The Big 10 are big dummies

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If the Big 10 gets their way on this, the regular season is officially dead.

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/47584209/college-football-playoff-expansion-hearing

SEC wants 16, and the B1G wants 24. I’m assuming the desire for 24 is purely a play for Fox by the Yankee conference to force the division of TV rights.

If Sankey doesn’t hold the line on this, he’s pretty much useless. I’ve become resigned to the fact they are going to expand. 16 seems right to give the top 4 a play-in game. The question is how far will they go with games on campus.

Redd Foxx has a word for Tony Petitti.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

This entry was posted in CFP, It’s Just Bidness and tagged , , , by eethomaswfnc. Bookmark the permalink.

About eethomaswfnc

I've been a Dawg my entire life. UGA was always my dream school where I received 2 Terry College degrees and met my DGD wife. I've been a season ticket holder for over 30 years and love the in-stadium experience over anything from Section HD. My first game in Sanford Stadium was the 1981 Auburn game where we clinched the SEC championship. The best game I've attended in person was the Midnight Miss against Ohio State (nite, nite!). The best home games I've attended were the 1984 Clemson game (the Butler did it) and the 2013 LSU game (that 4th down is still the loudest single moment I've experienced between the hedges). The game I love to win is against the Handbags (FTMF), and the game I hate to lose is the NATS (Tuck Fech).

36 thoughts on “The Big 10 are big dummies”

  1. I think the equity firm that will run the big 10 wants 24 teams. I’m getting closer to walking away from college football. Yesterday when I read this and that Frazier was shopping I just about threw up.

    • I am there with you. I support my alma mater in everything, but “college football” is really losing my devotion.

      • I didn’t watch a minute of either semifinal (and likely won’t for the championship game). If someone had called me on Friday and said they had an extra ticket for free if I could get myself to MBS, I would have said, “Tonight is laundry night.”

        • Yep, I have walked away from college football. I didn’t watch a single snap of any team other than UGA, and I have zero interest in the tournament final.

          Kdawg05

    • It’s sickening. Unbridled, short-sighted, extractive greed is fucking pretty much everything, very much including CFB, up and down and sideways. Anybody who wants to know what’s going on with our new private equity overlords should read Megan Greenwell’s book, “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.” If only the subtitle were hyperbole.

  2. At this point, we might as well just make it a 64-team pod-based quadruple-elimination tournament with re-seeding and get rid of the regular season altogether. We can seed teams the same way they do the NBA draft lottery, with the ping pong balls. Each team gets a number of balls based on a combination of last year’s record, media rankings, and Pat McAfee’s personal opinion.

    Who needs tradition and rivalries? Think of the viewership numbers!!

    • Championship game tickets (other than the game in San Jose) have always had a robust secondary market. That’s not what the post is about.

      This is about rendering the best regular season in sports as meaningless.

      • I went to both of our natties and paid less than half that for both games on the same secondary market.

        As far as the regular season, its now a series of qualifying exhibitions whether the number is 12, 16, 24, whatever.

        My response was directed at the sentiment that there is diminishing interest. I think the suits are getting a different message in their wallets.

        • Don’t forget this is a Miami home game and Indiana’s Hail Mary dream season, so the ticket demand will naturally be significantly higher than for 2 regular blue blood fanbases having to travel.

          • I haven’t forgotten but I saw 2nd and 26 from a loge seat at MBS that I paid less for than the “get in” price next Monday.

            UGA 60 miles away. I think we were pretty psyched.

            Tuscaloosa 200 miles away. When aren’t they?

          • Not sure when you bought your ticket but I know I got mine in Indy the day before the game at a price half of what it was 3 days prior. The prices always start higher than they finish. And that was 8 years ago, so the starting prices had to have been a good bit lower then too, right?

          • I don’t believe that Miami “home games” often sell out as they don’t have a lot of “true” fans or a stadium that is actually “theirs”.

            I’m hoping for an Indiana victory (even though that means all of the “BIG 10 is superior to the SEC” boasts) as I’m not ready for the Miami bandwagon to reappear (does anyone else remember the late 80’s and early 90’s when all of the Miami clothing was being worn by numerous rappers and people who generally didn’t even watch college football?).

          • They are ultimate bandwagon fans. They will be out en masse for the game.

    • What about the Fiesta Bowl, where it looked like there were huge swaths of unoccupied seats, and the quarterfinals where it looked like there lots of unsold seats/secondary supply (took about a 25% haircut to unload my Sugar Bowl tix the day before the game)?
      Not to mention the pitiful attendance at the other bowl games. Gator Bowl was awful, Citrus Bowl was awful, it ain’t what it once was!
      Whether TV thinks so or not, they need a crowd!

      • Wouldn’t shock me that all the preliminaries move to campus and that the finale becomes an unattainable ticket for fans and is just a big gathering of muckety-mucks who want to see and be seen.

        Like the Super Bowl.

        If you’ve never seen a Super Bowl live…don’t.

