The death of college sports as we know it
I have such mixed feelings with college sports. On one hand, many people see them as a way out of poverty and communities where academics are severely underfunded and opportunities are few. And then you have the exploitation that comes with the system and how the athlete aren't paid even though their coaches make as much as the pros do, sometimes more.
In like a dozen states the highest paid public employee is the college football coach
Yeah, it's a bit of a mixed bag at best. Even with the new Name, Imaging, and License deals, most athletes remain unpaid or severely underpaid with a few exceptions. The only reason I follow college sports is that until recently, it was the closest thing to Association Football in the US. The impassioned fans, decades of tradition (some good, some bad), sometimes just strait out brawling on and off the field. But now it is finally being destroyed in favor of bigger media markets and TV deals. College sports was the last resort of quality sports for reasonable ticket prices. Stadiums and arenas were designed to fit as many cheap seats as possible, now it's being replaced by luxury seating for university donors. Personally I think the increased commercialization of college sports will be it's death. How many G league games do most basketball fans watch? Not many. The increased commercialization of college sports will, in time, make them more like minor leagues than their own separate things that made them popular in the first place.
I think congress has the legal authority to do something about this, since college football playing on Saturdays in the USA is part of some law or antitrust agreement, like how the NFL can't play regular season games on Fridays or Sundays. The Friday night thing is infuriating to me, they'd rather people not watch football on Friday nights to get more fans into fucking high school football.
Not that they would actually do it, but I could see a law passed or hearings held to throw a bone to fans instead of passing meaningful legislation, to force all these teams into conferences so the teams could travel via bus instead of private planes. These conferences used to be based on proximity to each other, now they're based on TV markets so Big 10 Network can demand more money or the conference can demand more from the other networks for TV deals.
Also lol at UCLA doing this, a state school in superlib California, doesn't give a shit about their fans. Usc is private I believe, but ucla has some form of public oversight by a board, which I now realize is probably made up of ghouls.
what's the economics behind this? were SC/UCLA floating less lucrative programs?
reddit college footballers seem pretty distressed that this portends the end of college football (or, the the beginning of the end of what they like about college football, which is the local rivalries/ storied traditions or w/e).
Yeah. SC and Oregon are the only real moneymakers in the PAC, and it's SC over Oregon by a mile. LA does numbers with basketball.
Previous commissioner of the PAC basically ran the conference's TV rights into the ground. Spun up their own network and couldn't get anybody to pay for it except DirectTV I think. And of course all the SC games people actually wanted to watch were on actual networks so it just made it shitty and expensive for fans of the rest of the teams to watch their games (so we just watch bootlegs obviously).
And this whole time he insisted on having conference HQ in SF, literally the most expensive city in the country.
Anyway this whole thing sucks to me, a Cal fan. Our successful-but-not-lucrative sports teams are going to eat shit for this. We almost had to get rid of the men's baseball team a few years back, and before that we almost eliminated literally the winningest men's team in college rugby.
