The Rest of College Football

[nhwbrooklyn]

If anyone wants to take a look at their inner subconscious bias, just imagine if the MSU players who got in this bar fight were black. It would seem much worse and "out of control" but instead it's not really resonating.

You can feel that bias in how the media and people in general are reacting (or in this case not reacting) to it. Words like "thugs" would be thrown around much more.

[WingsFan]

Hey, brook you made it :-) for all your Borg guys he holds a preeminent position as the Michigan State poster over here.

[nhwbrooklyn]

Am I really?

State fans are not well represented.

[WingsFan]

More like laughed at, just don't show Liney your temper :-)

[lineygoblue]

State fans are fine.

Just don't expect most of us Michigan fans to join in and trumpet the virtues of everything Spartan.

[*JD*]

They're going to have to convert that TE to WR to keep up with the tradition that Ingram, Rison, Burress & Rogers have laid out before him.

[Ghengis Jon]

It wasn't THAT long ago they changed Michigan law for 'fleeing and eluding' from misdemeanor to felony. Growing up, it was a rite of passage to get chased by the police and get away. I remember guys in high school throwing eggs at cop cars just to initiate a chase. No big deal to escape the 'fascist agents of mindless social control'. No excuse for assault though.

I guess today we just have to live with a nanny-big brother society.

[Rob F]

If anyone wants to take a look at their inner subconscious bias, just imagine if the MSU players who got in this bar fight were black. It would seem much worse and "out of control" but instead it's not really resonating.

You can feel that bias in how the media and people in general are reacting (or in this case not reacting) to it. Words like "thugs" would be thrown around much more.

nhwb---to educate you:

1)Though we're new to this forum, our core group that just migrated over here has been together since the late 90's and the Freep Forums. We generally react more quickly to things that happen concerning osu, because that's the bigger rivalry, than we do regarding moosu. We'll try to be more on top of spartan thuggery in the future

2) All spartans are thugs and out of control

[nhwbrooklyn]

There is the post I expected

Welcome Rob and the rest of you guys. Deb runs a great forum and it's cool to have an established community migrate here.

I might stick up for sparty every once in a while but I really don't intend on being your resident troll... I'm sure you have a few of those already

[lineygoblue]

I think we only have one Sparty that posts with us regularly.

[nhwbrooklyn]

No V-Tech... surprising.

[entropy]

By Michael Smith & John Ourand

Staff Writers

Published March 14, 2011, Page 1

On the verge of collapse just months ago, the Big 12 is nearing a cable agreement with Fox that will more than triple the conference’s revenue over its current contract.

The Big 12 and Fox are close to finalizing a long-term deal that will pay the 10-team league more than $60 million a year, well up from the $20 million it now receives from its cable contract, industry sources say.

Fox, meanwhile, has been in discussions with eight of the league’s schools about establishing a conference-specific channel for a handful of football games, up to 60 basketball games and Olympic sports. The channel would not include programming from the University of Texas, which has partnered with ESPN on a new Longhorns channel, or the University of Oklahoma, which is planning its own channel, as well.

The other eight schools, however, have been engaged with Fox about a college sports channel that would carry their events. Fox’s talks, led by the co-president of Fox Sports, Randy Freer, primarily have gone through Learfield Sports, which is the multimedia rights holder for Kansas State, Iowa State, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M and Texas Tech. IMG College owns the rights at Baylor and Kansas.

Talks have centered on having Fox flip one of its three Fox College Sports national channels, which are carried on cable sports tiers. Whether the channel could be called the Big 12 Network remains to be seen because only eight of the 10 schools in the conference would be participating. The conference office would have to rule on whether the name could be used in such a venture.

The athletic directors at the schools that would make up such a channel were updated about the negotiations by Learfield executives during last weekend’s Big 12 basketball tournament in Kansas City.

The two arrangements — Fox’s cable deal with the league and Fox’s potential channel with the eight teams — are separate conversations, sources say. Fox’s cable deal with the Big 12 must be completed first so that the network knows how much content is available for a conference channel. The conference office is not involved in the talks about a channel for the eight schools.

“The conference continues to work diligently on our future television rights agreement,” said Big 12 spokesman Bob Burda, but he offered no details on the progress of the talks. Fox executives had no comment on the deals because they have not been signed.

