I need to stop writing unreadable blocks of text.
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I am typically a âUVa will be fine in realignmentâ evangelist, but a few recent developments have concerned me a lot:
- Sankey is starting to sound like heâs ready to go scorched earth on the NCAA and maybe even the CFP at some point. I am not sure expansion is on his mind at all right now, and if football ends up in its own category or something in a super league situation, then I am concerned with how that would affect the current revenue sharing situation within conferences. It could necessitate a different structure to how the media deals with conferences are structured. Or we could end up an SEC member for everything but football or something. Donât know exactly what it would look like, but there is definitely risk of total systemic overhaul here.
- With ESPN launching their new digital âflagshipâ service, the media market/carriage fees component of all of this is becoming less important, and with some of the reporting about this new digital service, it sounds like they are willing to take the short term pain of less cable subscribers and focus more on what the brand brings in national eyeballs. You could see a world where ESPN isnât interested in DC cable carriage fees at all by 2032 or whenever which would really hurt us. Carriage fees are what saved Maryland and Rutgers, but I am not sure we can rely on them this time around.
- Bubba Cunningham is a great ally for us in this. He clearly values our rivalry/partnership. However, there is a lot of reporting he was steamrolled on the Belicheck thing, and there were rumors he looked hard at the Michigan State job. Heâs also not getting any younger. Will he be the AD at UNC in 2032? And if heâs not will the next guy value us as much as he does? Or will they take the biggest check and get out of dodge?
I think you are right that being a patsy for the big teams is a bit of a selling point. They need more Vanderbilts for sure, but will they offer the future Vandys full shares? We have already seen the B1G and ACC take teams with less than the full rev. share amount being given to them. We could end up in a situation where weâre trying to compete with a conference of teams getting full media shares while we are getting an amount closer to our old ACC number, but at least in the ACC everyone is getting around that same number..
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Yeah, I donât think itâs a guarantee (or even likely) that we will join the BIG or SEC. Both are getting so big that there are expansion issues with diminishing returns, more logistical complexity, or streaming taking mix from carriage fees as a primary source of revenue - especially as time goes on.
I think itâs more likely we stick with the acc in some shape or form or we join acc breakaways schools to form with the big 12 into a distant third conference.
Unc and notre dame are the clear most attractive properties in the next round of expansion because their national brands drawing in eyeballs across multiple sports and geographies. Maybe we are the add-on to Unc? Otherwise we are competing with bigger football brands (Florida state, Clemson) or schools with bigger alumni bases. Our primary asset is the dc and other va markets, which become less and less attractive as time goes on and streaming takes over.
Our best bet to the SEC or BIG is for expansion to happen soon, is to ride along with UNC, or to build football and basketball brands that are nationally relevant.
Thatâs clearly the ADâs strategy, though I question their execution at this point (losing bronco, losing Tony Bennett, hiring Tony Elliott, poor PR, not being proactive in building a next gen NIL structure, and because of that not being able to fire Tony Elliott when he clearly isnât the guy to get us there).
Further, I donât buy for a second that being bad at football is a good thing for expansion because the power 2 need more vandyâs.
That has never been an expansion decision criteria.
Itâs always been about maximizing the next media deal. The better your football and basketball programs are, or the more alumni/fans you have that tune in, and/or the more geographies you being to carriage fees, the more attractive you are. Unless you are analogous to ucla to USC and are a package deal.
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You might be completely right. Iâm just optimistic on this for maybe irrational reasons. I know the last realignment was more about fanbase size and viewer ratings than market size and cable subscribers.
Iâm hoping the next one, which might be decided in 2028 with a 2030 start date to allow for a 2 year notice like UT and OU gave the Big XII, will be about increasing the size and quality of student populations. If TV money is stagnant, revenue growth might have to come from more out of state students paying more tuition (especially if thereâs a large decrease of foreign tuition paying students between now and 2028). Maybe thatâs the market size the conferences look at over cable subscribers. 50k/year in tuition for an additional student means more to Georgia, Florida, Alabama or Texas than an extra 5 bucks a month for each additional cable or streaming subscriber.
