COUG ROWING:
No. 17 Cougars Head to Sixth-Straight
NCAA Rowing Championships
The Championships take place May 25-27
at Nathan Benderson Park at Sarasota, Fla.
From WSU Sports Info
WHAT'S HAPPENING THIS WEEK:
Seventeenth-ranked Washington State
University women's rowing will make its 13th overall, sixth-straight and eighth
NCAA Championships appearance in nine years as it heads to Nathan Benderson
Park at Sarasota, Fla., May 25-27, for the 2018 NCAA Rowing Championships...the
University of Central Florida (UCF) will serve as host for the event...Division
I racing begins at 9 a.m., Friday with the varsity eight heats...please see
page two of today's notes for the complete schedule.
THE FIELD:
WSU will compete against 21 other NCAA
Division I teams, including four other Pac-12 squads...WSU's varsity eight has
defeated four of the 21 other varsity eights that will compete for the national
championship: Navy, Northeastern UCF and Gonzaga...as a team, the Cougars have
also competed against nine other NCAA participants; Texas, Ohio State,
Wisconsin, Indiana, Syracuse, Washington, California, USC and Stanford, as all nine of them are ranked
in the top-15 in the nation...this season marks the sixth with an expanded
field of 22 teams...eleven teams earned automatic bids, while the other 11
(including Washington State) were at-large selections...the Cougars' varsity
eight is seeded 15th, the second varsity eight 15th and the varsity four 12th.
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Answering the latest expansion buzz: Why
the Arizona schools won’t join the Big 12
By JON WILNER San Jose Mercury News
PUBLISHED: May 22, 2018 at 9:53 am |
UPDATED: May 23, 2018 at 7:34 am
Realignment chatter, usually contained
to message boards, Twitter feeds and sports bars, made its way last week to the
websites of respected publications like the Dallas Morning News and Kansas City
Star.
The speculation is rooted in frustration
within the Pac-12:
Frustration with the football
postseason, the basketball postseason, the tepid success of the Pac-12 Networks
and the lagging revenue (compared to other Power Fives).
Combine that state of play with accurate
but less-than-complimentary comments from Arizona State athletic director Ray
Anderson, and you have the uptick in chatter.
Only this time the narrative has
flipped:
The Big 12, once on life support, is
looking to grow. The Pac-12, once the aggressor (recall Texas, Oklahoma and the
Pac-16) is vulnerable to poaching. Might the frustrated Arizona schools be
there for the taking?
If so, the Big 12 would actually become
the Big 12 and add heft, a major TV market and football inventory prior to the
next round of Tier I media rights negotiations in the early 2020s?
In my experience, there are two rules of
realignment:
No. 1: It’s never done until it’s done …
and sometimes not even then.
No. 2: Everyone has an opinion, but only
a handful of voices truly matter. And those voices rarely, rarely talk.
After mulling whether to address the
latest buzz — it’s nothing more than that — I opted to publish this column in
order to 1) remind fans of the oft-overlooked machinery behind realignment and
2) provide Hotline readers with a point of reference when the topic inevitably
resurfaces in a few years.
From this vantage point, the situation
is clear:
There is no chance … none, zero … of the
Arizona schools jumping conferences prior to the next round of Tier I deals.
It might look enticing at the moment,
with the Pac-12 floundering on the field/court and the Big 12 schools
generating more annual revenue through conference distributions and local media
rights.
(Pac-12 campuses received $30.9 million
from the conference in FY17, while their Big 12 counterparts collected $34.3
million, plus varying seven-figure amounts from local TV deals.)
But never forget: Realignment doesn’t
play out in the minutiae of year-to-year performance cycles; it unfolds on a
broader canvass, one painted by university presidents, boards of regents and
state politicians.
For the Arizona schools, jumping to the
Big 12 doesn’t make sense.
For the Big 12, inviting the Arizona
schools doesn’t make sense.
Let’s dive in …
*** The Big 12 doesn’t make sense for
Arizona and Arizona State from a competitive standpoint.
For all but a handful of football and
men’s basketball teams, recruiting is geography: The program’s center of
gravity is the largest talent base within the conference footprint.
For Arizona and ASU, that center is
Southern California: 370 miles away, stocked with alums of both schools,
culturally similar to Tempe and Tucson and loaded with talent like no place
else.
