thesentinel
Recruit
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2013
- Messages
- 101
The B10 has already admitted that that was a mistake ... they took Rutgers "based on proximity to a huge market" but now with the media partners involved ... the REALIZATION is that "viewer draw" is the critical metric. Nobody in that huge "Rutgers market" watches Rutgers / B10 football. Huge fail. The new "baseline metric" is the potential to draw a MINIMUM of 4 million viewers for games vs decent opponents. Miami drew 4.02 viewers for a 3:30 game against A&M. Prime time games between top 10-15 ranked programs will draw 6-8 million. UM fits the profile and just needs to keep winning.
It wasn't a mistake. The way their contract works for the B10 network is heavily based on carriage fees. They managed to put the squeeze on cable carriers for households within b1g school markets. I don't know if they can still do that going forward, but it would make many of their decisions make sense. They want maximum coast to coast cable subscribers, regardless of who watches. The opposite is the SEC going for non-stop premium matchups to just get raw eyeball totals.
I used to think that and agree that they shouldn't be but I'm not so sure now.
I think there actually could be some prisoner of the moment groupthink at play and things could be definitely fluid.
FSU has one good year last year and all of a sudden they're one of the belles of the ball?
Stanford has 3 or 4 consecutive down seasons after about a decade of a averaging double digit win seasons and being part of probably the most successful overall athletic department in the country but now have to beg their way into a dying ACC?
UVag has been mentioned repeatedly as a possible B1G addition. If they finish this year with like one win and in last place in the ACC, do we really think their stock won't be heavily damaged if addl realignment is imminent?
Actual quality of product doesn't matter. FSU has an enormous fanbase and almost 50k students. They mint 10k alumni+ a year, most of whom are americans who care about football. Stanford has 15k total students, most of whom are people who don't give a **** about football.