All season long there has been weeping and gnashing of teeth amongst coaches and many of the TV talking heads regarding the new timing rules for college football. You've heard about how there are about 12 fewer plays per game and how this hurts teams trying to make comebacks and how the NCAA has "sold out" to the TV overlords. Well, I've observed almost a full season with the new rules; and now, I want to make a few observations about the rule changes and the screechers.
First, the games are shorter this year; that's a demonstrable fact. Any preference for shorter games resides in the realm of personal opinion; so, those screechers who take this as an assault on their right to a longer game have eaten too many rhetorical beans. To those who prefer the longer games, I'd suggest that you read on and look carefully at the bottom line cash-flow situation that I will describe later on and decide if it is worth the effort to moan about this.
Second, the rules as they exist can be exploited in ways that the rules committee cannot have intended - and surely did not contemplate. In the Penn State/Wisconsin game, Wisconsin had to kick off to Penn State with under a minute to play in the half. Wisconsin intentionally went offside three times because the clock starts running as soon as the ball meets the kicker's foot. That ran the time off the clock and while it was perfectly within the rules, it rewarded a team for breaking the rules of the game. That's never a good thing. So, whatever the rules mavens do, they must find a way to overcome these kinds of exploitation situations.
But the bottom line here is a cash-flow situation. The TV folks like the shorter games and the TV folks are the ones that are pouring the majority of about a hundred million dollars a year into college football. In Utopia, that would not be the case; if that's what you want, I suggest you go onto Orbitz book yourself on a one-way trip to Utopia. So here is the dilemma for the coaches and ADs who are so upset by all of this. If they tell the TV people to go and pound sand where the sun never shines and go back to longer games, the TV people may reduce the rights fees they are willing to pay for lots of the second-tier games. Since there are so many of those games, that would take a significant chunk out of the revenue pool that would not be made up by any increase in rights fees for top-tier games. So revenues would go down and - - hold your breath - - so would the resources available to pay coaches more than $1M a year to coach football and to pay offensive/defensive coordinators more than $250K per year.
So when you hear coaches engage in the Modern Pentathlon of Wailing [Bitching, Moaning, Whining, Griping & Complaining], step back and wait for one of them to address the general willingness among coaches to take a pay cut over this issue. Don't hold your breath while you wait for that statement. If you do, you'll wind up looking like Papa Smurf.
In the world of MLB, here's a datum to let you understand the real and significant divide among the "haves" and the "have-nots". The Boston Red Sox bid $51.1M just to acquire the rights to negotiate with Japanese pitching sensation Diasuke Matsuzaka - through Scott "Nuclear Winter" Boras no less. For $51.1M, the Florida Marlins could have paid the salaries of their entire 2006 roster for three seasons. And they'd have had a couple of million left over for some of the travel expenses.
Can it be a mystery to any baseball fan - and particularly any Cubs' fan - that the Cubs need pitching? No one who knows a baseball from a bass fiddle would think it was a good strategic move to go into the 2007 season relying on the health and productivity of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. So, were the Cubs in the sweepstakes for Matsuzaka? Are they chasing after Jason Schmidt and/or Barry Zito? As they say in the Hertz commercials, "Not exactly!"
According to reports, the Cubs are out wooing Gil Meche - late of the Seattle Mariners. I don't want to speak ill of Gil Meche because he is not a bad pitcher. His lifetime record is 55-44 which is decent; his lifetime ERA is 4.65 which is a bit on the high side; he's started 29 or more games in three of the last four seasons which shows he's durable. But given the wasteland that is the Cubs pitching rotation, is this the guy who will turn things around? I doubt it.
Oh, but you say I'm being unfair; the Cubs are also hot on the trail of another free agent starting pitcher. Yes, you're right; they are. Reports say that they want to obtain the services of Jason Marquis. His career stats are similar to Gil Meche's but he is coming off a 2006 season where he had an ERA of 6.02, which is bad by any measure. Even worse, the St. Louis Cardinals basically told him to stay home and watch the World Series on TV because they had more faith in a rookie pitcher in a critical situation than they did in him. So, it's Meche and Marquis who will pitch after Zambrano next year and that will make everything right in Chicago?
At least, the Cubs announced that they would not raise their season ticket prices for next year. Presumably, that will also apply to individual game tix that people wait in line in the chilly Chicago weather to gobble up. As those fans are waiting in line, they can think up all the clever ways they can play off Meche and Marquis as the "M&M Boys".
Is it possible - just possible - that the rising tide of NASCAR has peaked and may have begun to ebb? We are in the grand finale for the season that they call "The Chase" and TV ratings are down. Last year, these same "Chase races" drew a composite rating of 4.7; this year it is 4.1. That difference may not look big but it is a 13% decline in viewers. If you look at the composite ratings for the entire season and not just "The Chase", TV ratings are down 9% on the networks and down 15% on the cable outlets. I'm not hating on NASCAR here; I'm merely suggesting that the explosive growth in popularity that it experienced in the past decade may be over and NASCAR may remain a niche sport - albeit the niche it occupies is a large one.
Finally, here's how David Letterman says he watches the World Series. I wonder if this is the way Jason Marquis watched the World Series…
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"I sit down and drink a few beers in my underwear and scream at the TV. That's until they throw me out of Applebees"
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