Atlanta market. This about cable dollars. Recruiting opens up to fertile Georgia and Florida. And academics are inline. Don't be so shortsighted.
This is about the future. How long do you expect the cable TV market to exist in a recognizable form? Five years tops? Everything is pointing toward wireless delivery through the internet. How does Comcast et.al. live in that paradigm? Once the physical wire is disconnected, all hell is gonna break loose and its the guy making the sweaters that drives that bus, not the guy in the brown truck dropping them off at customers' doors.
The B1G is making strategic moves to secure content. Delivery will still be important, just not monopolized like the people maintaining coax on poles do now. Nimbleness will be a valued attribute for content providers...but not as valuable as content itself.
Why does the B1G want UConn? Because they, together with Rutgers, provide context for the New York market. By context I mean the setting of the contest as opposed to the simple fact that a contest is/will occur. The Yankees playing a game commands an audience. The Yankees playing the Red Sox commands a bigger audience. If the Yankees were to begin play this spring as a brand new team, having never existed as a team before, they would command an audience. The Yankees having the history they do commands a much bigger audience. Visiting the "house that Ruth built" only has meaning because there was a Ruth. The saying goes that the whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts.
A Rutgers/UConn rivalry can deliver more than either school taken alone can. Together, they can deliver (a portion of) New York. Alone, each is vulnerable to competitive incursion. There is a little known corallory to the "Law of Decreasing Returns" known as the "Law of Increasing Returns." Under this law, each unit of added input yields even greater (rather than reduced) output. Microsoft Windows followed the "increasing returns" model (for a while anyway...maybe it still does, I don't know) because it had won such a large share of the personal computer market they were virtually assured that new computer sales would bundle Windows with the product even though Microsoft did next to nothing to insure its inclusion.
Occasionally a product will be so successful, the original manufacturer will lose the power to enforcement its copyright. Things like kleenex, band aid, and thermos can no longer prevent newcomers from going to the market and advertising their product as kleenex. I am not here to argue that UConn and Rutgers can dominate the college football market, let alone the sports entertainment market, in New York the way J&J dominated adhesive bandages. What I am arguing is that a meaningful Rutgers/UConn competition would deliver value far beyond what either would alone. Delany MUST be thinking about that. He knows he hasn't secured New York with Rutgers so long as a rogue UConn program draws significant interest with basketball and increasing interest with football.
Being in New York with Rutgers doesn't deliver New York just like being in D.C. with the Terps doesn't deliver D.C. UConn/Rutgers delivers context in New York the same way UVa/UMd does in D.C. That 4 institution coterie also sets up a D.C. vs. NYC context and each of the six pairings UVa/UMd, UVa/Rutgers, UVa/UConn, UMd/Rutgers, UMd/UConn, and Rutgers/UConn adds to that larger context. Throw in Penn State and Phila and the context of the games takes on even greater importance.
Anybody who argues realignment from the perspective of cable boxes served might as well stock up on CRTs to sell to those cable subscribers. Who are the institutions that add value in the future? That's the debate. That's where UConn shines because of its geography, not in spite of it. That's why UConn's academics is important because it presents a school students aspire to attend and alumni are proud to have attended. Proud alumni may be a school's most valuable fans and foremost ambassadors. UConn and UVa are headed to the B1G because that's what makes sense for the future.
