Sports

The Sports TV Wars Come Back to Life

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There was a dead period of a little over a month in the sports TV wars, but some contracts are starting to get signed again.

CBS Sports Network is starting to become home to all the bottom-of-the-barrel detritus none of the other contenders want – both professional lacrosse leagues, and rumor has it the UFL will be looking to them as their savior. At least they share the PBR with NBC Sports Network. It’s even starting to spread to the college coverage that originally built the network and continues to provide its best programming; the Great Alaska Shootout, floundering since being abandoned by ESPN and putting together a patchwork of regional TV coverage, has gotten back on “national” television with the CBS Sports Network. As the Wars develop, I have a feeling you’ll see people start to say “that league is so far down they’re on the CBS Sports Network!” The challenge posed to CBS is if they can avoid that fate of becoming the network of last resort.

Of more substance, but not much, is the Ivy League expanding its relationship with NBC Sports Network, which already shows several football games, but will now show basketball and lacrosse for the next two years as well, and could sublicence some games to other entities.

Again, not a whole heck of a lot, but the big prizes of MLB and NASCAR are coming up very, very quickly. In fact, the NASCAR contract may be done in less than two weeks.

Sport-Specific Networks
6 9.5 4.5 3.5 0 1.5

Is ESPN the Godfather of college sports?

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A constant force working behind the scenes at every stage of college conference realignment has been ESPN. College sports are the bread and butter of ESPN’s business, and their money has in turn become the lifeblood of college sports. Ever since the Comcast merger went through, ESPN has been desperately working to prevent NBC from gaining a real foothold in the college landscape. ESPN has done so so doggedly that they may have inadvertently created a potentially greater competitor; although they teamed up with Fox to box NBC out of getting Pac-12 and Big 12 rights, the reports that Fox might create their own all-sports network should have shocked ESPN out of doing any more such team-ups – if anything, it’s NBC they should be teaming up with to box out Fox, or at least CBS or Turner. But ESPN is still the big man on campus, and at least where college sports are concerned, they may be influencing the outcome of the war in other ways.

The first such case is also the most well-established: when the Pac-10 was trying to annex virtually the entire Big 12 South to create the first 16-team superconference, the deal fell through largely because ESPN promised the Big 12 a more lucrative TV contract even with two schools, including mighty Nebraska, gone. Judging by reports, ESPN was not interested in the existence of such superconferences, at least not yet. But ESPN also collected a more directly lucrative payday from the collapse of the Pac-16 deal, because the continued existence of the Big 12 allowed ESPN to make a deal with the University of Texas to create the Longhorn Network.

The creation of the Longhorn Network set off the second wave of conference realignment, after the NBC-Comcast deal already had gone through. Some see in the moves of this second wave ESPN’s influence trying to further blunt any headway NBC might make. To take one example, ESPN last year was in the middle of exclusive negotiations with the Big East, and the conference rejected ESPN’s offer, presumably waiting for this year and for other potential partners like NBC to become part of the negotiations. But things didn’t work out like they had in mind, as the ACC – a conference not even yet affected by realignment, but worried about potential defections to the Big 12 – poached Pittsburgh and Syracuse from the Big East. Anyone who saw that move (and the Big 12’s eventual poaching of West Virginia and TCU) as the proverbial horse’s head in the Big East’s bed for rejecting ESPN’s “offer they can’t refuse” had their fires fueled by the comments of Boston College athletic director Gene DiFilippo, which he subsequently backed off from: “TV — ESPN — is the one who told us what to do.”

If ESPN was the force behind the erosion of the Big East’s football conference, it was a brilliant plan and smashing success. Before, for NBC to pick up the Big East might not have given them something as good as the Big 12 or Pac-12, but it would have given them a BCS conference that probably would count for more than the Mountain West with the likes of West Virginia and Pittsburgh on board. Now, numerically, the Big East has made up for those defections with the additions of SMU, Houston, Central Florida, Boise State, San Diego State, Navy, Memphis, and Temple, but even taking those eight and adding them to Rutgers, Cincinnati, Louisville, Connecticut, and South Florida doesn’t exactly give you the strongest conference. In fact, it looks a lot like Conference USA a decade ago; Rutgers, Connecticut, and Temple are the only schools that were in the Big East as recently as 2004 or so. Add in that the BCS, by all accounts, is looking to remove the official “automatic qualifying” status for conferences, and it’s hard to see how adding the new Big East would be a step up in any way, at least in football. Right now it looks like a lateral move at best from the old Mountain West.

