Friday, August 20, 2010
The WAC is Wack...
So, the Western Athletic Conference seems to be dying. It's three best members, Boise State, Fresno State and Nevada, have all announced that they are leaving to join the Mountain West Conference, which is losing Utah and BYU. Just more craziness over conference expansion, really. But, in this constant quest for TV revenue and the constant oversight of academics or what is best for the student, the six teams that are being left behind in the WAC are out of luck. They will just be forced to latch on to a few other teams and make up a new minor conference that will inevitably get raided in a few years when one of their teams get good enough. I am rapidly getting tired of the whole expansion movement. The conferences should remain as they are now for football, which is the sport driving everything. Gets me almost as annoyed as that Favre gentleman...
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I wouldn't bet on it, because it's not football that's running things. It's the potential opportunities that rest in football are driving things. At very few colleges the demands of a football can overwhelm the Athletic Department, even fewer the whole university, even fewer as publicly and boldly to suggest switching conferences. No such power exists.
ReplyDeleteWhat's driving it is the untapped revenues of the sport. The sport has traditional for so long it failed to capitalize on some opportunities college basketball and professional sports discovered long ago. Now, college football is seeing huge revenue opportunities in TV (weeknight games, TV window exclusivity, network branding, distribution fees), post-season (conference championships, extra BCS slots, bowl revenue and its relation to alumni/fan donations) and game day events (endless). Basketball, on the other hand, has few, if any, revenues to tap into.
These opportunities have only been known for the past two decades and most conferences have not explored every opportunity yet. So what you are seeing colleges and universities running around trying to create the best approach to profiting from these new opportunities. The focus is on potential revenue expansion, which is seemingly unrelated to the actual sport that plays host to it.
However, as stated earlier, given the pressures of publicly and boldly suggesting switching conferences, actual opportunities for colleges to maneuver themselves into profitable situations have been rare. I promise you that this won't be the final expansion movement. It will inevitably continue with a few more waves, and those waves will snowball into scenarios that may seem radical, even scandalous, to the college sports fan.