TMC
2012-05-30 01:15:22 UTC
http://dev.chuckoliver.net/2012/05/realignment-and-the-wal-martization-of-college-football/
By Chadd Scott
College football is experiencing 25 years of change within a span of
25 months. From conference realignment and expansion to a first-ever
playoff, changing bowl partnerships, blockbuster television contracts
resulting in undreamed of sums of cash, the “full cost of attendance”
scholarship debate, a dramatic coming rise in initial eligibility
standards and an overhaul to the NCAA rulebook, the sport three years
from now will look nothing like it did three years ago. I would argue
that no American sport has undergone a more sudden and dramatic
alteration to its structure in the last 50 years than what college
football is experiencing now.
If anyone tells you with certainty they know where the sport will find
itself upon the conclusion of these changes, they’re lying. Not even
those in charge of determining college football’s future – the
conference commissioners, television executives, school presidents and
athletic directors – know for sure where their accumulated decisions
will place the sport. Every new partnership, every new statement,
every new rumor redirects the course of the SS College Football.
The fluidity of events makes this time and place uniquely compelling
and breathtaking. The future of the sport is not fixed or
predetermined. The board is in play. Conversations had yesterday,
decisions made today, deals which will be announced tomorrow will
radically alter where the sport ends up and what it looks like when it
gets there. We are entering a post-modern phase of college football
where the order and landscape is being wrestled over and debated by
the power brokers behind-the-scenes and for all of us to observe
publically in near real-time.
While the exact coordinates of college football’s future are unknown,
obvious trends and momentum are apparent.
Power is coalescing in fewer and fewer hands. The richest conferences
with the most prominent memberships are grabbing more and more control
of the sport from the weaker conferences, the bowls and even the
NCAA. Moving forward, the conference will stand as the supreme source
of power. As conferences grow – not only in membership, but in the
power they possess and exercise in the form of conference-owned
television networks, conference-owned bowl games, pre and post-season
“events,” governance, influence over high schools and recruiting – the
sport of college football will bend to its wishes. Power conferences
have been accumulating power for many years, their willingness to use
it is a more recent phenomenon that shows no signs of slowing.
Equally obvious is that college football is shedding its localism and
regionalism and becoming a truly national sport. The advent of the
BCS demanded fans watch the game nationally, not merely within the
conference of their favorite team. The season-long BCS horse-race
created a story arch fans from Eugene to Miami followed every week.
As the season wound down, as often as not, games from multiple
conferences played on different coasts each had dramatic influence on
the BCS title game demanding fans of all the teams involved watch
games they would not have previously.
A massive explosion of college football on television contributed to
this fan and conference cross-pollination with the result being that
SEC fans can now easily watch most Big 10 games and vice versa with
the same situation existing for all other major – and many non-major –
conferences.
The accumulation of greater power within fewer hands and the
increasingly national prism through which college football is being
consumed by fans and presented by television networks contributes to
what I am coining the “Wal-Martization of College Football.”
America was once a nation of communities, often small communities and
neighborhoods. “Locals” from coast-to-coast ate different foods,
listened to different music and wore different clothes. Over the past
quarter-century many if not most of those “local” (idiosynchrasies)
have been erased with the nation increasingly becoming one, massive,
coast-to-coast suburb. If you travel widely across the country you
notice it has become increasingly difficult to notice any difference
between the towns and cities. Some locales such as Miami, Fl, or
Manhattan, or Las Vegas or Asheville, NC maintain their uniqueness,
but if you were blindfolded and dropped in Milwaukee or Indianapolis
or Atlanta or Houston or Kansas City could you really tell the
difference without asking someone?
From radio to TV and internet we now largely consume the same media.
Local newspapers are dying while nationally distributed broadcast TV,
radio and on-line outlets flourish. Shopping on Main Street moving
from locally owned store to locally owned store is a ritual long dead
as we now take the interstates and highways to do our shopping inside
cavernous “big box” retailers which offer the same thousands of
products distributed and marketed nationally to everyone else in
America.
Wal-Mart with its tens of thousands of stores dotting the nation
selling the same merchandise at bargain-basement prices has rightly or
wrongly been accused of the death of Main Street and local communities
nationwide in favor of a blacktop homogenous sprawl across the nation.
There was a time, too, when college football was a staunchly regional
game. The game was played differently in the West than the Midwest
and South. Coaches rarely left their region and neither did players.