      • Yeah, I took a bath on my Fiesta Bowl tickets. Sold them for way less than face value, and I’m sure there lots of tickets eaten for that game. The upper deck was spotty.

      • I noticed lots of unoccupied seats at many playoff games (as well as at the SECCG). I think that “it just costs more” to attend these games and the only fans that will pay are the obsessive fans and the fans that haven’t been there before (like Indiana).

  6. I’m about done. If I wanted to watch a bunch of 23 year-olds play for huge amounts of money, I’d just watch the NFL. At least they have rules.

    • I just watch my team. Other than that, I’ve been pretty disconnected for a while.

      It helps me to have this place serve as a refuge from the national sports media bullshit. I really don’t watch or read anything much outside of here.

      If there was something that would lead me to do any other thing rather than watch Georgia play football, I don’t know what it is. I can’t conceive of it. It is admittedly a sad, cultish and incurable devotion.

      HBTMFD!!! Until I am bulldog dead!

  7. 24 would be gross and stupid. No one ranked that low deserves a shot at a national championship.

    • Perhaps not but they would have “earned” it. And that is what matters. Until it doesn’t.

    • “Tournament championship”

      We could circumvent this by going back to a poll and declaring a season national champion based on their season results, pre-tournament results. Lots of arguments and discussions would ensue until the next season. I’d much prefer this to the current cluster.

  8. Or…hear me out…fill the first two weeks of the season with inter conference matchups of top programs that have seldom played each other at their home stadiums (no neutral site bs). Results will heavily influence the pollsters / committee while the rest of the season plays out. You have the final 8 in the playoffs. Conference title game participants are viewed as having an extra “data point” for the committee to consider so close upsets can keep you in but blowouts can knock you out (bama) as would lack of a data point (ND).

    At 24 this year the likes of the gnats, Iowa, Houston, Utah and Arizona are in. Plus that’s 12 more teams off the table for the Duke ‘s Mayo Bowls of the world unless they get the first round games (screwing the home team fans) or losers then go to these bowls where opts out will be so bad no one will show.

    Disney, Fox, Prime and Netflix need to think this through. Big games to open the season before the NFL regular season and MLB playoffs are underway vs Tulane v Arizona in early December…which gets more eyeballs?

  9. The tournament style championship ruined college basketball and is doing the same to CFB. We are currently well beyond the number of qualified championship worthy teams. A key injury at the wrong time causes a Cinderella situation and not a champion. Attendance has and will continue to suffer but TV viewership will increase and the money whores will keep taking the checks. At what point will ESPN start jettisoning some of the lesser bowls?
    Playing championship worthy games on Thursday or Monday is an abomination. I watch the semifinals with half hearted interest and will have the NC game on for background noise.

  11. (Well, that ^ didn’t work.)
    I came here to declare that ESPN and the CFP and NIL are abusing the Golden Goose and have violated the Golden Goose are now plucking (yes…with a “p” but your consonant may vary ) the goose for the oven.
    (BTW..goose isn’t fine dining by a long shot)
    Cooked birds don’t lay golden eggs.
    16 got us those worthy contenders Tulane and JMU.
    And now the morons think 24 is an improvement?
    How STUPID (greedy) can these assholes be??
    College presidents must get together and tell their coaches they cannot take a player out of the portal…shut that mother down…
    and tell ESPN to f’ off with their money grubbing expanded playoffs…
    shut THAT mother down…
    and require student athletes to be student athletes.
    ESPN’s short return on their scheming looks like a golden egg, but long term there’ll be nothing left but goose shit.
    People are tuning out. I mostly have and may altogether soon.
    I really, really hope that common sense will somehow prevail but money and greed are hard to kill.

  12. The desire to watch is still there, but the emotional attachment is gone. In another year or two, I’m certain my yard will be immaculate by mid-October.

  13. the powers that be have already killed this hallowed sport but they haven’t realized it yet.
    thanks for killing nascar, ncaa bball, mlb, nba, and now ncaa football.

  14. 68,000 and change announced attendance at Sugar Bowl. Called a sellout. Done capacity 73,000 with Ole Miss a newbie in the CFP and an average of 3 hours away. That tells the story. Most are watching it on TV or not at all. It’s dying folks but not quite dead. I sold 2 season’s tix infidelity by game and betted a bunch. When that disappears is when I cut all my tickets of 40 years.

  15. LOL, read this article about how asinine the Nascar “playoffs” became and how sick the few remaining fans were when it just became a glorified “whoever finishes highest in the last race wins” contest!
    Whoever said above that we’re almost to the end of what they can due to destroy the sport, Nascar had 10 years of tweaks before it realized it was F-ed; not sure CFB can take another decade of Sankey + Big10 idiocy….
    Once upon a time, a bunch of ESPNers (hi Marty & McGee and a bunch of others) were full-time racing reporters; Heather should take their career arcs to the unemployment line or bit players in other sports, as a sign of caution!
    https://www.espn.com/racing/story/_/id/47592082/nascar-restores-10-race-chase-championship-format

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