bill dazzle
Craft beer and urban living enthusiast
Posts: 10,388
Joined: Aug 2016
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I Root For: Vandy/Memphis/DePaul/UNC
Location: Nashville
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RE: Athletic: The top 5 schools most likely to leap to the Power 5, coaching grade whiffs
(02-28-2021 09:59 PM)JRsec Wrote: (02-28-2021 09:43 PM)bill dazzle Wrote: (02-28-2021 01:23 PM)JRsec Wrote: (02-28-2021 11:33 AM)bill dazzle Wrote: (02-28-2021 11:29 AM)JRsec Wrote: I've played around with a few different approaches to Vanderbilt. My favorite is the partial football membership with full membership in other sports including basketball. By partial Vanderbilt would probably be pretty well served to play Tennessee, Ole Miss, Kentucky, Missouri (which was an old neighboring game for them, though nobody else in the SEC played Mizzou) and rotate another while scheduling 7 games against schools of similar size and composition. That would give them their traditional SEC rivals and enable them to have seasons that truly could be bowl worthy. I believe this would revitalize their football to an extent in that their fans wouldn't see their annual role as the hopeless punching bag for the rest of the conference.
That said if NIL becomes complicated for the schools, or expensive then I think they, and more than a few others, would take more drastic action in response.
But we'll see.
If the NIL forces Vanderbilt to make a drastic move .... IF VU could stay in the SEC for all sports but football and then had a football "scheduling alliance" or even football-only league with, say, Wake Forest, Duke, UConn, Tulane, UMass, Rice, Army, Navy, etc. (i.e., prestigious universities not known for great football) ... I would be fine with that as a Vandy fan.
The big issues are addressed with these kinds of arrangements. Branding for Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Duke, Tulane, and Rice in the old SWC is important to these schools and important to their conferences. If a Vanderbilt or Wake has 3 solid draws for a home football season against a brand opponent they are fine, especially if the remaining schedule is competitive without being devastating.
Conference branding is exposure, but so to are bowl games.
Basketball and Baseball seasons are structured already to handle odd numbers of members or more members. Football for the top brand schools requires currently a certain number of buy games. You enhance the quality of those schedules by playing a school like Duke, or Vandy, or Wake instead of scheduling a directional school from the town of Isolated in a nearby State.
If opening up permanent slots to schools who would add more to everyone's revenue, and working out a proportional payout to the partials is what it takes to serve not only the best interest of the conference but to creatively find a way for old friends to stick around, it just seems to me to be reasonable solution. The trick is in scheduling a Vanderbilt it needs to be offset with a Tulane or Duke so that you keep that home slot filled between two slots on the schedule giving the Vanderbilt like school that key home game to drive ticket sales. So in that regard it isn't a typical buy game, but when you play them at home fan interest is higher than playing a smaller directional school.
So Alabama for instance could play 9 conference games rotate a buy game home and home in alternation with the conference schedule to guarantee 5 home games out of those 10 and still buy home only games for the other 2 to keep that 7 home game ticket package. With a 16 member conference and 2 partials you would always have enough room on the schedule to accommodate them.
So hypothetically you could expand the SEC to 16 permanent members, keep Vanderbilt under a partial arrangement, and add another partial arrangement and still keep a very similar schedule but simultaneously upgrade the schedules and perhaps the academics if that 2nd partial was also an academic elite who was very good at basketball.
I'm too much of a bonehead to understand all this, JRsec. But your references to "partial arrangements" has yielded an idea for a limerick I shall pen for one of my lady friends.
EBF Bill. Everything but Football and a partial scheduling arrangement for that with proportional payouts from the conference's full member share.
When you work on that limerick it should have in it "payment but not for the works".
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02-28-2021 10:08 PM |
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