On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 11:15 PM, JW <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree wholeheartedly with Joe. I mean no disrespect to PLU or Coach > Westering, but if you ask even serious college football fans to name great > coaches, there's a good chance Frosty won't be mentioned. They're paying > attention to the teams who collect a lot of money to provide 14 hours of TV > programming on Saturdays, and that money is enriching just about everybody > involved except the athletes themselves. And if colleges decided to reduce > the rights fees they collect in the name of making the sport "cleaner", it > would just be more in the pockets of Disney, Comcast, et al. (SNIP) >
JW has put his finger on the most difficult part of this. I have been having conversations with friends over the years about how to get Big Money out of sports (College and, to a lesser extent, Pro), and it really is not clear how you would do it. As JW explains, if you somehow put a ceiling on rights fees, that would not get the money out, it would just concentrate it all the more in the hands of those who already have the Big Money. The proposal we keep coming back to is Congress passing legislation making sports a public good, and requiring broadcast networks to air contests commercial-free during prime weekend day and weeknight evening hours. Putting aside the political/financial realities that would prevent that from ever happening, I am not sure that even that would work, since without the profit incentive to attract more viewers how good would the production values be? OTOH, would we trade all of the BS that comes with Big Money in sports for some kind of local access production values for the televising of the games? Yes - I think maybe we would. I guess there are intermediate positions where the controls could be put not on rights fees but on the price of commercial spots, thought that ad dollar is going to want to go somewhere, and it will be hard to plug every hole to keep it from seeping back into sports, where so many live eyeballs are. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
