Sports

Can the FedExCup be saved?

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Another FedExCup has come and gone. The PGA TOUR’s TV partners have been shoving it down golf fans’ collective throats for months, showing every golfer’s rank in the standings at every event as though anyone cared, trying to get people revved up for the “Playoffs”, and it still didn’t go over with golf fans.

The FedExCup was supposed to be golf’s answer to NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup. Finally, golf would have its own season-long points chase culminating in a “playoff” event to crown a champion. It hasn’t worked out that way. After the first two FedExCups ended anticlimactically, the PGA TOUR (as it pretentiously capitalizes itself) decided they didn’t want to risk even the slightest chance of the Cup being decided before the TOUR Championship was even played, and adopted a bizarre system where the values of the Playoff events ballooned to five times the normal levels, and the points weren’t reset until the TOUR Championship itself, at which point anyone in the top 5 could win the Cup. Was the TOUR Championship an event held at a course appropriate enough to crown the champion of the entire year in golf? Who the hell knows.

All I know is that NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup doesn’t seem to have been negatively affected by the possibility of someone all but locking up the title before the final race. I also know that guaranteeing that the FedExCup would come down to the last event hasn’t actually gotten anyone more excited for the FedExCup. It doesn’t help that Tiger Woods was out of the running this year, but no one cared last year either, when Tiger won the whole thing.

What’s the difference between the Chase and the FedExCup? What is NASCAR doing right that the PGA TOUR is doing wrong? Some of it is elements outside the TOUR’s control; NASCAR already had a tradition of a season-long points chase, and golf owes virtually all its popularity to one man right now. No one cares about the vast majority of people competing for the FedExCup, and the PGA TOUR has made it worse by inviting over a hundred people to partake in their “playoffs”, virtually ensuring no one any good is going to be on the bubble not to get in. Wow, way to make your non-majors matter! No wonder you moved the reset to the last event!

The points system doesn’t help – golf fans mocked it roundly when it first came out for its complexity (winners received 4500 points!). At the same time that it moved the point where the points reset, the TOUR also decided to make the points more user-friendly. It did this by reducing the points for a win… to 500. Wow, that’s nice and intuitive. Granted, the TOUR needs to make room in their points scale for the 70 players that make the cut. NASCAR only needs to make room for 43 or so, so they get away with awarding 190 points for a win. The TOUR would probably be awarding 300 points if it wanted to be proportional about it, but it can do even better.

How about this: 100 points for a win.

It’s a nice, round number – everyone and their mother is familiar with 100, and can conceptualize it in terms of percent. The World Golf Rankings use 100 for a win in a major, let alone a regular event; complex modifications aside, what’s wrong with the points system you already had? I’m not going to be using the World Golf Rankings points system, though, and I’ll explain later how I cram 70 players into 100 points.

2nd place receives 50 points, a bit less than the World Golf Rankings and a lot bigger drop-off than the 20 points from a higher number in NASCAR. If they lose in a playoff, they get 70 points, reflecting the fact that outside the US Open, most golf tournament playoffs involve choosing one hole that may or may not be representative of the entire course.

3rd place gets 35 points, 4th 30, 5th 25, 6th 21, 7th 18, 8th 15, 9th 12, and 10th place receives 10. Ties receive the highest possible number of points. Yes, I know money is awarded by taking the average of the tied positions, but the money list does that because it has a set purse; the amount of money it awards in total is predetermined. For points standings, do you really want to ask casual fans to do all that addition and division to decipher the points standings or determine how many points each golfer will get? And is there anything less user-friendly than fractions of a point?

Beyond 10th place, points are awarded based on strokes, not positioning; subtract one point for each stroke behind 10th to a minimum of 1 for anyone who makes the cut. This is one of the biggest sources of confusion in existing ranking schemes: in most golf tournaments, most of the players who make the cut tend to cluster around a few scores, resulting in massive ties. By awarding points for these positions based on position, the number of points awarded is almost based on chance, even using the money list’s system. This way, mid-table golfers know every stroke is worth one point – no more, no less. And setting a hard minimum of 1 also gets rid of those horrible fractional points.

What about majors? 150 points for winning a major, 100 for playoff losers, 75 for second, 50 for third, 40 for fourth, 30 for 5th, 25 for 6th, 20 for 7th, and the same as before for the rest. THE PLAYERS Championship awards 125 for winning, 80 for playoff losers, 60 for 2nd, 40 for 3rd, and the same as before for the rest. World Golf Championship events award 110 for winning, 75 for playoff losers, and the same as before for the rest. Events held the same weekend as bigger events give winners 25 points, 20 for second place (playoff or no), 15 for 3rd, 12 for 4th, 10 for 5th, and deductions for strokes behind 5th to a minimum of 1 – though beyond a certain point, you shouldn’t get benefit of the doubt for squeaking past the cutline and then crapping out at an event the best players were spending somewhere more important. Again, no fractional points.

How exactly the championship is awarded is a thornier issue, although the current approach surely isn’t it. The purest approach is to not do any reset or jacking up of the points, but then you need to be prepared for the championship being well in hand at the final event, and maybe even the winner not showing up there at all. You could just do successive cutlines without resetting the points standings, so each “playoff” event counts the same as any other, but that’s unlikely to affect the top players.

Do you have a four-event playoff, and reset the standings beforehand? Maybe, but you need to make sure the events are balanced – some courses have higher roughs, some wider fairways, some are longer than others. Make sure you have enough of a balance of challenges as you do the rest of the year, so everyone is challenged evenly and someone has to be a very good all-around golfer to take enough of a lead to skip an event.

