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ESM owner Brandon is a longtime Orangebloods member @Txbaseball22 . Elite Sports Media has THE BEST in Longhorn memorabilia anywhere. You can find memorabilia from UT legends such as Vince Young, Ricky Williams, Sam Ehlinger, Cat Osterman and Ivan Melendez. He also works with current Longhorns such as Quinn Ewers and Xavier Worthy.
The next big signing will be this Saturday, May 20th. Brandon will be doing a private signing with Jordan Whittington in Round Rock. It's not open to the public but you can purchase items through Brandon to get them signed.
This week ESM is featuring a couple of autographed jerseys from Bijan Robinson.
Trust me guys, you want to get your Bijan memorabilia now BEFORE he begins his Hall of Fame career in the NFL.
If there is some kind of memorabilia you're looking for, please reach out to Brandon - he can probably get it.
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ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips insists his conference isn’t going anywhere.
“What I’ve been told (by athletic directors and presidents) is that we’re all in this together — emphatically,” said Phillips.
Sounds an awful lot like the dreaded “vote of confidence” to me.
The ACC wrapped up its spring meetings this week and most ACC ADs spent their time in Florida dodging reporter questions about conference realignment.
Ross Dellenger with Sports Illustrated first broke the story that seven ACC schools - Florida State, Miami, Clemson, Virginia, Virginia Tech, North Carolina and North Carolina State - have met with lawyers over the past couple of months, looking at ways they could possibly break the conference’s grant of rights with an eye towards potential conference realignment.
"That's not a warning sign,” said Phillips. “These are schools that are under a lot of stress, a lot of pressure. The reality is our conference is third in the country in (media rights) distribution. We need to close the gap between the top two conferences.
“That just isn’t news to me, per se” said Phillips. “There’s not a conference in the country or institutions that haven’t talked about conference expansion and the landscape and what’s best.”
The ACC’s grant of rights is the most restrictive in college football. All of the schools have signed over their television revenue to the conference through the year 2036.
But the ACC’s television contract puts the schools far behind their competitors. The league is set to pay out $240 million per year to member schools through 2036. Compare that to the Big 10’s new deal which will pay more than $1 billion annually, and will actually come up for renewal before the ACC’s. Details of the SEC’s contract following the addition of UT & OU are still not public but the number is reportedly more than $800 million each year. It too will come up for renewal before the ACC gets another bite of the apple.
That is what has prompted the seven schools to look at ways to break the contract and go shopping for a new home.
"Something has to change because we cannot compete nationally being $30 million behind every year," Florida State Athletic Director Michael Alford told ESPN in February. "It's not one year. We're talking about $30 million compounded year after year."
In an attempt to avoid legal fights and make the biggest schools in the conference happy, the ACC ADs and presidents spent the spring meetings working on a revenue-sharing plan which would reward the highest-performing teams. As a result, FSU could end up netting $10 million a year more.
That had FSU AD Alford singing a very different tune than the one he was singing in February.
JUST HOW EASY IS IT TO GET OUT OF A GRANT OF RIGHTS CONTRACT?
So far, no school has ever gone to court to challenge a grant of rights, and there are a couple of reasons why that may have been a factor in those decisions.
You might expect that a conference’s grant of rights contract would be a big document outlining all of the potential ways that conferences keep their schools locked in. You’d be wrong. In fact, the contracts are often just a few pages. It turns out, that’s one of the reasons these contracts are so hard to fight.
Mark Wilhelm is a lawyer for the Philadelphia law firm of Troutman Pepper. He studied the conference’s grant of rights contracts for a paper during law school which was then published in the Harvard Law School Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law in 2014.
“The fact that the documents are so brief, so short, leaves out a lot of those details that would otherwise answer the questions that we have, like how do we get out of the grant of rights?,” said Wilhelm. “So if you're in a situation in which you want to enforce the grant of rights, where you want to be a good valid document that keeps a conference together, that's very powerful.”
Then there is the fact that suing to get out of a grant of rights contract could be a very long and expensive court battle.
“Someone's gonna have to pay a lot of lawyers a lot of money to find ways to argue their way out of the contract,” said Wilhelm.
He added that there are a lot of questions about whether a legal challenge would even be successful if a university did sue. “It's really hard to figure out that first portion of the formula, what's the chance that I'm going to be successful and how much am I going to pay to find out if I'm successful?”
