You're losing a lot of fan bases and losing a lot of viewers. You're also fracturing what was college football, which is why people watch. I guess if you think you can survive with your 2 conference fanbases and a few others then go for it.
recruit's head is going to explode.
- Thread starter pitt90seven
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I do not think Pitt will be left out, but if this is not a wake up call to the administration, then nothing will wake these people up , and in the end , they are going to lose MILLIONS ON behalf of Pitt
I think you’re wishcasting here.
Yes, a sizable chunk of Syracuse fans might stop watching. But there’s not a sizable chunk of Syracuse fans. That’s the problem.
College football super conferences made up of big state schools with huge, diehard college football fanatics, isn’t going to struggle to survive or draw ratings.
Wrong. It is already happening. You had the two preeminent, dominate powers face off against each other last year for the Championship in Alabama and Ohio State.
During a LOCKDOWN. When no one had anything else to do but watch TV programming.
Also, with the two fanbases limited in attendance, that means like thousands and thousands of fans from the two most rabid fan bases who would either be at the game, or likely large scale watch party events at bars are home, watching this on their own TVs. And the ratings was down almost 30%.
So...yeah, same teams all the time, freezing out large sections of the country, and it is not going to grow the sport at all.
But it’s not as if television ratings were booming across sports except for college football.
yep. i can't say all sports but everything i saw was ratings took a huge hit across the board. too many people focused on sourdough bread.
still, CFB attendance has been decreasing yearly for a while.
cutting out 75% of D1 teams is not a good business model.. you cut out large segments of the country, they arent going to sit around on saturdays and turn on cbs to watch tennessee vs ole miss.. they'll find something else to do on saturday afternoons.. yes, people in dixie land will continue to watch their teams,.
What % of D1 schools are currently cut out?
Even in the worst case scenario, large segments of the country will not be cut out. Super Conferences will largely make up the entire country. Just the large state school fanbases.
well there are 130 D1 schools i think and the rumor of the super conference is 32 schools. im no rocket surgeon or brain scientist but that's close to 75% being left out.. you figure most of the sec schools would remain in, some acc schools, a few texas schools, ohio state and michigan. USC, oregon types and you are getting close to 32..
that isnt making up too much of the entire country..
isn't that what's happening right now? clemson, bama, uga, nd, osu, and a few others. the rest of us are eating scraps.
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130 of those schools aren’t in the position you’re talking about though. You’re going in and out of arguments here.
There will be conferences. The question will be how many “P5” arguments will there be? I mean, you weren’t crying for San Diego State a week ago.
Yes I was. 4 days ago, in actual tears for the Aztecs. Ok, maybe not tears but I can honestly say I used to love watching them in early 90s on Saturday nights at like 11pm, watching Marshall Faulk and darnay Scott and being pissed almost to tears that they had to play on a football field that had a baseball infield on it.
this dumb scenario you guys keep bringing up, it has 98 D1 teams being relegated to irrelevance status. 30+ P5 teams being demoted to something that doesnt resemble major college football. hundreds of scholarships, 98 programs being defunded to the levels where it would be closer to a club sport than a revenue one..
not gonna happen.
I think you're missing the point that they can't survive solely on their own fanbases. Super conference related fans will watch, but everybody else will eventually lose interest.
It's a classic pull-through sales situation that won't be around anymore.
Exactly.
Right now you have a few powers with huge fan bases that are centrally located near talent hubs (Clemson, Bama, etc.).
Then you have some teams in P5 conferences that don’t actually have a chance, but have a big enough base that they at least get a seat at the table (Wisconsin, Missouri, etc.).
And then you have teams in P5 conferences that have no chance and bring nothing to football (Syracuse, Oregon State, etc.)
It’s largely the latter that would get cut out in the worst case scenario. But practically speaking it’s not going to impact college football like people are thinking because those teams bring nothing today. They don’t bring many fans to viewership numbers.
There are few exceptions of course.
I’m not missing the point, I just disagree with it.
