Good morning, all! I hope your weekend is going well!
Sports at the University of Connecticut is at a crossroads, despite the success of the university’s basketball programs. If UConn is to continue to be reckoned with in college basketball, its football program, currently independent, is going to have to join a major conference. And that means taking its basketball programs out of the beloved Big East to be a part of whatever major conference it joins.
This is no big revelation and nobody knows that better than UConn. However, time is now of the essence. The straw that stirs the drink is college football; plain and simple. Turn on your television set on a Saturday and the dominant programing is college football; all day on every major network. The sport is huge. Forget primetime Saturday; it is all day Saturday. To put it in perspective, the viewing audience for any Saturday afternoon regular season college football game blows away every MLB postseason game on primetime save the World Series, and even that is debatable.
There is no way UConn athletics survives as Connecticut fans know it, unless the football program undergoes a major upgrade, and that means joining a major conference. Therein lies the two-edged sword. No one wants to join a major football conference more than UConn but no one wants to have them. As much as the football program has shown improvement under coach Jim Mora, it is still leap years behind other schools. And the major conferences know that.
The moment of truth, however, is at hand because we are at the point in collegiate athletics, where private equity groups are ready to invest billions of dollars to get a piece of the action in these major conferences dominated by football. The Big 10 is about to get an influx of $2B+ of private equity money. That translates to $140M of dough for each school, up front, not counting the other income streams these programs have. You know if the Big 10 is about to receive this cash windfall, the SEC, ACC, Big 12, etc. will also get their payday. There is no way UConn can compete against that; no way their other sports programs can survive.
So what needs to happen? For openers, UConn has got to start filling their stadium for home football games. They are not doing that, no matter what the attendance figures show and the major conferences are very aware of that. Secondly, Pratt & Whitney Stadium needs to undergo a massive upgrade. The powers-that-be are going to have to work hard to convince private money to invest in a stadium renovation, because there is no way such a plan will be bought by the taxpayers. Thirdly, UConn has got to work even harder than I am sure it already is to be invited to the dance. The university has to do some research. Why, for example, can college football dominate the sports landscape in Oregon, whose population is less than 600,000 more than Connecticut’s? Oregon is sandwiched between states with major league professional teams just like Connecticut. Why does big time college football thrive in that state?
For Connecticut fans who love their UConn men’s and women’s basketball programs and the dominance both have had on the national stage, the reality is those days are numbered. College football is king, the private money is flowing into the major conferences and any university not part of that environment will be left on the outside looking in. And that includes the UConn basketball programs.
For UConn sports the clock is ticking and the midnight hour is closer than you think.
Here are some other thoughts as the college football polls are about to undergo a shakeup:
UCLA head coach Tim Skipper is really making a case to get that ‘interim” tag removed, isn’t he?
Somewhere in college football heaven, Bobby Bowden is asking, “What in the world has happened to my Florida St.?”
I’m guessing Arch Manning might be the happiest man in Texas today.
I guess Bill Belichick means it when he says he is sticking around at UNC, despite his rough first year as coach there. He called Kirk Herbstreit during ESPN’s GameDay as the panel was talking about Belichick’s Tar Heels.
Before Indiana’s win at No. 3 Oregon on Saturday, the Hoosiers were 0-46 lifetime on the road against Top 5 teams.
I would say Penn St. coach James Franklin is in trouble, following Saturday’s loss to Northwestern, dropping the Nittany Lions to 3-3. The thing is, he has a contract through 2031 that pays him $8M annually.
Former Seattle Mariners manager Dan Wilson has done a tremendous job in his first full season as Mariners manager, wouldn’t you say?
The Yankees are now home, watching the postseason, but after low ratings in the first two games of their ALDS with Toronto, Game 3 on Tuesday night bounced back to have the largest viewing audience of any divisional series game this season at 4.96M viewers.
In case you are wondering the ALCS starts tonight: Seattle at Toronto, 8:03 p.m. on FOX. It is kind of neat that both teams entered the American League as expansion franchises in 1977.
It might not be a ratings winner but wouldn’t it be something if Seattle played Milwaukee in the World Series? Remember, the Seattle Mariners were born because the Pilots up-and-left Seattle after one season (1969) and moved to Milwaukee. In order to stop a lawsuit by the city against MLB, owners voted to award an expansion franchise to Seattle.
That is going to do it for today newsletter. As always, thank you for subscribing and have tremendous Sunday!
DAN