Not that the Big East is entirely worthless (on the basketball side, Cincinnati, Louisville, Georgetown, St. John’s, Villanova, Notre Dame, Marquette, AND Memphis? Yes please), but unless NBC is absolutely determined to muscle their way in to college basketball, their energies might now be best directed elsewhere, perhaps towards the Big Ten contract coming up in a few years, with MLB and NASCAR far bigger prizes in the short term. But even if they are determined to muscle in to college basketball, ESPN is the big man on campus there as well. NBC recently signed a contract with the CAA, and now there are rumors that that conference’s two marquee programs, George Mason and VCU, may be bailing for the Atlantic 10. Coincidence? You be the judge. And that’s before wondering how much of a hand ESPN had in the decline of the Mountain West – certainly the death of the Pac-16 led directly to Utah moving to the Pac-12, which proved to be the domino that sent the entire Mountain West tumbling.

To directly tie most of this to ESPN’s meddling may be saying a bit much, and certainly it’s a serious accusation that no one should toss around lightly. But certainly conference realignment has had the effect of tightening ESPN’s hegemony around college sports and made it so that any efforts of NBC or Fox to challenge ESPN are best spent strictly on the pro level, maybe on the Big Ten in a few years. (The BCS doesn’t count because ESPN is the only entity that would or could put the BCS on cable, though cable outlets might have a shot at lesser bowls.)

The Mountain West Conference comes crawling back to ESPN

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Let me tell you a story of hubris, tribalism, monopoly, and karma.

In 2005, fed up with constantly getting shifted to timeslots that didn’t work for the time zones its teams played in, the Mountain West Conference decided to completely sever ties with ESPN. They signed a long-term contract with CBS to put its games on what was then CBS College Sports, and also agreed with Comcast to start the very first conference-specific network, the mtn., and put games on Versus.

And lo, it was good. Utah, BYU, and TCU were as good as any team from a BCS conference, and while games between them were never on Versus (the network more people got of any of them) in any years when they were the most important, their presence was quite fruitful for Versus, CBS CS, and the mtn. CBS CS and the mtn. got keystone programming, and Versus got some of its biggest ratings outside NHL games. And lo, when realignment hit college football in 2010, the Mountain West looked to solidify its place as a conference on par with any major conference, adding the other team as good as any from a BCS conference, Boise State, and looked to be one of the beneficiaries of the Pac-10’s proposed gutting of the Big 12, picking off incredibly valuable teams – Kansas, Kansas State – from the carcass.

But alas, that is when things turned for the Mountain West. The proposed Pac-16 deal fell through, but Colorado had already jumped ship. The conference was desiring of putting the conference’s size at a stable level, so they added Utah. And suddenly the Mountain West’s fortunes spiraled into a pit of despair. With its Holy War partner gone, BYU decided to become an independent. With Utah and BYU gone, TCU smelled greener pastures and left for the Big East, and later the Big 12. The Mountain West added Fresno State and Nevada, and later Hawaii for football, to compensate for these defections, but Boise was left with a conference not too different from the WAC they’d just left behind.

But that was just the beginning. For the realignment wheel was not done turning, as Boise State and San Diego State would leave for the paradoxically-named Big East. Suddenly the Mountain West was left with a football conference actually worse than what the WAC had, with Air Force and Nevada probably the class of the conference, and in fact were having trouble fielding enough teams to even be a viable conference. They were not alone: the Big East had also poached SMU, Houston, and UCF from Conference USA, and would eventually poach their star school, Memphis. So the Mountain West and Conference USA started talks for some sort of alliance that eventually grew into a proposed merger of the two conferences.

The TV rights for such a conference would prove to be a challenge: the Mountain West with their contract with CBS and what was now NBC, and Conference USA with its own CBS Sports Network presence and a fairly-recently-signed contract with Fox. One of the bigger complications was the mtn., as Conference USA had no similar network; would the mtn. expand to include all of Conference USA, stick to Mountain West territory, or go away entirely? By and large, the network had not been very successful, with much of its thunder stolen by far more successful networks launched by BCS conferences stealing the idea. The mtn. itself had been plagued by carriage disputes, resented by conference schools who saw all their games put there, and lost its best programming with realignment. The Mountain West and Conference USA would eventually realize that a merger would prevent them from collecting exit fees from departing conference members and would lose credits from past NCAA tournaments and softened it back to an “alliance”, but not before the Mountain West had already decided to pull the plug on the mtn.

