Team Speed Kills

SEC Baseball: What Everyone's Fighting For This Weekend

2012-05-17T13:00:36Z

SEC baseball is a little bit harder to follow than SEC football in one respect: It's harder to know what the stakes are. But as we go into this weekend, there are a few teams with a lot on the line -- only LSU has locked up a bye in the SEC tournament -- and others who will at least be fighting for seeding.

Below is our attempt to highlight the biggest battles of the weekend, with all series beginning today and running through Saturday. The schedule is: Arkansas at Tennessee, Florida at Auburn, LSU at South Carolina, Georgia at Alabama, Kentucky at Mississippi State and Ole Miss at Vanderbilt. But the most interesting contests might be the ones that will play out between teams that aren't playing each other.

Your humble correspondent will keep this site updated throughout the weekend and also be tweeting quite a bit (@TeamSpeedKills) as the results start to roll in. If there's one weekend to watch SEC baseball, it's this one; we hope this viewer guide will help.

THE BATTLE FOR THE SEC: Kentucky (18-9), South Carolina (17-9), LSU (17-10), Florida (16-11)
The team with the simplest formula here is Kentucky: Win out and they claim their first outright SEC regular-season title. Period. (The Wildcats did share one with Alabama in 2006.) Anything less than a sweep and things get complicated.

For South Carolina, simply winning one more game than Kentucky (and LSU) will do the trick. That's because of the quirk of having played one fewer game than the Wildcats; it's essentially a half-game lead if South Carolina wins one more than Kentucky. It also cuts the other way if South Carolina wins the same number of games as Kentucky; if the Gamecocks had won that other game against Georgia, they could have divided the title with the Cats by winning the same number of games. And South Carolina can't tie for the title at all because of that lost game; it's either win the title out right or don't.

LSU is in a bit more interesting situation. Winning one more game than the Wildcats will give them a share of the title but guarantees nothing more. It could, indeed, end up with a three-way tie between the Tigers, the Cats and Florida if all three end up with 19. LSU either needs Kentucky to get swept, or to just win one while the Tigers sweep the Gamecocks.

Florida is the only team out of the four that, barring yet another rain-out of a South Carolina game, has no path to an undivided regular-season SEC title, and the reason is simple math: Someone is going to win two of the three games played between the Gamecocks and LSU. It's in the rules of baseball and everything. That means that even if Kentucky gets swept by Mississippi State and Florida sweeps Auburn, a South Carolina win in two of three games gives the Gamecocks the title and LSU winning two in the series would split the honors with Florida.

BATTLE FOR THE EASTERN DIVISION: Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida
This is the race within the race for the SEC title. The winner of this race can do no worse than a No. 2 seed in Hoover next week -- and the top two seeds now come with byes. Because each division winner gets one of the top two seeds, the best that either of the losers can hope for is the No. 3 seed, which has no game off attached to it. That's a huge difference in a baseball double-elimination tournament, when a fresh pitching staff can be the deciding factor.

Again, for Kentucky, the formula is relatively simple: Win. South Carolina still has the same goal as before, that being to win at least one more game than Kentucky.

Florida's situation is a bit more complicated. First of all, they have to win at least two more games than Kentucky -- they hold the tiebreaker, so simply evening the series with Kentucky would give them a share of the Eastern Division title and the bye via the tiebreaker. But that's not enough on its own. Florida also has to win at least two more games than South Carolina, so a win or sweep by LSU this weekend would be a huge help.

BATTLE FOR THE NO. 1 SEED: Kentucky, South Carolina, LSU
Unless I'm getting something wrong in the convoluted SEC tiebreaker process, Florida has been eliminated from getting the No. 1 seed no matter what happens. The formula for Kentucky is largely the same: If the Cats sweep the Western Division Bulldogs, they'll be the No. 1 seed in Hoover. (This is not as important as having one of the top two seeds, but it's also not nothing.)

South Carolina still needs the same thing, to win one more game than Kentucky and LSU.

LSU needs to win at least two more games than Kentucky, because the Wildcats have the tiebreaker thanks to winning the regular season. If the Bayou Bengals win just one more, they end up getting the No. 2 seed -- which is the worst LSU can do at this point.

A FEW OTHER NOTES:

Kentucky and South Carolina are guaranteed the No. 3 and No. 4 seed no matter what happens, because none of the teams below them can catch up. The closest is Ole Miss at 14-13, and it can't catch up to Kentucky because it is mathematically impossible to win four games out of three, while South Carolina can do no worse than 17-12 and so would beat Ole Miss even if the Rebel Black Bears weep Vanderbilt and end up 17-13.
Florida could end up all the way down in seventh place, though that's an unlikely scenario that involves them getting swept while Ole Miss, Georgia and Arkansas all sweep. But, yeah, No. 2 is the ceiling and No. 7 is the floor -- that's a pretty wide range.
Georgia, interestingly enough, actually has a chance to get a decent seed out of this if everything falls their way because of the auto-tiebreaker they get from having played just 29 games. (Again, this could cut both ways, but we're trying to not get into calculus here.) If Ole Miss and Florida end up 16-14 or worse and Georgia sweeps Alabama -- a very distinct possibility -- Georgia would be 16-13 and would end up the No. 4 seed.
Also still alive for the No. 4 seed are Ole Miss, Georgia and Arkansas. Mississippi State and Vanderbilt would lose out to Florida either in head-to-head tiebreakers or a three-team tie, so No. 5 is the best either can hope for. At 12-15, Auburn can do no better than the No. 6 seed.
There are almost too many scenarios to calculate all the ways that the knot at the bottom of the tournament between Ole Miss (14-13), Georgia (13-13), Arkansas (13-14), Mississippi State (13-14), Vanderbilt (13-14) and Auburn (12-15) might turn out, especially if Florida ends up joining the mayhem. Suffice it to say that it could be a long night for folks in Birmingham trying to figure out who gets what seed.