A College football product dominated by the elite teams and fan bases is not going to hurt for ratings. It’s not going to miss an audience that isn’t there today anyway. And can largely mitigate the loss, if not outright overcome it, by pulling in casual sports fans that only tune in to watch college football for game of the century type matchups (Miami-ND, Miami-FSU, FSU-UF, Bama-LSU, etc.)
yes but you have 60+ programs at least competing at a P5 level so universities at least have the reasoning to dump millions upon millions into their programs, non P5 schools obviously to a much lesser extend. you take away that reasoning, universities arent going to pay narduzzi like coaches 3m a year. same with the espns/fox networks, they arent going to pay 280 million dollars to put this watered down product on tv.. that causes a trickle down effect big time..
you think pitt is gonna have an operating cost of 50 million (guessing on that number) to compete in a minor league football conference? you think all these schools are gonna just keep subsidizing their programs to charade around pretending to be major college football when the perception says otherwise? hell no..
But this is a different argument.
There’s two discussions here:
1. Will college football do just fine without being a major P4/3/whatever school? (“You” being fill in the blank school(s))
2. Will “you” be just fine without being a major P4/3/whatever school?
You’re addressing the second question with your post, but that’s irrelevant to the first. If “you” don’t really have fans watching today, what will it matter if “you” become a second tier program and those fans continue not watching?
We disagree then. I think you're creating minor league football and casual fans won't watch.
this scenario regionalizes college football, we've explained why, given links and quotes from national guys saying the same thing.. not sure how you are missing it. you shut out 98 D1 programs, that's alot of fans all over the country..
people in alabama and mississippi already are watching college football, you have them already. only letting the really really good teams play and telling everyone else to go find something else to do on saturdays in the fall is bad business..
here's another conern of mine: the gulf b/w the haves and have-nots will affect BB and olympic sports. if bama is bringing in a gozillion dollars, they can distribute that to other sports whereas the non top teams can not. i know it's sort of that way now but with NIL, bama could just decide to compete in lax and kids would go there b/c even at bama, you can get some endorsements playing on their lax team. i mean, why not if you're bama? just absolutely own as many sports as you can?
well you have the super conference, that makes the acc irrelevant. no football or hoops tv money from espn then yes, that will cause large cutbacks in the non revenue sports..
No, they do. Enough to make an impact. Plus if you start losing fans like Oklahoma St., West Virginia, etc.
I know you don't believe it, but trust me, there aren't enough fans of just Alabama, Ohio St., Texas, etc. to carry a billion dollar industry. I know you don't believe it, but there just aren't. College football relies on fans of the secondary schools to make it what it is.
You’ve provided what?
College football is and always will be a regional sport. Teams playing their regional rival for some type of regional trophy that only those regional fans have ever heard of. That’s why they invented the damn things. You’re regional rival was as good as it was going to get.
And I get what you’re saying. Fan bases that are checking out because college football hasn’t become regional, but has become dominated by one region, will continue to checkout if they aren’t even invited to the table.
And I will keep saying those fans don’t move the viewership needle anyway. You can’t get them back. The fans on this board that, even before last week, were saying they are less and less interested because of the gulf, can’t be won back. Because the gulf isn’t going anyway.
But you aren’t going to be losing a lot of those fans.
If this all shakes up in a super conferences situation, the big state schools throughout the US with big fan bases, will be just fine. They aren’t to be alienated and stop watching, because they will be invited to the party.
i think we can all see where this is heading. you can deny it or you could accept the fact that college football is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. what i mean is old testament. real wrath of god type stuff. fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. rivers and seas boiling. 40 years of darkness. earthquakes, volcanoes. the dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
But they do move the needle, which is reflected in the declining viewership. I don't understand the line of thinking that these fans don't matter. Every set of eyeballs matter. You want more eyeballs not less because at the end of the day you're still selling advertising.
Unless the business model is going to change to subscription for these rabid fanbases. Maybe that's the endgame.
You think it will be that many super teams....30 or 32? I think it will be more like 20 - 25 teams. The rest of us will be left to beg for the scraps and take what we can get.
I don't think there is a well thought out end game here. The SEC is just filling the leadership vacuum to seize money and control of the sport.
TBH, Jay Bilas makes a lot of sense. The ACC, as it currently stands can't compete financially. I don't see any way the ACC can hold on to schools like FSU & Clemson long term under the current arrangement. I wouldn't be surprised if Greg Sankey hasn't been fielding phone calls from Clemson & FSU in the last few days.
