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VT fans pay more for less basically? Consider me SHOCKED.
Clearly ACC TV deal plays a huge role as well.
Bingo. SEC/B10 teams get an extra $30m each year for just existing. We can't make that money up in Nike Deals, Chickfila kickoffs, and student fees.
Tangential to this, but i was surfing the net and found out TCU's football stadium capacity is:
47,000 !!.
They have had more success than the Hokies in the past 15 years (yes, some bad seasons as well....)
I think DCwilson is spot on that it's about talent (in the context of good coaching.) We haven't had a lot of either. A program can use facilities, academics, $, coaching personalities, fan base etc to attract the needed talent to win. But we haven't. (And this formula is changing as NIL/House ruling/potential Congressional bills, etc are getting on line)
We certainly have a rabid and loyal fan base. Living in South Carolina has been interesting to watch Clemson's rise (and fall?) and now Shane pulling USCe up. But they are both using all the variables to attract top talent to their rosters.
The best playoff in the United States by far exists in the college game. It's called march madness. One and done, win or go home. A true playoff that includes all conferences and grips an entire nation for a month
I miss the days when the college football season felt like one big playoff that lasted 4 months. One loss could ruin your season. That was the best.
I walked by those trees on the day of the Metallica concert. There are multiple dead and falling over or already down. They aren't that healthy as that area isn't being taken care of by the forestry or grounds department.
I can say for certain that olympic gymnasts start way before college. A cousin of mine was on an olympic track for gymnastics, and she was told she and at least one of her parents would have to move to Texas in order to continue training for that track when she was in/or heading into middle school (I don't remember exactly). She declined, and instead became a multi-sport star at her giant Georgia HS, and will be playing D1 Lacrosse next year, so it all worked out pretty well for her.
SEC: "Let's pay the players millions, tax free."
VT: "Let's save some old trees."
Is it complicated?
Or is it just another case of "The folks that own the place win"?
Been there, it sucks. at least they let you in the tow boat. My last tow they had me in sit in my boat and when we had to come through Caxambas Pass in Marco Island as a storm was whipping up. Guy radio'd me and told me to put life preservers on and "hold on" as we shot over some 5' standing waves in the inlet, full on air born with back realignment landings. Whatever hadn't broke in that boat yet broke that day.
This is pretty much spot on.
Correct, but you have try to have as horrid a post season as the NBA.. No travel, but 3 off days between games because they refuse to play on bad TV nights- Friday/Saturday. Its a joke. Not mentioning 85-41 leads vanishing regularly, etc. It's one level above the WWE.
Yep, you're tracking what I was putting down. That realignment round was based on the fiction of "TV markets". This most recent round (Texas/Oklahoma, USC/UCLA, Washington/Oregon) is all about eyeballs, which is synonymous with $$$.
The MLB's playoff system is nowhere near the best system, because of the nature of the game. A 5-game series, even a 7-game series, is still too small of a sample size to determine the best team. A lot of times it comes down to the schedule, and who is able to get their best pitchers ready to pitch game one of the series. When a team gets their pitching rotation thrown off by an earlier series, it can throw the series out of whack. Unless the team with their ace starting game 1 is coming off a bye, which is another thing I hate about the MLB postseason. Three years of this current setup, and we're starting to see that the bye is not really an advantage.
So no, the MLB does not have the best professional playoff system. Far from it. No, we're not going to get 9- or 11-game series, but having 7-game series throughout and no byes would be a start. If you have to have a bracket with byes, then at least have the first round take place at the bye team's stadium, with game 1 and 2 being the first two days after the regular season, with game 3 if needed being the first game of a doubleheader with the bye team. That way, there's only two days of rest between the regular season and the playoffs, which reduces the "bye penalty".
"The schools that the P2 have been gobbling up have all of those."- yes post Rutgers, Maryland, Missou, etc- which have none of what you mentioned in football.
It always should have been about pitting the conferences against each other for bragging rights.