Wilhelm first started studying the issue while he was in the athletic department at the University of Michigan because of the perception that college football realignment was all about money.
“Internally, the goals were always to number one, have the highest performing student-athletes both in the classroom and on the field and number two, win championships,” said Wilhelm. “Money wasn't the goal.”
While he still holds that belief to be true, he acknowledges the need for money.
“Money matters, of course, because realistically if you're going to be in an athletic department with a $30 million budget you're probably not winning college football national championships, right? It's just not going to be feasible,” said Wilhelm. “So there is this, this money arms race. But my view is that it's not just for the sake of getting more money, which is I think, at least some of the narrative out there. It's more about having the funds, having the resources in order to sort of put together and have championship caliber teams.”
Which of course leads me to the current situation. When asked, without mentioning any school, if a university were to be $10, $20, or $30 million a year behind its competitors in the arms race, could that be a financial incentive to challenge a grant of rights?
“Absolutely, yes,” responded Wilhelm.
Florida State received around $36 million dollars from the ACC in 2021 as part of its annual payout (a figure that includes things such as TV revenue as well as bowl money and March Madness revenue). Meanwhile, if you travel East from Tallahassee down I-10 until you get to I-75 and take a right, you’ll wind up in Gainesville, Florida where the University of Florida received $54.6 million dollars.
The Florida number is expected to go up significantly with the new ESPN contract. The Florida State number isn’t expected to grow that much. Hence, Alford’s comment about needing change.
Alford recognizes that he is not going to be able to stay in the ACC and receive the same as his in-state brethren at UF receive, but he’s not asking for equal money either.
"We just need to be in a competitive boat," Alford said. "We're the third-best media agreement right now. We want to stay the third best. We need to be able to compete. As long as we're there and competitive, that's what the number is."
WHAT IF THE SCHOOLS ARE ABLE TO BREAK THE DEAL?
If the ACC 7 go to court and are successful in breaking the contract, then the conference realignment wheel will go into overdrive.
It’s no coincidence that the seven schools would all be very attractive to the bigger conferences and would justify SEC and Big 10 expansion.
Florida State would almost certainly end up becoming the newest member of the SEC. Clemson is another school that would take its football tradition and head to the SEC where it has more in common than the schools surrounding it in the ACC. Meanwhile, Virginia Tech may not be a blue blood in college football, but it certainly gas some blue-tinted coloring of some sort (which is a belabored way of saying they’ve had some good seasons in the past and they have somewhat of a name). Tech’s location, Blacksburg, Virginia, is also squarely in NASCAR territory, about two hours from Bristol, Tennessee along the border of the two states.
North Carolina and Virginia would be awfully attractive to the Big Ten – a conference that prides itself on academic excellence. Those schools would also pair nicely with Maryland in making the mid-Atlantic firmly Big 10 country.
North Carolina State and Miami are two schools that I just don’t know which way they would go. Maybe the Big 12 could step in and make a push? The Big 12 would be able to offer them more money and stability than what they’ve received in the ACC. Plus, they fit with Big 12 Commissioner Bret Yormark’s goal of a coast-to-coast conference which also prides itself on basketball.
It’s entirely possible that none of the schools are looking to move. They could just be interested in re-opening the television negotiations in order to close the gap between them and the SEC and Big 10? Who knows?
Of course, none of this matters if the ACC is able to strike a deal to keep its member schools happy. But in the game of conference realignment, nothing lasts forever – even cold November rain.
A WORD OF CAUTION FOR THE PAC-12
The Pac-12 also wrapped up its spring meetings last week amidst rumblings of conference realignment within their ranks. However, unlike the ACC, the Pac-12’s media rights are up for renegotiation.
The Pac-12 has been negotiating with potential television and streaming partners for nearly a year now with no deal in sight.
Arizona State AD Ray Anderson appeared on an episode of the ‘Speak of the Devils’ podcast and said he expects a multi-media rights deal by this summer. That puts the Pac-12 on target for a potential new deal by July.
After the new deal is in place and the new grant of rights is signed, Anderson says the Pac-12 itself will look to expand beyond the 10 teams remaining in the conference (San Diego State and SMU are eagerly awaiting bids).