Now, fast forward to today: the Mountain West has announced that CBS has sublicenced some of their games to ESPN. Oh, there may be only four of them, all but one of which is on a Thursday or Friday with the remaining game likely to be the biggest of the year between Boise State and Nevada, but the move is unmistakable.

Blargh.

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Okay. This series has burned me out.

I’m not going to put up more posts about the new playoff system, which looks to be some form of bracketed plus-one, until later, though it’s probably still going to be before any sort of final decision is made. I leave you with what I originally wrote in 2009 about that system:

Plus-One top 4 bracketed: GPA: 2.18. Grade: C+. A top-4 plus-one, had it been adopted in 1998, would have had a longer honeymoon than the BCS, despite arguably ruining the 1999 title picture by introducing controversy where there was none in the BCS, by averting controversy in 2000 and 2001 and not ruining the 2002 title picture. Then in 2003 it might have worsened the BCS controversy of that year regarding Oklahoma still being vaulted to despite losing the Big 12 title game, but tweaks in the system would fix that. But in 2004 it would have increased the importance of a controversy that didn’t need it, repeated the 1999 incident in 2005, and would have been insufficient three straight years from 2007 to 2009, creating an argument that with increased college football parity, we need an 8-team system. Too bad 8-team systems would have been even worse those years…

Of the major formats of 8 teams or less, this was the best one; I graded it a C+ in 2010 and a C- in 2011 (the latter for picking Stanford over Pac-12 champion Oregon). There are a few different formats out there regarding conference champions, and I need to assess them, and that would be part of the point of continuing the series.

Blargh. And before I found out about the BCS meetings, I had other plans for this week that were so much better…

Change of plans for College Football Playoff System series

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I really wish I’d known about the BCS meetings being this week, last week. Admittedly I kind of dozed off for several hours Wednesday, but as I write this I’m going so slowly I’m not sure I’ll even be able to hold myself to what I’m about to set.

For the first time since last year, I’ll be putting out two posts in a day on Thursday, covering both halves of the BCS era and examining how each and every one of the playoff systems in yesterday’s post would deal with them. That’ll set up Friday’s post giving a final verdict to all the systems. There’s an off chance I won’t give the final verdict until Monday, but I’m trying not to.

For the past four months, my main concern has been The Streak, but the BCS meetings are kind of imposing a bigger constraint on when I can post these things…

The Last Word on a College Football Playoff System, Part I: Potential Systems Explained

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Our long national nightmare is almost over. The annual BCS meetings are this week, and the assembled commissioners are almost certain to institute some sort of playoff system. By the end of this week, we may be saying goodbye to the debate over a college football playoff, or at least a particular stage of it.

Everybody knows one thing: they hate the BCS. What people can’t seem to agree on is how to fix it. One thing the BCS has brought us is a system that seemingly every year finds a new way to screw things up, and that means part of the problem with settling on a playoff format is that each year seems to support a different system, which often wouldn’t work so well in another year. Fortunately, that also means it’s also given us a lot of scenarios to examine and test the equally numerous playoff proposals. In honor of the end of this era, that’s what we’ll be doing this week, determining how they would have gotten rid of controversy (or not) and on the other hand, still maintained the sanctity of the regular season. Are BCS proponents correct that no system is perfect and so none can sufficiently improve on the BCS? (Note that I originally wrote much of this in 2009 as part of my “Evolving Take on the Debate on a College Football Playoff”, and as such most of the proposed systems are from before then with some having broken links, and you should probably read
that
series
yourself for many of my rulings to make sense.) Here are the various playoff systems supported in various places around the Internet and their backers:

