That’ll teach them to go up against a Punky Brewster marathon again.
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Here’s the issue. You have over 25% of Alabama’s commits are 5-star prospects and 85% are 4-star or better.
You can basically look at this screen-shot and line it up with all the playoff teams.
The whole targeting thing was a turnoff for me. You can even hit anymore. Everything becoming soft and fem
I understand you might break some hearts…but if your dream school doesn’t put you at the top of their recruiting then you go play somewhere else. You can’t tell me every kid that goes to Alabama is because it’s their dream school to play at (other than they play for National Championships every year and put more guys in the NFL than everyone else).
Everyone knows life isn’t fair and you don’t always get what you want.
I wonder what the numbers would have been were it on ABC instead of cable.
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Interesting! I haven’t been w/o cable in so long. I believe you need some device just to get basic TV right? I suspect a lot of folks still can’t afford cable.
LOL, it’s called cord-cutting and it’s a thing. There’s enough streaming content out there that cable is falling out of favor. Plus, most folks can pull in Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC and PBS and all of their substations with a regular antenna that you really don’t miss much. (Except Monday night football and a bunch of college games including the national championship).
It’s not about fair, it’s just such a nonsense idea that could only be made by someone who doesn’t follow college recruiting. 4 and 5 stars don’t mean anything in themselves. It’s just a ranking that someone came up with so they can market recruiting to the masses. So you are going to use a marketing gimmick to determine where kids can play? The whole idea has no basis in reality, especially when we are moving in the direction of giving the players more power.
There never has been parity in college sports and there never will be. Some things can be done to even it a little, but until Saban retires, we are stuck with Alabama football.
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I cut my time short once it became clear we were watching yet another hellacious Alabama beat down of some poor overmatched kids. Not even my contempt for Ohio State could make that watchable. I might not like them, but I’m not a sadist.
The consensus on this board seems to want to punish successful programs and limit where kids can choose to go to college. There is not way to fix things without adopting a socialist model for college football.
I rarely watch college football because I know Alabama, Clemson, OSU, and Oklahoma are the big 4 teams nearly every year. The Sooners probably should have been in the playoffs this year instead of Notre Dame. The only other program that can really challenge the big 4 on an annual basis is Georgia and they usually shoot themselves in the foot against Alabama in the SEC Championship Game.
I’m okay with watching beat downs because I love watching greatness in action. When the Seahawks throttled the Broncos for instance I watched and loved every minute of it. Not that I was rooting against the Broncos, but I just love watching greatness. This one was unusually boring to me though. Its like they kept running the same gimmick play and Ohio State had no answer for it. I almost ended up turning it off, but I saw just enough out of Fields that I wanted to keep watching in order to further evaluate him. Otherwise I would have turned it off as well.
Chord cutting has definitely changed the dynamic. I also wonder how much of the ratings come from sports bars and the like…who probably aren’t able to show the game in many areas right now (or have limited capacity).
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The big difference to understand between the NCAA and the NFL is that in the NFL, the 32 teams have to enter into collective bargaining with the players’ union, so they have no choice but to reach agreement on policies they view as good for the game, so they can speak (and collectively bargain) with one voice. This is not remotely how it works in the NCAA.
The NCAA is a loose affiliation of schools who voluntarily participate in it, mostly to coordinate scheduling. But the power in college football is and always has been with the individual conferences, whose marching orders are dictated by the biggest schools in those conferences. Each conference negotiates its own TV deals, unlike in the NFL, where there’s one TV contract for the whole league. In the last 20 years, conferences have adopted a more NFL-like model of revenue sharing among schools in that conference for TV dollars, and every school in the Big Ten and SEC have made out like bandits. But those schools and conferences have zero reason to enter into any arrangement where their behavior could be restricted by some AD at Coastal Carolina or something.
The NCAA can suggest steps schools can take to create a leveler playing field in college football, but they have no authority to dicatate to them. And there’s no reason why the big schools who basically write their own paychecks today would choose to behave any differently. Maybe we’ll get an expanded playoff (there’s actual money to be made with that), but other than that, college football will likely always be a story of haves and have-nots.
