College sports is the only sports league in the world that has not figured out that you only grow your market by franchise expansion. There are no new fans in existing markets, so the only way college sports as a whole can increase the sports overall audience is to be more inclusive, not less. If the sport continues down its current path of exclusion, fan interest and ratings will continue to contract.
Not sure I agree with this. Otherwise we'd have far more pro franchises than we already do. A market can be oversaturated. Besides, professional sports are more about large city franchises while college sports appears more concerned with states than cities per se.
For college football, I've felt for a long time that the focus should be on where interest and viewership is weakest and how do you increase interest and viewership there?
The weakest regions are the East Coast (except Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina) and the West Coast. So how do you increase interest in these regions? By getting as many Kings and Barons playing in that region as possible. Larry Scott got this. He knew the Pac was going to be a monster with Texas and Oklahoma. If college football were run like a professional sports organization, that deal would have met the commissioner's approval. Sure, the state of Utah might have been left out, but the increase interest from California, Washington, Arizona, and Oregon would have more than made up for that loss. And the viewership in Texas and Oklahoma wasn't going to be damaged by them going to the Pac-12.
On the East Coast, merging the better programs of the ACC and the Big East has been a long, arduous process that has taken some weird turns. But that definitely was the way to go to try and increase eastern interest, particularly northeastern viewership. Four programs in North Carolina are probably two too many, at the very least one too many. In a perfect world, Maryland stays, PSU and ND join (the two Kings the East Coast are most interested in) and UConn replaces Wake. Eastern interest skyrockets from Miami to Boston and North Carolina viewership isn't hurt by the loss of Wake.
In both of these examples, there are losses and there are gains, just like in professional sports where one city loses a franchise while another one gains. Unfortunately, where the interest and viewership is highest right now (BiG and SEC territory), truly didn't want the latter to happen, which also contributed to the West Coast deal falling apart.
So what we have is chaos and uncertainty in the northeast particularly. Sure, SU has a lifeboat, for now. But who knows for how long? Only programs in the region that appear "safe" are PSU, Maryland, and Rutgers.
Cheers,
Neil
