more straight-laced, putting-on-a-front-of-balance Bill O’Reilly (whose own counterpart might be Rachael Maddow).

Last week, Olbermann’s relationship with Current – a network he almost singlehandedly built into a fulfillment of Al Gore’s original vision of a “progressive” news network – abruptly ended as he was replaced in the 8 PM ET hour by Eliot Spitzer, on Friday no less. Much like his departure from MSNBC a year prior, which appeared to have been motivated more by longstanding issues with the brass than by the aftermath of the Giffords shooting, this appears to be one in a long line of departures resulting at least in part from Olbermann’s ego running unchecked (though I hasten to add that I get this only from a line in the show’s Wikipedia article that had a [citation needed] tag on it when I looked on Friday).

And that ego was on full display in his snarky statement on the break-up:

I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV.

Overdramatic much? I read that and thought that Current itself was shutting down.

It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. http://nyti.ms/HueZsa

Really? It sounds to me like all Current needs to do is point to this statement for an example of your lack of “respect” and “collegiality”. Just look at the last paragraph:

In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.

Yes, because they wouldn’t do every little thing you said? Where are you going to take your schtick now, “KOTV“?

Should I say it? Keith Olbermann, today’s Worst! Person! In the Woooorrrrrrrlllllllldddddddd!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Someone tell me where the problem lies here:

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I do a fresh boot of my computer from the beginning, not bringing it back from hibernate.

Upon booting, Windows pops up a “User Access Control” or somesuch message asking me if the Java installer can make changes to my computer.

I am on a network that works by redirecting every page I try to access to a login screen. This is the first time I have used my computer all day.

I can’t Alt-Tab out of the UAC screen to open a browser or something to log in. If I click Yes, the installer will start trying to download. Clicking No isn’t what I mean to do.

How, exactly, do I get out of this mess?

The local sports television wars

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Part of the reason why Fox may be considering launching a national general sports network and competing more head-on with ESPN may be because they know all too well what ESPN could go through if they, or anyone else, succeed.

One of the more underreported stories of recent years has been the slippage of Fox’s hegemony over the regional sports network landscape. Fox locked down regional sports networks to cover just about every NBA, MLB, and NHL team in the country in the mid-90s, but in recent years competitors, especially Comcast SportsNet and cable providers in general, have slowly made inroads on their turf – to say nothing of teams increasingly starting their own networks. This is especially the case in big markets, while Fox’s hegemony largely still holds in smaller, mid-size markets, but we could see this change as competitors make more money and turn their attention to those smaller markets. Here’s a rundown of how the regional sports network market has changed in the last decade, at Fox’s expense:

  • New York: New York City’s FSN affiliate was always owned by Cablevision with no Fox involvement; in 2008, it was rebranded to MSG Plus. In addition to the well-known YES Network, in 2006 the Mets left MSG and teamed up with Comcast and Time Warner Cable to start their own regional sports network, SportsNet New York.
  • Los Angeles: Starting next season, Lakers games will be leaving Fox Sports West in favor of a new network started by Time Warner Cable. With the launch of Time Warner Cable’s sports network, the largest market in which Fox enjoys something resembling a monopoly will be Dallas. If you count the Longhorn Network, you have to go to Atlanta, and then if you count CSS, you have to leave the top ten entirely and end up in Detroit. The launch of the network has also raised the stakes considerably in the nation’s second-largest media market; Fox gave the Angels such a payday, including equity in FS West, that they could be said to have funded the team’s winning of the Albert Pujols sweepstakes and contributed to the Dodgers selling for $2 billion.
  • Chicago, Philadelphia: Comcast, by contrast, has a complete monopoly in these two markets. CSN Chicago is partially owned by the teams in that market; the Phillies used to own part of CSN Philadelphia but now only control its advertising.
  • Texas: ESPN started the Longhorn Network last year, and unsuccessfully tried to convince the NCAA to allow it to air high school sports on it.
  • Bay Area: Comcast SportsNet started a network in the region when it won rights to show Sacramento Kings games in 2004. In 2008, FSN Bay Area was rebranded as a Comcast SportsNet station, and the previous CSN station became essentially “CSN Bay Area 2”, changing branding from CSN West to CSN California. Fox still owns a quarter of CSN Bay Area, but Comcast owns 45%, with the remaining 30% owned by the Giants.
  • Boston/New England: Cablevision sold Boston’s FSN network to Comcast in 2007, resulting in it being rebranded as a Comcast SportsNet station. NESN has been owned by the Red Sox and Bruins for ages.
  • Washington DC: Fox has never had a presence in this market, with Comcast SportsNet ruling the roost. Thus, it was Comcast’s problem when the move of the Expos to Washington resulted in a new regional sports network, MASN, stealing both Washington’s and Baltimore’s baseball teams (who also co-own the network).
  • Atlanta and the South: The South is where Fox’s hegemony is strongest, purchasing two different networks from Turner and turning them into FS South and SportsSouth. CSS’s programming is substantially weaker, with its highest-profile programming probably being college sports.
  • Houston: In 2010 the Astros and Rockets announced they were joining with Comcast to launch a new CSN station this fall. The impending announcement of that network forced Fox to do something it had never done before: give a stake in the network to a team it covers, in this case the Rangers, a pattern that may soon become the norm for Fox. I do not know if Fox will maintain a presence in the Houston area (they do still hold the rights to Houston Dynamo games), but if not Fox will only even have a network in three of the top ten markets representing 31% of the population in the top ten, mostly LA. CSN, by contrast, will have a network in six of the top ten (representing 47%), not even counting SNY and CSS.
  • Seattle, Denver, Portland, Pittsburgh, Utah: In 2008 Fox sold FSN Northwest, Rocky Mountain, and Pittsburgh to Liberty Media, who re-branded them as “Root Sports” in 2011. Altitude Sports and Entertainment also maintains a presence in the Rocky Mountains, showing Nuggets and Avalanche games (with Root Sports keeping the Rockies and Jazz), and Comcast SportsNet started a Northwest branch in 2007 to show Portland Trailblazers games, which expanded into Seattle the following year when the Sonics were stolen, er, moved to Oklahoma City.
  • Cleveland: In 2006 the Cleveland Indians left FSN Ohio to start the SportsTime Ohio network.
  • San Diego: In a possible preview of the future for smaller markets, the Padres have left Cox-owned 4SD and started a new FSN network. But even where Fox is growing its regional sports networks, it’s not as lucrative as it used to be, with the Padres owning a full fifth of the network.
  • New Orleans: While to my knowledge the same RSNs as the rest of the South have a presence in Louisiana, Hornets games and preseason Saints games are aired on the Cox Sports Television network launched in 2002.