This is something I’m not sure NASCAR has figured out – near as I can tell there isn’t a single road course in the Chase, and while I know correlation doesn’t imply causation, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not a coincidence that the advent of the Chase has coincided with Jimmie Johnson’s literally unprecedented run of dominance. Also, in accordance with the notion of providing a balance of challenges, have only one cutline and cut only the top 70 or 30. (Or maybe two, with a second cutline where you go from 70 to 30.

Do you bring only the top 15-30 players or so to the TOUR Championship, and have that event be winner-take-all? Maybe, but if so, you better make damn sure you push it as a fifth or sixth major, at least on par with the PLAYERS. Put it at storied courses like Pebble Beach (the course also needs to do a good job of teasing out the best all-around golfer rather than being an outlier), hand out major-level money or more, do everything you can to make sure golfers and fans see it as one of the top six most important events and prizes of the year. Only enjoin it with other events in a “playoff” if a) you do cuts without resets as above, or b) the cutline for the playoff events is determined entirely by the order of finish on the course that week. A low cutline also ensures it succeeds in its real goal, encouraging participation and success in the TOUR’s “other” tournaments.

In retrospect, it may have been a mistake for the TOUR to leave ESPN in favor of the Golf Channel as its sole cable partner; heaven knows ESPN wouldn’t just shove it down our throats but send it out the other side. The TOUR is left hoping the Comcast/NBC merger not only goes through but succeeds in creating a true competitor to ESPN. It’s also still an open question whether or not non-head-to-head sports like the PGA TOUR or NASCAR should even have “playoffs” given the need to balance fair competition with a dramatic finish. And in the end, will anyone care if Tiger doesn’t care? Will anyone care if there is no Tiger? Will anyone care about golf if there is no Tiger?

Adventures in crazy lineal titles

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Most of the time, the college football lineal titles don’t change hands the first few weeks as all the good teams play cupcakes. Someone forgot to tell the 2006 Boise State title.

It freakily ended the season in the hands of non-bowl-eligible Washington, so perhaps an early change is to be expected, but it has changed hands every single week this season. Hopefully now that it’s in the hands of big-boy Oklahoma it’ll stay in place the next several weeks, at least until the Red River Rivalry.

All lineal titles are now properly updated.

Belated remarks on BYU going independent in football

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The biggest loser in the Not-So-Great Conference Shakeup of 2010 may be the Mountain West, who got screwed through no real fault of their own whatsoever.

Yay, the Pac-10 may singlehandedly destroy the Big 12! We could wind up with the Kansas schools or even more, and then the BCS would HAVE to let us in to the party! Oh wait, they called off the dogs – well, at least we got Boise State out of the deal, although now that’s a wash because the Pac-10 is adding Utah to complement Colorado and become the Pac-12. Oh well, at least it’s a wash…

…except BYU has just lost its biggest link to the Mountain West and wants to go independent in football and join the WAC in other sports! But wait, we’re adding Nevada and Fresno State to effectively destroy the WAC! But wait, BYU is STILL leaving, only they’re joining the West Coast Conference in other sports instead of the WAC! Nooooooooo!!!!!!!!!

(Incidentially, the one underplayed angle in all this is the surely-salivating-to-ESPN-execs-tongues prospect of regular BYU-Gonzaga games in the West Coast Conference. Though BYU is rarely if ever the best team in the Mountain West, it is one of the Mountain West’s stronger teams in basketball, and Gonzaga has to like the prospect of having a legitimate playing partner other than St. Mary’s.)

The Mountain West is left with 10 teams, one more than before, but only two BCS-caliber programs instead of the present three: TCU and Boise State. Nevada and Fresno State are good teams in football, by non-Boise WAC standards, but at best they’re on the level of an Air Force: they’ll sneak into the Top 25 sometimes, but they’ll rarely make true national headlines. (Air Force knocking off BYU being an exception.) That won’t help the Mountain West’s case for becoming a BCS conference or dissolving the system. In fact, BYU’s move by itself could make the system stronger than ever, especially if they get a BCS auto bid (which could be a smarter move than you might think precisely for that reason).

But why would BYU make the move? Notre Dame is under heavy pressure to join a conference at some point, so BYU is bucking the trend by leaving one. Of course they weren’t getting much help getting into the BCS by staying in the Mountain West. But the big thing BYU is banking on is its status as the Mormon university. They are banking on becoming the new Notre Dame, Notre Dame West, with every game getting national coverage and a truly national following. They want to leverage their BYU network and turn it into a national powerhouse. (It’s unlikely any football games would air on BYU TV, but the mtn. deal prevents even non-football sports from airing on BYU TV.)

The success of BYU’s declaration of independence depends heavily on whether or not BYU can put together a schedule at least as good as what they had in the Mountain West, and the outlook is staggering. If you’re going to set yourselves up to be the new Notre Dame or Notre Dame West, it makes sense to set up a rivalry with the real Notre Dame. Throw in Texas, Oregon State, and Utah, and that’s four games against teams in BCS conferences, with an eye for more. Good luck getting that in the Mountain West. And BYU has signed a deal with ESPN, which means the full ESPN hype machine will be in full effect and BYU games will regularly be on a platform with wider availability than Versus. All that’s left is recruiting.

If BYU can continue to recruit and play at the same level that they have been in the Mountain West, and regularly play in BCS games, independence will suddenly look like a viable prospect and Notre Dame can start saying “I told you so”. This could be the move that ultimately sets up the next great conference shakeup and finishes off the Big 12. The Pac-10 and Big 10 are too tightly-knit to lose any teams to independence, but they and the SEC may be the only reasonably invulnerable conferences, and even then Nebraska and Penn State have to consider the possibility (though the Big Ten Network revenues may be too much to resist).

