Quite clear, if it wasn't before, that Marinatto is a Tranghese mouthpiece

[Northbound]

Plenty of blame to go around. The thing that is most troubling to me is that from my viewpoint the conference leaders weren't forward thinking enough to look out into the college althletics landscape and understand the attractiveness that CFB and by default the football heavy conferences have to the rights holders and by default the advertisers. I don't expect any of them to have a cyrstal ball, because nobody could have predicted what just occured, however some basic surveying of the landscape of college althetics would have told the leadership that the BE model, while great in CBB, doesn't really work in today's market. Since the BE is comprised with football and non-football schools it not hard to see..."hmmm, which one doesn't look like the others" and if the BE leadership thought that the market would stay static that's a big mistake. If they believed changes were coming it's a big error that they didn't understand that football would drive that bus, which means the BE hybrid model wouldn't work.

I get the sense that the BE to some degree was bound to the past with the basketball lineage and wasn't able to find a way to evolve attitudinally with the times. The conference's most powerful and public figures were and are all BB guys there's was/is no balance.

Easy to arm chair quarterback hard to be prescient.

 

[whaler11]

I'm not sure someone else could have done a better job of keeping things on track. This league is not one that really makes any sense. Too many different programs with too many issues and too diverse outlooks. For the life of me, I don't know why the football schools accepted him as commissioner, though.

So you get the point. There really wasn't a way to do any better.

The answer to the question is self-evident. The football schools accepted him because it didn't matter who had the job and every last one of them (except for UConn which is painful to admit) wanted their first golden ticket out of the league. If I'm Syracuse or Pittsburgh, I want someone weak in charge; I know I'm in demand and when I leave everyone points at the weak commissioner not me.

I know that there are a handful of Boneyard posters who think they have the negotiation skills to turn water into wine, but they don't. The Big East had so little leverage the first time they 'challenged' ESPN, a FRIGGING TELEVISION NETWORK put them out of business.

*Challenged in quotes because Pittsburgh may have created the illusion of challenging ESPN when in fact they were in bed together the entire time.