By all reports, the Pac-12 is in talks with ESPN, Amazon and Apple for a potential TV and streaming deal. How that shakes out remains to be seen. Is Amazon going to be the primary carrier of games? Is ESPN bidding for the A-tier rights or a smaller package of Friday night games?
However, I would advise the Pac-12 presidents to take a look at what’s happening in MLS before they sign over their best games to a streaming platform just because they’re offered more money.
The MLS has put nearly every game on Apple TV with a $14.99 monthly fee to tune in and watch.
However, while viewership numbers are not published like TV ratings, you have to believe the fact that MLS is now offering a one-month of free games offer means they’re not exactly happy with what they’ve seen so far.
worldsoccertalk.com
It’s important to note that college football, even the Pac-12, has a much more rabid and widespread fanbase than the MLS. There are plenty of fans who would sign up for a service if it meant that was the only way they could watch their alma mater play each Saturday. It’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison to look at the MLS and extrapolate what could happen with the Pac-12 if they went streaming.
Even in the MLS, rabid fans will pay the price to be able to watch their favorite sport. However, what the MLS’s decision to go with Apple TV has done is prevent casual fans from clicking over to watch games.
What casual, or even just curious fan, will sign up for a $15-a-month fee to watch a game where they don’t necessarily have a rooting interest?
The Pac-12 needs to do everything it can to ensure that as many people as possible see their games. They’ve already struggled to attract viewers to watch games on the Pac-12 Network due to a very limited number of outlets carrying the network.
Even if Pac-12 games are free on Amazon or Apple, many fans who haven’t cut the chord yet, will still have to deal with the “struggle” of clicking over from a cable or satellite outlet to a streaming outlet.
Never underestimate the “meh” attitude of the general public.
Of course, this could set up a potential dilemma for the Pac-12. Would the conference accept less money in exchange for more eyeballs on ESPN? If so, how much less can they accept before their own schools start looking at the Big 12 or other conferences in order to not fall behind in the conference arms race?
For now, Arizona State’s Anderson is another Pac-12 voice shouting down allegations that their conference members may be looking to jump ship.
Anderson added that Arizona State has had “no internal discussions about ASU going anywhere else because, very frankly, there’s no desire.”
That’s always true … until it’s not.
SPEAKING OF SOCCER …
I have been a soccer fan ever since the pandemic. Soccer was the first sport to come back and I fell in love with it. Actually, I fell in love with Leeds United in particular. Their style of play, their coach, the connection between the club and the city and the fact that Yorkshire is my ancestral home, all added up to me falling fast and hard.
But watching Leeds United has helped me understand more than anything else the saying, “It’s the hope that kills you.”
Last Saturday, Leeds, needing a win, got up quickly 1-0 on Newcastle. Then, shockingly, they were awarded a penalty kick and that hope swelled that they were about to go up 2-0 and were well on their way to an improbable victory over Newcastle and three points closer to safely avoiding relegation. Then this happened.
Patrick Bamford misses the penalty with a weak kick kind of towards the corner and the hope balloon started deflating.
That balloon was popped three minutes later when Leeds gave up a stupid handball leading to a Newcastle penalty kick.
It turns out that bad teams make bad mistakes. Leeds is a bad team and that’s why they are where they are in the standings.
Too much soccer talk for you? I understand. But the point of all that is that it really is the hope that kills you. You get inflated dreams of grandeur only to have them come crashing back to reality.
HOW HOPEFUL ARE YOU FOR THE 2023 SEASON?
The Texas Longhorns have yet to begin summer workouts, but the expectations for this team are already sky-high.
“This is our last year in the Big 12,” head coach Steve Sarkisian told fans last month. “The goal is to win a conference championship, and I think we have the roster and the team in place to go and do that.”
Is that too much hope?
In this case – no. (Note, I’m not calling for Texas to be a playoff team but I am giving you permission to dream big if you want.)
College football really comes down to one position – the quarterback. If you have a successful quarterback, you will be a successful team.
Sam Ehlinger has been Texas’ best quarterback since Colt McCoy, but the best he could muster was a 10-4 season that culminated with a win over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.