(USC will definitely be tempted if probation and Lane Kiffin don’t prevent the program from maintaining its Carroll-era heights, especially compared to the rest of the Pac-10 – and if a team that lost its upperclassmen and can’t go to a bowl is still ranked in the polls and that ranking is warranted, I guarantee USC will win a national championship the first year off probation.)

If Texas decides the outlook is right, they could jump to independence in a heartbeat (just look at how much more money it makes in all sports than the next non-Big 10, non-SEC, non-Notre Dame school), with Oklahoma following (though the Big 12 could stay together after all if enough other teams follow suit). Other teams that were once both independent and powerhouses before the 90s shakeup – Florida State, Miami (FL) – could bolt as well, which is bad news for the ACC. With ten members, the ACC could stay alive, if not taken very seriously and looking like the new Big East (though Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Boston College, and a few others are good teams), but the Big 12 would be down to eight pissed-off members, who might start looking at other conferences or at independence themselves.

But that’s trying to predict the unpredictable. Right now the future involves the impending destruction of the WAC, which is down to six teams and couldn’t even field a conference if Hawaii leaves. If the WAC can keep Hawaii in the fold they will try to replenish their numbers, probably with potential playing partners for Louisiana Tech from Conference USA and possibly the Sun Belt, but if it can’t a lot depends on what the Mountain West decides to do next, and whether they want to go straight to a football championship game or wait for better options than the WAC’s castoffs (like the Kansas schools should BYU’s defection eventually cause the Big 12 to implode).

If they do decide to go for a championship game, they will and should take Utah State and New Mexico State (the former is already rumored to be Mountain West-bound). Both, along with MWC-bound Nevada, are among the WAC’s best teams in basketball (when all is said and done the Mountain West’s new lineup would have had five teams in the NCAA Tournament last year), New Mexico State brings New Mexico’s in-state rival in-house, and while Utah State’s potential playing partners are both gone it does re-establish the Mountain West’s foothold in the sizable Utah market. That leaves Idaho, San Jose State, and Louisiana Tech. LA Tech likely joins Conference USA; Idaho and San Jose State, two of the worst college football programs in the nation, may have no choice but to go to FCS or shutter their football programs entirely. Perhaps the Big Sky or Summit League will take Idaho (although most of the Summit’s schools don’t play football so if Idaho keeps the football program the Big Sky may be the only option). The Big West may be the only geographic and cultural fit for San Jose State, and most if not all of their schools don’t play football, so their football program may be screwed unless they or Idaho want to go to the Great West.

Then begins the process of keeping a close eye on how BYU does financially and athletically over the next decade, as the future of college football may lie in their hands.

A new set of college football rankings for us to play with!

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That feeling is in the air… it’s college football time again, and with it comes the return of all-out obsessive coverage on Da Blog. Both lineal titles (college and NFL) have been belatedly updated, including the new 2009 Boise State title and Super Bowl XLIV title. (I’ll have a post on the new holder of 2006 Boise State coming soon.) Although my Da Blog Poll came out to two votes to keep the College Football Schedule to one to junk it, I’m getting rid of it anyway. I need all the free time I can get to work on other things, and along with the College Football Rankings, starting Week 3 I’ll be premiering a new college football concept that has a lot more reason to premiere at the point any two teams can be connected to one another through a series of games… and one that could prove to be a lot more time-consuming than the Schedule ever was.

I started thinking about this with regards to combat sports like boxing and MMA, which I may extend this concept to eventually. If any sport has a more confusing title situation than college football, it’s those two (and horse racing), with all the different weight classes, not to mention all the different sanctioning bodies in the former. But for all the confusion over who the champ is, how the champ is determined is fairly straightforward: to be the man, you have to beat the man. So long as the champion does not lose, that person will remain the champion. This is taken to the point where lists of rankings will actually separate out the champion from the ranked fighters. No matter how strong a record you may rack up, to be the man, you have to beat the man. The championship system in combat sports is predicated on the notion that the result of a single fight is representative of which fighter is better overall. The same principle should be in play for ranking fighters below the champion.

Now, in what other sport is this the case? I don’t just ask this rhetorical question because I already created the college football lineal title on the same notion. You regularly hear the argument that Team A is better than Team B because Team A beat Team B, even if it was by one point in overtime at home. In a sense, this is the philosophy behind the BCS Title Game, as well as, to a lesser extent, the Super Bowl. (In most other sports a series of games determines the champion, removing some of the uncertainty and ambiguity of a single game.) You take what you think is the top two teams, pit them against each other, and the winner is the champion, as well as considered “better”.  As I pointed out last year, 2005 USC may well have been as good as ESPN said they were when they infamously started comparing the Trojans to all the great teams of the past, but we take it as given that Texas was the better team, because they beat USC. And BCS arguments are regularly settled by comparing whether one of the teams under discussion beat the other.

So I’m introducing what I call the line-of-sight rankings, to bring if not objectivity, at least consistency to the criteria we already use to argue about college football. Every team is situated below all the teams it lost to and above all the teams it beat. Obviously, there will be contradictions in the rankings, and in those cases we’ll have to throw out some games. We’ll determine what games to throw out in this order:

  • If two or more different contradictions can be resolved by throwing out a single game, throw out that game. Throw out the game that resolves the most contradictions, except that if a game is the most recent game for at least one team, it is considered to resolve one fewer contradiction than it actually does.
  • Otherwise, always eliminate home-team victories before neutral-site games, and neutral-site games before road-team victories.
  • Among games of similar siting, for every full 10 points of the margin of victory, add one to the week number. Then eliminate the game with the lowest week number, but do not eliminate a team’s most recent game. In event of a tie, eliminate the game with the smaller margin of victory. If there is still a tie, add the total number of losses for the winning team to the total number of wins by the losing team, and eliminate the game where that number is higher. If there is still a tie, remove the prohibition on eliminating a team’s most recent game, and if that does not help, subtract the losing team’s C Rating from the winning team’s C Rating, and eliminate the game where that number is lower.