The two developments signify a stark turnaround from last summer, when the Big 12’s future was in doubt as Texas, Oklahoma and others talked about joining an expanded Pac-10.

At the time, one of the Big 12’s marquee schools, Nebraska, had fled for the Big Ten, and another, Colorado, had defected to the Pac-10. Rumors swirled that the six schools in the Big 12’s south division were headed out west, which would have meant the end of the 15-year-old conference, which was created out of the old Southwest and Big 8 conferences.

Commissioner Dan Beebe salvaged the league by promising growth in TV revenue and allowing schools to retain a substantial portion of their media rights, which cleared the way for Texas to start its own network. Once the Longhorns committed to staying, everyone else did, too.

Now the additional revenue from the new Fox cable agreement will be shared by 10 schools, not 12, which would expand each school’s piece of the pie.

The Big 12’s current cable contract with Fox runs through the 2011-12 academic year and will pay the league $20 million in the final season. Terms of the new deal will drive revenue above $60 million and potentially close to $70 million annually for the league.

The conference also has a network broadcast contract with ABC/ESPN worth $480 million over eight years that runs through 2015-16. It was first thought that the Big 12 would extend its cable agreement to 2016 to make it concurrent with the ABC/ESPN contract, but now sources say that the Fox extension will go beyond 2016 and could go out as long as 10 years, to 2022.

The network and cable deals combined will bring an average of close to $130 million a year into the conference to share with the 10 teams, putting the Big 12 only slightly behind the ACC, which recently struck a deal for $155 million a year with ESPN.

If Fox follows through on its talks to create a conference channel for those eight schools, it would aggregate what’s known as the third-tier rights from those schools. The third-tier rights are the games that are not picked up as part of the network or cable contracts, so they drop to the third tier.

Most schools turn over their third-tier rights to their rights holder, like Learfield and IMG College, which televises those games locally or regionally via TV or online and uses them to generate ad revenue.

Under terms of the new cable agreement with Fox, each school will be permitted to retain the rights to at least one home football game and a handful of men’s basketball games. That means a new conference channel would have the rights to a minimum of eight football games total. In men’s basketball, anywhere from six to 13 games per school typically fall into the third tier of rights.

Kansas is considered to have the most valuable assortment of third-tier rights because of its historically strong basketball program and national following.

But while a new channel would significantly boost exposure and potentially aid recruiting for the eight schools, it is not expected to provide a financial windfall. Those schools already are being paid for their third-tier rights in their multimedia contracts with Learfield and IMG College.

By flipping an existing Fox College Sports channel, Fox would save on development and facility startup costs, and would start with a national distribution footprint of between 10 million and 20 million homes. However, the network would either have to pay Learfield and IMG College to obtain programming rights or negotiate a partnership position for them in the channel. The other option would be to create a syndicated network of over-the-air channels within the Big 12 footprint. Bill Byrne, the Texas A&M athletic director, is on the record as supporting the creation of a channel. “I prefer an offering in the form of a Big 12 Network for our fans,” Byrne wrote in his January blog on the school’s athletic website.

A new channel could send repercussions through the league on several fronts, including scheduling. Most of the third-tier football games are against nonconference foes in September. To provide more balanced programming, those games would need to be scattered throughout the season, which means the conference schedule would have to accommodate nonconference games in October and possibly November.

The schools also would have to work with the conference on how conference games are distributed. If Texas plays Texas A&M in volleyball, does the home team get the rights to the game? Can it be simulcast on both the conference channel and the Longhorns’ channel?

And what about the name of a conference channel? Can it be called the Big 12 channel if all 10 of the league’s schools are not involved?

Those are details that need to be ironed out, but it’s clear now that talks are getting more serious and that the idea of a conference channel for eight schools has significant support.

=======================


hmmm...Combined with the ABC/ESPN deal, the Big 12 will bring in $130M per year. So $13M each if divided evenly, which the Big 12 does not. That doesn't sound that great. I guess we'll have to see what everyone not named Texas can do with their individual TV deals.