Ehlinger famously declared “we’re back” on the podium after the game. Since then, Texas has gone:
2019: 8-5
2020: 7-3
2021: 5-7
2022: 8-5
Georgia, meanwhile, has won two straight national championships.
If Texas wants more than another trip to the Alamo Bowl, it's going to need more out of the QB position.
Quinn Ewers, Maalik Murphy and Arch Manning are giving Texas fans a heaping helping of that most dangerous commodity, hope.
“We’re pretty lucky in the quarterback room right now,” Sarkisian told fans during a stop in Dallas this week.
Sarkisian has been particularly impressed with Ewers’ development. The sophomore from Southlake is entering his second season as a starter.
"Year Two is when you make those strides and become that elite player,” Sarkisian said. “I saw it with [former USC quarterback] Carson Palmer in year two; he wins the Heisman Trophy and ends up being the first pick in the draft. I saw it with Matt Leinart. I saw Jake Locker [at Washington]. He ends up being the 10th pick in the draft. So I’ve seen it years and years of playing in our system. I love what Quinn brings.”
As for the rest of the team, Sark is bullish on them as well.
“I just think the way we look, the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we eat, it’s just more of a comfort level for me that this just feels like my team,” Sarkisian said during an interview with Cedric Golden and Kirk Bohls for their podcast, ‘On Second Thought.’
The hope among many fans is that a Big 12 championship is the lowest expectation in 2023. Some fans’ hopes are higher than Xavier Worthy jumps …
Dare I say, some fans are hoping for a playoff appearance?
I tell ya, hope is a dangerous thing. Stay safe out there.
SPEAKING OF HOPEFUL FANS …
There are apparently a lot of Texas baseball fans hoping for a sweep of West Virginia this weekend and a share of the Big 12 title.
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but Texas hasn’t swept a Big 12 series since it swept Texas Tech at the start of conference play in March.
“It’s hard to sweep in the Big 12,” said head coach David Pierce. “But you can’t sweep unless you win game one and that’s all we can be concerned with and then let the series play out from there.”
Pierce says he’s focused on game one of the West Virginia series, but with an eye toward the future.
“It’s not just about the league share,” said Pierce. “It’s also about some of the implications of RPI positioning in the [NCAA] tournament, just finishing strong. But really, just playing good baseball, if we can do that. That’s all I expect from my team.
The Horns have played some good baseball this season but they’ve been inconsistent, getting good pitching one night, good hitting another. Consistency, or the lack thereof, is why the Horns are currently tied for third in the conference standings, looking up at Oklahoma State and West Virginia.
“We’ve been a little inconsistent,” Pierce admitted. “But at the same time, I’ve seen a lot of improvement from individuals and so we’ve just got to keep improving.
“I’m not really into looking back right now because I think we just have so much room to get better. I really do. If we can put all three phases together, consistently, I think we could be a really good team. But we have to do that as we go into the stretch now with the regular season and tournament and postseason.”
Pierce has not been shy about talking to his team about postseason play, even before the regular season wraps up.
“We have been talking about playoff baseball for the last three weeks since May started,” said Pierce.
But while he wants them playing with a postseason demeanor, he does not want them focused on it so much that they lose sight of the next objective.
“I don’t want them to go in worrying about what they have to do, we haven’t done that all year,” said Pierce. “But they need to go in there and play with a little bit of an edge and don’t drop their guard.”
Catcher Garrett Guillemette says the team feeds off the energy of postseason baseball.
“Coach made it pretty clear that once he gets to May, it’s a different kind of baseball and we’re excited for it,” said Guillemette. “Our last practice yesterday was probably the most energetic and probably one of the better practices we’ve had, just from a game standpoint and paying attention to the details.”
The details that matter most for now are this: the Horns need to sweep West Virginia and have OU beat Oklahoma State at least once. If all that happens, they can claim another title and start focusing on the conference tournament and the NCAA tournament.
Who knows, maybe with a sweep this weekend and a sweep of the Big 12 tournament in Arlington next week, maybe the Horns could even host a regional during the NCAA tournament.
Is that too much to hope for?
ESM owner Brandon is a longtime Orangebloods member @Txbaseball22 . Elite Sports Media has THE BEST in Longhorn memorabilia anywhere. You can find memorabilia from UT legends such as Vince Young, Ricky Williams, Sam Ehlinger, Cat Osterman and Ivan Melendez. He also works with current Longhorns such as Quinn Ewers and Xavier Worthy.