How Texas Beat Everyone in Revenue

2012-05-16T18:51:33Z

Yesterday, I took a look at the USA Today's new report on the finances of college athletics. Texas, as usual, was the runaway top earner in the country.

Today, I'm breaking down the revenue side to show just how the Longhorns outpaced everyone else. The revenue categories are tickets, contributions, licensing, and other. The USAT has full descriptions here, but here's the gist. "Tickets" includes only the face value price of tickets sold and associated shipping and handling fees. "Contributions" includes all donations, including the (wink wink, nudge nudge) donations for the right to buy season tickets. "Licensing" includes TV and other media money, merchandise, sponsorship, and ads. "Other" includes anything else, from bowl game and NCAA tournament money to camps to parking and concessions.

In the following charts, I'll be looking at the top ten revenue earners without including subsidies (athletic fees and school contributions).

TICKET REVENUE

How is Texas the king of ticket revenue? I'm not 100% sure, but some of it likely has to do with synergy and the rest probably has to do with accounting. Let me explain.

ESPN actually published the 2010-11 NCAA filings for seven of these ten schools, with LSU and Penn State the only ones left out and Tennessee's 2009-10 report published for some reason. I took the figures the schools reported and the NCAA's attendance statistics for the big three sports (football, men's basketball, and baseball) to figure out average cost per ticket. It's not perfect because there are a lot of free or reduced cost student tickets mixed in there, but it gives a rough estimate. One note: the figures for Texas here are going to be low for reasons I'll explain shortly.

Oklahoma had the highest average football ticket price at $63. Texas was tied with Ohio State for second at $50 a pop (more on OSU in the next section). Michigan was at $46, Alabama was at $41, Auburn was at $40, and Florida was at $28 (more on that later too). Texas was second in basketball at $17 per ticket behind Ohio State's average of $22. In baseball, Texas was tops at $5, with Oklahoma at $4 and everyone else at $3 or $2.

For ticket revenue across the big three sports, Texas was second at $40,9 million behind Ohio State's $47.5 million. Prices in Austin for the big three sports were high, but they trailed No. 2 ticket revenue school Ohio State overall. It's not because of the non-revenue sports, which at less than $1 million combined in income for the Longhorns, are called "non-revenue sports" for a reason. So how does Texas end up $11.2 million ahead of the Buckeyes?

It's tucked away on the filing in a category called "Revenue Not Related to Specific Teams". In that field, Texas reports $19.4 million in revenue. The next highest is Ohio State at $1.6 million. Half of the eight schools reported zero income for that category.

The NCAA's instructions for the tickets section say to include revenue from ticket sales and "money received for the shipping and handling of tickets". It specifically says not to include tickets for conference and national tournaments on campus or "amounts in excess of a ticket's face value paid by ticket purchasers". It can't all be shipping and handling charges, can it?

My best guess is that some of that money is for the Longhorn All Sports Package. It gives students, faculty, and staff the ability to purchase a pass good for all sports where tickets cost money for $80 per year or just $40 for the spring sports. Pass holders can purchase additional tickets for a spouse or dependent for $93. Because it's good for all sports, I'm guessing that it's filed under Revenue Not Related to Specific Teams. If that's true, then the existence of the LASP is why those average ticket prices for Texas above aren't quite right. They should go up by some amount if the LASP is accounted for accurately and it is indeed counted under Revenue Not Related to Specific Teams.

The LASP can't account for everything though, because even if you assume that all LASPs are for the full year and half of them are the higher priced spouse/dependent passes, Texas would have to sell 224,349 of them to hit $19.4 million in income. That's obviously not happening. If you assume 40,000 LASPs are sold at full year value, which is probably far too high but gives a sense of scale, that's $3.2 million in revenue. That leaves a lot left over.

Unless the reporting was done incorrectly, the non-LASP element has to be shipping and handling fees of some sort (examples: fee of $15 on student orders, fee of $30 for students to get tickets from will call instead of printing a PDF at home). Even so, I still think there's something funny going on with the accounting across schools. Oklahoma claims zero for Revenue Not Related to Specific Teams, but I checked and there are fees on ticket purchases. Maybe Texas puts all fees into Revenue Not Related to Specific Teams while other schools put fees into the individual sports' buckets? I don't know and I'm not sure how to find out.