Maybe weâll also be able to show off all these 2028 LA Olympic medals our students and alumni have won.
And as far as full/partial revenue shares, the best thing that could happen for us is a bidding war between the conferences for our membership.
Dammit, another unreadable block of text.
Can we stop including this in the list of grievances. I dont think there was anything that anyone at UVa could have done to stop that from happeningâhe was done and it was due to the changes to the sport and to college athletics in general that he simply couldnât live with.
One could argue that his departure has actually provided UVa with a better path forward to remain relevant in basketball.
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Iâm not insisting that anyone else call her âDrâ. As I have mentioned on the board a handful of times before, I come from a family of academics (father, grandfather, both of my aunts). Itâs literally in my blood. That is why I call her Dr, because it is absolutely an achievement worth merit IMO. It is ridiculously hard to get if you actually know what it entails, which is a legitimate academic contribution to the field that youâre working in. NOT just completing coursework, but pushing the frontiers of knowledge within that field. 2.5 million Americans might be a large raw number but itâs still less than 1% of ALL Americans lol so not sure what that stat was dropped for
When I was a research assistant for one of my professors at UVA, I remember another undergrad referring to our professor as Mr. X instead of professor X or Dr X or whatever. It didnât matter, the professor didnât complain or treat him any differently and it didnât have any impact on the teams work. So yea, it clearly doesnât make a difference in the big picture. I do it cause I like showing respect to something that I have a lot of appreciation for. Itâs why I have the same attitude on the board. Nothing more or less dude. Iâm âawareâ of the tradition of not referring to professors/faculty as âDr.â or âProfessorâ. I can count on 1 hand the amount of times I heard ANYONE call a faculty anything other than either of those terms tho in my 4 years.
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We have to think bigger. Can we deliver 500 additional students to other conference schools per year that would otherwise never consider going to those schools? So at any given time, there are 2000 out of state students from Virginia at other B1G/SEC schools? Could we make the other schools in our new conference the 2nd choice school for our applicants who we donât accept? 2000 students at 50k tuition a year would be 100 million dollars in value weâd be delivering to the new conference.
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I genuinely donât believe for a second that academic enrollment is a primary, secondary, or tertiary consideration for conference expansion. Time and again, itâs come down to maximizing the next conference media rights deal.
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Heâs clearly the one of the 3 major coaching losses that is least to blame for Carla. I donât blame her absolutely, but I donât fully absolve her either.
Tony left because he didnât think he could win his way and the outlook for UVA basketball wasnât motivating him anymore. Is that mostly due to structural reasons? YES. Could the University have done more to create a structure around him that would have kept his motivation high (after all, he went back on his initial proclivity to retire in April)? Absolutely yes. Iâm not saying it would have prevented his retirement. But it could have.
Carla has time and again demonstrated she is an excellent fundraiser. But itâs almost always been in reactive situations. She has not proactively adjusted the strategy and operations of the AD to support these HOF coaches transitioning into the new era. She has not positioned UVA to be a leader in the new world college athletics order. I donât blame her 100% for that â not many AD leaders have successfully done that. But if Tony was looking at a roster and program that could compete for Final 4s, I donât believe for a second he would have stepped away.
Thatâs mostly Tonyâs doing. But a visionary AD could have pushed Tony in ways that might have kept him around. Call it 20% of the blame on Carla.
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I consulted to higher ed for 15 years and it is automatic for me to refer to a PhD holder as âDrââin academia it can be interpreted as disrespect not to. That said if I built a personal relationship with one of my clients I would often be instructed to drop the honorific (but I would never assume that, needed to be instructed to do so)
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Iâm not saying academics has ever been a motivating driver for modern conference realignment. Itâs always been about money. But I think at some point the ROI for the streamers and TV networks hit a plateau and media money stops growing as fast. Plus money is money. You have to sell the money upside of gaining a new, valuable market of potential students and youâre the partner to best help them exploit it.