The Big 5

  • Actual BCS system. The system we all know and loathe.
  • Plus-One with traditional bowls. What the BCS honchos are calling the “original ‘plus-one'”. Effectively, goes back to the old bowl system, but adds an additional postseason “week” after the bowls, selecting the two best teams in the country. Plus-ones are embraced primarily by people who don’t really support a playoff but aren’t satisfied with the result the BCS provides (or, reportedly, the BCS honchos when they’re not worrying about public opinion). This one is proposed by Brian Sakowski and… that’s it (although Frank the Tank flirted with it once). No one else needs to be told what a disaster this one would be, and not just because it would reduce the bowls to play-in games. It’s almost untestable because there are almost as many “traditional bowl lineups” as people proposing them (the Big 12 is almost as young as the BCS itself) and the ripple effects on the rest of the bowl system are almost unknowable. But plus-one after the current bowl system, as supported by no one and tested in place of this by Ed Gunther, is even worse, because it creates the most skewed bracket ever, pitting 1 vs. 2 in the first round, rendering anticlimactic at best and utterly ruining at worst classic BCS outcomes like Texas-USC in 2005. People who have proposed variants of this – including Jon Miller of HawkeyeNation.com – often have specific years in mind, like 2003, when they wanted LSU to take on USC for the national championship.
  • Plus-One top 4 bracketed. Also known as the “four-team event” considered by the BCS honchos. A simple four-team playoff. Basically further mangles the bowl lineup by plucking two more teams into semifinal bowls, and turns out to produce first-round rematches often if left unchecked – often enough Gunther considers it inferior to plus-one after the current bowl system, obvious nonsense. As tested below, if 1/4 and 2/3 matchups would produce rematches, they are switched to 1/3 and 2/4. This system and variants of it (often giving home-field advantage in the first round) are backed by Richard Cirminiello of CFN, Tim Layden in SI in 2001, Frank the Tank, and Ben Prather, proprietor of SBNation’s former “BCS Evolution” blog. Jerry Hinnen has the semifinals the week before students’ finals week instead of being part of the bowls, allowing semifinal losers to join a pool with the teams at 5-10 in the other BCS bowls, and seems to be confused because he wants to include “the teams that need to be in” and includes the mid-majors that won BCS bowls, but those teams placed 8th at best in the BCS before the bowls, so the only thing I can think of is he intended to give auto bids to teams that go undefeated, but that includes some teams that didn’t “need” to be in like 2007 Hawaii and 2008 Boise State… Mark Schlabach and (if they were to firmly support a playoff) EDSBS want a plus-one but don’t give details, so I classify them here.
  • 8-team playoff, BCS champion auto bids. The two eight-team systems are often backed by people who want to use the BCS bowls as quarterfinals, ignoring how that would reduce the bowls to play-in games, or people who aren’t satisfied with a plus-one but aren’t ready to embrace 11/5. This playoff allocates six spots to the champions of BCS conferences, leaving two at larges. I could call it a “6/2” system, mirroring my “11/5” terminology. Fundamentally the system proposed by the Mountain West in 2009, and originally backed by Matt Hinton (now Yahoo’s “Dr. Saturday”) to the extent he supports any specific proposal, Pat Forde, this AP simulated system, BCS Watch to the extent he supports any playoff, James Irvine, Vincent Ellerby, and Frank the Tank‘s earliest proposal (the last two attempting to maintain traditional bowl assignments in the quarterfinals). Many proposals of this system replace one of the at-larges with an auto bid for a single non-BCS team, as in the system used in College Football News’ simulated playoff and backed by their Pete Fiutak, and also proposed by bceaglesfootball.com (which also takes away the Big East’s BCS auto bid). (CFN teamed up with WhatIfSports for December Madness after the 2007 season.)
  • 8-team playoff, no auto bid. Just the best eight teams in the country. Supported by Gene Wojcechowski, Matt Starnes, and Stephen Carradini. President Obama famously proposed an 8-team playoff during the campaign but didn’t specify how teams would be selected (though his original comments to Chris Berman suggested the no-auto-bid approach), putting him in the company of CFN’s Matthew Zemek, Paola Boivin, and USA Today‘s editorial board.
  • 11/5 system. Also known as “16-team playoff, auto bids to all conference champions.” Supported by Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel, Sloppy Joe of College Football Cafeteria, CBS’ J. Darin Darst, Fox’s Peter Schrager, SupportAPlayoff.com, Eric B. Shaw, Mark Blankenbaker, TrueNationalChampion.com, and yours truly, as well as all right-thinking people who pondered the college football playoff debate, at least before realignment set in (Wetzel, the most prominent voice for this model, explains his newfound misgivings about it and conversion to a BCS-auto-bid 8-teamer towards the end of this article) – yet seemingly treated as a strawman and untested by Gunther (on the grounds that one of the above four will happen before we get this). For the past few seasons, WhatIfSports.com has held its “December Madness” tournament under 11/5 rules and simulating the results with its game simulation technology; I did the same with my own bracket for several years, using the same site.