Because every team doesn’t play every other team in college football, there will still be ambiguity in the rankings. If a team’s worst relevant loss is to the team, and their best relevant win is to the team, where between those two numbers is the team itself ranked? I settle these situations as follows:

  • If there is a “pod” of only one team as described above, including undefeated teams, rank the team directly ahead of the best team beaten in a relevant win. Winless teams are ranked directly behind their worst relevant loss. The team in question will have the rank of their worst relevant loss in parenthesis or, if undefeated in relevant games but not , have their entry boldfaced.
  • If there are two or more “pods” of multiple teams each that can be ranked a certain way between any two teams (or at the top or bottom of the rankings), or if there are two individual teams that can be ranked between another two teams but whose ranking vis-a-vis one another is unclear, break them up and rank them separately, within their own pods. Each team’s rank is listed as their best possible ranking except at the top of the rankings, when it is their worst possible ranking. In the case of the individual teams, they are listed as tied and in C Rating order unless one has a lineal title.

I’ll whip out the first rankings Week 3, when they become meaningful, and we’ll see how they play themselves out over the course of the season, and how much work they add to my already heavy workload.

Sports graphics: Baseball, ESPN, Golf, and other things

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Getting this out of the way before the NFL preseason starts in earnest:

A new element is all the rage in baseball graphics, pioneered by YES Network, with NESN changing its graphics shortly into the season to accommodate it, and starting to make appearances on ESPN. If the experiences of YES and NESN are any indication, this new element will effectively force already-crowded banners to become two-line boxes to squeeze it in. (How many banners are left on baseball coverage beyond Comcast SportsNet?)

I’m referring to the pitch count meter. The general trend seems to be to make the pitch count meter share space with wherever the speed of each pitch appears. YES and NESN have put the score and places of runners on the top line, and nothing else, with everything else going on the bottom line…

…while ESPN has put both elements in the same space as the positions of the runners on base. The pitch speed is displayed first for longer than normal, followed by the pitch count for a shorter period.

Incidentally, the design of YES and NESN’s boxes seems to suggest that Fox may want to consider a version of my original baseball two-line box idea. If Fox wanted to impose pitch count on its current two-line box, it would have to adopt an approach similar to ESPN’s and display both pitch speed and pitch count in the same space as the count and number of outs. (Incidentially, did anyone notice the red-white-and-blue theme all Fox and FSN graphics adopted for the positions of runners on base for July 4th weekend and reprised for the All-Star Game?)

In other baseball graphics news, MASN joins the box bandwagon, while SportsTime Ohio, whose graphics I’ve mocked in the past, creates a graphic easily mistaken for ESPN’s (using the same font and the same color down the sides of the team abbreviations seen in ESPN’s other new graphics) and may have outdone them in the process. The graphic still inexplicably disappears when not showing the pitcher-batter confrontation, and not displaying “MPH” on the pitch speed is jarring, but at least it doesn’t show a team logo when no one is on base for no reason anymore.

I get the sense that ESPN’s graphics for non-SportsCenter studio shows, which have been seen on “Winner’s Bracket”, “Baseball Tonight”, “The Decision”, and during ESPN’s World Cup coverage, were designed after the SportsCenter graphics and possibly following a change of priorities. Especially when a headline is shown at the bottom of the screen, the somewhat robotic look actually looks spiffier than SportsCenter, despite the latter supposedly being the flagship show. In addition, the graphics, especially the colors, look too specific and may have been designed for color symmetry with the World Cup world feed in mind; it’ll work for most sports, and worked really well during the World Cup, but it’s not meshing well at all on Baseball Tonight. BBTN could have done well to adopt the sport-specific look now seen on NFL Live and College Football Live; time will tell if that look survives the transition to the new graphics (though college football probably wouldn’t suffer from a full transition to them).

I much preferred ESPN’s actual World Cup score graphic to those on Univision and CBC, especially since ESPN didn’t try and fail to ape the world feed’s other graphics. But as the World Cup went along, ESPN first put up a display of team jerseys on the screen whenever it could, and then incorporated them into the graphic itself, at the expense of consistency with the world feed graphics. Had ESPN been thinking ahead, it could have added jersey colors in a way that created more flow, such as in a line underneath the team abbreviations.

During the World Cup, I noticed that ESPNews had dropped its larger BottomLine in favor of a BottomLine more like those in place on other ESPN networks. I haven’t been keeping up on my feeds so I don’t know if this has already gone through the sports media blogosphere (although SportsCenter will be expanding its presence on the News soon), but it seems odd that ESPNews is still using its old graphics, especially since they spill off the edges of the screen in SD. Might a change to get closer to ESPN’s other graphics be in the works?

If the graphics ESPN had during the British Open are its new golf graphics, they weren’t in place for the US Senior Open. They’re not dissimilar to graphics ESPN has sometimes added to other networks’ golf highlights during SportsCenter, and while they show the level of customization available across sports (even with changes in colors), they definitely reflect ESPN’s new graphic style… when displaying the leaderboard and studio personnel. I’d prefer the player-name-crammed-to-the-side style used in other sports than what ESPN actually used when showing player stats, involving the player name across the top in a jarringly different large Arial font. Look at the bottom video and tell me the front nine and back nine scores couldn’t have been shown consecutively – wasn’t the point of the new format to avoid taking up too much space? Even the World Series of Poker is using the name-crammed-to-the-side style!


Augusta National finally entered the 21st century, and adopted graphics for the Masters more like CBS’ current graphics for other golf tournaments, while still looking unique.

