Oh thank sweet baby Jesus now we’re gonna get a YUGE TV deal!
Wins against P5 will certainly help the P6 effort and aid the negotiations. If you are saying Memphis beating Iowa State and UCF beating Auburn won't help and support the next round of TV negotiations then your just either being really stubborn or really stupid!
Pro and college football are different but I can't help but draw some comparisons between the P6 effort of the American and the emergence of the AFL in the sixties that eventually merged with the NFL
"
At first, the NFL ignored the AFL and its eight teams, assuming the AFL would consist of players who could not earn a contract in the NFL,
and that fans of professional football would not waste their time watching them when they could watch the NFL.
The NFL also had the media advantage: For example, in the 1960s,
Sports Illustrated's lead football writer was
Tex Maule,
[5] who previously worked with NFL commissioner
Pete Rozelle when Rozelle was the general manager of the L.A. Rams and Maule was the team's public relations director; Maule "was certainly an NFL loyalist,"
[16] and several sports reporters took his deprecatory columns about the AFL as fact. Another example was
Dallas Cowboys general manager
Tex Schramm, a close friend of Rozelle (Schramm hired Rozelle as Rams' GM), who was influential in NFL coverage by its national TV partner,
CBS, including the network's employment of former NFL players as game announcers and the absence of AFL scores and reports on the network.
However, in spite of this bad press, and unlike the NFL's previous rivals, the AFL was able to survive and grow, and began to prosper in the mid-1960s after the relocation of the Chargers and Texans to non-NFL markets, the sale and rebranding of the New York Titans (to the
Jets), and the Jets' signing of
University of Alabama quarterback
Joe Namath to an unprecedented $427,000 contract.
The league's financial survival was also buoyed by NBC's $36 million, five-year contract to televise AFL games beginning in 1965.[15]
You see Jimmy, success matters, it really does.
Don't underestimate Mike Aresco's knowledge and connections in the upper echelons of the networks and the college football world. I believe the principle decision makers in the last days of the old Big East knew exactly what they were doing when they hired him.
AFL–NFL merger - Wikipedia
about UConn and the AAC.
