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Gary Pinkel on the Big XII's Troubles

Gabe DeArmond of Powermizzou.com tweets some interesting quotes from Mizzou football coach Gary Pinkel.  Pinkel was being interviewed by Tim Brando this morning.  Unfortunately I don't have a link to the interview itself.  Here's what Gabe (@GabeDeArmond) tweeted in three separate tweets:

#Mizzou coach Gary Pinkel with Tim Brando this morning: "Obviously we've got some issues in our league...You don't hear anything...

"About any other league in the country having these problems. And we all know where it starts."

Pinkel: "It's really a shame because the potential of the league is just so tremendous. I have no control over it."

I presume Pinkel means Texas.  I've had thoughts here and here at The Sports Economist over what's going on within the Big XII.

Economically speaking, when it comes to "producing competition" as we sports economist like to say, the "firm" as understood in economic theory is the league itself.  A league, like any firm at its heart, is a cooperative.  A little bit of pure self-interest is supposed to be expected, but once the cooperative is formed, we expect, well, cooperation between the members to make it work.  

That's not what we've seen with the Big XII.  Whether it's the Longhorn Network or the concentration of conference political power, Texas holds the best hand and is not afraid to play that hand even if it means destabilizing the whole conference.  That's why Nebraska left despite the fact that the conference's revenue-sharing system favored it.  That's why Texas A&M left.  

It's sad because the Big XII as it existed from the time it was a 12-team conference was an excellent sports conference.  Not just an excellent football conference, but an excellent sports conference.  But its existence seems to be falling apart daily.

Update:  Dave Matter posts more of the Pinkel interview.  Pinkel comes down hard on conference commissioner Dan Beebe.  Here is the entire interview with Brando.

EcoKat Part Deux

John LaPlante on the non-sensical EcoKat, the silly new mascot of Kansas State athletics:

Even more silly than that, Willie (the Wildcat PM) has been joined on campus by "EcoKat," a student dressed in a ridiculous custom of "repurposed materials," brought together in what the Kansas City Star calls all together unfortunate styling." 

According to a K-State website, EcoKat is a "crusader of conservation and fanatic of fluorescents." 

Crusaders? Fanatics? Now we have an admission: people who push fluorescent light bulbs are religious fanatics! Fortunately for football fans, "EcoKat is not affiliated with K-State athletics."

Unfortunately for K-State, EcoKat *is* affiliated with K-State athletics in our minds already.  All KSU fans can hope for is that she gets so busy with her recycling and even more fanatical about her fluorescents, that she forgets her public duties.  

But what type of "camp" has Willie the Wildcat been sent to?  Is it one of those nifty little camps we send our kids to or is it a Soviet-style labor camp.  Given the enviro theme, I'm definitely betting on the latter.  In fact, here's a little video taken at the camp.

 

What is KSU Thinking? EcoKat? For Real?

I heard about the new environmentally friendly mascot at KSU this morning on 810 WHB.  I imagined it would be some green Willie the Wildcat thing.  But no.  It's this:

My god.  Has somebody spent too much time under their flourescent light bulbs?  

When I go to a football game, the last thing I want done is to be preached to.  About anything.  But this takes being preached to to a whole new level.

I'm not the only one who thinks it's ridiculous, and overly pious.  From the KC Star:

For every tweet in defense of EcoKat are dozens more mocking the mousy mascot. A sampling: “#EcoKat makes me want to leave my porch light on 24hours and drive two blocks to the gas station for a pack of gum”; “In honor of #EcoKat, I will separate my plastics, glass and aluminum from one another... then put them in the trash anyways”; 

New Compensation for NCAA Athletes

Victor Matheson:

Most likely in repsonse to recent articles on the thesporteconomist.com critical of the NCAA’s policies towards payment of college players, the NCAA, after great debate, has agreed to increase the allowable compensation that schools can make to student athletes.

The passage of the game-changing Proposal 2011-78 now allows student athletes unlimted access to fruit, nuts, bagels and bagel spreads including, but not limited to, butter, jelly, and cream cheese. Previously, the NCAA made no provision for access to adequate bagel condiments. While college athletes used to work for peanuts, their situation has now significantly improved – they now work for peanuts and peanut butter.  

Story here.  Well, that certainly improves upon the situation.  And we wonder why the NCAA manual has gotten so much like the US tax code.