If the league was to merge with either the SEC or the Big 10, I'd much rather hook up with the SEC. The Big 10 is such a poorly mismanaged conference that flourishes financially thanks to the sheer size and clout of their core member schools.
TBH, Jay Bilas makes a lot of sense. The ACC, as it currently stands can't compete financially. I don't see any way the ACC can hold on to schools like FSU & Clemson long term under the current arrangement. I wouldn't be surprised if Greg Sankey hasn't been fielding phone calls from Clemson & FSU in the last few days.
If the league was to merge with either the SEC or the Big 10, I'd much rather hook up with the SEC. The Big 10 is such a poorly mismanaged conference that flourishes financially thanks to the sheer size and clout of their core member schools.
if this happens, we can all quit watching college football and watch the Major Football League which is starting in the fall of '22. not sure the teams yet, pretty sure we dont have one.
Correct and maybe that's only 30 percent of the fanbase, but 30 percent is a lot of viewers, maybe it makes sense financially since there will be a lot less mouths to feed but it won't be good for the sport at all
Look there are a lot of fans here saying if Pitt isn't in this big time fb group we won't keep watching. This will happen at every school not included. Most watch the majority of the big games. It's going to affect rating's. It might not effect them enough that Alabama will lose money because the pie will be split so many fewer ways but there is no question the pie is going to be smaller. Will that cause a slow erosion of college fb and eventually hurt the super conference teams I don't know. It also matters how many teams lose a spot if it's two super conferences of 28 teams it won't matter but if it's one with 32 it will especially if the sec keeps teams like Vanderbilt
I'm just spitballing here like everyone else. but I'm thinking more along the lines of 2 super conferences of 32 teams & a 16 team playoff. That pretty much includes every current P5 school. The D1 squeeze is going to be on teams 66-130, imo. I also think we will see current P5 schools rid their schedules of garbage games like UMass, Delaware, Western Michigan, and Austin Peay
I agree scraps is what we will get!
If there is a 32 team power league there is no governing body (NCAA) to have standardized rules. They will be governed only by the rules of their league. If these teams only play each other there are going to be many more injuries to players because of the increased competition. I feel they would raise the scholarship limit. If they raised it from 85 to 100 they would have 480 more of the top recruits in their schools each year. What if they had no scholarship limits at all?
What if they allowed all teams to each add 5 college players each year during the season from any of the other college leagues with immediate ability to play? In that scenario what if half way through the season Texas was 6-0 and their starting QB has a season ending injury and Pitt in a lesser league is 6-0 and Kenny Pickett is having a great year. Texas could add him to their roster at mid season which would help them and screw Pitt.
I am not saying any of this will happen but I am saying the rules of a power league will be 100% for the benefit of their members with no regard to what these rules do to any other college.
But those fans are largely gone. You can’t have it both ways. “Syracuse fans have stopped watching college football so ratings are declining.” “How can the future of college football survive without Syracuse fans?”
Do you really think a 12 week schedule of nothing but power houses across the country going at it, isn’t going to attract any fans? You’ve only got losses here. But really, the best way to get the northeast fan base isn’t to keep propping up Syracuse. It’s to create a weekly product that appeals to their elite, pro-sports mentality.
Do you really think a 12 week schedule of nothing but power houses across the country going at it, isn’t going to attract any fans? You’ve only got losses here. But really, the best way to get the northeast fan base isn’t to keep propping up Syracuse. It’s to create a weekly product that appeals to their elite, pro-sports mentality.
I don’t think it’s going to be 32 teams. You’ll have the SEC and Big Ten loaded with teams, or those two and then a third conference consisting of the major teams that are left. Like you’re not going to get rid of the entire west coast. That alone will get you over 32.
If there is a game of the century type game every week, why would be view it as something special. Also in your current Argument you keep mentioning Syracuse and their fans not caring. Ok let's substitute Syracuse for Michigan/Tennessee/USC/Any blue blood who lost a step recently. These Blue Blood Programs have struggled to be their usual selves the past decade and a half. Their fans are pissed. Now lets say in this new league they start losing even more to the point that they are Sryacuseish, which is a possibility for a few of these blue bloods. You think their fans are going to stick around and watch Clemson vs Alabama because technically they are part of the club? If one of those schools goes 5/6 years straight with losing records watch how fast the fans jump ship.
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