And if it's not an accounting difference or a reporting error, then Texas fans are getting soaked for a remarkable amount of shipping and handling fees.

One other thing that jumps out to me: the five SEC schools in the top ten in overall revenue are in the bottom six in ticket revenue.

CONTRIBUTIONS REVENUE

Texas plummets all the way to No. 2 in Contributions revenue, behind only Florida. UF was last in tickets but first here, which makes me guess that Florida makes up for lower ticket prices with high seat license fees. I do know for a fact that those fees at UF have been going up in recent years. Another clue is that on Florida's NCAA filing, it reports $37.1 million in football-specific contributions. That's about $7 million greater than the next-highest school (Texas, of course, at $30.2 million).

Ohio State's low total here is probably a result of the exact opposite strategy of what Florida does. OSU does sell seat licenses for its basketball arena, but the information pages for its football luxury suites and club seats seem to indicate that all costs are encapsulated in the ticket price rather than divided into separate ticket prices and required "donation" fees. Also, OSU reports only $15.1 million in football-specific contributions, which is the third-lowest amount of the eight schools that the figures are available for.

That said, Ohio State's football contributions make up 85.8% of its contributions total, which is right in the middle of Florida's 88.4% and Texas's 81.0%. Auburn and Michigan are also in the 80% range. If you transfer $15 million from football tickets to football contributions to simulate Florida's model, it comes out to 92.3% of total contributions. Ohio State's lag in contributions for this particular year doesn't seem to be explained entirely by the choice to have high ticket prices and low required seat donations.

In any event, this is another place that Texas racks up revenue. Four of the top five in ticket revenue make up the bottom four of contributions, and four of the top five in contributions make up four of the bottom five in ticket revenue. The sole exception is Texas, which is in the top two of both categories.

LICENSING REVENUE

It should come as no surprise that the top two in licensing benefit from the Big Ten Network. I don't know why Penn State lags so far behind, as its itemized report isn't available (and OSU and UM lump most of this category into the Revenue Not Related to Specific Teams bucket anyway). Texas at this time was taking advantage of the Big 12's unequal revenue sharing model, which is probably one reason it ranks ahead of Oklahoma. Texas also is a much more populous state, it should be noted, and probably sells a lot more merchandise as a result.

Then again, TV revenue isn't as big a part of the pie as you might think. The SEC made $158.3 million from TV in 2010-11, which comes out to an average of $13.19 million per school. The conference's deal, like all TV deals, starts small and escalates as the years go on. The rest of the average $19.5 million payout from the league came from postseason revenue and the SEC Championship Game, and that money goes into the "Other" category. Or, at least, it's supposed to.

OTHER REVENUES

Here's a great example of how the accounting from school to school is different. All of the SEC schools listed here received approximately $19.5 million from the conference, with approximately $6.3 million of it coming from postseason play like bowls, March Madness, and SEC championship events. That postseason income is supposed to be in this category, but Tennessee, Auburn, and LSU all report well under $6.3 million for this part.

Texas actually is in the middle of the pack here, which is uncharacteristic of the school. Again though, it's as likely to be due to accounting differences than anything else.

OVERALL REVENUE

There's your overall revenue chart. Texas is way out ahead before you even get to the final "Other" category. It's primary advantage in revenue is that it both charges high ticket prices and is big in donations and contributions. All the rest of the schools are big in one but not the other. As long as Texas fans continue to be willing to shell that out, the Longhorns will remain on top.

Sprints Had a Long Day at the Ballpark, Like Many SEC Teams // 05.16.12

2012-05-16T12:01:16Z

BUSTBALL: A LONG DAY FOR THE SEC
In the final round of midweek games before the regular season-ending series this weekend, conference teams jockeying for position in the NCAA tournament didn't look so good. Not exactly a way to match up with Baseball America's projection of nine bids for the SEC.

Kentucky loses to Murray State, 7-3
Though, in fairness, Murray State sent every one of its weekend starters to the mound to try to get a win in this one. Still, the Racers are 210th in RPI. Kentucky was on the bubble for a national seed in the baseball tournament -- which guarantees you home-field advantage up until Omaha -- but this loss might burst that bubble.

Florida lost 12-7 at Samford
It was Senior Night for the Bulldogs, so that was nice. Samford is 63rd in the RPI while Florida is -- was? -- No. 1.

Mississippi State got blanked by Central Arkansas, 2-0
Central Arkansas is 191 in the RPI, which is probably just a bit better than the Houston Astros.

Ole Miss lost to Arkansas State, 10-5
Losing to the 140th team in the nation in RPI is probably not the best way to close out your non-conference schedule.

At least South Carolina got rained out
LSU is coming to Columbia in the Gamecocks' last chance to actually play a baseball game in the last week of the season.

Tennessee loses to Middle Tennessee State, 11-4
Not that the Vols are in the running for anything, but Dave Serrano is still not happy. This is some of what he's quoted as saying in the university's press release about the game.

"I am the leader of this program and am very proud of that, but I'm not proud of the product we are putting on the field right now. ... I'm not pointing fingers, but we just aren't good enough right now. That's the bottom line. We aren't good enough and right now we aren't showing a toughness to show up every day."

