Just Can't Imagine

[jibsey]

that the powers that be, and by that I mean the people who make money off of UCONN college basketball fans are going to let this asset whither on the vine without trying to influence this. We are the fans that fill up the Garden. We are the horde that buy the widgets from the commercials, and if UCONN loses prominence that's big money lost to advertisers in the northeast regardless of how many ACC games they put on. It's the casual fan that makes up the ratings numbers and if we play lesser teams, that dollar is shrunk. Shouldn't that mean something to ESPN? The 3 million people in Ct. mostly don't care if Syracuse plays North Carolina, and if I'm an ad executive at ESPN I'm on the horn day and night to try to protect this advertising base.

 

[Palatine]

UConn basketball will be fine.

 

[uconnell]

Great, what about football? I am a fan of ALL UConn athletics.

 

[nomar]

We just got screwed. There are programs less valuable than we are, but they happen to have been protected.

My "favorite" post on this whole mess is below; I think Fishy lays it all out quite clearly. It's really incredible to think about how unlucky UConn has been.

It's actually stunning, but in the entire country, we've actually managed to top the list when it comes to losing the expansion game.

We were a hoop school when football mattered. We were in the wrong place when region matter. We were in the right place when region didn't matter. We were academically-superior when academics didn't matter. We were BC's enemy when BC's opinion mattered and BC's friend when BC's opinion didn't matter. We're close enough to Boston to make us too far from New York City and close enough to New York City to make Boston too far away. We went to a BCS game and somehow suffered more slings and arrows than the other seven conference schools that could not beat us out to get to that game.

And finally, when our last best chance to get to where we had to be came up, we somehow managed to end up against a commuter school that had slapped just enough cheap perfume on itself to pass as a growing football power at a time when the ACC is feeling a mite peculiar about its football abilities.

It was the ultimate trick shot and somehow we pulled it off.

http://www.the-boneyard.com/threads/expansion-winners-losers.28643/