Versus’ new IndyCar graphics are a downgrade, and look too much like ESPN’s new motorsports graphics – complete with displaying time behind the leader on the same line as the name of each driver! On the plus side, shortly after (or maybe even before) my last roundup Versus did indeed shake up its other graphics – they’ve gone from aping old ESPN graphics to old Fox graphics, but it’s a start!

Finally, NBC… what are you doing, man?!? After how much I praised how you managed to get timeout indicators to mesh with the rest of your graphic, you go and adopt these bulky white things at the Hall of Fame Game.

Why replay wouldn’t have fixed the controversial foul ball call in Thursday’s Phillies-Marlins game

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Bob Davidson’s controversial call in Thursday’s Phillies-Marlins game, depriving the Marlins of the potential game-winning run, has sparked yet another round of calls for baseball to adopt instant replay, even among Phillies fans… except there was nothing replay could have done in this instance, and not just because there wasn’t a camera in proper position to make absolutely certain that, just because the ball bounced fair before the bag and fair after the bag, that necessarily meant it was fair as it crossed the bag.

Once the ball is called foul, the play is dead. The fielders stop going for the ball, the runners stop running the bases, and you can’t make assumptions about what might or might not have happened had the play continued. Yes, the runner on second probably would have scored, but how can you say that for certain? What if there would have been a play at the plate? Every sport with replay has this same problem (think when a completed pass is called incomplete); at best, you could do with tennis does and say the pitch doesn’t count, taking away a strike if there weren’t two strikes already.

There was a similar play in last year’s postseason where a fair ball (more indisputably fair than in this instance) was called foul. But in that case, the ball bounced into the stands for a ground-rule double, making it fairly straightforward to determine the outcome of the play – similar to how baseball currently determines whether a home run was fair or foul. You can’t use replay in circumstances where the actions of the players would determine the outcome of the play if it hadn’t ended.We all want baseball to get with the 21st century and adopt replay, but let’s not get too carried away.

As the Realignment Turns

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I’ve stayed out of the ongoing talk of conference realignment in college football, in part because there wasn’t really anything concrete to talk about and anything could happen, and in part because of what I’ve had to deal with in my own life. But there is something concrete now, with Colorado joining the Pac-10, Nebraska joining the Big 10, Boise State joining the Mountain West, and apparently, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State all jumping ship to the Pac-10.

I have to say, I was surprised when I heard this last rumor. The Pac-10 seemed to be the most likely candidate not to expand at all; it’s quite possibly the most tight-knit group in college sports, any expansion would require a unanimous vote (so if one school had a problem with a potential addition it could scuttle the whole deal), and right now it’s neatly organized into five natural geographic rivalries. (This proposed expansion actually comes pretty close to preserving those geographic rivalries; the only inconsistency is in the Texas schools and Colorado, and even that can be divided into Texas/Texas A&M and Texas Tech/Colorado.) 16 teams is an unwieldy size for a conference, as the non-football Big East has shown, and as demonstrated by the convoluted “pod” systems proposed for a 16-team Big 10. And taking a whole bunch of teams from a single conference can result in those schools forming cliques. I could easily see the “original” 10 becoming the equivalent of the old Big 8 schools vis-a-vis the newcomers from the Southwest Conference, er, Big 12.

I knew the Pac-10 had interest in Texas – any conference would, and Texas had come calling when the old Southwest Conference broke up – but I didn’t anticipate them gobbling up basically the entire Big 12 South. This tells me one of two things:

  • The Pac-10 is deliberately destroying the Big 12 to erase competition when the TV contracts come up for renewal next year.
  • The Pac-10 wanted Texas, but was told they needed to bring along Texas A&M and Texas Tech as well. (Recall that when Texas finally joined the Big 12, Texas politicians forced the Big 12 to take Texas Tech and Baylor over the objections of basically everyone else.) They then added Oklahoma and Oklahoma State for the hell of it and/or to preserve the Red River Rivalry.

If the latter of these is true, that suggests the price for adding Texas may have been too much for the Big 10 to take – they were willing to add Texas, but not Texas A&M and Texas Tech as well (and Oklahoma and Oklahoma State would have been a non-starter, especially if the Big Ten still wanted to add Notre Dame). Otherwise, for Texas to pass up the Big Ten would seem to suggest that the proposed Texas Longhorns Sports Network would make so much money it’s a better bet than having to split the gerbonkers money from the Big Ten Network. Nebraska would probably be the Big Ten’s third choice for expansion behind Notre Dame and Texas in some order, bringing a fantastic football program, a great volleyball program, but not much else and a small immediate market (though it will help the BTN in other areas); certainly the Big Ten won’t take kindly to the Pac-10 stealing their thunder, and they won’t just sit idly by and let the Pac-10 steal their 16-team idea.

Regardless, if all this happens as planned, the remaining pieces fall into place rather easily. Start with the “orphaned” members of the Big 12: Iowa State, the Kansas schools, Missouri, and Baylor. They would like to think the Big 10 would swoop in and save four of them, but Iowa State and Baylor in particular are weak links (despite Baylor’s basketball program and the potential of Iowa State-Iowa being an intraconference rivalry), and the Big 10 isn’t particularly interested in grabbing a bunch of schools just because they’re available. The Big 10 is primarily concerned with the New York City market and Notre Dame. The Big 10 could take Missouri just to have a lockdown on the St. Louis market, but after that they’re more likely to take Syracuse and Rutgers (possibly Pitt instead of Syracuse) and stop, and wait for that selection to cause the Big East to implode. At which point Notre Dame will come calling, the non-football schools will form their own conference, and six more schools end up orphaned.