The next big signing will be this Saturday, May 20th. Brandon will be doing a private signing with Jordan Whittington in Round Rock. It's not open to the public but you can purchase items through Brandon to get them signed.
This week ESM is featuring a couple of autographed jerseys from Bijan Robinson.
Trust me guys, you want to get your Bijan memorabilia now BEFORE he begins his Hall of Fame career in the NFL.
If there is some kind of memorabilia you're looking for, please reach out to Brandon - he can probably get it.
You can reach Brandon via email at esmsportsut@gmail.com, or on facebook at Elite Sports Memorabilia if you have any questions or would like to place an order.
Social Media
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Twitter @EliteSportsMem
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IG Elite_Sports_Memorabilia_UT
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ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips insists his conference isn’t going anywhere.
“What I’ve been told (by athletic directors and presidents) is that we’re all in this together — emphatically,” said Phillips.
Sounds an awful lot like the dreaded “vote of confidence” to me.
The ACC wrapped up its spring meetings this week and most ACC ADs spent their time in Florida dodging reporter questions about conference realignment.
Ross Dellenger with Sports Illustrated first broke the story that seven ACC schools - Florida State, Miami, Clemson, Virginia, Virginia Tech, North Carolina and North Carolina State - have met with lawyers over the past couple of months, looking at ways they could possibly break the conference’s grant of rights with an eye towards potential conference realignment.
"That's not a warning sign,” said Phillips. “These are schools that are under a lot of stress, a lot of pressure. The reality is our conference is third in the country in (media rights) distribution. We need to close the gap between the top two conferences.
“That just isn’t news to me, per se” said Phillips. “There’s not a conference in the country or institutions that haven’t talked about conference expansion and the landscape and what’s best.”
The ACC’s grant of rights is the most restrictive in college football. All of the schools have signed over their television revenue to the conference through the year 2036.
But the ACC’s television contract puts the schools far behind their competitors. The league is set to pay out $240 million per year to member schools through 2036. Compare that to the Big 10’s new deal which will pay more than $1 billion annually, and will actually come up for renewal before the ACC’s. Details of the SEC’s contract following the addition of UT & OU are still not public but the number is reportedly more than $800 million each year. It too will come up for renewal before the ACC gets another bite of the apple.
That is what has prompted the seven schools to look at ways to break the contract and go shopping for a new home.
"Something has to change because we cannot compete nationally being $30 million behind every year," Florida State Athletic Director Michael Alford told ESPN in February. "It's not one year. We're talking about $30 million compounded year after year."
In an attempt to avoid legal fights and make the biggest schools in the conference happy, the ACC ADs and presidents spent the spring meetings working on a revenue-sharing plan which would reward the highest-performing teams. As a result, FSU could end up netting $10 million a year more.
That had FSU AD Alford singing a very different tune than the one he was singing in February.
JUST HOW EASY IS IT TO GET OUT OF A GRANT OF RIGHTS CONTRACT?
So far, no school has ever gone to court to challenge a grant of rights, and there are a couple of reasons why that may have been a factor in those decisions.
You might expect that a conference’s grant of rights contract would be a big document outlining all of the potential ways that conferences keep their schools locked in. You’d be wrong. In fact, the contracts are often just a few pages. It turns out, that’s one of the reasons these contracts are so hard to fight.
Mark Wilhelm is a lawyer for the Philadelphia law firm of Troutman Pepper. He studied the conference’s grant of rights contracts for a paper during law school which was then published in the Harvard Law School Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law in 2014.
“The fact that the documents are so brief, so short, leaves out a lot of those details that would otherwise answer the questions that we have, like how do we get out of the grant of rights?,” said Wilhelm. “So if you're in a situation in which you want to enforce the grant of rights, where you want to be a good valid document that keeps a conference together, that's very powerful.”
Then there is the fact that suing to get out of a grant of rights contract could be a very long and expensive court battle.
“Someone's gonna have to pay a lot of lawyers a lot of money to find ways to argue their way out of the contract,” said Wilhelm.
He added that there are a lot of questions about whether a legal challenge would even be successful if a university did sue. “It's really hard to figure out that first portion of the formula, what's the chance that I'm going to be successful and how much am I going to pay to find out if I'm successful?”
