Biggest fear I have is not even the total amount of media money we can bring in. Worst case, we can always try to raise the money from somewhere to compete with the power conferences. The thing I am seriously concerned about is recruiting. Being in the AAC will hurt recruiting big time in football. If we can't get the kind of kids that can compete at the top level, we will be screwed. Until we hire a real coach and can replicate what Boise has done up to date, we could become a mid-major like rest of the AAC teams. UCONN has to continue to invest in football and hire an upcoming football coach. If we have another year like the previous two, we might as well kill the football program now. The main difference on why UL got into the ACC over UCONN is the fact that Jurich got UL to invest millions into their facilities and coaches while UCONN sat still.
Recruiting isn't going to suffer at all, when players see 29 out of 32 NFL teams coming to evaluate seniors at UCONN personally, and when players are routinely getting drafted into the NFL and making game day rosters in the fall, and actually contributing. If Tyvon Branch played anywhere east of the Oakland, and got media coverage, we'd already have our first multi year pro-bowler.
What's changed, is two fold - first - that our television revenue for college football regular season games has dropped quite a bit, for the next 6 years. It's up to us to do something about that in the next few years. We suck on the field, and we suck, we win and draw people, things will change in just over a recruiting cycle when it comes to regular season broadcasting. What we've gained there is a level of television exposure for the next few years, that we've never had before - so there's good with the bad there - and we need to win. Nobody looking for free handouts at uconn. We win - we want to be compensated, we lose - we lose. We're not looking to be bottom feeders and money suckers.
I don't know how much, with regards to the regular season broadcasting contracts, but we weren't making much there anyway with the existing contract.
The real loss, is the second part - and that's the revenue sharing from the college football post season.
What's been the consistent dividing issue for decades in intercollegiate athletics, and has only accelerated and deepended and widened recently, is really a problem long term, it's not just for us, it's for all of intercollegiate athletics. It's the revenue sharing plan around the college football post season.
That's what major university, division 1, division 1-A, BCS, FBS - whatever label it's had over the years, has always been about - the uniqueness of the college football post season. It's a first class money racket and cartel. Regular season television contracts are a short term driver of change, that was initiated in the mid 1980s when the NCAA was deregulated from controlling TV revenue around college football, and has predictably accelerated intercollegiate movement since.....and movement gets faster and faster with every new contract and contract breach these days. The ACC grant of rights, is as meaningless as the $50m exit fee, as meaningless as the $5m entry fee to the Big East......those types of things are going to stop all together soon, I think. Schools will simply stay together as long as it suits their individual needs as TV scheduling dictates.
But the college football post season has been a money grabbing pit for a select group of universities for 130 years. That group started with a small handful of schools and has grown to a little over 60, which we were part of, for a short time becuase of the Big East.
UCONN, Cincinatti, Louisville, and South Florida were given access to that select group of universities that for over a century, were involved with most of the money in college football post season. Boise tried to get in, Memphis, ECU, TCU, etc. etc.....every single other football program that was looking at the Big East football league for the past 20 years, was looking for the same thing UCONN, Cincy, Louisville, and USF got from the Big East. The preferred sharing of the college football post season money.
The current ESPN contract for the college football post season is $500 million dollars. THe schools in the PAC10, Big 10, Big 12, SEC and ACC will share approx 70% of the revenue, while 30% will go to the remaining FBS football programs - with a lot of other skimming going on by the former BCS schools in the contract bowls.
The bowl participantsn, since the replacement of the invitiation only system in the early 1990s, have developed the model where participants fall on the sword financially, so that the other schools in the group, can spread the wealth. What those schools lose in the bowl years, they make up in the years they don't make it. It's been this way for decades now, and the schools involved have all become quite rich from it. WHen it was UCONN's turn to fall on the sword, making it to the BCS, in 2010, the school was completely unprepared for it. The media latched on to it too.
Of all those schools, that for many years, were left out of the college football post season $ starting in the early 1990s, only TCU through the Big 12, and Louisville through the ACC, managed to gain entry into that group that shares the majority of that money, while UCONN, Cincy and USF had access for a short while, but lost it.
THe new playoff system though? That's going to be interesting. Get into the playoff system, though, and things change. Got to win and prove it on the field though. The cartel of the college football post season, might not survive the evolution of a playoff system.
There are a lot of moving pieces to all of this stuff, and TV contracts are the major intermediate and short term movers, but those universities that own the major shares of the college football post season money, are the long term power players.
How the playoff system develops, and evolves will be very interesting to follow, because a true playoff system, would eventually mean that those 60 some odd universities that control the majority of the revenue, wouldn't have the same ability to do so anymore with a true playoff that gives every FBS program the same road to a national title.
The creation of such a thing, that exists in every sport, other than FBS football, will be fought tooth and nail by those schools that have owned the post season for over a century.
As for UCONN, we need to schedule big games, and win them. We do that, and become a regular top 25 in football, the same we we do in everything else, and the rest will fall in place.
At UCONN, we get real OCD about winning. THe coaches all know that two seasons without championship level performance on the football field is unacceptable.
Have a nice day everybody.