Baylor I see going to Conference USA, the Kansas schools could bolt to the Mountain West and give that conference a championship game, and Iowa State could be stuck with the MAC. As for the Big East orphans, I see them getting split by the SEC and ACC. That would leave those two conferences with 15 schools each, one short of the Pac-16 and Big 16. I could see the SEC taking TCU and Memphis, giving it Memphis’ superlative basketball program and an inroad into the lucrative Texas market. The Mountain West could then replace TCU with (say) Nevada. The WAC then nabs a Conference USA team to keep the band together and give Louisiana Tech something resembling a playing partner, offsetting the addition of Baylor (or alternately, just nabs North Texas while C-USA nabs Troy). The former Big East non-football schools probably raid schools like Xavier from the A-10.

One thing to note is that the SEC could come out the big loser in this scenario. Last year the SEC signed contracts with CBS and ESPN that netted them billions of dollars and all sorts of concessions from ESPN – “SEC on ESPN” branding, an “SEC Weekly” show on ESPNU, and so forth – that the SEC thought made forming their own network unnecessary. Now, however, the Pac-10 is positioning itself to maximize value for its own new network, meaning if the ACC doesn’t do the same (and with its contract up right now, it’s entirely possible it won’t), the SEC will be committed to 15 years without its own network. The Big 10 isn’t lacking for games on ESPN, and the BTN’s distribution problems, part of the reason the SEC went to ESPN, have started to fade, so for the money sports the SEC may be at a significant exposure disadvantage, even with its syndicated games being beamed far and wide. I doubt most people in the SEC would prefer to add TCU, Memphis, and (say) Louisville and South Florida to wind up potentially losing much of its football advantage.

However, I do not see this becoming the new status quo in college football into perpetuity, for two reasons:

  • In theory, this creates four superconferences of 16 teams each, so organizing a playoff should be simple: just take the champions of each conference. You could even preserve the Rose Bowl as a semifinal, with an ACC-SEC Sugar or Orange bowl in the other semifinal. Easy, right? Well… except you still have a very strong Mountain West with Utah, BYU, arguably Air Force, Boise State, and most tellingly, the sometimes-good Kansas schools. That’s a coalition strong enough to mount a serious antitrust challenge to any playoff that exclusive, even if it becomes the only relevant non-BCS conference. We’d probably still end up stuck with some sort of imperfect BCS compromise as a result.
  • As mentioned, 16 is an unwieldy size for a college football conference, and could easily result in the formation of cliques. I’ve already mentioned how the Pac-10 will become the “old” Pac-10 and six Big 12 “interlopers” with only the Arizona schools and Colorado forming a narrow bridge between them. The ACC could have it even worse by taking on four Big East schools, which could join with the schools the ACC raided from the Big East a decade ago, especially Boston College, to butt heads with the conference’s Tobacco Road base. As these new TV contracts come up for renewal, people’s TV watching habits may change again, with the Internet becoming the new means for most people to watch sports. The result could be another conference shake-up in a decade’s time that could even result in some conference shrinking, including the ACC splitting in two and some of the Big 12 renegades seceding from the Pac-10 to join some of the better Mountain West teams in a pseudo-Big 12 revival.

However… there are now rumors swirling that Texas A&M is more interested in joining the SEC than the Pac-10. Certainly the SEC would prefer to add A&M, the second-most storied program in the state despite its recent hard times, than TCU, but I’m not buying this story because I’m thinking wherever Texas goes, A&M will follow (from what I’ve read there is no love lost between Texas and the SEC, so that’s out), though if they can maintain their rivalry as a nonconference game more power to them. If A&M does go to the SEC, the Pac-10 could add Utah; I’ve never been a fan of the Colorado-Utah route to the Pac-12, mostly because it doesn’t preserve those natural geographic rivalries, but in this case adding one fewer Big 12 team could help prevent the forming of cliques and Utah is geographically situated to help bolster the bridge between the two parts of the conference. However, there’s also a chance that the defection of A&M could completely undermine the package deal bringing the Big 12 South to the Pac-10, rendering everything unpredictable yet again. Texas to the Big 10 might not be dead yet; the Big East may be offering Notre Dame as a sacrificial lamb to salvage the rest of the conference (“just take Missouri and/or Texas rather than Syracuse or Rutgers!”). Stay tuned.

(If that blog post comes to fruition – and given how conveniently it matches its author’s opinions and hopes I’m skeptical, and even its author only gives it a 24% chance of happening – the Big 12 probably isn’t dead but instead raids the Mountain West of BYU, TCU, Air Force, and maybe New Mexico, leaving Boise State really wishing it hadn’t committed to the Mountain West so soon…)

Belated Notes on the NCAA Tournament’s New Contract

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I know my already slow posting pace has become even slower recently. The reasons for that will come out in due time. But I did want to make some notes on the NCAA Tournament signing a new long-term deal with CBS and Turner a few weeks back, and the tournament expanding, for the moment, to only 68 teams. That’s a relief… for now.

Early round games will be broadcast on CBS, TBS, TNT, and… truTV? All of the proposed bidders had fourth channels that weren’t going to be as good as the others; ESPN had the best package with ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, and ESPN Classic in a pinch or if ESPN was really committed to killing sports on ABC – although given the justification for not putting games on CBS College Sports, ABC Family would have been more likely than Classic or the U (although ESPN apparently didn’t think the U’s limited distribution was a factor). (Fox had FX, Fox Sports Net, and… Fox News? Fox Soccer Channel, in a pinch? Alternately, the Fox College Sports channels? Comcast/NBC had Versus, Universal Sports, and… Comcast SportsNet, or CNBC, or MSNBC?) But CBS and Turner could have used CBS College Sports and even if it didn’t reach as many people, at least it would have fit (and helped further distribution for the network). Heck, they could have even dipped into their existing team-up for the CW, though I don’t know how healthy that network is at the moment.

