OT: Rothstein - Big East could play 20 conference games if it adds 11th team

[UConnSwag11]

2013-2014 attendance was good

 

[chiller99.5]

thanks Capt Obvious

 

[chiller99.5]

such witty repartee

 

[junglehusky]

I'll be on board with going back the the Big East the moment Syracuse and Pitt also decide to go, and not a moment sooner.

 

[TheRealKBuks]

@shizzle787 is correct that studies and technology will be able to detect CTE on the living. This will only increase the liability factor. I think his 5 year time frame is too conservative.

OTOH there are helmets being designed which look promising in limiting if not eliminating concussions.

OTOOH soccer is becoming popular in this country to the point that viewership and participation could impact football.

College sports, like everything today, has a lot of uncertainty. It will be interesting to see if there is further erosion of ESPN subscriptions and how that impacts media coverage and conference contracts. My thinking is the P5 ends up as a P6 with 120 or so teams in order to consolidate basketball distributions in a similar manner that took place in football. That's the next best play for a money grab if my uninformed conjecture is correct that media monies to conferences might have peaked.

The idea that helmets are being developed that will protect against concussions is mostly wishful thinking and not achievable. You have to imagine your brain as a bowl of jello in a glass dish (the Jello representing your brain the glass dish is your skull). If you put a helmet (some type of protection) on the glass dish and drop it, the helmet will prevent the glass from breaking, but does not protect the brain from rapidly accelerating and then stopping inside the skull.

use the same jello dish, put protection on it, and shake it back and forth. There is no impact on the glass so the helmet adds no protection, but the jello inside is completely destroyed. The same happens to your brain.

 

[ctchamps]

The idea that helmets are being developed that will protect against concussions is mostly wishful thinking and not achievable. You have to imagine your brain as a bowl of jello in a glass dish (the Jello representing your brain the glass dish is your skull). If you put a helmet (some type of protection) on the glass dish and drop it, the helmet will prevent the glass from breaking, but does not protect the brain from rapidly accelerating and then stopping inside the skull.

use the same jello dish, put protection on it, and shake it back and forth. There is no impact on the glass so the helmet adds no protection, but the jello inside is completely destroyed. The same happens to your brain.

It doesn't take much imagination to believe something like your description has taken place to most of the people in the Boneyard.

 

[champs99and04]

Only on the boneyard is it a foregone conclusion that the P5 will branch off and kill march madness as we know it, yet football itself is in no real danger because people from the south like it. I'm not even dismissing the possibility, I'm more baffled by how definitive people are when they talk about it. This is the only place where I have even heard this stuff and it has been going on for five years at least with not much evidence that things are moving too quickly towards a resolution. It's one of those things that gets repeated so often that it just gets accepted as fact, and it's a convenient excuse for UConn fans to break out when it comes to assessing the status of our athletic program.

I'm fine with staying in on football. We're seeing some signs of life now from the program and we're actually in a really good league overall for both football and basketball. People are uncomfortable acknowledging that what's best for the football program might not be what's best for the basketball program so they conceive these extreme end games where one can't exist without the other. But it's a small sacrifice for the basketball program to play in the AAC as opposed to the Big East, at least for now. I don't have a problem acknowledging that even as somebody who doesn't really care a ton about UConn football in the grand scheme.

 

[shizzle787]

What will be interesting is if the SEC and Pac-12 go to 20. Then there will be more momentum for the Big 12 to expand. Time for us to get really good at football.