This is an incredibly naive take. Bragging rights don't mean shit when it comes to pulling in more dollars in media rights.
I'm not buying it. For a while, it was "TV markets" that was driving realignment. Conferences brought in new schools that converted certain states from "out of footprint" to "in footprint", thus driving up their cable channel rates. And the ACC had a competitive media rights deal with the other conferences around that time period. But I've seen analysis (really can't remember where, blame my ADD) that indicates that it's the big matchups, the > 4 million eyeball games, that are what is currently driving up the media rights. The more of those a conference has, the more lucrative their media rights are, because it's those topline games that drive the majority of the revenue.
And it makes sense. At some point, there's a number of eyeballs watching a game where the producer breaks even based on the production cost (assuming today's standard of quality production, not the fucking ODU-level production). I don't know where that number lies, but it makes sense that the biggest games will make the studio much more money than a game against two basement-dwellers. Which means that the more games that a conference has that draw more eyeballs than the threshold, the bigger their media rights are going to be.
And what drives eyeballs these days? Winning, yes. But also name recognition, rivalries, and the size of a school's fanbase. The schools that the P2 have been gobbling up have all of those. The B1G grabbed two schools from the same city, UCLA and USC, because they are bluebloods, have huge national fanbases, and are a big rivalry. Forget that they're in the same footprint, that really doesn't matter that much anymore, if people in that state aren't watching the games. B1G games involving those schools are likely to draw above the threshold in eyeballs, and have a good chance, if they're winning, to draw more than 4M eyeballs.
Excuse my stream of consciousness post, but that is why the latest round of conference realignment happened. And that is something that even getting the playoff right 25 years ago wouldn't have prevented, as the bottom line for these conferences is MAKING. MORE. MONEY. Full stop.
You have the worst luck with boats.
As I'm getting ready to head back north, that picture reminds me of the time me and a buddy were in a 16' aluminum johnboat about 5 miles from the cabin on a fly in lake in BFE Canada. It was a beautiful day and all of a sudden the wind picked up and the sky turned black. We were fumbling around trying to pull start the 15hp yamaha to get out of dodge when a waterspout started up a few hundred yards away from us. The thing was massive and seemed to be hundreds of feet tall with the wind breaking trees on the bank. It was the most scared I have ever been in my adult life, and I literally thought we were going to die. We laid in the bottom of the boat amidst the beer cans awaiting our impending doom and everything seemed to clear up as quickly as it got bad. To this day I have irrational anxiety of some sharknado storm carrying me off while I chug one last beer.
Beamer pushed for years to move those outdoor practice fields (stadium Woods/where the soccer stadium went) etc. He wanted 2 full fields. That could have given you the room to build a new north endzone too.
We can win a team championship. It's not some impossible hurdle. Everyone else has done it. JMU has done it, Rice has done it, Army has done it. Most ACC schools have multiple team championships. We compete against those schools. What it takes is commitment and not settling for good enough- which we have done in 90% of our sports. We have made no commitment to womens golf or lacrosse... if we win in those, it's luck. We could invest in a regional wrestling facility like penn state has and maybe actually compete with them and OSU/Iowa. We could hire additional coach for softball, we could hire a new coach for men's golf. We could support baseball like an ACC school and not rely on luck. We don't have a standard of championships here, we have a standard of don't embarass ourselves.
They said long ago that there's no way they could replicate the South Endzone in the north. Given where the practice fields are, they need that pedestrian pathway between the Lot 1 entrance and the East Stands. It wouldn't be possible to build a North Endzone structure and still retain that footpath outside the ticketed area.
What else is new....
TBH, I wouldn't care if we do or don't win consistently in baseball/softball if we had won a CWS. I'll take a championship over the diamond version of "consecutive 10-win seasons".
There is a much better apparel deal out there for VT. But in typical VT fashion, we don't lead, we get comfortable, we accept status quo. Whit could get a better deal, he just refuses to.
Pickled Wrinkle is a cool bar/restaurant in that area as well.