[entropy]

http://omaha.com/article/20110312/SPORTS/703129742#shatel-mavericks-move-up-is-smart-but-bittersweet

Today should be a day of celebration at UNO. But it will feel like a wake.
This is a day for which we've long waited. UNO intends to go Division I. But there won't be a parade or confetti.
I applaud the plan but do so with a heavy heart. The Mavericks will be growing up, but the powers-that-be are recommending that two great friends of Omaha, UNO football and Mav wrestling, be left behind.
It's all pending the backing of the NU Board of Regents, but finally, after years of indecision, UNO has announced its identity. Dodge Street High has decided what it wants to be when it grows up.
UNO will be a hockey school and a Division I basketball school. It will be a Summit League school, with a shot at the NCAA tournament, playing in an intriguing mix with former North Central Conference members and schools from Indianapolis, Tulsa and Kansas City.
UNO is not the state's school. UNO can never be UNL. It can't be North Dakota, which is the UNL of its state, with all the subsidized benefits of being the big dog.
For years, people — including myself — have wanted UNO to figure out what it wanted to be. Before hockey came in 1996, it was easy. Don't blame hockey. Hockey was a brilliant idea. Back then, UNO was the nice little Division II school down the street. But it was looking for an identity in Omaha, its slice of the pie. Creighton had basketball. UNO had hockey.
But the byproduct of hockey was having one foot in Division I and the other in Division II. For the most part, the hockey people and other coaches made nice. But the combination wore thin. The hockey people were competing against other Division I schools and budgets and wanted to raise the budgetary and marketing ante. But UNO had a Division II mentality, too. Eventually, you had a water-and-oil mix of treating hockey big-time — going into the Qwest Center Omaha — with a Division II athletic budget.
Through it all, UNO has had to deal with its own awkward growing pains; booming expansion, the dorms, the Ak-Sar-Ben move, and the scandal in the administration building. It was maddening to watch. How could UNO ever reach its full potential with incompetent leadership? You'd watch UNO and say, this could be so much better. If only they had a clue. If only they had a plan. A commitment to something, anything.
That commitment, that identity, comes today.
I applaud it. I applaud UNO deciding, once and for all, what it wants to be in this world. I don't applaud good men and teachers like Pat Behrns and Mike Denney losing their jobs or the programs they built. I don't applaud young men losing their chance to compete as champions. This is heartbreaking collateral damage for a move that could make UNO athletics financially viable and competitive in the bigger picture.
There's incredible irony here, too. For years, Behrns has quietly pushed for UNO to move up to Division I and play in the Football Championship Subdivision, formerly known as I-AA. Behrns has tangled with the administration at times, but it was all with good intentions and a vision in mind. Behrns felt UNO athletics had big potential in the city, with the money people and the casual fans. FCS football was part of that vision. It beat the alternative, which was staying in a Division II world that is becoming flooded with schools that are “lower-level" and “lower-commitment" football schools, those with 24 scholarships.
It's the sort of philosophy that says, if you're not getting better, you're getting worse.
So UNO finally announced it wants to be Division I and leaves Behrns behind.
This is a tough one. Al Caniglia. Sandy Buda. Behrns. Marlin Briscoe. Ed Thompson. Even in the mammoth shadow of Nebraska's Cornhuskers, UNO football carved its own footprint in this community. The Mavericks may not have been good enough to play in Lincoln, but they were good enough to play championship football on gorgeous fall afternoons at Caniglia Field against the best competition in Division II.
But football, by virtue of its unwieldy size, is always the elephant in the room when it comes to athletic budgets. You either feed it or cut it. There's no in-between. Getting better or getting worse.
Trev Alberts says he can't afford to take UNO football along for the ride, and that's the honest truth. We're talking going from 36 scholarships to 63. UNO football has its share of Omaha businessmen who love their Mavs, but not nearly enough who can step up and cover the difference. And that's not taking into account the added expenses in travel, stadium expansion, etc., in going to FCS. UNO would also have to add women's sports to balance the gender equity scales. UNO is already maxing out on subsidies. The state of Nebraska is not going to step up to save UNO football.
