BCS National Championship-no juice

[brasssbonanzaa]

I actually did some research on this subject for something else. It is sort of hard to get real firm numbers on how many households have cable/satelite/U-verse-FIOS tv, but estimates range from a low of about 76% to a high of 90%. Providers can tell you how many connections they have but they don't or won't differenciate between say a busness connection (a bar or club for examble) and a home. this is esepecially true for the satelite providers...cable providers have better data. In any case, most analysts seem to put the number in the 85-88% range.

The fact that ESPN felt comfortable moving the supposed biggest game of the year in college football to a platform that isn't available to 10-15% of households, to me suggests that in fact college football is losing market share big time, and not just this year. The Auburn Oregon game dropped 11% from the previous season but at 15.29 it positively swamped this year's edition.

I don't think them moving it to ESPN is a sign that ratings are dropping and ABC has no interest in hosting it in a primetime spot, but more that they can move it to ESPN and not really miss out on any viewers.

This also speaks to how ridiculous the scheduling of this game is. Why in the world they would put this on the Monday after an NFL playoff weekend is beyond me. Even ESPN's own homepage didn't have their cover story as the title game until early in the afternoon Monday. No one cares about college football past January 2nd, and putting it up against NFL playoff coverage is publicity suicide. Whoever came up with this idea to hold it so late should be fired.

 

[brasssbonanzaa]

There was absolutely nothing boring about UConn v Butler. It was tough, tough defense ( think of it along the lines of being the opposite of the NBA All Star Game that is simply a dunk showcase). Now that's boring ("look at me, I 6'11'' and can dunk. Wow let me Tweet that I'm getting me get another 'tat"). I absolutely agree with you, however, that the NC should be decided in tourney fashion (on the field) and not as it currently is.

I agree with you to an extent, though I can see how many casual sports fans would turn the game off because they got bored. That said, the quality of the game isn't the relevant point here, it's how the game was arrived at. UConn-Butler was decided by the outcomes of an exciting tournament, and of course we hadn't previously played Butler is a regular season game. There's really no valid arguments for how we arrived at this game. LSU-Alabama was arrived at by a series of computer formulas that no one knows or checks, and backroom voting practices by people who knew that their vote would directly lead to this rematch game that would not only produce a controversial matchup unappealing to the mass TV audience and likely a boring game, but more importantly, create more disdain for the BCS system and further prove it's stupidity, especially if the outcome of the game was 9-6 Alabama and the AP voters all stuck with LSU at #1.

The big argument for why people love college football is how important every regular season game is. The LSU-Bama matchup only proved that that supposed importance of regular season games can be totally nullified by a series of voters. What would've happened if Bama won game 1 9-6 and LSU won game 2 21-0? College football is really just one giant game of the emperor's new clothes, everybody parades around talking about how great it is, when really, at its core, NO ONE likes the setup. College football's supposedly vitally important regular season leads to the overall most boring postseason in all of sports. 30+ meaningless games that are little more than pomp and circumstance bragging rights games, and one poorly timed and inevitably controversially conceived championship game that doesn't necessarily produce the indisputed champion. I'll take college basketball's longer and less game to game important regular season that leads to an exciting championship week and the completely meaningful and by far most exciting postseason tournament in all of sports.

 

[Jarhead_1775]

Did you all see during the heisman show when they paraded that old codger on the stage and were hailing him as the father of the current bcs system? Holy cow that's all I could think of was the emperor has no clothes!!!! I was personally nauseated.

 

[freescooter]

This also speaks to how ridiculous the scheduling of this game is. Why in the world they would put this on the Monday after an NFL playoff weekend is beyond me. Even ESPN's own homepage didn't have their cover story as the title game until early in the afternoon Monday. No one cares about college football past January 2nd, and putting it up against NFL playoff coverage is publicity suicide. Whoever came up with this idea to hold it so late should be fired.

I posted this in the my original post on this subject. the scheduling of this game is terrible. It belongs on New Years Day or the following night. To me it ought ot be the 8 o'clock game on New Years Day in a perfect world, though that's probably not all that practical. In a related foolish thing, this game has managed to turn virtually every other bowl game into the Poulin Weed Eater Bowl. Among the major bowls, really only the Rose has managed to retain anything like its original level of influence. Which would seem to be an illogical action on its face, though given the way the bowls work, ticket guarentees and so forth, it might not matter that much to them. But now we have 2nd and 3rd tier bowls ecoming more important (BVA Compass, really?) interspersed with higher level interspersed with BCS bowls which basically sends the message that none of them count for anything...your Orange Bowl is no more important than your Cap One is no more important than your Idaho Potato Bowl. The original concept of bowls being more important as you get closer to New Years Day has been totally lost. It has become such a mess that it is no wonder viewership is falling.