You can't knock a guy for being honest.

THE STORY THAT NEVER ENDS: CONFERENCE REALIGNMENT

This doesn't sound like a man leading a raiding party
Bob Bowlsby, who's taking the reins at the Big 12ish, appears to be ready to try to at least slow down all this realignment talk. Best of luck.

"My opinion," he told USA TODAY Sports on Tuesday, "is college athletics would be well served by some period of smooth water and not all of the angst and disorganization that goes with moves from one league to another."

Of course, all the pressure for realignment right now would come from Florida State, and it would be very hard for the Big 12ish to say no if the Seminoles seemed ready to make the jump. But if the head of the would-be landing spot is trying to cool down talks, that would seem to be a good sign for the ACC.

ESPN: Enough already
That ESPN put out a statement on the ACC contract in light of all the discussions of Florida State moving to the Big 12ish is unprecedented. It's also probably a subtle sign from the network that it would like that talk to go away.

The new agreement with the ACC provided a win for all involved. Fans will be served with more ACC content than ever before through a wide variety of outlets, devices and technologies. ... The ACC has received significant additional financial compensation and unprecedented exposure for the added value and the longer term.

The reasons that ESPN would like to put an end to all of this is pretty clear. Since the 2010 realignment, the network has had to negotiate new or renegotiate old deals with the B1G, the Pac-12, the ACC and the Big 12, not to mention the negotiations that are currently underway with the SEC and the trouble that they're having getting the Big East to agree to a contract. Realignment has now spun out of ESPN's control, and there's nothing a near-monopoly like ESPN hates seeing more than things getting out of its control.

The importance of the statement is that ESPN is still a big player in the decisions that conferences make about expansion, because the goal of expansion is to get more money from television networks -- and much of that money comes from ESPN. The question is whether the conglomerate that helped fuel realignment in the first place can now put the genie back in the bottle.

Gene Stallings defends Texas A&M's move to the SEC
Though he says that success will probably take a little time -- it did for Arkansas and South Carolina -- the former A&M and Alabama head coach suggests that there was no way to preserve the status quo in the Big 12ish.

"First I didn't want to go to the Pac-10," Stallings said. "I would have rather kept the conference intact. Since it wasn't going to be intact, I would rather go the SEC than anywhere else."

Stallings is probably right on both counts about the future of the Aggies in the SEC West: It will take a while for them to win, but it will work out for TAMU in the end.

I'm sure he meant this as a compliment
Will Muschamp is one of the few SEC coaches to have actually visited Texas A&M as a coach for the opposing team. So what does he think?

"You ever been to College Station?" Muschamp asked. "It'll be the only time you go."

I'm sure Aggie fans will take that in the good-natured way in which it might have been intended.

More SEC officials: A good thing or a bad thing?
The conference is also making a move toward trying to better explain calls.

OTHER NEWS

Missouri QB arrested for leaving scene of accident. And returning. And leaving again
This is just not bright. Missouri's backup quarterback, Corbin Berkstresser, hits a parked car belonging to fellow Missouri student Jeremiah Willis. Berkstresser then apparently flees the scene -- briefly.

After Willis and his roommates called police, two white males walked down the street and asked about the accident. They said they were looking for a lost dog. After later seeing Berkstresser’s mug shot from the Boone County Sheriff’s Department, Willis and his roommate, Andy Rosenberg, identified Berkstresser as one of the two males.[para] If you're going to hit-and-run, then hit-and-run. Don't come back.

The arrest could end up being something of a big deal for the Tigers. If James Franklin (MO) faces a setback in his recovery -- he's expected to be back in time for the season opener and certainly for the Sept. 8 inaugural SEC game against Georgia -- Berkstresser would likely be the signal-caller for the Tigers.

But if the damage is more than $1,000, Berkstresser could face felony charges, and university policy would bar Berkstresser from playing until the case is wrapped up.

Watch that second dismissal. It's a career-ender
Few people managed to get kicked off the same football team twice in their lifetime, much less twice in a year. Missouri safety Tavon Bolden is one of those people.

The source indicated Bolden's most recent dismissal would be permanent.

At this rate, there might not be anyone left to play for either team in the Georgia-Missouri game.

Leon Orr has a unique defense
The Florida defensive tackle was charged with driving with a suspended license, an issue he's had in the past. But he's got a defense that has now apparently been removed from his Twitter page.

First off I wanna apologize to the (Gator) nation for this bad publicity, but I'm being depicted as a criminal of some sort and I've never had handcuffs put on my wrist or been pictured in a stripe jumpsuit!

Well, that's encouraging.

Phillip Fulmer (Tennessee), R.C. Slocum (A&M), Charles Alexander (LSU) to the Hall of Fame
How long before Fulmer turns in one of the other members for buying votes?

But not Wuerffel
Danny Wuerffel is probably not the worst snub by the College Football Hall of Fame, but he's certainly a notable one.

Saban restores sanity to interdivision schedule nonsense
I'm not sure if this is good or bad for the proposal -- Nick Saban is not exactly a beloved figure outside of Tuscaloosa -- but the Alabama head coach said in no uncertain terms Monday that he doesn't like Steve Spurrier's cockamamie idea about interdivision SEC games.