Wilhelm first started studying the issue while he was in the athletic department at the University of Michigan because of the perception that college football realignment was all about money.
“Internally, the goals were always to number one, have the highest performing student-athletes both in the classroom and on the field and number two, win championships,” said Wilhelm. “Money wasn't the goal.”
While he still holds that belief to be true, he acknowledges the need for money.
“Money matters, of course, because realistically if you're going to be in an athletic department with a $30 million budget you're probably not winning college football national championships, right? It's just not going to be feasible,” said Wilhelm. “So there is this, this money arms race. But my view is that it's not just for the sake of getting more money, which is I think, at least some of the narrative out there. It's more about having the funds, having the resources in order to sort of put together and have championship caliber teams.”
Which of course leads me to the current situation. When asked, without mentioning any school, if a university were to be $10, $20, or $30 million a year behind its competitors in the arms race, could that be a financial incentive to challenge a grant of rights?
“Absolutely, yes,” responded Wilhelm.
Florida State received around $36 million dollars from the ACC in 2021 as part of its annual payout (a figure that includes things such as TV revenue as well as bowl money and March Madness revenue). Meanwhile, if you travel East from Tallahassee down I-10 until you get to I-75 and take a right, you’ll wind up in Gainesville, Florida where the University of Florida received $54.6 million dollars.
The Florida number is expected to go up significantly with the new ESPN contract. The Florida State number isn’t expected to grow that much. Hence, Alford’s comment about needing change.
Alford recognizes that he is not going to be able to stay in the ACC and receive the same as his in-state brethren at UF receive, but he’s not asking for equal money either.
"We just need to be in a competitive boat," Alford said. "We're the third-best media agreement right now. We want to stay the third best. We need to be able to compete. As long as we're there and competitive, that's what the number is."
WHAT IF THE SCHOOLS ARE ABLE TO BREAK THE DEAL?
If the ACC 7 go to court and are successful in breaking the contract, then the conference realignment wheel will go into overdrive.
It’s no coincidence that the seven schools would all be very attractive to the bigger conferences and would justify SEC and Big 10 expansion.
Florida State would almost certainly end up becoming the newest member of the SEC. Clemson is another school that would take its football tradition and head to the SEC where it has more in common than the schools surrounding it in the ACC. Meanwhile, Virginia Tech may not be a blue blood in college football, but it certainly gas some blue-tinted coloring of some sort (which is a belabored way of saying they’ve had some good seasons in the past and they have somewhat of a name). Tech’s location, Blacksburg, Virginia, is also squarely in NASCAR territory, about two hours from Bristol, Tennessee along the border of the two states.
North Carolina and Virginia would be awfully attractive to the Big Ten – a conference that prides itself on academic excellence. Those schools would also pair nicely with Maryland in making the mid-Atlantic firmly Big 10 country.
North Carolina State and Miami are two schools that I just don’t know which way they would go. Maybe the Big 12 could step in and make a push? The Big 12 would be able to offer them more money and stability than what they’ve received in the ACC. Plus, they fit with Big 12 Commissioner Bret Yormark’s goal of a coast-to-coast conference which also prides itself on basketball.
It’s entirely possible that none of the schools are looking to move. They could just be interested in re-opening the television negotiations in order to close the gap between them and the SEC and Big 10? Who knows?
Of course, none of this matters if the ACC is able to strike a deal to keep its member schools happy. But in the game of conference realignment, nothing lasts forever – even cold November rain.
A WORD OF CAUTION FOR THE PAC-12
The Pac-12 also wrapped up its spring meetings last week amidst rumblings of conference realignment within their ranks. However, unlike the ACC, the Pac-12’s media rights are up for renegotiation.
The Pac-12 has been negotiating with potential television and streaming partners for nearly a year now with no deal in sight.
Arizona State AD Ray Anderson appeared on an episode of the ‘Speak of the Devils’ podcast and said he expects a multi-media rights deal by this summer. That puts the Pac-12 on target for a potential new deal by July.
After the new deal is in place and the new grant of rights is signed, Anderson says the Pac-12 itself will look to expand beyond the 10 teams remaining in the conference (San Diego State and SMU are eagerly awaiting bids).