Add all this up and it suggests a fairly bleak future for Fox’s regional sports networks. Fox still rules the roost, but the Houston defection may signal a tipping point – because if Fox doesn’t maintain a Houston presence, less than half the population in the top 35 markets will live in a market with an FSN-branded RSN. By contrast, not counting SNY or CSS (but counting Seattle as a CSN market), Comcast SportsNet will move to over a third of the population in the top 35 markets – and SNY alone brings that total to 45%, almost as much as FSN. At that point, Comcast, not Fox, could conceivably get into the business of producing national programming for RSNs, and might not even have to resort to FSN stations in that many markets. Throw in just those markets where CSS’ competition is FS South, SportSouth, and their variants, and CSN goes over the top to 54%. Now you know why the unified FSN branding is no more.

At least in markets where Comcast is the dominant (or even a significant) cable provider, CSN has to be considered a full-fledged competitor to FSN for local sports rights – and that’s before the possibility of Time Warner Cable wanting to expand its sports-network brand, or teams starting their own networks. To this point, Fox has been in retreat in the biggest markets as CSN has taken over and teams have started their own networks. Fox’s move to start offering stakes in their networks may help stem the tide and keep its hegemony in smaller mid-sized markets, but may cost Fox too much money in the long run, especially if the market for local teams is starting to enter a bubble similar to that which has enveloped national sports rights. At best, Fox and Comcast are likely to compete on equal terms from here on out, with Fox’s only advantage being inertia and its lack of ties to cable distribution systems.

Despite the failure of its attempt to compete with ESPN, FSN has proven to be just as much of a cash cow for Fox. But they could be forgiven for wondering how long it will stay that way. Suddenly the idea of launching a general national sports network to compete with ESPN starts to look a lot more attractive.

Say hello to the Fox Sports Network?

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ESPN has been doing everything in its power to keep NBC from becoming a competitor for their sports hegemony, and they haven’t been above making enemy-of-my-enemy arrangements with Fox to do so. They tag-teamed with Fox last year to keep the rights to the Pac-12 out of NBC’s hands, and they recently signed a joint extention with the Big 12 with Fox as well.

That may prove to be a mistake, as Fox has done as well as anyone since NBC fired the opening shots in the sports TV wars, picking up rights to the UFC and World Cup without ESPN’s help and even stealing the latter from ESPN. All these sports contracts have been made primarily with an aim to improving the presence of sports on its FX cable network, hoping to follow the blueprint of TBS and TNT in using sports to attract eyeballs to their general purpose cable network. Beyond that, Fox has an established infrastructure of cable networks, eschewing a single all-sports network in favor of attracting eyeballs to their sports brand through a wide variety of special networks – their dominant collection of regional sports networks for local sports, Big Ten Network for college sports in the Midwest, Speed Channel for NASCAR fans, Fox Soccer for soccer fans, and Fuel for “action sports” and recently UFC fans.