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My guess is that with the horrible ratings, the NCAA will soon target Ohio State for some violations, simply to get them out of the picture for awhile. This coincides with a professional team from the state finally being worth fans attention. Alabama has no professional team, so don’t expect it to be them. Money talks.
I highly recommend the film Junction Boys for those of you who want to see how a program rises in the college ranks.
I know the ratings were down based on historical numbers, but I had understood they actually weren’t bad for this year. Ratings for live sports across the board have been down all year, and network TV watching in general is way down.
Actually more so than the conferences, it’s the schools themselves that hold the power (ever since Georgia and Oklahoma sued the NCAA back in the early 80s), which they then allot to their own personal fiefdoms, the conferences, that they’ve mostly bent to their will. All the teams in the SEC see the benefits, predominantly fiscal, of siding with LSU, Alabama, etc… so there’s no reason to rock the boat. The same is true in the Big 10.
This is even more obvious in the less-unified Big 12, where Texas has its own national network, Oklahoma has its own regional one, and the rest of the teams have to share what amounts to a predominantly digital network (only available via ESPN+), and the conference profits are not divvied equally. Texas and to a lesser extent Oklahoma run that conference, what they want goes. Which is why, IMO, the Big 12 is the weakest of the big conferences.
In the end the point is sorta moot, you’re spot on about the NCAA being a paper tiger. They have precisely zero control over college football, and why would the big schools want to change that? It’s been working for them like gangbusters. The only way anything changes is if they ever start to lose money. You’ll notice how quickly Daniel Snyder changed his tune on the WTF team name once the sponsors started pulling out lol.
Definitely, just watch what happens if there’s a disagreement between Ohio State and Rutgers. The conferences are most definitely bigfooted by the powerful schools in those conferences, but it’s at least an area where groups of schools collaborate and make decisions collectively.
Like if TV networks were reducing their offers to carry Big Ten football because it was uncompetitive and boring, the schools in the Big Ten would likely agree to take some collective action to address that. But they wouldn’t give a shit what schools in the Pac 12 or the ACC (and certainly not like the MAC) think. Technically, those are their competitors for TV revenues and coverage, not just games. If the SEC is putting out a boring product and the Big Ten isn’t, that’s actually great news for the conference negotiating its next TV deal.
Yeah it’s interesting and the complete opposite of the way the NFL works. Which, give me the NFL model, I struggle to watch foregone conclusion leagues like NCAA football or European soccer (despite my avatar). And yet the viewership and popularity of both is very high, so there must be some appeal to others.
To me the NFL is a great example of what’s good for the whole is good for the individual too. Jerry may not like to share all the money he makes off the Cowboys, but they wouldn’t be nearly so valuable if the NFL wasn’t as competitive as it is. It’s a smaller piece of the pie overall, but the pie is a hundred times as large as it used to be. Even the Bengals are worth a billion dollars. The bottom line is the bottom line, NFL teams make more money from sharing. It’s counterintuitive, but probably a good leasson for the world.
I also find it interesting that our biggest sports league (the NFL) is essentially socialist (sharing of resources, etc…) while European sports leagues are capitalist af. But that’s probably trending too close to a political discussion, so I’ll shut it down lol, I have no interest in that.
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I tossed out a similar idea in a basketball thread a few years ago.
Your “one and done” type players will end up being more spread out because one team can’t afford to take too many at a time. (my proposal only had 4 years to a scholarship offer)
Same theory with football even though it’s more of a “3 and done”. Alabama normally has 8+ juniors going into the NFL every year. It’s like having to deal with dead cap money for players that have already left.
Here’s a list of the ratings thru the years BCS and College Football Playoff ratings list - Sports Media Watch
I was hoping to see a pattern but I can’t, other than seeing a pattern of declining ratings in the last few years overall. The semi-final games came in close to where it has been trending lately but there was definitely a significant dropoff for the championship game itself.