Archive For The “Fox” Category
New Year’s Eve is supposed to be about all the good things about college football.
For FCS, it’s about the run-up to the FCS National Championship game in Frisco, Texas. This season – again – North Dakota State heads to the party once again, while the No. 1 team in the nation. Jacksonville State, tries to be the team that finally harpoons the Bison to break their consecutive national championship streak.
In the FBS, the bowl games that really matter – the plus-one playoff teams, the four teams that could win their bowl championship – are being played. Lots of people will tune in. Advertisers will see a very strong return on investment on their ad buys for the game. The administrators for Alabama, Michigan State, Clemson and Oklahoma will be entertained, and well paid.
Yet now, at the end of 2015, there are dark clouds on the horizon looming pretty much everywhere about the entire sport. Folks are worried about head injuries more than ever. The bowl system, with more exhibition games than ever, feels overstretched, and the games are competing with more and more sports entertainment and feeling diluted. Even the revenue model for sports on TV feels under threat as more and more people cut the coaxial cable and media conglomerates like ESPN actually shrink in viewership.
College football was, and still is, the greatest sport in the entire world. But many forces of change feel like they’re coming, and it’s making a lot of folks pessimistic about the future of the sport.
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Exactly when is a media entity not entitled to report on itself?
This is the question I frequently pose to myself when ESPN, Fox and CBS report on anything about college realignment issues in general.
It’s especially true about this report made by Jeremy Fowler of CBS Sports.Com, which purports to be an inside look at who has the “most say” in realignment – TV networks or the conferences themselves.
The good news is that there are a lot of revealing insights into the top men running the show in collegiate athletics, including media people and conference commissioners. The bad news is that it reads like the writer is trying to snooker the reader into thinking that TV has no influence over realignment – when a keener, more independent look at the quotes reveals anything but.
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