Proposals That Don’t Fit In the Big 5

  • “Flex” playoff system, Zane version. Basically, a system that tries to always be the best system, sometimes being a single national championship game, sometimes being Plus-One top 4 bracketed. Here’s the simplest I can explain Billy Zane’s idea: If there are two undefeated teams ranked 1 and 2 and no one else above a certain threshold, or two or fewer teams with one or fewer losses in the top four, they play a single national championship game. (If an undefeated team plays a 2-loss team in this manner, the national championship game is not necessarily for the national championship.) If there is one undefeated team at and two 1-loss teams (or a 1-loss team and an unbeaten that’s not ) in the top four, the undefeated team gets a bye into the national championship game and the two one-loss teams play each other. Otherwise, it is Plus-One top 4 bracketed, except any unbeaten over said threshold automatically gets in (top 5 as proposed in the demonstration, but top 6 as I analyze it below, for reasons that will become clear), bumping out teams with losses if needed.
  • “Flex” playoff system, Prather version. Link is the same as Prather’s support for Plus-One top 4 bracketed, which seems to be more recently supported, an admission of the complexity of this plan. Similar to the Zane version, except the size of the gaps in the BCS standings (equivalent to a 1.5-spot average difference in the polls) is used to select the qualifying teams, and the result could be as large as an eight-team playoff, larger if there are more undefeated teams than that.
  • Plus-One top 4 bracketed, preserve Rose Bowl. This is a compromise between “Plus-One with traditional bowls” and “Plus-One top 4 bracketed” by preserving the only traditional bowl matchup worth preserving, similar to Frank the Tank‘s “semi-seeded plus-one”, and a reformation of the Big Ten’s “Four-Team Plus” model under consideration (essentially a bracketed plus-one that ignores the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions for the semifinals only, considered by Frank the Tank here). Under this model, even if the Pac-10 or Big 10 champion is in the top four, and even if the other one isn’t, they will play each other in the Rose Bowl no matter what. Curiously, this often duplicates the results of plus-one after the current bowl system. For example, in 2003, USC would have been force-seeded to the Rose Bowl, leaving LSU to play Oklahoma. Under this system, non-Rose bowls are listed as the higher-seed’s tie-in bowl, unless the higher seed is the Big East champion or (somehow) an at-large.
  • Plus-One top 4 bracketed, conference champions only. An attempt to avert situations where a normal bracketed plus-one renders conference championships meaningless. Apparently this one was considered by the suits in the room but ultimately rejected.
  • 6-team playoff.
    Brian of MGOBlog wants no autobid, home field, 3 seed picks whether they face 5 or 6, 1 seed picks which first-round winner they face. Ryan Murphy gives auto bids to the BCS conferences that aren’t the Big East; that version will only be assessed for years after the ACC raided the Big East.
  • 8-team playoff, conference champions qualify based on ranking.
    Frank Xei (at least I’m assuming that’s his name) proposes putting all conference champions in the top 12 of the BCS standings in the tournament, then the remaining spots go to the top non-conference champions. As you’ll see, this will sometimes exclude BCS conference champions, which is “some” times too many for the BCS gatekeepers. Ditto for Sloppy Joe‘s more mature playoff proposal, which takes all conference champions in the top 14 and Notre Dame if they crack the top 8. After originally proposing the original BCS conference champion auto bid system, Ty Duffy subsequently suggested a system with the top six highest-ranked conference champions, regardless of conference, selected.
  • 8-team playoff, conference champions qualify based on number of wins. As suggested here, conference champions would be required to have nine wins over FBS teams, but would go in automatically regardless of ranking if they had that many.
  • 8-team playoff, conference champions only. Proposed by Arizona State president Michael Crow. Chris Suellentrop‘s system would also include BCS auto bids, as would Jason Nafziger.
  • 10-team playoff. Used by ESPN c. 2009 (no auto bid) and by College Football Campus (BCS champion auto bids) for their simulated playoffs, and suggested by Playitoff.org (current BCS automatic qualification requirements for auto bids), Dr. Saturday (BCS champion auto bids, two-team-per-conference rule remains in effect), and Brandon E. Kennedy (BCS champion auto bids), mostly because it’s a nice round number we’re all familiar with, despite the fact it’s arbitrary (our counting system would make more sense if we had six fingers on each hand) and produces an ugly bracket. One advantage of the format is that it’s possible to give automatic byes to the BCS conference champions, no more, no less.
  • 12-team playoff.
    Ryan West backs giving the BCS conference champions auto bids. (West also proposes holding each round at a BCS bowl site, which’ll never happen.) CollegePlayoffs.com does not, and includes a 16-team NIT-like tournament, while thinking “Bowl Tournament” isn’t an oxymoron from the bowls’ perspective. Jonathan West (who I don’t believe is related to Ryan) also backs an auto-bid-free format. The Enhanced Bowl Season gives auto bids to the BCS conference champions and one non-BCS champion, plus any other non-BCS champion in the top 12 of the rankings.
  • 16-team playoff, only BCS conferences get auto bids. As proposed by ESPN blogger Ghostsof1948, Russ Thorson, and Jeb Puryear.
  • 16-team playoff, auto bids for champions of top 8 conferences and BCS conference runner ups. This is what Bill Hahn‘s bizarre proposal amounts to. Even more bizarre, seeding is random, with the conference champions randomly seeded 1-8 and the runner ups randomly seeded on the opposite side of the draw as their respective champions.
  • 16-team playoff, auto bids for qualifying conference champions. This is the Mountain West’s 2011 proposal, with the qualification being that the team must be in the top 30 teams in the country.
  • 16-team playoff, no auto bid. The basis for SI’s simulated playoff, and also proposed by Sam Matta, Chad Crabtree, and “Tommy” on The Right Sphere. John (?) Houlgate would pick the 16th team randomly from the teams ranked 16-25, obviously untestable.
  • 20-team playoff. Tyler West essentially adds four play-in games to the 11/5 system. He also suggests making every conference get a championship game, but the system is testable without it. He also has an odd rule that teams in position to get an at-large before playing the conference championship can’t be left out in favor of a team from the same conference, which seems to have the effect of reducing the incentive to win the conference championship.
  • 24-team playoff. Simple: there are over 100 teams in college football, and over 300 teams in college basketball. There are 11 conferences in college football, and 31 conferences in college basketball. There are 12 games in a college football season, and 30-some games in a college basketball season. Therefore a college football season should have roughly a third of the teams in March Madness, and that adds up to 22-23. 20-team proposals aside, 24 is the nearest number that produces the neatest-looking bracket. Whether it preserves the sanctity of the regular season is another matter… I want to keep my level of work sane, the BCS standings a useful baseline, and the regular season with a modicum of meaning, so this is the largest playoff I’m willing to consider.