"I think the other division games you play on the other side are important to our fans and there's a lot of tradition involved in some of those games. I think if you minimize the importance of those games, that wouldn't be in the best interest of our league."

The fact that at least two other SEC coaches have said they support Spurrier's plan isn't great, but at least now we know that there are concerns beyond Mike Slive's with the proposal.

Jim Delany isn't the only problem in the B1G
It appears that many of the officials in his league are also trying to make sure that somehow, some way Pasadena will be a part of the postseason.

"For us it's critical to keep the Rose Bowl in the equation," Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis said.

The next time a Yankee says anything about the South trying to hold onto long-ago and archaic traditions ...

Charting the Revenues and Profits of College Athletics

2012-05-15T16:40:28Z

The USA Today put out its annual report on the financials of college athletics, this time on the 2010-11 athletic year. I've assembled some of the data into chart form here. As always with these things, only data on public universities is available.

The horizontal axis is revenue. The midpoint is the median revenue for the top 51 revenue producers and is noted on the chart. Why 51? Because Ole Miss ended up No. 51 and I wanted to capture all 11 public SEC schools. The vertical axis is profits, which is revenue minus expenses and subsidies. Here's how the USAT defines subsidies:

The sum of students fees, direct and indirect institutional support and state money. The NCAA and others consider such funds "allocated" or everything not generated by the department's athletics functions.

Most (if not all) profitable athletic departments pay back any subsidies they receive, but most athletic departments aren't profitable without them. That's why I pull them out of the profit figures. I want to see which programs can function profitably on their own.

This chart includes all available BCS conference schools, plus a couple notable others. Click it to make it bigger. The only logos that are mostly obscured are Nebraska, which is below South Carolina and Kentucky, and UCLA, which is below Missouri and Virginia Tech. Also, Indiana is under Washington.

Here are my observations.

Only 22 programs were profitable in 2010-11 net of subsidies. Nine of them were in the SEC, with only Auburn (loss of $822,383) and Ole Miss (loss of $1,589,324) taking hits. Seven were in the Big Ten, five were in the Big 12, and one (Oregon, thanks Phil Knight!) was in the Pac-10. Not a single ACC or Big East program was above water without subsidies.
Texas was the revenue champ by far, bringing in roughly $18.5 million more than second place Ohio State. The Longhorns spent more than the Buckeyes brought in and still turned the second largest profit in the country. Texas was $3.1 million short of doubling the median revenue for the top 51 public schools. Keep in mind this is for 2010-11, so it's before ESPN guaranteed the school $15 million per year for the Longhorn Network (half of which goes to academics for the first five years).
Kansas State was the most profitable program overall despite being below the top-51 median for revenue. LSU was most profitable in the SEC, Penn State in the Big Ten, and again, Oregon was the only Pac-10 school to turn a profit.
Florida State was almost $16 million in the hole for that year. No wonder some at the school are thinking about switching conferences to make more money. If you look at true revenue, which is revenue minus subsidies, FSU is 26th among public schools ($71 million) near institutions such as Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas, and Illinois. It's far behind its main recruiting rivals Alabama ($119.2M), Florida ($119.1M), Auburn ($99.6M), and Georgia ($89.1M). Clemson, FSU's rumored traveling partner to the Big 12, is even more behind in 37th place with $56.1 million in true revenue.
UNLV was the only non-BCS school to finish in the top 51 public schools for revenue, but it did so largely thanks to a $32.2 million subsidy. It was the least profitable program on the chart and, I'd bet, in the country.
Boise State was down over $10,000,000 for that year, it's last of playing football in the WAC. Its move to the Mountain West was expected to boost revenue by less than $1 million per year. There's your reason why the school is chasing TV money with the Big East despite how little sense it makes for a team in Idaho to be in a conference with "East" in its name.
Army was profitable before its subsidy of of $11.76 million, and Air Force was barely in the black before its $25.3 million subsidy. Your tax dollars at work, partially.
Once you get past a certain point, roughly Iowa State's $48.6 million, the revenue figures start to become meaningless. The variations between schools largely are due to subsidies rather than organic athletic department revenue. For instance, Delaware has the highest revenue of I-AA schools at $36 million, but $28.5 million of that consisted of subsidies. The Blue Hens had only $7.5 million of true revenue. Fresno State is listed below Delaware on the list with $30.2 million in revenue, but $21.8 million of that was true revenue.

UPDATE

Here's a good article explaining some of the vagaries involved with the way these subsidies are accounted for. In short, it almost requires being a CPA to sort out what precisely direct and indirect school support actually means. Take this data as a general guideline only. Until reporting across all schools is standardize (and more thorough), it'll be impossible to get a completely accurate comparison.

ESPN Is Making More 30 for 30 Films, Bo Jackson Included

2012-05-15T13:19:36Z

ESPN Is Making More 30 for 30 Films, Bo Jackson Included

ESPN has decided to do another run of 30 for 30 branded documentaries. You might remember some of the first set of them, like the one on Mississippi's Marcus Dupree or "Pony Exce$$" on the SMU football scandal of the '80s.