Given this, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that Fox is considering launching its own all-sports network to compete with ESPN, which, yea back in the days of yore, Fox Sports Net was supposed to be. It’s worth wondering what Fox is thinking here, and how it affects their efforts to put more sports on FX – and color me skeptical that converting Fuel to be such a network is going to create something much bigger than Fox College Sports, let alone CBS Sports Network. But if Fox comes into this with a plan and puts enough emphasis on this all-sports network, and converts a network with a big enough reach like Speed to do it? They, not NBC, immediately become the best-positioned competitor to ESPN.

NBC’s biggest advantage over Fox was always the presence of an all-sports network. Take that away, and Fox has three things that NBC doesn’t but ESPN does: a sport-specific Spanish-language network, a national radio network that Fox has taken to start adding live sports to recently, and an international distribution arm. Fox can match NBC in other areas as well – most obviously its regional sports networks, but Fox can also match Telemundo as a Spanish-language broadcast network with the pending launch of its MundoFox network.

Now consider what Fox can put on such a network without adding a single new contract. From FX and Fuel it can show college sports from major conferences and UFC programming. From Speed it can show NASCAR truck series races, Formula 1 races, and the NASCAR All-Star Race. From Fox Soccer it can show marquee English Premier League games, the UEFA Champions League, and World Cup competition. If Fox was serious about this, I’d argue that right off the bat they can create a network that’s at least as much of a draw as the NBC Sports Network, and if they can add just one major-league contract, they can actually legitimately claim to challenge ESPN.

This is a potential game changer in the sports television wars, one that could ripple across all of this year’s big contract showdowns, especially the ones over Major League Baseball and NASCAR, which could affect whether or not Fox actually decides to go forward with this network, as well as Thursday Night Football if the NFL ever decides to put that back on the market. The fight for TV sports supremacy may officially be a three-way fight.

Update on the current situation

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I swear I haven’t up and decided to render The Streak meaningless by continuing it with a bunch of contentless posts. I do intend to start one of the better series I’ve planned for Da Blog, but the new quarter just started and I might be getting myself heavily involved in it. I have every intent to post something substantial tomorrow (Wednesday), though. Stay tuned.

Kickstarter Feature Jeopardized

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The method I had been using to keep track of all the highest-earning Kickstarters, both for the weekly Kickstarter posts and for a Google Docs spreadsheet of my own I was considering making public, no longer seems to be working.

I will consider finding another method, but it may be unable to catch Kickstarters that aren’t being listed with their category for whatever reason. I must warn, however, that the most likely outcome is just stopping with the feature, as I’ve gotten tired of the venture, it’s very time-consuming, and I’d like not to interrupt the week with something irrelevant if and when I start a new series I’ve been planning and hinting at.

The 2012 Mid-Major Conference

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Refer to this post if you don’t know what this is about or to catch up on the rules.

This year, six conferences produced multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament: the MWC, A-10, West Coast, C-USA, MAAC, and MVC. These conferences are guaranteed one spot each in the Mid-Major Conference.

Two teams reached the Sweet 16, from different conferences. Ohio did not come from a multi-bid conference, but Xavier did. New Mexico was the only team from the Mountain West to win their first game; ditto for Creighton and the Missouri Valley, and Gonzaga and the WCC, not counting the “First Four”. No team from the MAAC or C-USA won a game in the NCAA Tournament. Memphis and Southern Miss split their regular season games but Memphis won the conference tournament while Southern Miss was upset before reaching the final; Loyola (MD) has a similar advantage over Iona, with the added bonus of not having to play the “First Four”.

This leaves one spot in the MMC to be determined by my discretion, with no conference restrictions.

Without further ado, the eight members of the 2012 Mid-Major Conference:

Xavier (Atlantic 10)
Ohio (Mid-American Conference)
Creighton (Missouri Valley Conference)
New Mexico (Mountain West Conference)
Gonzaga (West Coast Conference)
Memphis (Conference USA)
Loyola (MD) (Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference)
Murray State (Ohio Valley Conference)

A record number of mid-major conferences producing multiple bids (matching the first year I did this in 2007) leaves me with only one discretionary pick, and there was no way I was going to leave Murray State’s two-loss season out. As with Memphis last year, Loyola received an MMC pick solely because Iona received an at-large they might not have deserved, and this one is a bit less defensible. The CAA could have used a spot for VCU or Drexel, and Harvard might have gotten a discretionary spot if Murray State weren’t so strong. Combined with the problem the “First Four” poses for determining tourney distance, I may have to change my rules for how I treat the “First Four” (which didn’t exist in its current form when I made them) in future years. I’ll also need to keep an eye on whether conference realignment affects which conferences are considered “major”. Speaking of which, give an honorable mention to Colorado, who would have qualified for the MMC this year if the Pac-12 were considered what they were this year: a mid-major.