Proposals Too Radically Different To Be Tested (Or Ever Pass)

  • 16-team playoff, only winners of conference championship games get auto bids. As proposed by Bruce Leban. Why is it untestable? Because conferences would race to adopt championship games somehow, someway, forcing realignment and turning this into a variant of one of the below.
  • 4-team playoff in place of conference championships. This is essentially what Mark Cuban has proposed, and it’s untestable for the opposite reason: it effectively forces conferences with championships to get rid of them.
  • Gunther Modified Season. Teams play only 8-9 regular season games, most of them conference games. Then a selection committee divides teams into two groups, with the top 32 teams in Group A and everyone else in Group B. Group B teams play each other the first week of November, ideally teams within 10 ranking spots of them with home field based on attendance rankings, Group A teams the second week with home field to higher seed. Then everyone is reseeded and Group A is condensed to the top 16 and everyone plays the third week, and then Group A is condensed to the top 8 and everyone plays the fourth week, and then Group A is condensed one more time to the top 4 and intra-conference matches are allowed there, though not rematches. Finally bowl bids are divvied out and and play in the championship game. The “playoff” in Group A is not a traditional single-elimination tournament, as teams can lose early on and remain in Group A, but conversely a team can win and still not stay alive; one commenter proposed fixing this by first having the field cut from 28 to 18, with 14 winners and 4 losers, then to 12 similarly, then 8, then cut in half each subsequent round; I would go 24 to 16 to 12 to 8. Gunther claims the basic framework is “workable and realistic” as opposed to some other plans both above and below, but no one will accept such a major change in a million years – it changes too much tradition, like November rivalry games, and it’s too complicated for Americans – even though it’s more conservative than its cousin…
  • Johnson Swiss System/32-cum-8-team playoff. The Swiss system is the system used in chess tournaments, and it basically boils down to always facing someone with the same record as you. If you win your first game, you face someone else who won their first game. If you lose that game, you face someone who’s also 1-1, and so on. Ben Johnson’s postseason (leaving his conspiratorial thinking aside) would work like that. It would realign all the BCS conferences, as well as a conference taking the best teams from the Mountain West and WAC, so that each conference had a uniform number of teams, and would have the first eight games all be conference games. The top four teams from each conference would play a mini-bracket leading to a conference championship, with the losers of the conference semifinals playing in a conference third-place game (if they haven’t played already in Johnson’s current proposal). The conference champions, as well as the winner of a game between the MAC and C-USA champions, would form an eight-team bracket, but as originally proposed, losers of each game would face losers of a comparable game, so quarterfinal losers would face other quarterfinal losers, semifinal losers would meet in a third-place bowl, and the winners of quarterfinal loser games would meet in a third bowl, the losers in a fourth. As originally proposed, a similar process would be followed for the losers of the conference championship game and conference third-place game participants. The conference 5-8 teams (3-4 for MAC and C-USA) would enter a similar “Holiday” bracket, the conference 9-12 teams (5-6 for MAC and C-USA) would enter another similar “NIT” bracket, and the remaining 24 teams (would these all be MAC, C-USA, and Sun Belt teams?) would enter some sort of “Sportsman’s” bracket. As presently proposed, at least last I checked, Johnson seems to have taken a cue from Gunther’s system, as teams that weren’t in the main championship bracket would play primarily regional games, an attempt to mollify people who would protest that people couldn’t possibly move from game to game, although the Swiss system seems to still be in effect. In any case no one will agree to the major restructuring of college football conferences required by the Johnson system, or the loss of control over non-conference schedules, or the destruction of interconference rivalries, or the movement of “rivalry week” to week 8 at the latest, or how, comments that this system gives every team a shot at the championship notwithstanding, Sun Belt teams are supposed to ever have a shot at the championship (or in the case of the original proposal, even the non-Sportsman brackets)…
  • Realignment. Hunter Ansley of DraftZoo.com proposes realigning FBS into eight 12-team conferences, divided into two leagues, which would play a 16-team playoff, with conference championship games, two league championship rounds, and a game between the champions of each league, with bowls serving as rounds of the tournament. Two words: Pipe dream. The proprietor of the Get the Picture blog seems to want a playoff comprised solely of all the conference champions but would rejigger the conferences to create a competitive balance, or the appearance of one. At the height of the first round of conference realignment in 2010, several people entertained dreams of the power teams forming four 16-team superconferences that could then set up a de facto four-team playoff. Yours truly proposed blowing up the current conference system in favor of instituting a system of promotion and relegation last year, and weaker forms of pro/rel have also been proposed. Most realignment plans just shuffle teams around into new alignments without regard for whether the conferences or teams would agree or even the impact on other sports. The way realignment has actually played out, especially the first round in 2010 when the Pac-10 very nearly became the Pac-16, underscores the inherent unpredictability of the enterprise.