 

 

Kansas State Announces Its Own Network

The Big XII is abuzz with news that Texas A&M may move to the SEC, partly (mostly?) because of its issues with the coming Longhorn Network.  Meanwhile, another Big XII school is launching its own network.  Here's ESPN's David Ubben.

The Big 12's new design allows for member schools to take advantage of their third-tier rights, and Kansas State appears to have made its move to do so. 

The Wildcats announced on Monday plans for KStateHD.tv, a high-definition, digital, school network that launches on August 30. 

Kansas State's season opener against Eastern Kentucky will be broadcast on the network. 

Much of the on-demand programming will be free, but there will be a charge for live athletic events and other premium content. The cost for all-access users is $9.95 per month or $79.95 per year. 

Mizzou has been offering much of its athletic content online for years, so I expect Mizzou to offer something similar to this KSU network.  Will I buy access?  If the price is reasonable, yes.  But that should go without saying.  Everyone has a price.

Big XII Revenues to be Distributed More Equally

From the KC Star:

The income from all of its TV contracts plus other sources of revenue such as bowl games and the NCAA basketball tournament will result in about 76 percent distributed equally.

Previously, about 57 percent was shared equally and the rest went to schools based on television appearances. The more a team was on TV, the more money it received.

This won't necessarily improve competitive balance, but it should improve the political climate within the conference.  Nebraska didn't leave because didn't leave the conference because of economic inequalities.  NU left because it didn't like the Texas-centricity of the Big XII.

 

Spending in College Football

Brad Humphreys discusses the Fanhouse data about spending in big time college football.  Fanhouse collected total expense data from the US Department of Education's EADA data set and found that the programs that usually populate the top of the rankings (Ohio State, Texas, Alabama, etc.) tend to spend the most on their programs. 

While those schools spend in the neighborhood of $25.1 to $32 million, schools like Louisiana-Monroe spend just over $2.9 million on their programs.  None of this is surprising to me.  Spending imbalance derives from revenue imbalance which derives from demand imbalance. Ohio State has a bigger fanbase than Louisiana-Monroe and that drives the spending differential between those two schools.

But Brad correctly notes this is an apples to oranges comparison because schools like Ohio State and Texas spend a lot on everything else.  So he recalculates spending on football on a per-dollar-spent-on-student-services basis using data available from the IPEDS data base.  Here's Brad:

Here’s how the Top 5, and cellar dweller Louisiana-Monroe compare by the ratio of student services spending to football spending

• Louisiana-Monroe 2.7
• Ohio State 2.6
• Texas 2.0
• Notre Dame 1.0
• Alabama 0.9
• Auburn 0.7

Louisiana-Monroe spent $8 million on student services and 43 million on football, or roughly $2.7 dollars of student service spending for every dollar of  football spending.  Auburn spent seventy cents on student services for every dollar spent on football.  Ohio State’s football spending is actually not that big when compared to student service spending.  I hope that students at Alabama and Auburn get a lot of benefit out of football, because they are not getting nearly the student services that students at, say, Louisiana-Monroe are getting.

When I saw Brad's post, I wondered how the Big XII schools (circa 2010) measured up against each other.  So I gathered student service spending, instructional spending, and enrollment data for each Big XII school for the 08-09 school year from IPEDS and their football spending for the 09-10 school year from EADA.  I calculated the spending per dollar spent on football for each expense category.  Here's the data for student service spending.

Baylor	5.36
Texas A&M	3.26
Colorado	2.43
Iowa State	2.38
Mizzou	2.27
Texas Tech	2.09
Texas	2.00
Kansas State	1.93
Kansas	1.66
Oklahoma State	1.19
Nebraska	1.02
Oklahoma	0.93

Baylor leads the way with a whopping $5.36 dollars spent on student services for every dollar spent on its football program.  This year's Baylor program is bowl-eligible for the first time as a Big XII school, so football success isn't something experienced on a regular basis for the Bears.  But Baylor students get a lot spent on them in other areas of the school.  A&M, CU, ISU, Mizzou, Tech, and Texas all have values over 2 while OSU, NU, and OU bring up the rear.  Texas looks pretty good in comparison, but remember that Texas has a lot of undergraduates.  Here is the dollar-for-dollar spending per 1000 students.