By all reports, the Pac-12 is in talks with ESPN, Amazon and Apple for a potential TV and streaming deal. How that shakes out remains to be seen. Is Amazon going to be the primary carrier of games? Is ESPN bidding for the A-tier rights or a smaller package of Friday night games?
However, I would advise the Pac-12 presidents to take a look at what’s happening in MLS before they sign over their best games to a streaming platform just because they’re offered more money.
The MLS has put nearly every game on Apple TV with a $14.99 monthly fee to tune in and watch.
However, while viewership numbers are not published like TV ratings, you have to believe the fact that MLS is now offering a one-month of free games offer means they’re not exactly happy with what they’ve seen so far.
MLS Season Pass free trial debuts from Apple TV
Major League Soccer and Apple TV have debuted a one-month free trial to MLS Season Pass. It'll give soccer fans an opportunity to test drive the streaming subscription service. The free one-month trial is available now through October 31, 2023. After the free trial ends, MLS Season Pass renews...
worldsoccertalk.com
It’s important to note that college football, even the Pac-12, has a much more rabid and widespread fanbase than the MLS. There are plenty of fans who would sign up for a service if it meant that was the only way they could watch their alma mater play each Saturday. It’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison to look at the MLS and extrapolate what could happen with the Pac-12 if they went streaming.
Even in the MLS, rabid fans will pay the price to be able to watch their favorite sport. However, what the MLS’s decision to go with Apple TV has done is prevent casual fans from clicking over to watch games.
What casual, or even just curious fan, will sign up for a $15-a-month fee to watch a game where they don’t necessarily have a rooting interest?
The Pac-12 needs to do everything it can to ensure that as many people as possible see their games. They’ve already struggled to attract viewers to watch games on the Pac-12 Network due to a very limited number of outlets carrying the network.
Even if Pac-12 games are free on Amazon or Apple, many fans who haven’t cut the chord yet, will still have to deal with the “struggle” of clicking over from a cable or satellite outlet to a streaming outlet.
Never underestimate the “meh” attitude of the general public.
Of course, this could set up a potential dilemma for the Pac-12. Would the conference accept less money in exchange for more eyeballs on ESPN? If so, how much less can they accept before their own schools start looking at the Big 12 or other conferences in order to not fall behind in the conference arms race?
For now, Arizona State’s Anderson is another Pac-12 voice shouting down allegations that their conference members may be looking to jump ship.
Anderson added that Arizona State has had “no internal discussions about ASU going anywhere else because, very frankly, there’s no desire.”
That’s always true … until it’s not.
SPEAKING OF SOCCER …
I have been a soccer fan ever since the pandemic. Soccer was the first sport to come back and I fell in love with it. Actually, I fell in love with Leeds United in particular. Their style of play, their coach, the connection between the club and the city and the fact that Yorkshire is my ancestral home, all added up to me falling fast and hard.
But watching Leeds United has helped me understand more than anything else the saying, “It’s the hope that kills you.”
Last Saturday, Leeds, needing a win, got up quickly 1-0 on Newcastle. Then, shockingly, they were awarded a penalty kick and that hope swelled that they were about to go up 2-0 and were well on their way to an improbable victory over Newcastle and three points closer to safely avoiding relegation. Then this happened.
Patrick Bamford misses the penalty with a weak kick kind of towards the corner and the hope balloon started deflating.
That balloon was popped three minutes later when Leeds gave up a stupid handball leading to a Newcastle penalty kick.
It turns out that bad teams make bad mistakes. Leeds is a bad team and that’s why they are where they are in the standings.
Too much soccer talk for you? I understand. But the point of all that is that it really is the hope that kills you. You get inflated dreams of grandeur only to have them come crashing back to reality.
HOW HOPEFUL ARE YOU FOR THE 2023 SEASON?
The Texas Longhorns have yet to begin summer workouts, but the expectations for this team are already sky-high.
“This is our last year in the Big 12,” head coach Steve Sarkisian told fans last month. “The goal is to win a conference championship, and I think we have the roster and the team in place to go and do that.”
Is that too much hope?
In this case – no. (Note, I’m not calling for Texas to be a playoff team but I am giving you permission to dream big if you want.)
College football really comes down to one position – the quarterback. If you have a successful quarterback, you will be a successful team.