(Although ESPN had the best package of networks, I wouldn’t be surprised if the biggest call for a 96-team field came from their corner, and that this demand helped kill their chances. ESPN is really crowded with sports events on its schedule; among other things, on the first weekend of the tournament the Nationwide Series race would likely have to be pushed back to 11 AM ET or earlier to accommodate both men’s and women’s tournaments. The major obstacles, especially for ESPNU, are the wrestling championships, which could be moved to another weekend, and the NIT, especially the second round. I wouldn’t be surprised if ESPN wanted to kill the NIT to free up space for tournament games, even if those games would need to be replaced in the main tournament. For the same reason, unless the NIT died I can’t see ESPN not putting first round games on ABC, as it needs one-channel wiggle room and games aren’t being put on the News, and if that’s the case I can’t see them not putting the rest of the tournament on ABC either. Except…)

Needless to say I’m not pleased with CBS and Turner alternating coverage of the Final Four. I had a problem with one LCS being on broadcast and one not, and I have a problem with the Final Four only being on broadcast in alternate years, which doesn’t even make sense to me, unless Turner wanted some Final Fours if it was going to get in to the early rounds. And it was one thing for ABC (and NBC, and CBS) to show regular season college football but for the National Championship to be on cable, but it’s quite another for CBS to show early rounds of the NCAA Tournament but for the championship to be on cable.

But more than that is the problem I have with the Final Four and national championship moving to cable at all. It’s a trend following on from the move of the BCS to ESPN, and the parties involved don’t see any pushback because TBS is nationally available, but this would set a really bad precedent. I don’t know this for certain, but unlike the BCS, the NCAA is a legitimate sanctioning body, and if Congress allowed this to stand it would likely open the floodgates for any championship, right up to the World Series and Super Bowl, to move to cable, and sports to all but abandon broadcast. ESPN may not like losing the tournament but they have to be salivating for Turner to win the argument. It might actually help an ESPN competitor like Versus to have more high-rated sporting events available, but if none takes advantage this would effectively give ESPN a monopoly on all of sports, with a few scraps left for Turner.

It’s interesting, though, that this alternation only starts in 2016 – after ESPN’s current BCS contract ends. Is this a sign that if the sports landscape becomes more broadcast-friendly, CBS might take the Elite Eight and Final Four back? Or that CBS and Turner might be hoping that by 2016, cable will have advanced to the point that a Congress that was reluctant now might be more forgiving? Or that the TV landscape will go all to hell, everyone will be watching on the Internet anyway, and it’ll be a non-issue? If being on CBS will “bring more ratings in the early years”, why not the later ones?

Will Turner start showing regular-season college basketball games? Will this be the end of staggered start times? I imagine the play-in games will move to Turner as well?

The NCAA Tournament “will have one look, but there will be separate branding” – so much for my hopes of Turner adopting consistent graphics across all sports, and on the other hand, is CBS planning on another graphics shake-up? Was the new graphics on the NFL last year a preview of further changes? Will CBS and Turner have different studio teams, and will there be one, two, or four studio teams?

I’m seeing several different theories as to why ESPN lost. One theory is that they’re saving up for an Olympic bid, but another is that ESPN is starting a new conservative bidding strategy as a result of increased interest from Disney bosses. That would mean a conservative Olympic bid as well, as well as a real opening for an ESPN competitor to swoop in.

Oh, and quit whining about Dick Vitale not being able to call a Final Four; I doubt ABC would be willing to put that sort of bombast to such a large and diverse audience on broadcast. He would have called the first two rounds only, since CBS’ B, C, and D color commentators already work for ESPN (though he might have bumped out Bill Raftery for the C spot – ESPN would face revolt if they didn’t hire Gus Johnson and there’s a reason CBS never paired him and Raft, so Dickie V wouldn’t have bumped out Len Elmore). I would have expected Brent Musberger, Bob Knight, and maybe Jay Bilas calling the Final Four – I know Knight is bombastic himself, but think of him as the new Billy Packer. I could see the other Sweet 16/Elite Eight teams being Brad Nessler/Jay Bilas, Sean McDonough/Bill Raftery, and Gus Johnson/Len Elmore, with Mike Patrick/Dick Vitale, Dave O’Brien/Steve Lavin, Mike Tirico/Hubie Brown, and Mike Breen/Mark Jackson/Jeff Van Gundy rounding out the first two round teams, with John Saunders, Hubert Davis, and Digger Phelps manning the studio.

On CBS and Turner, if I were to guess what they’ll do, is take the present teams, remove Dick Enberg who’s done with CBS apparently, add Marv Albert/Reggie Miller (and demote either Jay Bilas or Bill Raftery to the first two rounds only, with Verne Lundquist and either Bilas or Raft becoming the new B team, and Johnson/Elmore rounding out the Sweet 16/Elite Eight teams) and replace Dan Bonner with Doug Collins as Kevin Harlan’s partner for NBA synergy (as with my last two ESPN teams), throw out the Spero Dedes/Bob Wenzel team, and replace Mike Gminski as Tim Brando’s partner with Dan Bonner, Bilas, or Raftery, with the remainder going to Dick Stockton. (After Brando’s infamous performance one or two years ago when he lucked into a Gus Johnson situation and throughly blew it, I wouldn’t be surprised if CBS/Turner kept Dedes instead of Brando. I know the blogosphere hates Stockton, but he works TNT NBA games in the playoffs and is a big name.) Ian Eagle stays only because he already does some NBA playoff work for TNT; he’d be the first to go if it weren’t for that. You’re left with Nantz/Kellogg, Lundquist/Bilas, Albert/Miller, Johnson/Elmore, Harlan/Collins, Stockton/Raftery, Eagle/Spanarkel, Brando/Bonner (I could leave Spanarkel, Wenzel, or Gminski with Brando with Eagle getting Bonner, Bilas, or Raft).