Baylor	0.45
Kansas State	0.12
Iowa State	0.11
Mizzou	0.10
Colorado	0.10
Texas Tech	0.09
Texas A&M	0.09
Kansas	0.09
Oklahoma State	0.08
Nebraska	0.06
Texas	0.06
Oklahoma	0.05

Baylor comes out on top with KSU in second.  NU, UT, and OU - the historical powers - bring up the rear.  Comparatively, Louisiana-Monroe spends 45 cents per 1000 undergraduates, postively Baylorish.  So what Brad comments holds even more with the rest of the Big XII: "I hope that students at" every Big XII school save Baylor "get a lot of benefit out of football, because they are not getting nearly the student services that students at, say, Louisiana-Monroe are getting."  Or Baylor.

I've gathered data on research and instruction spending as well as data on spending on men's basketball, but crunching that data is left for a future post.

"FOX Lands Big Ten's Football Title Games"

Story here (via Craig Depken).  Why did the Big 10 decide to expand?  Academics?  Research?  Um, no.  The answer is - DING DING DING DING - money from sports (from Jeff Junstrom of the Pitt Stop).

This comes as no surprise, as the very lucrative Big Ten Network was a joint venture between the conference and Fox Sports. Financial details have not yet been released, but many analysts believe the price paid was quite large.

The Big Ten Conference is preparing to auction the TV rights to its new football championship game, a move that industry insiders say could fetch $15 million to $20 million a year.

College conferences are clubs.  For a team to gain entry into a club, a majority of the incumbents must vote "yes."  Big 10 revenue sharing is equal, so bringing in another school causes the money in the sharing pool to be split 12 rather than 11 ways.  Any entrant must enhance the size of the pool sufficiently to offset a majority of the incumbents' losses.   That extra 1 to 1.5 million per school sure helps in pushing a given school's vote to yes.  If your potential entrant is Nebraska, that helps in that regard too.

Damn Right It's Good to be the Cupcake

The demand for cupcakes - typically lower-level college football teams that will travel to an established program and offer up their hides in exchange for a big payday - has soared over the past few years, especially with the addition of the 12th game in the regular season schedule.  The results are expected:  the price of cupcakes has exploded.

On the other hand, SDSU officials say the revenue from such games is needed. Which is a big reason SDSU agreed to play another power-league team Saturday at Missouri. For playing the game, Missouri will pay SDSU $800,000. Same goes for next year, when SDSU has agreed to play at traditional powerhouse Michigan for $1,016,800.

I'm not convinced that SDSU is that much of a cupcake.  But maybe that's just the pregame jitters for me.

There's a paper in here for an entrepreneurial person willing and able to dig around for cupcake prices.  The prices of cupcake games should depend on the number of regular season games, the demand for the home team's games (which partly if not completely explains the $200,000 between the Michigan and Missouri payouts), and other factors.

Rivalries in the Big 10

I like the way that the Big 10 made maintaining most of its rivalries a priority.  Save for the Iowa-Wisconsin series, they were able to keep the rivalries a part of the overall landscape in college football.

Commissioner Jim Delany stated repeatedly the past several months that the Big Ten would prioritize competitive balance and protecting rivalries in forming its as-of-yet unnamed divisions, and I'd argue the league successfully achieved that. Each side has two of the four "glamour" programs (Ohio State and Penn State in one, Michigan and Nebraska in the other) and one semi-regular title contender (Wisconsin in the former, Iowa in the latter). And nearly every important rivalry will still be played annually, with the notable exception of Wisconsin-Iowa. (The Badgers are the one team with a legitimate gripe about their placement.)

Meanwhile, Nebraska's impact will be felt almost immediately upon its arrival. When the Huskers' 2011 schedule scrolled across the Big Ten Network ticker, the first two games to show up were "at Wisconsin" and "vs. Ohio State." They'll spend their first November playing at Penn State, at Michigan and vs. Iowa. Think those games might get some eyeballs?

As far as new rivalries go, I think that the Iowa-Nebraska series has all the makings of a natural rivalry.  By that I mean that it derives up from the fanbases of both schools, not down from some Bill McCartney-esque intelligent designer.  

You have neighboring states that have flagship football programs that have been very good at the same time.  Of course Nebraska has the overall edge on success, having won five national championships.  But I recall when I lived in Omaha back in the late 80's and early 90's that fans from each side were chomping at the bit for their teams to play.  The Iowa fans wanted the Hawks to show that they could beat the Bugeaters and Cornhusker fans wanted the Huskers to put the Hawks back in their place.  

Time will tell if this is a good rivalry or not.  One or both teams could go into the dustbin of college football and the series will become an afterthought.  But if I were a bettin' man, I'd bet this becomes a nice rivalry.