BYU goes independent
After bantering about this earlier today on a college football blog, I thought I ought to chime in about this here.
One of the first football games I went to at the University of Wyoming was against Brigham Young University. The taunts hurled in their direction from the student section are not quite fit for a family publication.
In any case, the Cougars of BYU are leaving the friendly confines of the Mountain West Conference after this season, choosing instead to strike it on their own as an independent, opting instead for the West Coast Conference for all sports besides football.
This move is huge for the fledging WCC, which is made up of private religious schools that are similar in size. Having recently opted not to expand as recently as June, the conference changed its tune quickly when the possibility of BYU joining fell into their lap after the collapse of the Western Athletic Conference.
Most of the fallout seems to be that it doesn’t make any competitive sense for BYU to do this. Except, none of the realignment moves that have happened this year have absolutely anything to do with competitiveness. They have everything to do with money. College sports fans desperately want to believe in the purity of the game, because it makes them feel better when contrasted against the backdrop of holdouts, lockouts and performance enhancing drugs of the pro ranks.
This move makes a ton of sense for BYU in the short term. It’s unlikely the BCS Board of Directors will give BYU much in the way of concessions related to access to BCS bowl games beyond the standard “finish in the Top 14” that they had while in the Mountain West. But the school can schedule whoever it wants. They’ll have help, partnering with ESPN to broadcast their BYU-TV games and that will help tons to create some marquee matchups. Still, the BYU name doesn’t have the same cache as Notre Dame (even if BYU has been a lot better over the past decade) and it’ll be difficult to convert eyeballs west of the Mississippi.
Still, the Mountain West’s horrible TV deal was the sticking point here. It was hampering BYU’s own goals with marketing itself. Worst case scenario, the two parties kiss and make up within a decade in some kind of new conference realignment. Best case? BYU has great success and manages to position itself beyond what it could’ve done as a member of fledging leagues.
I’ve been hypercritical of the Mountain West leadership for being conservative during the quiet period. Boise State should’ve been invited years ago and they would have been smart to position that league well before Utah had a chance to bolt. But their missteps are coming back to haunt them now. The league will be a 10-team league next year, which is still one team more than they’ll have this season. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they found a way to expand to 12 teams before the dust settles.
No matter what, the league they’re inheriting isn’t as good as the one they are leaving behind. Meanwhile, the WAC will need a hail mary to ensure it’s own survival. I suspect UT-San Antonio will join the league and at least one other Texas school to prevent the defection of Louisiana Tech, but if Hawai’i decides it’s easier to be an independent too, they might have a difficult time scrambling to convince half a dozen FCS schools to move up in a few years, since many of them will need to add sports to qualify at that classification.
To really illustrate BYU’s quibble, the MWC television network (The Mtn.) is only available on extended packages via cable and DirectTV sports package. Meanwhile, BYU-TV is available on the basic tier of DirectTV, meaning I could conceivable follow BYU football anywhere, whereas the Mtn. would be an added expense.
I think this move is smart, proactive and low-risk because people aren’t looking at it with the right lenses. It’s all about the dollars and cents and long-term, it makes a lot of sense and cents for BYU to make this move.
We’ll see how it goes, I guess.
About that blog…
I floated on Twitter earlier today that I am considering moving my higher ed blog to tumblr. Which is hilarious since it wasn’t too long ago that a little birdie recommended I start a tumblr and I mentioned how much I hated it when I’d tried it last fall sometime. But it wasn’t personal blogging that brought me here, it was a blog I’d started for my class in December that did it. I wanted a simple solution and after taking Posterous and tumblr mano a mano, tumblr won out.
In an somewhat related note, a Posterous person wrote me on Twitter today after I told some higher ed colleagues that I didn’t like it. Pretty interesting. He told me ways it was better and invited me to check it out and to email them if I had other questions or concerns. I thought that was classy stuff. I don’t think I’ll check it out anytime soon, I mean, I checked it out as recently as two weeks ago and I just didn’t like the interface at all. But I’m all for trying different things out, so it might serve a purpose for me later.
Anyway, back to the edustir.com deal. I think I’m going to move it. I’m about 80% sure right now. But the other problem I was having was about content and what I wanted to do about that, because honestly…the space I used to inhabit is FILLED with people who are frankly a lot better at communicating stuff than I am. It’s not even hard to admit. I do have a perspective and I can be useful at times. Mostly with the whole op-ed columnist angle. But it sometimes feels weird, because while I have been around the game for a minute; I haven’t exactly been doing it long enough to be this damn cynical.
Plus, it seems even the more cynical among us seem to do a really good job of bring the sort of content that makes you want to cite them. I do a very good job of this in presentations, but I have a hard time translating that to the blog. And I haven’t been in a position to do any conferences the past few years due to timing and/or money, depending on the time.
But it’s not about that. The reason the blog took off, is the uniqueness factor and timing. If I’d waited six months, the blog wouldn’t have been voted in to bloghighed.org and my traffic never would’ve taken off and my profile never would’ve reached the audiences it’s managed to. Since I have that space and I really enjoy engaging the community the way I have in the past, I’ve just felt for a while that I need to find some way to get back to that authoritative position because I’m just not doing it online.
Sometimes, I just think that I’m not very good at things. Then I prep for my class, get into the classroom and I realize I must know something. Or I’ll engage a client or do a presentation for a prospective client and all of that knowledge just starts oozing out. It’s invigorating, but it’s not happening on my blog.
So I’ve decided to shift the blog’s from strictly talking about web strategy as it relates to institutional web presence and to focus more on college athletics branding and marketing, strategy and so forth. There’s a huge gap there, I have a lot to offer that audience and best of all, barely anyone has registered blogging about it within the community. The uniqueness factor isn’t the only thing that makes it fun to blog, it’s just an angle that I think would work well for me and provides a platform to offer my expertise in a more innovative way; as I did when I started.
The switch to tumblr will be a good 2-year anniversary celebration and it might manage to get me into the tumblr directory since the education space there is kinda thin. Hey, I’m all for hitting the spots where I can.
Also Extension.fm is awesome. No more staying on a page (especially music-filled tumblr blogs, but in general) to listen to tracks. Just float and go.