But join the Big 12, and the Arizona
schools would have more difficulty luring prospects out of the L.A. basin. The
appeal of playing in the same conference as USC and UCLA would vanish.
The center of gravity for the Wildcats
and Sun Devils would shift two times zones to the east, to the Dallas
Metroplex: 1,110 miles from Phoenix, not as comparable culturally — in many
regards, foreign territory.
The Arizona schools would be outsiders
recruiting against Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and TCU, not to mention LSU,
Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio State and Notre Dame.
Their Southern California pipeline
reduced to a trickle, the Wildcats and Sun Devils would be left to rely on Lone
Star scraps.
Good luck with that.
The current situation, with a solid
presence in Southern California and a toe-dip in Texas, is far more conducive
to building competitive rosters.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Olympic sports
component.
If nothing else, the Pac-12 possesses
the top Olympic sports in the country — an ideal competitive landscape for
hundreds of ASU and Arizona athletes, many of whom grew up in, ahem, Southern
California.
The Pac-12 makes far more sense from an
expense and logistics standpoint. Most of the Pac-12 campuses are closer to
Phoenix and Tucson than any of the Big 12 counterparts.
Schlepping dozens of teams to the
central and southern Plains — not to mention Ames and Morgantown — is decidedly
suboptimal in matters of time and cost.
*** It doesn’t make sense for Arizona
and Arizona State from an academic standpoint.
Academic association might not matter to
fans (or coaches), but it matters to the voices that matter … to the presidents
and the regents and the pols.
Which conference offers more prestige on
that front:
The Pac-12, which has four schools
ranked in the U.S. News top-25 (Stanford, Cal, USC and UCLA), or the Big 12,
which has none in the top 50?
And if the U.S. News ranking isn’t your
thing, consider the conference ties to the prestigious (in academia)
Association of American Universities:
The Pac-12 has eight members in the AAU;
the Big 12 has three.
The guess here is Arizona president
Robert Robbins, the founding director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute,
and Arizona State president Michael Crow, who has spent years raising ASU’s
academic profile — and is commissioner Larry Scott’s staunchest supporter —
would prefer academic alignment with California’s powerhouse universities.
And so would the Arizona Board of
Regents.
*** It doesn’t make sense for the Big
12.
Let’s not forget that realignment
requires a willing suitor.
Assuming the Arizona schools are a
package deal — Tucson is well-represented on the Board of Regents — it’s
difficult to envision a scenario in which the Big 12 benefits financially by
adding both schools.
Think about the last wave of realignment
at the Power Five level:
Utah and Colorado to the Pac-12.
Rutgers, Maryland and Nebraska to the
Big Ten.
Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC.
West Virginia and TCU to the Big 12.
Louisville, Syracuse and Pittsburgh to
the ACC.
Notice something? In no case did a
conference invite two schools from the same state: The math don’t work.
Why would the Big 12 only add one major
market (Phoenix) but split the revenue pie two additional ways?
Because neither Arizona school brings a
major football brand to the table — sorry, Wildcats: basketball doesn’t matter
— there’s no way the Wildcats and Sun Devils could pay for themselves and
increase the size of the revenue pie for everyone else.
There’s also the matter of timing.
It makes less-than-zero sense for the
Big 12 to expand during the remaining years of its current Tier I deal with
ESPN because the parties removed the contractual mandate that required ESPN to
increase the rights fee if the conference expanded.
But there’s also a problem with delaying
expansion until the current Tier I deals terminate: They expire on different
schedules (spring of ’24 for the Pac-12, spring of ’25 for the Big 12).
Would the Arizona schools contractually
commit to the Pac-12’s new deal with ESPN or Fox, Facebook or Amazon, then
leave after 12 months and absorb years of massive financial penalties?
No chance. Ain’t happening … for so many
reasons.
But what might happen?
The Hotline has long believed the best
move for the Pac-12 and the Big 12 might be to combine forces and create a
football scheduling alliance.
At the negotiating table, content rules:
An alliance would create premium
inventory — the conferences could include a predetermined number of annual
cross-over games — and it would fill every kickoff window from 12 p.m. Eastern
to 10:30 p.m. Eastern.
The specifics of the arrangement can be
left for another day. Or year. For now, let’s be cognizant of the big-picture
forces that spark realignment … or maintain the status quo.
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