Sam Ehlinger has been Texas’ best quarterback since Colt McCoy, but the best he could muster was a 10-4 season that culminated with a win over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.
Ehlinger famously declared “we’re back” on the podium after the game. Since then, Texas has gone:
2019: 8-5
2020: 7-3
2021: 5-7
2022: 8-5
Georgia, meanwhile, has won two straight national championships.
If Texas wants more than another trip to the Alamo Bowl, it's going to need more out of the QB position.
Quinn Ewers, Maalik Murphy and Arch Manning are giving Texas fans a heaping helping of that most dangerous commodity, hope.
“We’re pretty lucky in the quarterback room right now,” Sarkisian told fans during a stop in Dallas this week.
Sarkisian has been particularly impressed with Ewers’ development. The sophomore from Southlake is entering his second season as a starter.
"Year Two is when you make those strides and become that elite player,” Sarkisian said. “I saw it with [former USC quarterback] Carson Palmer in year two; he wins the Heisman Trophy and ends up being the first pick in the draft. I saw it with Matt Leinart. I saw Jake Locker [at Washington]. He ends up being the 10th pick in the draft. So I’ve seen it years and years of playing in our system. I love what Quinn brings.”
As for the rest of the team, Sark is bullish on them as well.
“I just think the way we look, the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we eat, it’s just more of a comfort level for me that this just feels like my team,” Sarkisian said during an interview with Cedric Golden and Kirk Bohls for their podcast, ‘On Second Thought.’
The hope among many fans is that a Big 12 championship is the lowest expectation in 2023. Some fans’ hopes are higher than Xavier Worthy jumps …
Dare I say, some fans are hoping for a playoff appearance?
I tell ya, hope is a dangerous thing. Stay safe out there.
SPEAKING OF HOPEFUL FANS …
There are apparently a lot of Texas baseball fans hoping for a sweep of West Virginia this weekend and a share of the Big 12 title.
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but Texas hasn’t swept a Big 12 series since it swept Texas Tech at the start of conference play in March.
“It’s hard to sweep in the Big 12,” said head coach David Pierce. “But you can’t sweep unless you win game one and that’s all we can be concerned with and then let the series play out from there.”
Pierce says he’s focused on game one of the West Virginia series, but with an eye toward the future.
“It’s not just about the league share,” said Pierce. “It’s also about some of the implications of RPI positioning in the [NCAA] tournament, just finishing strong. But really, just playing good baseball, if we can do that. That’s all I expect from my team.
The Horns have played some good baseball this season but they’ve been inconsistent, getting good pitching one night, good hitting another. Consistency, or the lack thereof, is why the Horns are currently tied for third in the conference standings, looking up at Oklahoma State and West Virginia.
“We’ve been a little inconsistent,” Pierce admitted. “But at the same time, I’ve seen a lot of improvement from individuals and so we’ve just got to keep improving.
“I’m not really into looking back right now because I think we just have so much room to get better. I really do. If we can put all three phases together, consistently, I think we could be a really good team. But we have to do that as we go into the stretch now with the regular season and tournament and postseason.”
Pierce has not been shy about talking to his team about postseason play, even before the regular season wraps up.
“We have been talking about playoff baseball for the last three weeks since May started,” said Pierce.
But while he wants them playing with a postseason demeanor, he does not want them focused on it so much that they lose sight of the next objective.
“I don’t want them to go in worrying about what they have to do, we haven’t done that all year,” said Pierce. “But they need to go in there and play with a little bit of an edge and don’t drop their guard.”
Catcher Garrett Guillemette says the team feeds off the energy of postseason baseball.
“Coach made it pretty clear that once he gets to May, it’s a different kind of baseball and we’re excited for it,” said Guillemette. “Our last practice yesterday was probably the most energetic and probably one of the better practices we’ve had, just from a game standpoint and paying attention to the details.”
The details that matter most for now are this: the Horns need to sweep West Virginia and have OU beat Oklahoma State at least once. If all that happens, they can claim another title and start focusing on the conference tournament and the NCAA tournament.
Who knows, maybe with a sweep this weekend and a sweep of the Big 12 tournament in Arlington next week, maybe the Horns could even host a regional during the NCAA tournament.
Is that too much to hope for?
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