The one thing I trust no matter what happens is Pollard's ability to maximize the effectiveness of our budget. The guy has shown repeatedly that he can get $75M worth of results on a $50M budget.
Realignment Megathread (All The Moves)
- Thread starter ISUcyclones11
- Start date
Amd UNC is BY FAR the favorite team in the State! UNC would be a GREAT grab for any conference.
As long as our conference is playing for CFP and March Madness bids and the B1G/SEC haven’t just separated on those, we will be in the big time in my view even if those schools are pulling in $50 or $60 million more than us.
Nice sentiment. That would just be to much disparity over the long haul to be anything but an occasional Cinderella team.
Any school in CFP outside the normal 5-10 is already a Cinderella.
College football has never had worse parity.
Iowa State has never won a natty and never come particularly close. If that’s essential for you, then the last 100+ years have been a sham.
Competing for the same CFP berths as Alabama etc. is enough. If our league has no shot of making the CFP, we are the Sun Belt or the MAC. Until then we’re at the big boy table.
I'd believe anything in realignment at this point. If the SEC wanted to to plant a flag in "Big 10 country" there are pretty limited options. Iowa State would be one of them.
If that happens, I will consider my work done! Born and raised in Birmingham as an Alabama fan, and my first Iowa State football game was the 1978 Hall of Fame Classic @ Legion Field. 'Twould be something indeed!
I don't think Oregon is in the Big10's top 2 among remaining Pac12 schools.
With Big10 expansion over the last decade we have seen that market size matters as the BTN (Fox) can charge in-market carriage fees. Cal or Stanford bring the San Fran market (6th largest DMA), which is more valuable than adding Portland (#21).
Also if there are any legs to Newsom's complaint about UCLA going to Big10, adding Cal would eliminate that issue. If the Big10 can add Rutgers, it will bend over backwards to add Cal.
I had also read an article that the Big10 may be able to collect a higher in-market carriage fee if they are the dominate conference in both LA & SF. Might also be able to extend that higher carriage fee to SD DMA.
Don't overlook BC to the Big10. Especially if ND is added.
Boston is the 10th largest TV market, that is a cash gravy train for the BTN. The Big10 would have the the NE metros cornered: DC, Philly, NY and Boston. Add Chicago, LA & SF and the Big10 would have a school/presence in 7 of 10 top DMA's.
College football is an absolute afterthought in Boston. The only college sport that gets much interest or coverage in New England is hockey. Barely anyone cares about college football. Useless market to lock up.
Same could be said for NY and NJ regarding Rutgers.
The Big10 is different with the BTN. They can charge a substantially higher fee to cable & streaming companies to carry BTN in-market. So it doesn't matter if BC is good on the field. It doesn't matter if people care. All that matters is BTN is included in the base cable/streaming package and the Big10 automatically gets more money in Boston.
He does have a point though, with the way the BTN works. Which is why Rutgers and Maryland are money makers for them even though they are horrible, and get horrible viewership.
They still get carrying fees for all those cable subs. With streaming thats started changing some now though. But there still are a lot of cable subs.
I thought Fox was able to lever in the BTN as a rider for the YES (Yankees) network.
Regardless, the BTN is already (sadly) in New England so it wouldn’t be an expansion of subs anyway.
A decade later nearly everyone associated with the Big 10 regrets adding Rutgers and Maryland - they just won't admit it because they can't. And for the record, do you know why Rutgers "works"? Because FOX owns YES, and they tied the availability of YES to the acceptance of BTN. If FOX couldn't do that there's not a single other way they could have forced BTN onto a primary tier. I really doubt the Red Sox have that same kind of situation - NESN isn't tied to FOX like YES is.
And at least some people care about Rutgers and Maryland. Nobody cares about Boston College. And it's not the "Miami 'nobody cares'" where they still have the nationwide cult following carried over from the 1980s and 90s where people pretend to be Hurricane fans because it's the "cool thing to do", it's the legitimately nobody cares about Boston College.
The only reason why BTN works in New York is because they blackmailed cable subscribers by tying BTN to YES - if viewers didn't pay for YES on 1st tier, they would lose access to YES. People in NY literally pay to not watch BTN because otherwise they couldn't watch the Yankees.
FOX cannot do the same thing in Boston - NESN isn't associated with FOX, so they can't blackmail the subscribers in the same way.