College football was a drive-to, not fly-to sport for fans. The
experts you turned to for analysis on your favorite team lived in the
region you did; they didn’t fly from all across the country to a
centralized broadcast location for game-day, then jet back hundreds of
miles to where they live Sunday-Friday. Conferences were aligned
along geographic not economic lines.
The disconnected nature of college football’s past likely slowed its
growth and certainly diminished its financial clout, but the upside
was a remarkable charm. College football felt handcrafted, not mass-
produced. It tasted homemade, not industrially generated. It was a
boutique, a flea-market, the corner store, not Wal-Mart.
Conferences now span multiple regions. The vast majority of games are
broadcast by two television networks producing all games off the same
template, a template driven primarily by NFL broadcasts and largely
copied by the smaller networks. Coaches and players increasingly
leave their regions fusing their games and strategies with others
resulting, with few exceptions, in all teams running variations of the
same offenses and defenses. Jersey companies outfit teams across the
country making them all look the same and instead of traditions
growing organically and locally, they are increasingly bogarted from
what is seen on TV each week.
The question becomes is the “Wal-Martization of College Football” good
or bad for the sport? The answer is neither and both - much like the
retail domination of Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart put your family owned
hardware or shoe store out of business, its rise was a disaster. If
Wal-Mart provided you a job, its growth was welcome. If the building
of a Wal-Mart filled in a wetland where you spent your time as a child
exploring nature, it’s a menace. If it saved you time and money each
week running errands and shopping for a family of six, it was a
godsend.
The “Wal-Martization of College Football” has and will forever change
the game. If you find your favorite team on the inside of one of the
power conferences, you’ve got it made. Your very survival is
threatened if you’re on the outside. College football’s national
explosion in popularity has provided more coverage of the sport on
more outlets year round. Remember when college football went into
hibernation everywhere except on campus following the Rose Bowl until
kickoff on Labor Day? Larger less geographically dense conferences
means travelling to away games is much more difficult and expensive
for the small group of fans who are able to do so, but the money they
generate results in greater amenities in the home stadium and richer
surroundings for the student-athletes.
The “Wal-Martization of College Football” will have winners and
losers. It will demand fans to accept a great deal of change over a
short period of time which can be difficult. As with many
developments of modern America, this sudden evolution is not
inherently positive or negative, that will be determined by each
conference, team and fans’ individual response to it.
By Chadd Scott
College football is experiencing 25 years of change within a span of
25 months. From conference realignment and expansion to a first-ever
playoff, changing bowl partnerships, blockbuster television contracts
resulting in undreamed of sums of cash, the “full cost of attendance”
scholarship debate, a dramatic coming rise in initial eligibility
standards and an overhaul to the NCAA rulebook, the sport three years
from now will look nothing like it did three years ago. I would argue
that no American sport has undergone a more sudden and dramatic
alteration to its structure in the last 50 years than what college
football is experiencing now.
If anyone tells you with certainty they know where the sport will find
itself upon the conclusion of these changes, they’re lying. Not even
those in charge of determining college football’s future – the
conference commissioners, television executives, school presidents and
athletic directors – know for sure where their accumulated decisions
will place the sport. Every new partnership, every new statement,
every new rumor redirects the course of the SS College Football.
The fluidity of events makes this time and place uniquely compelling
and breathtaking. The future of the sport is not fixed or
predetermined. The board is in play. Conversations had yesterday,
decisions made today, deals which will be announced tomorrow will
radically alter where the sport ends up and what it looks like when it
gets there. We are entering a post-modern phase of college football
where the order and landscape is being wrestled over and debated by
the power brokers behind-the-scenes and for all of us to observe
publically in near real-time.
While the exact coordinates of college football’s future are unknown,
obvious trends and momentum are apparent.
Power is coalescing in fewer and fewer hands. The richest conferences
with the most prominent memberships are grabbing more and more control
of the sport from the weaker conferences, the bowls and even the
NCAA. Moving forward, the conference will stand as the supreme source
of power. As conferences grow – not only in membership, but in the
power they possess and exercise in the form of conference-owned
television networks, conference-owned bowl games, pre and post-season
“events,” governance, influence over high schools and recruiting – the
sport of college football will bend to its wishes. Power conferences
have been accumulating power for many years, their willingness to use
it is a more recent phenomenon that shows no signs of slowing.
Equally obvious is that college football is shedding its localism and
regionalism and becoming a truly national sport. The advent of the
BCS demanded fans watch the game nationally, not merely within the
conference of their favorite team. The season-long BCS horse-race
created a story arch fans from Eugene to Miami followed every week.
