- Kansas AD Lew Perkins unveiled the secrets behind the curtain when he explained yesterday that the five Big 12 schools facing life outside the BCS — KU, Kansas State, Missouri, Iowa State and Baylor — came up with a ‘business plan’ to keep the Texas and Oklahoma schools from bailing on them to the Pac-10. This business plan essentially amounts to these five schools paying for the privilege of having Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State in their conference. Whether the subsidy will come from their NCAA Tournament revenue or penalties levied against Colorado and Nebraska for leaving is unclear, but what is absolutely certain is that the dollars will end up in Austin, College Station, Stillwater and Norman. Just. Wow.
- Jerry Jones has done some amazing things in his lifetime, so if anyone else was pitching the idea of adding Arkansas and Notre Dame to the newfangled Big 12, we’d immediately dismiss the idea. With the billionaire Cowboys owner saying it, we’ll at least entertain the thought for fifteen seconds or so. For what it’s worth, Arkansas AD Jeff Long said that the Hawgs have “no interest” in leaving the SEC. And why would they? They are making major bank where they are, and the Big 12 is still going to be fraught with uncertainty given its ridiculous revenue ‘sharing’ agreement.
- Here’s a good recap of Tom Izzo reactions from around the blogosphere over at BiaH. Izzo as professional coach just doesn’t feel right. We like this move to stay in East Lansing.
- An interview with one of the best in the biz, Jay Bilas, for your lazy-day summer reading.
- We enjoyed this post by Braves & Birds, an Atlanta-area sports blog, but we need to make one clarification: if you add up the value of all of the separate conference television contracts as well as the BCS bowl game contracts, it still does not approach what the NCAA Tournament brings in an average year (~$700-$800M) from its television deal. The problem isn’t revenue in college basketball; it’s where the revenue goes. Since the NCAA Tournament collects all the money from CBS/Turner up front and metes it out to the schools and conferences as it sees fit while all the college football dollars go directly to the conferences/schools themselves, it’s easy to see why the gridiron game is the driver here. It also explains why there won’t be a college football playoff anytime soon as administered by the NCAA — the big-ticket schools simply don’t want to share that revenue with anyone else.
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"he big-ticket schools simply don’t want to share that revenue with anyone else." If the big-ticket schools could get rid of or otherwise marginalize the little-ticket schools, then we will have a playoff. I am going with a playoff some time by 2020.
What are the odds that Kelvin Sampson becomes coach of the Cavs and what are the odds that Lebron stays with him as coach? How ridiculous would this be?