Tune in next time, when we take a look at how each of these systems would have done each year of the BCS era.

Fox Sports Takes Over Saturday Nights

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I’ve figured Saturday night, so abandoned by the broadcast networks, was an ideal sports night for some time. Way back in 2005, I believe it was, I wondered why a college football game between Virginia Tech and Miami (FL) with massive BCS implications was airing on ESPN. It made so much sense for ABC to air college football in primetime, and this was a perfect example of a game that would easily have aired there under the circumstances. In other words, I had the idea for “Saturday Night Football” before ESPN did. (If I’d only known how ESPN would treat ABC in subsequent years…)

When “Saturday Night Football” was announced, I wondered if other sports would colonize Saturday primetime, perhaps even to the point of it becoming as sports-saturated as weekend afternoons. It happened in bits and pieces here and there, but I have to admit I didn’t initially have much of a reaction to Fox revealing they would be giving virtually their entire Saturday slate to sports. I guess I just figured it was inevitable at some point.

The surprise is that it is Fox taking this step. Up until recently, Fox seemed to be the network that still cared about Saturday the most; while ABC and NBC aired movies and CBS aired reruns, burned-off shows, and “48 Hours”, Fox had a consistent, ratings-producing lineup of “COPS” and “America’s Most Wanted”. But “AMW” was all but cancelled, turned into a series of occasional specials, this past fall, and now Fox is cutting back on its “COPS” order to give the night over to the sports division, which will fill it up with baseball, NASCAR, UFC, NFL preseason games, and in the fall, regular-season college football for the first time in Fox’s history (and potentially one NFL divisional-round game come January).

I expect that by the end of the decade, all four major networks will have largely turned their Saturday nights over to sports. A key could be the upcoming Major League Baseball contract renegotiations. Fox has already greatly increased their inventory of primetime baseball games, to be branded “Baseball Night in America”; I expect baseball will, with whatever network they shack up with, make primetime the core of the main broadcast package (certainly only the holder of the baseball contract can reasonably expect to reliably fill Saturday nights with anything worth showing for much of the summer), possibly even to the point of inverting Saturdays. Right now most games not airing on Fox are in primetime, partly due to Fox’s exclusivity preventing Extra Innings from carrying any game in their window. I could see a situation develop where most games are played during the daytime on Saturdays with only those games picked to air on the network playing in primetime.