As the season wound down, as often as not, games from multiple
conferences played on different coasts each had dramatic influence on
the BCS title game demanding fans of all the teams involved watch
games they would not have previously.
A massive explosion of college football on television contributed to
this fan and conference cross-pollination with the result being that
SEC fans can now easily watch most Big 10 games and vice versa with
the same situation existing for all other major – and many non-major –
conferences.
The accumulation of greater power within fewer hands and the
increasingly national prism through which college football is being
consumed by fans and presented by television networks contributes to
what I am coining the “Wal-Martization of College Football.”
America was once a nation of communities, often small communities and
neighborhoods. “Locals” from coast-to-coast ate different foods,
listened to different music and wore different clothes. Over the past
quarter-century many if not most of those “local” (idiosynchrasies)
have been erased with the nation increasingly becoming one, massive,
coast-to-coast suburb. If you travel widely across the country you
notice it has become increasingly difficult to notice any difference
between the towns and cities. Some locales such as Miami, Fl, or
Manhattan, or Las Vegas or Asheville, NC maintain their uniqueness,
but if you were blindfolded and dropped in Milwaukee or Indianapolis
or Atlanta or Houston or Kansas City could you really tell the
difference without asking someone?
From radio to TV and internet we now largely consume the same media.
Local newspapers are dying while nationally distributed broadcast TV,
radio and on-line outlets flourish. Shopping on Main Street moving
from locally owned store to locally owned store is a ritual long dead
as we now take the interstates and highways to do our shopping inside
cavernous “big box” retailers which offer the same thousands of
products distributed and marketed nationally to everyone else in
America.
Wal-Mart with its tens of thousands of stores dotting the nation
selling the same merchandise at bargain-basement prices has rightly or
wrongly been accused of the death of Main Street and local communities
nationwide in favor of a blacktop homogenous sprawl across the nation.
There was a time, too, when college football was a staunchly regional
game. The game was played differently in the West than the Midwest
and South. Coaches rarely left their region and neither did players.
College football was a drive-to, not fly-to sport for fans. The
experts you turned to for analysis on your favorite team lived in the
region you did; they didn’t fly from all across the country to a
centralized broadcast location for game-day, then jet back hundreds of
miles to where they live Sunday-Friday. Conferences were aligned
along geographic not economic lines.
The disconnected nature of college football’s past likely slowed its
growth and certainly diminished its financial clout, but the upside
was a remarkable charm. College football felt handcrafted, not mass-
produced. It tasted homemade, not industrially generated. It was a
boutique, a flea-market, the corner store, not Wal-Mart.
Conferences now span multiple regions. The vast majority of games are
broadcast by two television networks producing all games off the same
template, a template driven primarily by NFL broadcasts and largely
copied by the smaller networks. Coaches and players increasingly
leave their regions fusing their games and strategies with others
resulting, with few exceptions, in all teams running variations of the
same offenses and defenses. Jersey companies outfit teams across the
country making them all look the same and instead of traditions
growing organically and locally, they are increasingly bogarted from
what is seen on TV each week.
The question becomes is the “Wal-Martization of College Football” good
or bad for the sport? The answer is neither and both - much like the
retail domination of Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart put your family owned
hardware or shoe store out of business, its rise was a disaster. If
Wal-Mart provided you a job, its growth was welcome. If the building
of a Wal-Mart filled in a wetland where you spent your time as a child
exploring nature, it’s a menace. If it saved you time and money each
week running errands and shopping for a family of six, it was a
godsend.
The “Wal-Martization of College Football” has and will forever change
the game. If you find your favorite team on the inside of one of the
power conferences, you’ve got it made. Your very survival is
threatened if you’re on the outside. College football’s national
explosion in popularity has provided more coverage of the sport on
more outlets year round. Remember when college football went into
hibernation everywhere except on campus following the Rose Bowl until
kickoff on Labor Day? Larger less geographically dense conferences
means travelling to away games is much more difficult and expensive
for the small group of fans who are able to do so, but the money they
generate results in greater amenities in the home stadium and richer
surroundings for the student-athletes.
The “Wal-Martization of College Football” will have winners and
losers. It will demand fans to accept a great deal of change over a
short period of time which can be difficult. As with many
developments of modern America, this sudden evolution is not
inherently positive or negative, that will be determined by each
conference, team and fans’ individual response to it.