It's a nice pipe dream some of us had, UNO going FCS. But the brutal reality is, UNO was never in position to make that move financially. Why? The city. Count the larger cities that have competitive college football with a full-time commitment. Nebraska is a football state, but a Nebraska football state. Many of the Division II football powers are the thing to do in their town or area. UNO is one of many things to do around here.
At its best, Mav football is going to draw just under 10,000. Lately, and Behrns can take some of the blame here, attendance has dwindled dramatically. Last year, UNO averaged 3,777 for seven games. Take away the big crowds for Nebraska-Kearney and Northwest Missouri State and UNO averaged 2,446 fans.
It's unthinkable, but Maverick football — once the bell cow for UNO — became expendable.
College wrestling is a niche sport, but UNO wrestling made a national imprint — it won its third straight Division II national championship on Saturday. For years, Denney has been a hidden gem in Omaha, a coach's coach whom you could see thriving in any sport. His wrestlers have been a credit to UNO and the city, champions to the end. They deserve a better fate, but it's not about that. At some point, nonrevenue sports are all the same, interchangeable parts, soccer and golf for wrestling, in the grand scheme of gender equity compliance and the business of college sports. But if you care about good people, losing Mav wrestling is a punch in the gut, one that no doubt knocked the wind out of Chancellor John Christensen, a big wrestling fan.
In the end, this is about a bigger picture. That vision belongs to Christensen and Alberts. Who knew? When Christensen hired Alberts, the cynics cracked that he was hiring a figurehead, a cheerleader, someone to put a happy face on an athletic program stuck in the mud. Alberts has been a bull — who took the UNO bull, literally and figuratively, by the horns.
Division I was Alberts' primary goal from day one. How he would get here would be interesting. But, wow. This is incredibly creative, if not cruel. And it's flat-out full of guts. We all assume Alberts wants to eventually throw his hat in the ring to replace Tom Osborne at Nebraska one day. The primary duty of that job is to take care of Nebraska football, no questions asked. And so here comes Alberts, with a recommendation to cut UNO football. What will the Huskers think?
I know Alberts, and he did not take this lightly. He's a football guy and former player. If there's blood on his ax, it includes some of his own.
The bottom line is, Alberts is taking care of UNO's future, its best interests, just as Osborne would do for UNL. Hockey has become UNO's Husker football. And a financially fit UNO means a healthy hockey program.
There's another angle at work here. The one high hurdle folks thought Alberts might never clear is getting the Board of Regents to approve UNO going Division I. Why? Voting to create an in-state competitor for NU football would be widely frowned upon. Under this plan, that is no longer an issue.
What's indisputable is UNO is on the verge of deciding its own fate. The Mavs want to take on Creighton in this hoops market, and let the comparison of admission standards begin. They're going to feed the hockey machine. No longer will they have to worry about Division II dragging down hockey, or even what happens to Division II. They're not UNL. They're not UNK. They're the city school, bustling and growing and doing the city thing. It's a risk, but that's what bold people who aren't afraid to make changes do. Welcome to the new UNO.
This saga reminds me of a signature line from a classic movie, “Shawshank Redemption." The line is, “Get busy livin' or get busy dyin.' "
Today, Maverick fans must feel like they're doing a little bit of both.

Contact the writer:
402-444-1025, tom.shatel@owh.com

[entropy]

if you need a good laugh...

http://twitter.com/danbeebe

[geo weidl]

A drop in the bucket for the doomers

State cites Notre Dame violations in death


SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Indiana regulators fined Notre Dame US$77,500 on Tuesday for six safety violations in the October death of a 20-year-old student who was killed when the hydraulic lift he was on toppled over in high winds while he was filming football practice.



The school failed to maintain safe working conditions or heed National Weather Service warnings on a day wind speeds in the area surpassed 80 kilometres an hour, the Indiana Department of Labor said.
"The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated that the university made a decision to utilize its scissor lifts in known adverse weather conditions," agency commissioner Lori Torres said.
Declan Sullivan, a junior film student from Long Grove, Ill., died Oct. 27 after the lift he was on fell over. Less than an hour earlier, he had tweeted his concerns about what he described as "terrifying" weather.
"Gusts of wind up to 60 miles an hour (96 kilometres an hour) today will be fun at work ... I guess I've lived long enough," he wrote.

http://sports.sympatico.ca/home/state_cites_notre_dame_violations_in_death/8b4d2805