The ADs can go back to their Presidents and say theyâre helping out the academic side too and be treated as heroes at their schools. This is the dream we can sell and what AD or President doesnât like their ego being stroked a little? I donât think itâs an easy sell, we have to work at it along with bringing the other metrics. But if all weâre bringing is a limited number of fans and eyeballs, weâre not going to win out. If thatâs the only ROI of adding us, weâre not getting invited. We have to bring value that no one else can deliver.
Yea itâs certainly not cool to not refer to a doctorate as one of those terms unless explicitly told. The only thing abt this situation is that it has been mentioned of that tradition at UVA of only referring to anyone as Mr or Ms.
But once again, literally never heard ANYONE during my undergrad at UVA actually do that. They always said professor or Dr. bros just triggered cause of his agenda
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I kinda feel the opposite. Tony couldnât have been âhands offâ enough to just let someone else run with this, since itâs so core to his job. It wasnât just that he didnât want to NIL fundraise or negotaite, itâs that he didnât want players who wanted to negotiate. How would someone take that off his hands?
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I think if Carla engaged with media more and communicated with the fan base more she wouldnât have as much blame. I think that would fix a lot of issues people see in her
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Carla: People blame me for everything they donât like about the UVa athletics department. The fans never say âthank youâ.
Don Draper:
GIFs aside, I doubt there is a fan base anywhere that doesnât blame their AD for a bunch of (silly) things.
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People still in the bargaining stage of grief wrt TB. âNow see, if we just had this visionary leader with some really outside-the-box, magic bullet ideas, Tony wouldâve stayed and won 3 more titles.â
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Thereâs a reason many fans had been expecting Tony to retire early even before all of college athletics blew up. All you had to do was listen to him speak over the years. He never wanted to coach into super old age. In fact, it never even sounded like he felt like coaching was what he really really wanted to do in life (he always talks about how he fell into it after his playing days were sadly cut short). The man was never going to be a Boeheim or Coach K.
Then the whole system turned into what it is and ushered him out. People already tried to shield him from it and did for as long as they could. Unless you can point to something specific that could have been done to keep him, I think itâs just unfair to blame Carla or UVA. He didnât want to do what he had to do to stay competitive in the modern game, and thatâs ok. But resources werenât an issue - support wasnât an issue. He could have had literally anything he wanted if he asked - Carla and the donors would have happily paid. The money was there - he didnât want to use it because thatâs not how he wanted to coach.
The debates about all the other things potentially being at the ADâs feet - totally make sense and Iâm not sure where I stand. But I donât see how Tony is at all Carlaâs fault unless somebody can present an argument better than âwell maybe she could have done something and it might have made him feel differentâ.
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This is all true, and I agree with you. But I also think that we are still in pretty good position. Yes, itâd be better if football and basketball were better, but we are the flagship university in a large, growing, affluent state (same as UNC). We have demonstrated an ability to be competitive, and if I remember correctly, we actually draw a solid number of eyeballs to our broadcasts even when we arenât great.
Yes decisions arenât being made like they used to, but given that, and given that neither the BIG or SEC have a presence in VA and NC (again big growing affluent states with good recruiting) I think weâre quite attractive. Plus thereâs no schools lobbying against us internally (eg UF against FSU, South Carolina against Clemson) and geographically we make sense for both (obviously that means less than it used to, but given how crazy theyâve already made travel costs, can only help all else equal). I mean who knows, but I remain personally optimistic if we can just get out this dying conference.
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Yeah you still need to be competent at football. Competing for bowl eligibility, at least, but I donât think they care between like 6 and 10 wins really to be honest, and frankly I donât know that our win total will ever cause us to get a ton of national eyeballs.
Brett Yormark at the Big 12 has talked a lot about how he thinks the next gold rush in college athletics now is basketball (mens and womens), of course with his conference he has to say that, but I think there is some truth to it. The football product is reaching close to peak monetization, I think theyâll set their sights on basketball in earnest soon, so I think a good basketball program is a real asset.
On the quality of student population, the B1G is the only one that would care imo. They do take the BTAA fairly seriously, and we would be a great addition to that, but theyâve shown theyâve gotten flexible on that front when they let in non-AAU member Nebraska.