They haven't announced the full set of films as far as I know, but there will be one on Auburn and SEC legend Bo Jackson. Speaking of Bo and ESPN, take 8 minutes today to watch the Outside the Lines segment on Bo Bikes Bama, Jackson's bicycle tour of Alabama to raise awareness of the people still hurting from last year's tornado outbreak.

Sprints Is Running Out of Things to Say About FSU and the Big 12 // 05.15.12

2012-05-15T06:03:26Z

So this pretty much confirms that FSU is thinking about it, right?
A lot of people have made a big deal out of the fact that FSU President Eric Barron has issued a memo/email about the possibility of leaving the ACC for the Big 12ish. But it's possible to overstate the importance of Barron's obvious preference for staying in the ACC and miss the significance of the memo.

First of all, Barron works for the Florida State board of trustees -- not the other way around. If the trustees want to move to the Big 12ish and no one higher up in Florida's hierarchy stops them, the Seminoles are going to be taken biennial trips to Lawrence, Kansas. Barron can advocate for the ACC all he wants -- but if he doesn't convince the trustees, there's nothing Barron can do to stop the move.

That said, I find it fascinating that Barron felt compelled to issue the memo. If it was just a rogue trustee popping off in the media, and there wasn't at least some momentum toward Florida State moving to the Big 12, why would he go to the trouble of writing out a long response to a non-issue? Sure, you can't totally ignore something like this, but there are far easier ways to nip that talk in the bud.

And that brings us back to what is most telling about Barron's memo: It doesn't say no. It lists a lot of reasons that trustees might want to say no, but if anything what Barron wrote leaves us with direct confirmation that Florida State is reconsidering its place in college football's current alignment.

I assure you that every aspect of conference affiliation will be looked at by this institution, but it must be a reasoned decision.

That sentence says it all. Florida State is going to re-evaluate its conference affiliation. The only question is whether Barron's opinion carries the day or the board decides to move in a different direction.

They'll fit right in
Kansas won't play Missouri any more now that the Tigers have moved to the SEC. So Missouri lawmakers and citizens have come up with a perfectly reasonable response: Getting ready to block the creation of a KU license plate in Missouri. This shocks the sponsor of the bill.

One thing is for certain: The Border War appears plenty healthy. Denison, who went to college in Texas, had a full voicemail last Friday -- and at least one particularly ugly message.

"I can’t believe," Denison said, "there is so much talking over a bill that can’t even be voted on until next year."

Obviously, we don't condone the send of nasty voice mails to lawmakers just because they have dumb ideas -- there would be some states where the entire population spent 24 hours a day on the phone -- but the fight shows that Missouri is already showing signs of being an SEC state.

One down, five to go
Arkansas has released Kane Whitehurst from his scholarship after his arrest last month. No word yet on whether Maudrecus Humphrey, Marquel Wade or the other Razorbacks who have ended up in the pokey might soon have more free time on their hands.

Back to square one
The supporters of the stipend are trying to put as good a spin on this as they can, but there's reason to think that the idea is either in real trouble or in danger of getting watered down so much that it won't have the effect that it's supposed to have.

You wonder how those less wealthy programs will feel when the NCAA divides and the upper-tier teams start paying players "market value." Because that's what we're looking at if the stipend proposal keeps getting bottled up.

Evaluating Florida State as an Realignment Candidate

2012-05-14T19:03:49Z

Over the weekend, Florida State board of trustees chair Andy Haggard finally gave everyone cover for openly discussing the FSU-to-the-Big 12 rumors by speaking about the matter. In ensuing comment threads, along with some from the past, you can find plenty of SEC fans expressing interest in the having the Seminoles join their league instead of the Big 12.

FSU is a complicated target as far as expansion goes for a variety of reasons. For this post, I'm going to do my best to keep my analyst hat on and rival fan's hat off.

It's a huge national TV draw.

Perhaps the best thing the program has going for it is broad national appeal. That's one of the most important aspects of these conference TV deals. Most all teams do well enough in their home markets, but if you can get people 3,000 miles away to tune in, that's very valuable.

Through the beginning of 2010, four of the top eight highest rated ESPN college football broadcasts involved FSU. Only one of those was in the halcyon days of the 1990s, too. Two of the more recent games were games with Miami (2006, 2009) plus another against Clemson (2007). Those three games were during the down decade for the program (and Miami's down decade too) and a record number of people still tuned in.

Keep in mind that telecasts on CBS and ABC regularly blow away ESPN's best numbers. CBS had 20 million viewers on last November's LSU-Bama game while the best ESPN did on that list was 7.5 million households. In any event, the program gets people from far away from Florida to tune in. Perhaps you could still view the program as redundant for the SEC as UF is also a big national draw and is in the same state, but there's not much reason at this point for the conference to go out and add someone who isn't a big national draw. Any additions beyond 14 have to really pull a lot of weight, and FSU would do that from a TV perspective.

Its fan support appears to be very elastic.

I'm using the term "elastic" here like an economist would. It seems to be very contingent on winning.