Options abound for the other three networks for optimizing their Saturday primetime, though some of them depend on picking up more contracts and renegotiating existing ones. ABC already airs some NBA playoff games in primetime; they could experiment with airing a few high-profile regular season games there as well. The SEC’s contract with CBS and ESPN restricts CBS’ ability to air more than one primetime game (it took a lot of hoop-jumping to get LSU-Alabama aired there this year), but that contract may have been reopened as a result of realignment, and CBS could air some college basketball games in primetime on a regular basis. NBC is probably the least well-equipped of the networks to fill out Saturday nights due to their lack of suitable contracts, but they could air more Stanley Cup Playoff games in primetime on their main network on Saturdays if Canada’s CBC (for which Saturday has always been “Hockey Night in Canada”) would rather have them there, and have Notre Dame put more and better games in primetime.

One interesting side effect could be a potential bright spot for people like me who bemoan the march of sports events off broadcast. If broadcast networks decide they would like to get the higher ratings for sports events on Saturdays at all costs, they could nab sports events that might have aired on cable otherwise. Obviously there’s a limit to how low-profile you can go before it makes more sense to stick with what they were doing before, but you could see events that would otherwise have aired on ESPN show up on ABC, NBC Sports Network events airing on NBC, and so forth. Reports of the death of sports on broadcast appear to be greatly exaggerated.

First impressions of Jim Rome’s new show

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Because of classes, the ESPN shows I watch and the inability to switch channels with no one home, I wasn’t able to see the first episode of Jim Rome’s new show on the CBS Sports Network, Rome. I did, however, watch the second episode on Wednesday, so what’s my verdict after what I said about his ESPN show, Jim Rome is Burning, a while back?

While the show’s structure is fundamentally the same as JRIB, it seems to have embraced the rushed nature of Rome’s takes and has condensed them considerably. JRIB normally saw four takes in the first segment, maybe five. That Wednesday, I saw seven different takes in the first segment, and that only lasted about six minutes. During the last segment, I saw a total of nine takes, almost tweet-length, or short enough for PTI‘s Big Finish, during the last segment; on its predecessor, rarely was there even three “Final Burns”.

This simple change turns out to produce two segments good enough for me to watch on a regular basis. Back in December, I threw out a whole swath of potential changes to the opening segment, from no longer reusing takes from his radio show to ditching the music in the background to getting a cohost to introduce each topic. Several other changes have been introduced – for example, Rome is now sitting down in the first segment, though it’s harder to notice than you might think – but as it turns out, all it took to improve Rome’s show considerably is one simple change with ripple effects on other aspects, as the topics now seem to flow better.

However, it only produces two segments like this. The fact is that the show completely grinds to a halt in the middle two segments. “Goin’ In” seems to come closer to restoring the original intent of the Forum, but it’s a jarring contrast to the fast-paced “Rome Wants” segment that follows it. Considering the pace the rest of the show goes at, it’s worth wondering whether the bookend segments have been made too fast. Ultimately, speeding up Rome’s takes only serves as a band-aid to the larger problem, to the extent that the show really feels like a series of disconnected segments than a cohesive whole.

One thing Friday’s and Monday’s shows, which ditched “The Newsmaker” interview segment in favor of a second “Goin’ In” segment, put into focus for me is that “The Newsmaker” grinds the show to a halt more than “Goin’ In”; the latter segment actually makes sense as a way to go more in-depth on some of the topics covered in brief in the opening segment. Perhaps that should be made the case full-time, but there’d be even more of a contrast if “The Newsmaker” was placed in the penultimate spot and immediately followed by “Rome Wants” (though two “Goin’ In” segments full-time is probably overkill).

At least when the show was on ESPN there was limited space in the schedule for it to air; on CBS Sports Network, there is no excuse for the show not to be a full hour. Do you know what airs on CBS Sports Network in the 6:30 ET timeslot immediately following Rome? A re-air of the episode of Rome that just aired! The only conclusion I can come to is that CBS is anticipating adding another sports talk/debate show in the following time slot at some unspecified point in the future. If the show doesn’t expand, though, and “The Newsmaker” is going to be kept, I would suggest at least trying moving it to the penultimate segment.

Also, Rome really needs a better phrase to start the show with than “Let’s do this”.

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.

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.