 

[brasssbonanzaa]

I think there's starting to get to be enough upswell to get rid of some of these ridiculous bowl games that shouldn't exist because the product as a whole is far too watered down. I also think ESPN is going to be pushing to move back the title game due to the slipping ratings. It's no coincidence that ratings start plummeting when the game was pushed back a week. No other sport is dumb enough to compete with the NFL playoffs.

 

[rich1122]

Heard this morning on Imus that it was third-worst rated championship game EVER!! Just too many games now. Nobody cares.

 

[mattp]

I think there's starting to get to be enough upswell to get rid of some of these ridiculous bowl games that shouldn't exist because the product as a whole is far too watered down. playoffs.

i don't think the problem is with the lousy bowls. i enjoyed the weaker bowls for the most part. plus if you don't care about them you can always watch something else. usually between the 3 or 4 lousy bowls on in a given day there's a good one or two and i enjoy that. it's almost like the early rounds of the NCAA tournament where there's nothing marquee on, but between all the riff raff you can find a couple gems. i think the problem is with the big bowls. the top bowls aren't picking based on merit. if the BCS Bowls were all top 10 teams battling each other, they'd have been a lot more interesting.

the problem isn't that the lousy bowls water down the field, it's that the BCS bowls are no more important than the lousy bowls. especially when you don't like the NC game (and does anyone ever want to see two division teams play in a NC), all of the other bowls, from the Meineke CarCareBowl of Texas(was i the only one confused when i saw the Meineke Car Care Bowl on the docket?) to the Orange become meaningless. the games felt more like preseason exhibitions than postseason exhibitions

 

[brasssbonanzaa]

i don't think the problem is with the lousy bowls. i enjoyed the weaker bowls for the most part. plus if you don't care about them you can always watch something else. usually between the 3 or 4 lousy bowls on in a given day there's a good one or two and i enjoy that. it's almost like the early rounds of the NCAA tournament where there's nothing marquee on, but between all the riff raff you can find a couple gems. i think the problem is with the big bowls. the top bowls aren't picking based on merit. if the BCS Bowls were all top 10 teams battling each other, they'd have been a lot more interesting.

the problem isn't that the lousy bowls water down the field, it's that the BCS bowls are no more important than the lousy bowls. especially when you don't like the NC game (and does anyone ever want to see two division teams play in a NC), all of the other bowls, from the Meineke CarCareBowl of Texas(was i the only one confused when i saw the Meineke Car Care Bowl on the docket?) to the Orange become meaningless. the games felt more like preseason exhibitions than postseason exhibitions

The problem with the comparison of the whogivesashit.com bowl and the first round ncaa tournament game is the bowl game means absolutely NOTHING, whereas the tournament game means something. Also, those bowls are played in 1/3 full stadiums, with some 7-5 Sun Belt team and a 6-6 MAC team. From a profitability standpoint, that all makes absolutely no sense. Chop off 8-10 bowls and making a bowl will suddenly once again mean you had a decent season.

 

[mattp]

i just meant they're similar in the entertainment they give me. i like surfing between several games that by themselves wouldn't warrant time on the couch, but collectively result in a nice way to kill an afternoon. do you really think the Orange Bowl or NC game would have been more interesting if you eliminated the bottom 10 bowls? i don't think so because the matchups are still not terribly attractive. all you'd be doing is stealing practice time and bling from kids that attend the Sun Belt and MAC conference, and you'd be taking away a chance to travel to see a game from their fans. i had fun at the Birmingham and MCC bowls. other UConn fans had fun at the Int'l and MotorCity, so why take that away from them? i think it would create a bigger disparity a between the haves and have-nots.

 

[freescooter]

I think you could still have bowl games for good teams, conference champs and the like, but really the 6-6 standard is too low. Bowls ought to be a reward for a good season, not an entitlement for a mediocre one. I think you could really get rid of a bunch of those games and still have enough room to reward teams that had solid seasons. Maybe every conference champ gets a bid somewhere, then the loser of every conference championship game since at least they won something tho get to that point, then start picking among the teams with 8 wins. Hell half the bowls that now exist came into being in the past decade and were essentially "created" by ESPN to provide something for them to carry on tv. You could eliminate maybe 10 and still reward teams that deserve to be in the post season. You'd just have to tell temas that finish 7th or 8th or 9th in their conferences at 6-6 that it just isn't good enough to go to the pot season. To borrow a phase from Nelson, try harder next year.