Check out the school on the college football attendance tool. Median attendance declined over 9,000 per game from 2007 (two years after the school's last ACC title) to the program's low in 2010. Attendance then bounced back more than 6,000 per game in 2011 after the team won 10 games in 2010.

Furthermore, the athletic program is in a financial hole thanks largely to declining revenue for Seminole Boosters. In its most recently reported year, the organization brought in $32.7 million. That's a decline of $10.1 million from its yearly revenue from four years prior. I expect that winning 19 games over the last two years will help donations perk up a bit, but it's further evidence that the fans and donors are a quite fickle. I don't know how much this factor matters in the grand scheme of realignment, but it is something to be cognizant about.

Geography is a challenge.

If you could create Florida State as we know it today out of thin air and put it anywhere you want to, you wouldn't put it in Tallahassee. It's only a relatively convenient drive from one of the state's major population centers in Jacksonville. Gainesville, by contrast, is roughly two-and-a-half hours or less (depending on traffic) from Jacksonville, Orlando, and the Tampa Bay area.

That's part of the reason why attendance is so variable. A Gator fan in Orlando is likely to drive the two hours up to Gainesville to see the team snack on a cupcake or play a non-rival opponent, but a Seminole fan might think twice about it thanks to the four-and-a-half hour drive. And for South Florida-based fans? Tallahassee is actually about 45 minutes closer to Baton Rouge than Miami according to Google Maps.

The state of Florida is very big, likely bigger than you think it is if you've never lived there. Because of that fact, Seminole fans who would have to fly to hypothetical Big 12 road games would be doing nothing different than what they already do get to many ACC road games. The flight requirement only gets stronger with the additions of Pitt and Syracuse.

The best travel situation for the team, band, cheerleaders, and students is the SEC, with five presumed division opponents (UF, UGA, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vandy) and four opposite division opponents (Auburn, Bama, Mississippi State, LSU) no more than an hour longer of a drive from Tallahassee compared to the second-closest ACC opponent (Miami). For the alumni fans who tend to fly to road games, the ACC is the best travel situation with most member schools being located near large airports.

Its history is a double-edged sword.

FSU only joined the ACC in 1990 and played its first season in the league in 1991. It actually turned down an invitation from the SEC in the process. Can you imagine any legitimate independent power doing such a thing today? It shows how much times have changed.

FSU doesn't wield as much power in the conference as it would like to because it is a relative newcomer. The ACC had been around nearly 40 years when the school joined, and the founding members had shared history in the Southern Conference dating back to the 1920s and '30s. It's not hard to find people asking why FSU would want to leave the ACC to go be under Texas's thumb, but it's kind of under the thumb of the core North Carolina ACC schools as it is. At least in the Big 12 the school would likely get millions of dollars more per season to feel better about it.

The trade off is that if it were to leave the ACC, the school wouldn't be sacrificing any long time rivalries to do so. Or, at least, it wouldn't have to if it didn't want to. The Big 12 would probably go back to an eight game conference schedule if it expands to 12, meaning FSU could still play Florida and Miami annually and maintain seven home games. That would prevent the school from playing very many interesting non-conference games outside the state, but that's not unprecedented in the region. If the school ended up in the SEC, well, it'd be even easier to maintain the two big in-state series.

Big 12 or SEC?

We know the Big 12 is considering expansion. We know the SEC would prefer not to expand seeing as how the league just went to 14. If FSU wants out of the ACC sooner than later, then there's really only one choice.

Overall, the SEC would be a better fit for the school than the Big 12 for geographic and cultural reasons. In fact, I think if Texas A&M waited until this summer to leave the Big 12, more likely than not FSU would be the SEC's 14th team instead of Missouri. FSU wasn't ready to think about leaving the ACC last year, but it certainly is this year.

Ultimately, I think it will take some kind of cataclysm to get FSU in the SEC. I really don't think the SEC will be the first conference to go to 16 teams. The powers that be discovered during the scheduling process just how hard it is to keep everyone happy with the new 14-team league, so they're not going to expand to 16 apropos of nothing. Last year's expansion was a unique opportunity to get the league into Texas, but no similar opportunities exist. It's not that they don't exist right now. They simply do not exist. The SEC would only go to 16 if either the Big Ten or Pac-12 leads the way.

The Pac-12 is stuck at 12 until Texas is ready to go there; we pretty much know this thanks to the conference turning down a package of just Oklahoma and Oklahoma State last year. As long as both the Longhorn Network and Pac-12 Networks exist, Texas will not be going to the Pac-12, period.

The Big Ten only considers AAU schools and Notre Dame as potential expansion candidates (Nebraska was in the AAU prior to losing that status after it joined the Big Ten). Looking over the list of AAU members, the plausible choices for the conference are Rutgers, Iowa State, Kansas, and ACC schools. The idea of Rutgers is better than the reality, Iowa State is redundant given Iowa, and Kansas sucks at football. The Big Ten would have to raid the ACC for at least three of its four additional teams, but I think the leadership up there is too conservative to make that kind of move.

