(This is what I send to friends and relatives across the country. I'll be posting this in sections, once a day.)
The Situation
College Football - Once again, you can’t talk about Syracuse football without talking first about what’s happening with college football. College Football has changed many times in its history and what we remember from 20, 40, 60 years ago was not what it has always been but the changes were incremental and logical from a geographic standpoint. In this era, the conferences are “hitting the fan” and are becoming unrecognizable and totally illogical from the standpoint of why conferences have always been formed. The idea had always been to make scheduling easier and create interest by uniting natural geographical rivals that have a history between them in one unit such that each year, you know who, (typically) 8 of your opponents will be: you just have to arrange a date and time. Meanwhile, fans, especially the families of the players can drive to road games and the conference itself comes to represent a particular area of the country.
Now they are being put together by TV executives who figure they can make, (and thus pay out to the schools) the most TV money if they unite the most successful programs with the biggest TV markets. The top schools are all for that and also for reducing the number of partners in digging this gold. I call this the “college football rapture” with the chosen ones moving upward to a college football nirvana and ‘leaving behind’ the lesser schools, (and markets), to fend for themselves in an economic desert. I think this is a “be careful what you wish for” situation. College sports have always been about the smaller markets and fans that want their local team to put their area on the map. College sports is well down the totem pole in the big markets that are dominated by pro sports. Also the football factories will miss the schools they used to beat every year when they go 4-8 in a bad year instead of 10-2 because they are facing other football factories week after week.
I also think that the ‘left behind’ may not be in such a bad situation. They may not get a share of the ‘big money’ but they will be able to organize themselves in more traditional conferences that their fans will find more attractive than being in one of the super conferences and being road kill for the football factories every week. I don’t think we’d be chosen but imagine if we were in a super-conference and had to play Penn State, then Ohio State, then Michigan, then Michigan State and then Notre Dame. How fun would that be? If we wound up in a “left behind” conference centered in the east, we might be perennial contenders and could win it or even a national championship in what might be Division 1 of the NCAA if the super-conferences break off and form their own organization. That doesn’t sound so bad.
The fans are the ultimate source of any money that gets made. They buy the tickets and concessions. They pay for the parking and preferred seating. They contribute to the university and to NIL opportunities. They watch the commercials, click on the websites and join the internet sites that require membership. It all comes from the fans and if you want to make more money, you need to present something that appeals to the fans more than what you’ve got, or that would create more fans. Leaving behind the schools that aren’t football or TV powerhouses cuts off the fans of the schools you left behind. I predict that the powerhouses and the TV people will want us back someday.
Syracuse has always been in the highest level of college football. By that I don’t mean they’ve always been an elite program, always competing for a national championship. I mean whatever the highest level of the college sport was, we competed at that level. We were ‘big time’ and not ‘small time’. We were in the ‘University Division’, not the ‘College Division”. We were in ‘Division 1’, not 2 or 3. We were in ‘Division 1A‘ not 1AA. We are ‘FBS’ not FCS and in the ‘Power 5’, not the Group of 5. Many have the mindset that if we aren’t at the top level, that would be a huge disaster and the fans would lose interest and the program would fade into irrelevance or even disappear. I don’t think it will be that bad. Fans of North Dakota State and Mount Union have been having fun at less than the highest level for years and we could, too.
What would we do without the big money? We never made big money when Ben Schwartzwalder or even Dick McPherson and Paul Pasqualoni were here. We still played college football. Being ‘left behind’ might put an end to or at least tone down the facilities arms race and that would be a good thing. A dose of sanity would be welcome.
(Tomorrow: Syracuse's situation)