Blogging the Lesser Tournaments V: The Championships Before the Championship

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Richmond, VA, Monday: Saint Louis had a 13-12 lead with about eight minutes left in the first half, but then Virginia Commonwealth hit three straight three-pointers and didn’t look back. The Rams had the lead 36-25 at the half, but the Billikens managed to cut the deficit to three in the first five minutes of the second. Then Virginia Commonwealth basically iced the game with a 14-4 run spearheaded by Joey Rodriguez, taking the first game of the CBI Championship Series. Saint Louis 56, Virginia Commonwealth 68.

New York, NY, Tuesday: What could be the last NIT semifinals had two games worthy of the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Dayton led 34-30 at the half and pushed it to 64-58 with three minutes left on technical free throws before Ole Miss started to come back, cutting the deficit to 64-62 with 64 seconds left. With 35.8 seconds left, Murphy Holloway went to the line with a chance to tie, but bricked the second free throw; London Warren hit one of two with 23.7 seconds left to put the lead back at two; Trevor Gaskins missed a layup, and Chris Johnson hit two free throws to make it a two-possession game with 11 seconds left; Warren knocked the ball out of bounds on the ensuing Rebel possession, and Johnson stole the inbounds pass, knocking down one of two free throws to send Dayton to the championship game, hoping to send a message after a disappointing season. Dayton 68, Mississippi 63.

Meanwhile, North Carolina is the NIT’s Butler, and might not have been that far off from Butler’s seed. But it certainly took them everything they had to knock off Rhode Island. The score was knotted 30-30 at halftime, and after Rhode Island took a 59-54 lead with 1:47 to play, UNC scored the next five points to knot it at 59-59. URI’s Delroy James whiffed on two free throws with 28.6 seconds left in regulation, and Larry Drew let the clock run down to six seconds before taking an ill-advised shot. Late in the extra session with UNC leading 68-67, Drew forced up a shot with five seconds left, beating the shot clock buzzer. Lamonte Ulmer picked up the rebound but lost control before getting off a shot before the buzzer sounded, leading Rhode Island coach Jim Baron to suggest a foul should have been called. North Carolina 68, Rhode Island 67 (OT).

Springfield, MO, Tuesday: Pacific led 35-29 after one and 50-44 with 11 minutes left, but Missouri State went on an 11-0 run in the next two minutes, taking a 55-50 lead. From there it was simply protecting it. Pacific went on a 5-2 run in the two minutes after that, but Missouri State locked down the game for good with a 12-4 run over the next five minutes, leading 69-59 with 2:19 to play. Pacific’s second half play was plagued by turnovers and fouls as five Bears scored in double figures, including 16 points from Caleb Patterson, who had played a total of 27 minutes the rest of the tournament. Pacific 65, Missouri State 78.

St. Louis, MO, Wednesday: Saint Louis scored the first nine points and overcame a 20-16 deficit to lead 33-24 at the break, but a high-scoring second half saw the game tied at 61 with 3:04 to play. From there, the Billikens’ youth caught up to them, as Virginia Commonwealth went on a 10-4 run to become the first team to sweep the CBI Championship Series. Virginia Commonwealth 71, Saint Louis 65.

New York, NY, Thursday: Could the NIT final – possibly the last game in NIT history – provide as much excitement as the semis? Dayton led 45-32 at the break, but North Carolina played them tight in the second half, starting on a 12-1 run in the first three and a half minutes before Dayton recovered. Marcus Ginyard missed a potential game-tying layup, leading to a Paul Williams 3 that put Dayton up 62-57 with 7:46 to play. UNC managed to cut the deficit to 67-63 with 3:37 left, but Chris Johnson hit a 3 and a dunk that put the Flyers up 72-63 with 2:50 left. North Carolina cut the deficit to 68-73 with 1:14 to play, but wouldn’t score the rest of the way. North Carolina 68, Dayton 79.

Congratulations to Missouri State, Virginia Commonwealth, and Dayton. Had North Carolina won, the season might end with UNC and Duke each holding postseason titles. Instead, mid-majors could hold all four postseason titles. That’s the norm for three of the four, but Butler’s trying to do something that hasn’t been done since UNLV two decades ago.

The 2010 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, five conferences produced multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament: the MWC, West Coast, A-10, WAC, and C-USA. These conferences are guaranteed one spot each in the Mid-Major Conference.

Three teams reached the Sweet 16, all from different conferences. Of these, Northern Iowa, Cornell, and Butler did not come from a multi-bid conference, while Xavier and St. Mary’s did. From the Mountain West Conference, two teams won their first round game while the other two did not; from the WAC and C-USA, neither team from neither conference won their first round game. New Mexico and BYU both lost in the semifinals of the conference tournament, but New Mexico swept the season series; Utah State split the series with New Mexico State before losing to them in the WAC tournament; ditto for UTEP and Houston before Houston beat them in the conference tournament.

This leaves no spots in the MMC to be determined by my discretion. However, an honorable mention should be given to Washington. The Pac-10 played like a mid-major this year, and Washington would be the conference’s qualifying member if it was considered one, since it made the Sweet 16.

Without further ado, the eight members of the 2010 Mid-Major Conference:

Butler (Horizon League)
St. Mary’s (West Coast Conference)
Xavier (Atlantic 10)
Northern Iowa (Missouri Valley Conference)
Cornell (Ivy League)
New Mexico (Mountain West Conference)
New Mexico State (Western Athletic Conference)
Houston (Conference USA)

Of note: This is the first time in the history of the MMC that Gonzaga and Memphis have not been members. The Mid-Major Conference committee (=me) will meet later this year to determine if modifications to the mid-major conference criteria need to be made if the NCAA tournament expands to 96 teams.