In short, I don't see what will be the spark that sets off the superconference Armageddon. The Pac-12 is boxed in by geography and the Big Ten and SEC tend to be conservative. If and when that time comes, FSU will certainly be a candidate for joining the SEC, but not before.

It may feel somewhat inevitable that FSU leaves the ACC because of how much has gone on the past couple years, but nearly as much hasn't happened compared to what has. The possible Pac-16 and Pac-14 configurations fell through, and consequently the Big East wasn't able to pick up Big 12 refugees. The proposed merger of CUSA and the MW didn't end up happening either. Missouri practically threw itself at the Big Ten before Nebraska became that league's 12th member. Plus, UConn desperately wants in the ACC and Louisville wants in the Big 12, but both are still in the Big East.

FSU's president made a case today for staying in the ACC, and it seems like the leadership there is divided. As long as there is no consensus, there won't be any changes. FSU would be a positive addition for the newly stable Big 12, but it's not as clear cut an upgrade for FSU as when teams left the unstable Big 12 or Big East over the past couple years. That lack of clarity means uncertainty will reign until FSU's power brokers decide what they want to do.

Sprints Wonders If Catching Passes Counts as Community Service // 05.14.12

2012-05-14T12:01:28Z

Is Arkansas Latin for Florida?
Three more player arrests at Arkansas -- Marquel Wade, Maudrecus Humphrey and Andrew Peterson -- bring the number of players who have had an offseason encounter with Fayetteville's finest to six. Wade has the potential to play a key role in the Hogs' 2012 offense, and Humphrey could be expected to at least provide depth at wide receiver. In case you haven't heard (which means you haven't been paying attention), the Razorbacks lost essentially their entire wide receiving corps to graduation and the draft this year.

Oh, and there was that whole head coach fired for shuttling his university-employed mistress around town on a motorcycle thing.

One of the other arrestees, Kane Whitehurst, was also a wide receiver. So maybe the flexbone offense is looking good, no?

Because it's good to see Alabama finally win a championship
Does this make it a softball school?

THE STORY THAT NEVER ENDS: CONFERENCE REALIGNMENT

Can we get Baghdad Bob to help weigh in on this?
There are two important things to keep in mind when trying to figure out what is happening in the Florida State to Big 12 drama. The first is that everything vaguely related to government in Florida is almost certain to devolve into something resembling a banana republic. The second is that this trend is amplified in any college, which is overseen by varying degrees by the Florida Board of Governors, the institution's board of trustees and the Legislature.

So Florida State's athletics director said one thing, Florida State's board of trustees chairman said the opposite thing and head football coach Jimbo Fisher seemed to back the chairman. Then FSU president Eric Barron tried to walk it all back.

"Florida State respects the views of the Chair of its Board of Trustees that, of course, any university would examine options that would impact university academics, athletics or finances," Barron said in his statement that was released at 11:01 p.m. Saturday. "At the same time, Florida State is not seeking an alternative to the ACC nor are we considering alternatives. Our current commitments remain strong."

None of which is an actual denial that Florida State might move to the Big 12ish over the summer. My guess is still that the chances of that are relatively small, but this could be filed under "denials, non-denial variety."

So that's that. I'm sorry -- Chairman Haggard, you wanted to add something after President Barron's statement?

"All I tried to say was I think Florida State needs to keep an open mind," he said. "If the Big 12 or the SEC or any other conference wants to talk, we have an obligation to listen. If the Big 12 calls, should we hang up the phone? No.

"I'm not saying take it. I'm saying listen to it. Listen to what they have to say."

So glad we got that all straightened out.

It's official
This is a few weeks early, but the Texas A&M and Missouri banners have been raised at SEC headquarters in Birmingham.

Conference realignment destroys some rivalries. And starts others.
This is an interesting story about the discontinuing of the Kansas-Missouri rivalry -- which is Kansas' fault just like the end of the Texas-Texas A&M game is the Longhorns' fault. But I digress.

You have to hope that the Jayhawks and the Longhorns eventually get over whatever hurt feelings they have and realize that these rivalries are important -- not just to fans of their rivals or to college football fans, but to Kansas and Texas fans as well. If Georgia and Georgia Tech can play every year despite the Yellow Jackets having bolted the SEC decades ago -- no, "the tearing asunder of ancient rivalries" is no more new than realignment -- then Kansas and Missouri can continue playing their games as well.

But Missouri will eventually develop some SEC rivalries. Just like South Carolina had a natural fit in Georgia when it joined 20 years ago, Missouri has a natural rivalry with Arkansas. Texas A&M has one with LSU from having faced each other dozens of times.

Here's the thing: South Carolina is probably going to give up its "rivalry" game with Arkansas -- which was contrived at first but has lead to the Razorbacks being one of the teams I hate the most as a South Carolina fan -- so that Arkansas can play Missouri every year. The new cross-division rival for the Gamecocks is likely to be Texas A&M; here's hoping those teams also end up being nice enemies for each other.

Texas A&M pitcher throws no-hitter
I find this slightly odd that the feat came against San Diego State, since most baseball teams play conference series during weekends at this point of the season, but congratulations to Ross Stripling.