Glad some of the Pac came along with us. Still disappointed how it all worked out. Feel bad for Oregon State and Washington State Also, just wondering, does Big 12 have some kind of streaming component?
They have an agreement with espn+ to carry a bunch of stuff. Not sure how comprehensive it is, but I've used it for hoops and baseball, and the occasional rando football game that wasn't on any of the 5 or so cable networks (Fox, FS1, ABC, all the espns) that broadcast B12 stuff.
One fear in the back of my mind during this process has been a lack of space for all this new inventory. I feel like UH games are gonna wind up on ESPN8 "The Ocho" more often in this brave new world.
I have no idea how much I pay for espn+ but I use it a lot more than I expected to, so I've never cancelled it.
Came free with my Hulu subscription, so hopefully lots of content on there. Don’t know anyone with cable
youtube.tv, I think has all that stuff I mentioned earlier. Don't know anything about it. Find a friend in the next month.
After this debacle I ended up subscribing to FuboTV. I've been "streaming" Rockets and Astros games for 5-6 years at this point and just fed up. I watch too much sports and we are never going to get out of paying 100 a month to do so. It's part of why the P12 collapsed and why all of those folks got let go at ESPN. Stuff costs what it costs and getting lesser versions of it comes with it's own set of issues. I watch Arsenal, Rockets, Astros and Coogs and I guess it is what it is. Peacock and FuboTV are what I need to cover me. Going to wait and see if they're going to have Arsenal CL games on normal cable or if I'm going to need Paramount as well. Also subscribed to the Athletic.
Again, the stupidity continues. Cal and Stanford in the ATLANTIC Coast Conference? Big 12 with 16 teams? Big 10 with 18 teams? Greed has destroyed college sports. Nothing makes sense anymore. Can we at least get together and rename all the conferences now? "Conference A" and "Conference B" make more sense than what we currently have.
Its always funny to hear this. College football is probably only going to get more and more popular as we consolidate into this NFL 2.0 model.
I think there will be more money, but I don't think it will get more popular. 18 team conferences are just silly - either half the teams will never play each other (if they go into 9 team divisions) or there will be no consistency of opponents and eventually you're going to have a season where 3 or more teams go undefeated in conference and create a total subjective mess on who gets to play for the title. When you only play an opponent every 3 or 4 years, there's no passion there. Had a close game and got knocked out of the championship race? Let's get our revenge in 2028 when none of the students that watched this game will be there anymore! Conferences that go coast-to-coast but don't have neighboring schools are silly - they prevent fans from travelling for road games and they eliminate regional rivalries. Tennessee or Florida are going to be more interesting and fun for Texas to play than Baylor or Texas Tech, but no one's going to care about those games the minute they are over. People from different schools won't be talking about the game or trash talking each other in the office the week after. The giant conference's strength is that they can put more premier matchups together spread out throughout the season. But with the same amount of total inventory, if you get more good school vs good school matches, that just means the lesser schools will be on TV that much less. All around, money is driving this, but like unregulated NIL, I don't think this will excite fans or drive viewership in the long-haul. Certainly in the short-term having new matchups and new opponents will be exciting, though.
Lots of sports ratings and interest have declined over time while money goes up. Texas is way richer today than 10 years ago, but the stadium doesn't even sell out all the time and seats can be found for many games for $10 on Stubhub.
I don't know how to square that from an economics standpoint. One would think gameday attendance would be a strong correlary to the popularity of a sport, but that doesn't really seem to be the case over the last 10 years or so. At any rate, the money won't keep coming in for a product that doesn't have any demand to support it. And right now, the money is talking.
I think contributors to Texas' less-than-sold out games are: We've been mediocre or outright bad for 14 years. The Big 12 home schedule is sometimes underwhelming and this will improve in the SEC. Home crowds can now come see us lose to A&M and Arkansas instead of Kansas. Attending a football game is a lot of effort. It's an all-day affair that a lot of people don't have time for anymore and the in-stadium experience isn't better than watching multiple games at home. TV and replay timeouts are brutally long in DKR when you have no way of watching any other games. This is a sport-wide issue not unique to UT.
have you seen that this season's season tickets sold out? plus getting seats for Texas road games are expensive, check out how much it is to get Houston tickets.
